RONG AID

Howard objects to his local Rite Aid's policy concerning debit cards, which he considers too lax. Apparently, his branch (or, should I say, his ex-branch) does not require a photo ID for credit cards, including debit cards used as credit cards. I do not know if this is a chain-wide policy or a failing of his local store. My own experience with the story will not shed any light on that, as my debit card is also a photo ID.

In any event, it looks like a potentially lax credit card acceptance policy may be the least of my local Rite Aid's worries. Particularly damning, in my view, is the suspect's lawyer's vocal denials that the former pharmacy tech has any links to terrorism. Let's briefly review the track record of other events that have been widely reported to have no links to terrorism:

• The wave of anthrax attacks following 9-11, still unsolved. For weeks on end, Tommy Thompson couldn't bring himself to utter a complete sentence about the anthrax attacks without throwing in a phrase like "very isolated" or "no connection to terrorism."
• Richard Reid
• That fat white guy with a ponytail who shot up an El-Al counter at LAX and yelled "Artie took my job!"
• Oops, I meant to say, that non-white guy who just happened to be from Egypt, but who definitely had no connections to terrorism. I mean, c'mon, his victims may have been Jewish, but that was just a coincidence. El-Al's ticket counter was the most accessible; otherwise, he might just as easily have shot up a ticket counter for Qantas, Mexicana, Lufthansa, or any other airline that uses the Bradley terminal.
• That white guy in a big white van, probably an NRA member or something, who picked off all those people in Maryland last fall.
• Oops, I mean those two black guys in blue 1990 Chevrolet Caprice, one of whom changed his surname to Muhammad "for religion purposes," but neither of whom could possibly have had anything to do with Islamic terrorists.
• Columbia. Well, I guess they can't be wrong all the time.