As you go over the clouds and through the air to grandmother’s house this Thanksgiving, you’ll find the federal government unconstitutionally impeding your travels at its checkpoints in airports.

But there’s one small mercy: the bureaucracy manning those checkpoints, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), promises that screeners won’t steal passengers’ pumpkin pies this year as they have the last two. The TSA pretends that pie filling, like bottled water, moisturizer, sunscreen, wine, and other liquids and gels, suddenly turns explosive at 30,000 feet.

It adopted this bizarre belief after the British government claimed it had thwarted a plot in August 2006 to bomb transatlantic airliners. Terrorists would smuggle components of a liquid bomb aboard their planes and catastrophically combine them once the jets were aloft – or so British and American authorities insisted.

Actually, the scheme was so far-fetched, and the government’s charges so obviously bogus, that a jury in London this summer refused to convict a single one of the eight defendants of terrorism. That hasn’t stopped the TSA. Using the preposterous plot as its excuse, it has pestered passengers for two years with silly, stringent and confusing limits on the quantities of gels or liquids they can carry aboard planes: “3-1-1 for carry-ons three-ounce bottle or less (by volume); 1 quart-sized, clear, plastic, zip-top bag; 1 bag per passenger placed in screening bin.” Screeners confiscate amounts larger than three ounces – and amounts smaller than that, too, if the bottle in which the last ounce of Scope resides says 6 ounces on the label.

What happens to the plundered liquids and gels? In the case of Thanksgiving pies we know that, “deemed as potentially harboring contraband,” the agency decreed that delicacies too dangerous to nestle in an overhead bin were nevertheless fine fodder for “soldiers in the airport's USO lounge.” So while some taxpayers did without dessert last Thanksgiving, the TSA encouraged American troops to risk explosions by feasting on stolen goodies. Meanwhile, the agency alleges that its 3-1-1 nonsense “represent[s] a sustainable level of security for the TSA, passengers, airports and airlines.”

The TSA may find the level “sustainable,” but does the environment? The tons of toiletries and lakes of liquor filched at checkpoints have to go someplace; the TSA denies that its employees party on the wine they swipe after spritzing themselves with our perfume. That abstinence leaves all the more of our treasures for trash collectors to dump in landfills. Ironically, the Federal monster forcing us to chuck our mouthwash and make-up professes to care about the earth – so much so that it robs us of another $7.2 billion per year to support 18,000 bureaucrats at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Why not rid ourselves of both the TSA and the EPA and call it a wash?

Controlling nearly 500 commercial airports, the TSA has learned an unpleasant truth: a jar of salsa here and a bottle of Snapple there add up to mountains of trash. Screeners at Fresno Yosemite International pilfer almost 300 pounds of contraband weekly. Despite its big name, Fresno Yosemite is a small airport, with only 40 daily departures; imagine the weekly tonnage flooding landfills from Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson (about 2724 daily flights) or Chicago O’Hare (2562 daily flights).

The TSA sandbags attempts to stem the flood, too. A California state senator named Dean Florez thought he saw a way to save the Earth while helping the homeless. He sponsored a resolution that would have done Robin Hood proud, urging airports to give “unused and unopened items” to homeless shelters as long as the charities accepted liability. But lawyers for the TSA nixed the idea, claiming the agency would still be exposed even if the shelters waived its responsibility. Florez dismissed that as "a lot of bureaucratic nonsense," while Larry Arce, director of the venerable Fresno Rescue Mission, pointed out that his liability insurance "covers just about everything.”

Something similar happened in Salt Lake City. But rather than merely quashing a suggestion, the TSA destroyed a functioning system. During most of 2007, volunteers hauled screeners’ loot to various charities, which deeply appreciated the “donations.” But then the TSA put a stop to it, despite a lack of any problems or complaints – except perhaps from the passengers who involuntarily contributed. Earl Morris, federal security director at Salt Lake City International Airport, sniffed, “There's just something that didn't feel exactly right.”

We’ll presume he means in addition to the fact that this is pilfered property. What’s bothering him may be the TSA’s absurd fear of exploding shampoo, including bottles still intact from the factory: Nico Melendez, another TSA spokesman, claimed, "Nobody knows what they are . . . even though they were sealed.”

Actually, everyone who doesn’t work for the TSA knows what they are: those little labels on them divulge all sorts of secrets to the literate. The TSA’s dictates “frustrated” Brady Snyder, manager of a rescue mission in Salt Lake. He told AP that he “doesn't buy the security risk excuse, saying the idea of a poisoned Sprite or a toothpaste bomb is over blown.”

But that’s the TSA’s logic for you. First, it steals items because they’re too dangerous for passengers to take aboard planes – but they’re safe enough to donate to the homeless. Then they become dangerous again, not because the TSA suspects they contain explosives, which is why it robbed passengers of them in the first place, but because it doesn’t trust factory-sealed bottles.

Everyone following this? To its acres of landfills, add 3-1-1’s “quart-sized, clear, plastic, zip-top bags” as another assault on the environment. Many plastics don’t decompose; discarded bags number among the worst pollutants. Presuming that every passenger uses one bag per flight and tosses it afterwards, the TSA now accounts for 730 million of the 100 billion bags Americans throw away each year.

But the TSA doesn’t care. A bogus bomb scare and its power over passengers supersede a green Earth.

It's not only the Constitution that's being trashed.

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Dan Whitehead said:

	... When are people going to develope a spine, rise up and crush these snotty, arrogant, smarmy thieving bureaucrats?
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November 25, 2008
Votes: +5

FloridaWarren said:

Let me zee your paperez!!! The problem with today\'s society is that not enough of our citizens remember those old World War II movies I watched on black & white TV back in the 50s, where the German soldiers patrolled railroad stations and the Gestapo demanded to see the passengers\' papers. If we are not going to abolish the TSA, we should at least make the TSA inspectors wear old German uniforms, complete with the lightning \"SS\" symbols on them, so our dumber citizens finally get the point!

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November 26, 2008
Votes: +5

Teish said:

Better use for the pie... OK, maybe I'm a little too indignant about all of this, but if a TSA agent tried to steal my homemade pie, I'd just toss it in their face. Better make sure it's a cream pie for the best effect. Seriously, it's really out of hand. Last time my sister flew to Florida, she opened her checked baggage when she arrived, and found that her deodorant was missing (?????) and that someone had spilled coffee on ALL of her clothes. They were clean and coffee-stain free when she packed them. Seriously, I refuse to fly anymore. I feel bad for people who have to fly for work and such. Who wants to take two hours out of their day to be treated like a dangerous criminal by a TSA agent on a power trip?

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December 02, 2008
Votes: +3