Greg In The Desert

I have a feeling there will be some last minute changes that will still allow all states driver license. If not the situation could get ugly.

The Bush administration passed the law, designed to stop terrorists from entering the country, after Sept. 11, 2001. All 50 states have to comply with its regulations by Jan. 1, 2010.
Sec. Rick Homans said the clock is ticking and New Mexico is nowhere near close.
“The way it is right now, come Jan. 1st, residents of New Mexico and residents of about 25 other states wouldn’t be allowed to board airplanes unless they had a valid passport.”

This is not looking good.

Sen. Udall: Yeah. Well, as you are probably aware, the situation that we’re in now — we have health care on the floor — where if tried to move to anything else I think it would make it much more difficult procedurally. So I think if — I don’t see us getting to Pass ID on the Senate floor between now and the end of the year. So I think it would be very helpful for you to issue a statement — you might use this as an opportunity to do it — to assure people that after December 31st they will be able to travel with something other than a passport. I don’t know if you want to do that at this point but if you decline that’s fine.

Sec. Napolitano: I think I will not accept that invitation at this point in time.

I’m shocked and amazed by the TSA blog. It doesn’t seem to be written by government robots, but by actual human beings who seem interested to address TSA issues. Take this latest entry.

On Monday afternoon we began receiving questions about airports that were requiring ALL electronics to be removed from carry-on bags (everything, including blackberrys, iPods and even cords). This practice was also mentioned on several other blogs and left us scratching our heads.

So…we checked with our security operations team to figure out what was going on. After some calls to our airports, we learned that this exercise was set up by local TSA offices and was not part of any grand plan across the country. These practices were stopped on Monday afternoon and blackberrys, cords and iPods began to flow through checkpoints like the booze was flowing on Bourbon Street Tuesday night. (Fat Tuesday of course).

How can The President allow this to continue. It must be shut down NOW!

In the past week I’ve been to the Albuquerque SunPort, the Boise Airport, McCarren International Airport in Las Vegas and Sky Harbor in Phoneix. All have had Free WiFi. I’d like to salute you in those airports that made the decision to have free wireless. You make my time in these airports much better than would I had to pay for it (nothing worse than having to pay for it, and yes I’m talking about WiFi). In fact I’m writing this from McCarren now.

Phoenix is the only place I had problems with signal quality. I’m not complaning, I’m just saying.