Chris Battle is surprised how often he hears the question “How many terrorists has the Department of Homeland Security caught?” He argues that DHS’ job is prevention, not apprehension; that’s what the FBI does.

The implication of the question – usually the questioner already knows the answer – is that the failure to catch members of al Qaeda during the fingerprinting processes at the border, or during Border Patrol operations along the southwest land border, or during the student visa process, or during the airport screening process … the implication is that the tactics implemented by DHS are obviously failing. No terrorists.

It is important to remember, however, that we usually won’t know if the efforts are successful – at least from the perspective of stopping the next al Qaeda operative. It should be remembered that most of the September 11th terrorists who entered the United States did so by exploiting our immigration system. For example, Hani Hanjour, one of the men who helped crash a 757 into the Pentagon, entered America allegedly as a foreign student. He applied for and received his student visa, but he never set foot on the school at which he was supposedly studying. In fact, nobody ever heard from him again until that fateful morning of September 11, 2001.

Had the DHS student visa program been in place at the time, Hanjour’s failure to show up at the school for which he was given a visa would have resulted in an alert being issued to US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. ICE would have then investigated the matter. Had they run down Hanjour, he would have been deported.

And he would never have been tagged as a “terrorist.” He would only have been an individual who was caught exploiting the immigration system – like millions of others who do the same.

So, yes, it’s true that few terrorists are “caught” by DHS. It’s also true that few terrorists who are caught will likely ever be known.

That’s fair enough, I think, if the question is being asked as a proxy for “Is DHS doing its job?”

When I ask it, though, I do so as a proxy for “Is this worth the sacrifice in liberty for ordinary Americans?” Chris is right that we’ll never know, for example, how many would-be airline hijackers have been thwarted by the more stringent airport screening procedures implemented after 9/11.  We do know, however, that something like 75 million Americans fly each year and that each and every one of them is inconvenienced.  That tens of millions of man-hours a year are thereby wasted getting to the airport much earlier than would otherwise be required.  That Americans are so frustrated with the new rules that they’ve skipped some 41 million trips that they would otherwise have taken.

Oh, and all of the 9/11 hijackers could have passed through the current screening procedures, albeit possibly not with box cutters.   But there are other weapons that would easily pass through – especially if one includes weapons that could be easily assembled aboard the plane.

None of that matters, though, because of two unarguably useful post-9/11 changes. First, we’ve hardened the cockpit doors and implemented procedures to ensure that they’re not opened — no matter what — in the even of a takeover attempt.  Second, passengers have learned to go Flight 93 on would-be terrorists.  Before 9/11, passengers reasonably assumed that hijackers just wanted to go to Cuba or get paid a ransom or whatever and that the passengers would likely be released unharmed afterward.  Now, as Richard Reid’s almost comical attempt to blow up a plane with a shoe bomb demonstrated, passengers will overwhelm a would-be attacker.

That hasn’t stopped the TSA from making everyone take their shoes off to get through security screening, of course.

The Clear Card program whereby pre-screened passengers are expedited through airport security is no more.  I received this email overnight:

Ensuring that this wasn’t some sort of odd email fraud scheme, I did a quick news search and, sure enough, it’s true:

Clear began in 2005 with the potential to make airport security quicker and easier for frequent travelers. For an annual fee, Clear would collect information and put something through a government security check. Once cleared, the traveler, in theory, would have privileges at Transportation Security Administration checkpoints. It was originally envisioned as a “trusted traveler” program.

But TSA never was comfortable with the notion of “trusting” any travelers, and so the security benefits of a Clear card boiled down to getting a special lane and some staff to help carry plastic tubs for you. For some people, moving to the front of a line was worth the price. But many travelers now receive that benefit with special lines for elite-level frequent fliers. And since lines are, for the most part, far less of an issue for travelers, the re-named “registered traveler” program has been slow to catch on with the flying public. Clear only was available at about 20 airports around the country, and often only at specific checkpoints at those airports. Mr. Brill had stepped down as CEO in March.

As Wired’s Ryan Singel observes, “as the TSA got better at keeping lines moving in the last few years, Clear’s benefits became less clear. Clear continued to ink deals with the nation’s largest airports and even partnering with football teams to get fans in the door faster, but evidently those strategies did not fare well in a down economy.”

