The news has been making the rounds for a while- I am sure most folks have heard about the guy who was arrested and taken to county lockup for attempting to pay his bill at BestBuy with $2 bills. If not, try the [Baltimore Sun]. This article requires registration- thanks to bugmenot, you can use this username/password pair: bselig@dodgeit.com/bselig. Thanks to morons.org for pointing it out!
A couple more rehashes can be found here:
[slashdot] [worldnetdaily]
The gist is that this guy feels like he gets bad service from Best Buy and decides he is going to protest the bill he is getting by paying in $2 bills. Two dollar bills are, of course, legal tender. Rare, but not obsolete by any means- in 2003 the government was considering a new run of bills.
The situation somehow escalates from the cashier not wanting to take the $2 bills to the manager getting involved. Apparently somebody at BestBuy found it additionally fishy in that the ink seemed smeared on some bills and that some of the serial numbers on the bills were sequential. The thinking was apparently not only was somebody counterfeiting $2 bills, which the smart folks at BestBuy already know isn’t “real” currency, but the bills had sequential serial numbers. Contrast this with more conventional counterfeiters who produce fake $20 and $100 bills with only one or maybe just a few serial numbers.
The comedy of errors continues when the police decide that the safe thing to do is to put the man in handcuffs and leg irons and carry him off to county lockup. After about 3 hours the Secret Service comes along and injects some much needed sanity. So the poor bastard who was cuffed to a pole finally gets out.
Baltimore County’s response? Hey, we were playing it safe. According to spokesman Bill Toohey, “It’s a sign that we’re all a little nervous in the post-9/11 world.”
That pretty much wraps it up. For the most part, I avoid issues that look as if they could be political, but this is just stupidity. Unfortunately, this is the type of stupidity that tries to wrap itself in the flag, 9/11, and embed itself in politics. The unspoken rational is “If you aren’t supporting police departments that make false arrests because they don’t know $2 bills are legal tender, then the terrorists win…”
We need to reject this logic at every level. You can help. Stand up for a little common sense and accountability!