The Only Thing Better Than a Dry Front, &c.

Sometimes when you try to explain the productivity gains from increased investment per worker, you're so overcome by the beauty of Austrian-school capital theory that you lose sight of considerations that, hard as it is for us to imagine, are in the redemptive contemplation far more sublime still - like remedial partisan re-branding:

During a discussion about ongoing challenges to the economy Thursday, Alaska Republican Rep. Don Young referred to Hispanic workers as "wetbacks," an ethnic slur used to describe migrant workers. He has since apologized.

“My father had a ranch; we used to have 50-60 wetbacks to pick tomatoes,” Young told Alaska public radio station KRBD. “It takes two people to pick the same tomatoes now. It’s all done by machine.”

The term "wetback" is a pejorative term that has been used to describe workers from Latin American countries who swim across the Rio Grande to reach the United States.

From the hitmakers who brought you "TSA-Gent Man" ("They've given you our bodies/And taken away your soul"); points to Yahoo! for assigning the story to one "Claudine Zap", presumably in extension of her profiles of the fangirl favorites over at Taser Beat:

TSA agent accidentally pepper sprays fellow agents

By Claudine Zap | The Lookout – Thu, Mar 28, 2013

Pepper spray (ThinkStock)

An incident that reportedly led a TSA agent to accidentally shoot five fellow employees with pepper spray left Kennedy International Airport with mud in its eye.

According to the New York Post, the stinging substance that is meant to be aimed at the face, and can cause major eye irritation, sent all six airport security screeners to the hospital.

The Post reports:

The agent, Chris Yves Dabel, discovered the device at the Terminal 2 security checkpoint and tried to determine if it was real, a source told The Post.

He told Port Authority cops that he “found the canister on the floor and thought it was a laser pointer.”

“They were playing around with it,” said one Kennedy Airport official.

The incident sounds more like something from "The Three Stooges" than something security experts would do.

The TSA seemed to assert in a statement to ABC News that the agent was being professional, not playful. “Officers were examining an abandoned item to determine its contents and to move it out of harm’s way when it accidentally discharged.” The TSA added that no travelers were injured.

The embarrassing incident led to the shutdown of security check points for 15 minutes, the UPI reports.

This is not the first time the TSA has suffered a security snafu. An earlier report in the New York Post exposed Newark Liberty Airport for failing to catch a fake bomb as part of a training exercise. An undercover agent brought the mock explosives through two layers of security, hidden in his pants.