What’s odd is that, while it was always clear that a private contractor was operating the program, it was always marketed as a quasi-government operation, with the clearance handled by TSA.  My wife and I joined about a year ago although, as I noted in a post last March (”Clear Card Holders Jump Airport Security Lines“), it was always “a questionable concept.”

The government requires that people give up their 4th Amendment rights against unreasonable searches in order to fly on commercial airlines on the grounds that they have no idea which of us are potentially terrorists. The government then charges a fee to allow people to prove that they’re not criminals and skip part of the line. There’s something vaguely un-American about this.

This is compounded by the fact that the government doesn’t allow people with military ID or who otherwise have actual security clearances to bypass said lines, which leads me to think that this is about collecting the $128 rather than ensuring security. That view is enhanced by the fact that no security check that could be accomplished for $128 will do anything other than demonstrate that the person in question is not a wanted felon or on a terrorist watch list. That’s a screening that all of the 9/11 hijackers would have passed.

And then, last August, Clear Card’s security was breached and had to suspend new enrollments until they got encryption installed. Whether they ever did that, I never heard.

We managed to bypass some pretty long lines a couple of times but have been much-less-frequent fliers in recent months, what with the new baby.

UPDATE: It could be worse:  Kevin Rose just paid $200 and his card is in the mail!

Seth Godin has a number of “random travel thoughts,” several of which relate to airport security:

• When I go through security, why do I need to remove a cardigan sweater but the woman standing next to me can keep her cashmere blouse on? Are certain kinds of wool inherently risky?

• What would happen if Imagineers from Disney designed the security line? Why not let them try?

• After inspecting more than twenty million pairs of shoes, have the screeners found even one dangerous pair?

• After seven years, why is random yelling still the way that TSA screeners communicate their superstitious rules to people in line? Will this still be true in twenty years?

Good questions all.

The company that’s contracted to provide Clear Card, the TSA’s handy-dandy system for screening out terrorists (or, at least, providing people willing to shell out 150 bucks slightly shorter lines) has managed to lose its customers’ sensitive data and compromise the entire system.

The company that runs the Clear system, which speeds customers through airport screenings, has been prevented from enrolling new customers by the T.S.A. after a security breach affecting some 33,000 customers.

Verified Identity System’s Clear program allows passengers to scan their smart cards at a kiosk for a speedier security screening. T.S.A. spokesperson Ann Davis told CBS an unencrypted computer storing the personal information on the cards went missing from SFO on July 26th.

Davis said VIP is a privately run company that the airport provides with background checks of enrolled customers. Now the company must suspend new enrollments, notify affected customers, and secures computers until they can install encryption.

Current Clear customers will still be able to use their cards while the breach is sorted out.

This isn’t really surprising, considering that the geniuses behind this system didn’t figure out that it would be useful to include a photo ID on the card, something that would have been obvious to the average 5-year-old. This, even though they actually take your picture for no apparent reason.

Then again, coming back from Canada Saturday morning, my wife and I had to go through U.S. Customs on the Canadian side of the border, standing in an inordinately long line.  No worries:  There’s a separate line for those who have submitted themselves for security pre-screening and obtained a card from TSA.  D’oh: But not the Clear card but rather something called “NEXUS” which apparently only works for those going between the U.S. and Canada.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Alex Tabarrok muses,

There’s nothing like visiting a foreign country like China to get an appreciation of what it’s like to live under an authoritarian regime. I was reminded of this when I arrived home and found that the TSA had rifled through my baggage.

That’s the entirety of his post. I presume he means to shed perspective (we complain about high handed government policies in the US but we’re amazingly free compared to just about everywhere else) but one could read it the other way (it takes going through airport security and dealing with the TSA gestapo to truly appreciate authoritarianism).

Of course, “Not As Bad as Red China” is not exactly a motto we should aspire to.

Some Obama supporters are apparently taking advantage of Google’s terms of service to silence anti-Obama blogs, Simon Owens of Bloggasm reports. The company automatically shuts down sites upon receipt of TOS violation claims until they’re able to do a human audit, a rather slow process with given little priority on the free BlogSpot service.

After some digging it became apparent that several Blogspot accounts had been shut down because of similar spam issues, and nearly all of them had three things in common: Most were pro-Hillary Clinton blogs, all were anti-Barack Obama, and several were listed on justsaynodeal.com, an anti-Obama website.

