Bill Of Rights

On the Friday after Christmas two years ago, more than 13,000 passengers - out of food, water and patience - were cooped up in planes that had been circling closed airports or idling on the tarmac for as long as 11 hours. The "flights from hell" launched consumer advocates and the air travel industries on a quest for a national bill of rights for fliers. But this season, travelers will be just as exposed as before to the whims of the weather, air traffic congestion and cash-strapped airlines.

Americans are celebrating Independence Day this election year as the presidential candidates of the two major parties engage in a spirited debate over the direction the country should take over the next four years. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, soaring gas prices and rising unemployment, falling home values and a slumping economy are only the most visible challenges facing the nation. But the patriotism of the two major-party presidential contenders, which has figured as a subliminal but increasingly disturbing undercurrent of discontent on the talk-show circuit and on the Internet, is not one of them, and it should not be. Patriotism is the love of one's country, its people, its culture and, perhaps most important, its ideals, which represent the nation's most cherished hopes in a world that remains far from perfect.

Airline passengers just can't catch a break. Or can they? Hundreds of thousands of people were forced to scramble for alternative travel arrangements recently after American Airlines, the nation's biggest carrier, canceled more than 3,000 flights for maintenance checks. Meantime, Aloha Airlines, ATA and Skybus shut down operations, leaving passengers high and dry. Charter airline Champion Air said it would shut down in the next few weeks. Amid all this chaos, it was easy to overlook a federal court's ruling last month that overturned a New York law guaranteeing airline passengers a "bill of rights" for when they get stuck on the ground during epic delays.

Stronger gun limits could curb tragedies I think two recent columns -- "33 dead. Who's to blame?" (April 22) and "In post-massacre gun debate, both sides wrong" (Opinion * Commentary, April 23) -- were terribly biased. The first column reasons that "the pro-gun-control argument seems to be a non-starter" because the "gun control measures that have been proposed" would not have prevented the tragedy. I would counter that this means the measures proposed are far too weak. The second reasons that the Virginia Tech tragedy was "freakishly horrible" and that "deadly violence is a diminishing danger," and compares firearms deaths to auto fatalities.

WASHINGTON -- The way Kate Hanni tells it, an ill-fated holiday trip that left her family stuck inside a grounded airliner for nine hours without food, running water or working toilets amounted to "cruel and inhumane" treatment that no passenger should have to endure. So infuriated was she about the ordeal in December that she and her husband started a coalition of fed-up fliers to press for an industrywide passenger bill of rights. Yesterday, the Napa, Calif., resident appeared before a Senate panel to lend support to a bill by Sens.

Sept. 25 1789 Congress adopted 12 amendments to the Con- stitution and sent them to the states for ratification. (Ten became the Bill of Rights.)

Almost every school and university will celebrate "Constitution Day" on Sept. 18. Sen. Robert C. Byrd added an amendment to a spending bill in 2004 requiring educational institutions getting federal funding to provide programs on the document's history on the anniversary of its signing. Students will likely learn how the Constitution was written and ratified, but that is not enough. They must think about what those words mean today. Their teachers and parents should discuss with them these major approaches to constitutional interpretation: Original Intent.

TV PICK--Saving the National Treasures-- Preserving the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights. (MPT, Tuesday, 8 p.m.)

THE KEY WORD was exception, and some of our state legislators and defense attorneys acted as if they didn't know the meaning of the word. They do, of course. You don't graduate from college and law school and pass the bar exam without knowing what a simple word like exception means. But to refresh the memories of those who had objections to the words "hearsay exception" in the witness intimidation legislation - or what's left of it after the House of Delegates passed the bill yesterday - here's a definition from Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary: "An instance or case not conforming to the general rule."