A “Flag Blog” link sits at the very top of every free Blogspot account. If a person finds objectionable content on a Blogspot site or suspects it’s publishing spam, he or she can click on the link and it will send a notice to Google requesting “human review.”

Larry Johnson and others charge that this is a coordinated effort by “Obama supporters,” a rather nebulous group, but they have no proof as of yet. Certainly, nothing yet ties this to Obama or his campaign team. Sister Toldja says “it wouldn’t be surprising to find out this indeed was happening, considering how so many far left Obama supporters react at the slightest hint of criticism of Barry Oh.”

Indeed. It’s hard to imagine, given the pattern, that “Obama supporters” aren’t behind this. I’d be surprised, indeed, if Obama or senior campaign staff had any knowledge of this. Unless some major news comes out toward that end, then, the Obama angle is only tangentially interesting.

The crucial issue here is the ease with which electronic speech can be stifled. Jim Geraghty observes that “Google may need to revisit its policy in managing Blogspot,” snarking, “At the very least, the system should inquire if the person making the complaint has adopted the middle name “Hussein”. And Warner Todd Huston reminds us that this isn’t a unique occurence, with many conservative blogs having previously fallen victim to Google’s policies.

The power of Google in the marketplace is troubling. I say that as someone who’s an avid user of their products, especially Gmail and Google Search, and who derives some small income through Google’s AdSense program. On the other hand, I also, like most other bloggers, am at the mercy of Google — by far the biggest player in Internet search — for ranking in their system and referred traffic.

As I’ve recounted previously, I’ve been the victim of BlogSpot myself. More than a dozen niche blogs that I had on that domain, including the original incarnation of Outside the Beltway, was summarily “disappeared” and I was unable to get a non-automated response out of Google. I’ve said it before and I repeat: If you’re serious about your blog, get your own domain.

It doesn’t end there, though. The Digital Millenium Copyright Act provides that those who claim copyright infringement on material published on the Web merely have to lodge a formal complaint with the server and the host is obligated to take the material down in short order. The burden of proof is on the publisher, not the claimant, to prove that they have a right to publish the content. That power could easily be abused in an election cycle.

YouTube (which has been absorbed into the Google collective) and various other highly influential online outlets have adopted similar “guilty until proven innocent” rules. I have received several notices from YouTube informing me that a company has claimed a copyright on a posted video and that, while the video I posted would remain operational, all statistics and so forth would be credited to the claimant.

[Claimant] claimed this content as a part of the YouTube Content Identification program. YouTube allows partners to review YouTube videos for content to which they own the rights. Partners may use our automated video / audio matching system to identify their content, or they may manually review videos.

If you believe that this claim was made in error, or that you are otherwise authorized to use the content at issue, you can dispute this claim with [Claimant] and view other options in the Video ID Matches section of your YouTube account. Please note that YouTube does not mediate copyright disputes between YouTube owners. Learn more about video identification disputes.

In fact, the videos in question were legitimately copywrited and I’ve got no quarrel with the outcome. I only posted them to my account to preserve them, having posted videos on OTB only to have the original poster remove them and screw up the post. But the policy here is bizarre: YouTube will take action based on a claim but they provide zero recourse!

Given that online communication is increasingly important in politics and business, we’re going to need a better, more efficient means of dispute resolution than we currently have. Right now, it’s far too easy to do mischief.

The Senate easily invoked cloture yesterday, ending a threatened filibuster of a major overhaul of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. The revised bill is expected to pass today.

This may be the most important bill we pass this year,” said Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), an architect of the bill crafted over four months of negotiations between congressional leaders and the White House.

The bill would require that the secret FISA court approve procedures for intercepting foreign nationals’ e-mails and telephone calls. Spying on U.S. citizens, including those overseas, would require individual warrants from the same court.

It also would establish the FISA law, and the secret court it created, as the final legal authority on government spying. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), the party’s presumptive presidential nominee, have cited the exclusivity provision as the main reason they supported the bill. They said it is a rejection of President Bush’s stance that his wartime powers gave him authority to approve the defunct warrantless wiretapping program.

So far, so good. The sticking point, though, is that the bill would give retroactive immunity from civil suits to telecommunications companies that complied with Bush Administration requests to assist in electronic surveillance absent FISA warrants. As FDL’s Ian Welsh notes, “Obama and McCain were both absent, as was Clinton.” The only others not voting were Robert Byrd and Teddy Kennedy, both of whom are recovering from serious medical conditions. One presumes the others were off campaigning or fundraising — and wanting to escape and on the record vote.

This didn’t prevent Obama and Clinton from being criticized. Carrie Budoff Brown, reporting for The Politico:

Disappointed over his position on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the online activists feel jilted and betrayed and have taken to questioning his progressive credentials. One prominent blogger, Atrios, has even given him the moniker “Wanker of the Day.”

“He broke faith,” said Matt Stoller, a political consultant and blogger at OpenLeft.com. “Obama pledged to filibuster, and he is part of that old politics, in this case, that he said he wasn’t. It will spur us to challenge him.”

The FISA debate marks the presumptive Democratic nominee’s first serious break from the liberal Netroots in the general election. He is still their candidate, but the FISA issue has reignited skepticism among major bloggers, who had largely pushed aside doubts about Obama when Edwards, their favored candidate, ended his bid in February.

Welsh says “This is a sad day, especially for those of us who believed Obama when he said he would support a filibuster against retroactive immunity.” More importantly, he correctly notes that yesterday’s was “the real vote” and that voting against the final bill, while it might fool “the rubes,” is meaningless.

Greg Sargent presents Obama’s explanation for why he reneged on his promise to “support a filibuster of an earlier version of the bill,” namely that, “My view on FISA has always been that the issue of the phone companies per se is not one that overrides the security interests of the American people.” That’s a statement that will play well with most Americans, I think, even if it upsets the netroots.

And, indeed, Obama has correctly gauged that the latter is of peripheral consequence.

Still, the disillusionment goes only so far. The liberal blogosphere’s most recognizable name, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, founder of Daily Kos, said Monday on MSNBC’s “Countdown With Keith Olbermann”: “Let’s be honest, it is either Obama or John McCain. So we really don’t have much of a choice.” At stake for Obama in the FISA vote is the intensity of support for Obama, Moulitsas said.

“I don’t want to hear him talk about leadership. I don’t want to hear him talk about defending the Constitution. I want to see him do it,” he said. “If he does, it will increase the intensity and level of support he gets from base Democrats. If he doesn’t, we may worry he is just another one of these spineless Democrats who are more afraid of controversy in doing the right thing than they are in actually doing the right thing.”

The intensity of outrage over telecom immunity continues to puzzle me. The core issue is finding a balance between 4th Amendment freedoms and the collection of intelligence necessary to prevent terrorist attacks. Ultimately, that means finding a way to get swift but real judicial oversight, preferably by people with a serious understanding of intelligence collection, to guard against executive zeal. The ability to retroactively sue phone companies, who complied with what they either thought were legitimate requests from the government to help go after the bad guys or simply feared alienating their regulatory overlords, has always struck me as a tertiary issue.

Just when it appeared that the Associated Press had come to its senses, they’ve now announced an exorbitant up-front fee for even short quotations of their works, Tim Conneally reports for BetaNews. They’ve created a handy-dandy online form to calculate what we owe them.

Hmm. Well, surely, an organization as large as the AP, which goes around suing people, has lawyers on retainer, if not on staff. Surely, those lawyers have some training in copyright law and are familiar with Fair Use, as outlined in sections 107 through 118 of the Copyright Act (Title 17, U. S. Code). Presumably, then, there is a different fee structure involved for educational and non-profit use, right?

Right!

Hmm. Not much of a discount!

As a content creator, I’m very sympathetic to the AP’s desire to protect its economic interests. But to pretend that there is no right to quote some portion of their articles for the purpose of commentary or education is outrageous and undermines their objectives.

Michelle Malkin and Patrick Frey have a great deal of fun at AP’s expense, noting that work on their sites have been quoted, sometimes extensively, in AP stories. Tongue-in-cheek, Malkin even prepares a bill. They raise a legitimate point, though: Why is the AP’s quoting of someone else’s writing “reporting” whereas a blogger quoting the AP as a jumping off point for commentary “theft of intellectual property”?

Orin Kerr, who’s a lawyer — but decidedly not a copyright lawyer — writes that “fair use is always contextual and case-by-case” and that “copying the statements of a person who is ‘trying to get the word out’ is really different from a fair use perspective from copying the statements of a pundit or reporter.” But news outlets quote bloggers, including me, routinely without getting permission to do so. So far as I know, none of us mind that; most of us welcome it, in fact. But none have ever contacted me for permission to do so.

Kerr’s right that Fair Use is case-by-case and rather murky. But, although I’m not a lawyer, I’m rather sure that there’s no bright line rule that anything over four words is excluded.

Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, better known as “Kos,” is a specialist in media law who’s making enough money on his blog to justify going to court. He says: Bring it on.

Lots of blogs are calling for boycotts of AP content. Not me. I’m going to keep using it. I will copy and paste as many words as I feel necessary to make my points and that I feel are within bounds of copyright law (and remember, I’ve got a JD and specialized in media law, so I know the rules pretty well). And I will keep doing so if I get an AP takedown notice (which I will make a big public show of ignoring). And then, either the AP — an organization famous for taking its members work without credit — will either back down and shut the hell up, or we’ll have a judge resolve the easiest question of law in the history of copyright jurisprudence.

The AP doesn’t get to negotiate copyright law. But now, perhaps, they’ll threaten someone who can afford to fight back, instead of cowardly going after small bloggers.

I’m at a loss as to why the AP, whose relationship with bloggers is mostly synergistic, has been so ham handed in this instance.

Those who wish to fly without ID cards have but a few more days.

Beginning Saturday, June 21, 2008 passengers that willfully refuse to provide identification at security checkpoint will be denied access to the secure area of airports. This change will apply exclusively to individuals that simply refuse to provide any identification or assist transportation security officers in ascertaining their identity.

This new procedure will not affect passengers that may have misplaced, lost or otherwise do not have ID but are cooperative with officers. Cooperative passengers without ID may be subjected to additional screening protocols, including enhanced physical screening, enhanced carry-on and/or checked baggage screening, interviews with behavior detection or law enforcement officers and other measures.

Now, I’m as anti-TSA as the next guy and still maintain that being subject to search by federal agents absent reasonable suspicion, much less probable cause, is a violation of my 4th Amendment rights. But having to show identification so that it can be ascertained that I share a name with the guy on the boarding pass? No problem.

Daniel Solove begs to differ.

I’m one who routinely presents my ID to the TSA officials at the airport. I think that the ID requirement is stupid, but I just want to get to my plane and not be hassled. But others, for reasons of conscience or protest, do not want to present their ID at the airport. This new TSA rule strikes me as problematic from a First Amendment standpoint, since it seems to be designed to target those who don’t present ID for expressive reasons. As such, this new TSA requirement might be a form of viewpoint discrimination.

Although the First Amendment doesn’t restrict the TSA from requiring IDs in order to board an airplane, it does restrict using the ID requirement to penalize people who engage in expressive conduct. Because the TSA requirement seems to be targeted to this kind of expressive conduct (hence the exception for lost or stolen IDs), it may run afoul of the First Amendment.

I get that there’s such a thing as symbolic speech. You know, F- the draft and other such noble sentiments. But what exactly is the idea conveyed by not showing one’s drivers’ license? I got my license suspended? I’m under 16? I’m afraid the camera will steal my soul? F- you? Wouldn’t it be more expressive to say, “It really pisses me off that I have to show you ID to fly” to the agent while complying with the request?

I do, however, find it troubling that the regulation has a “is nice to the authorities” exemption. The freedom to be crabby with annoying government officials strikes me as much more fundamental to free expression than not showing an ID card.

Domenico Montanaro notes that, while everyone is focusing on the Democratic National Committee’s likely “compromise” solution of awarding Florida and Michigan half their original allocation of delegates, it’s actually much more complicated than that.

[A] 50% cut and a halving of the delegates is not the same thing. For instance, if Florida delegates are seated in their entirety, but only have their vote counted as a .5, then Clinton will net approximately 19 delegates out of the state. But if the delegation is cut in half, that’s done in every congressional district as well as statewide, then suddenly Clinton’s advantage is only a net of six. That’s right, the complicated nature of the DNC delegate selection process will be a good reminder to math majors everywhere that a 50% cut is not the same as a halving of an individual number. Go figure…

Nate Silver breaks out the math in much more detail. Complicating matters further, Matthew Shugart quips that, “Of course, if the Democratic Party used D’Hondt like most proportional-representation systems, 70-30 would still give 3-1 in a 4-seat district, but 2-0 in a 2-seat district.”

Regardless of the outcome on this score, M.S. Bellows, Jr. argues that Hillary Clinton will use it as an excuse to keep the fight going.

The rules meeting is a trap. Clinton wants the RBC to give Florida and Michigan not the full votes she is fruitlessly advocating for and which would in any case not translate to a win for her but the half-vote compromise she is publicly advocating against. When the committee does award half-votes, she will have cause to extend her campaign through the summer, guaranteeing a divided Convention and possibly killing Democrats’ chances of capturing the Oval Office in November (and of preventing pro-life , pro-Imperial Presidency Republicans from replacing the two remaining Democrats on the nine-member Supreme Court).

It’s a trap, and the Obama campaign and the Democratic Party are about to walk blindly into it. No one seems to be noticing that — let alone implementing the equally counterintuitive, Aikido strategy that would stop Clinton’s game: letting her have her way tomorrow, 100 percent, so that she lacks grounds to appeal, and Obama, instead, becomes the one holding the “I could appeal!” trump card.

Jim Tankersley thinks Clinton may want to use this as an excuse to keep going but that a lack of money and a fear of long-term damage to her political future will stop her.

Mathew Shugart examines often-heard claims that the race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama is “close.” He looks at the pledge delegate counts and sees Obama leading Clinton 52.4 percent to 47.6 percent and concludes, “I will grant that this lead is not a ‘landslide’ by any means. But, quite independent of any realism (or lack thereof) of catch-up scenarios, is a difference of almost 5 percentage points ‘close’?”

Actually, I’d say it is, at least when the races isn’t (technically) over yet. Further, part of the game has been trying to figure out the baselines. That is, percentage of what?

RealClearPolitics has added nearly 100 pledged delegates to the count since Shugart’s calculations yesterday. That brings it to 50.8 to 46.0 (1654/3253 to 1498/3253). That closes the gap slightly. And RCP assigns 9 pledged delegates from John Edwards to Obama. If those are excluded, which seems reasonable in terms of a first ballot if “pledged” means anything, then it’s even narrower (50.7 to 46.2).

If you add in the unpledged “superdelegates,” though, you get another set of numbers. RCP shows Obama with 307 and Clinton with 279. If you add them in and keep the Edwards delegates out, then it gets even closer, 51.6 to 47.7, a gap of 4 points.

Another way of looking at the same data is that Clinton has 90.9 percent the delegates Obama has. That’s pretty close, no? Especially in context of a race that so many have been saying she had a duty to withdraw from weeks ago.

Now, if we add in Florida and Michigan . . . .

Ultimately, though, it’s not the actual closeness of the race that matters but the perception of it. A month ago, the press played along with the idea that Clinton could overtake Obama, despite it being unlikely. She’s closed the gap substantially since then but, alas, not enough. Even though neither is likely to have enough delegates wrapped up to win going into the convention, the near-universal sentiment is that he is the winner and is owed the nomination. Absent a scandal of monumental proportions, I can’t see how Clinton overturns that.

via Steven Taylor

Responding to reports that American Airlines will enact numerous cost-cutting measures that will make flying even less pleasant, including charging $15 for the privilege of checking a suitcase, Kevin Drum wonders where it will all end.

Airlines have spent years trying to bully passengers into reducing their carry-on luggage — with TSA pitching in to help in recent years. Now that they’ve finally broken us (I finally caved in and started checking everything several years ago) they’re going to charge us for checking luggage. Lovely.

I don’t know anything about airline economics and obviously the American Airlines executive team does. Still, the kind of sleazy pricing practices they and the rest of the domestic industry are adopting, where advertised fares mysteriously rise 20% by the time you actually board the plane, seem like exactly the kind of thing designed to wreck their long-term business.

It has been noted for years that international carriers bend over backwards to make flying family-friendly whereas American carriers cater to the business traveler. (Those who’ve flown overseas on KLM or Lufthansa or Virgin will have noted that those flying with babies get the bulkhead seats, complete with snap-in bassinets that allow infants to sleep most of the way.) This is just a continuation of that trend.

Among the less-heralded changes American is making is “weeding out money-losing flights and limiting the number of low-priced seats in coach.” Clearly, the ideal passenger is the business traveler who books at the last minute, thus paying full fare, and travels with only a briefcase and a laptop because he’s flying back that evening, also at full fare. He’ll have his head buried in his paperwork or his eyes glued to the laptop screen the whole flight, perhaps consuming a bag of cheap snacks and a half can of Coke. No checked bags, no screaming kids, no annoying requests for pillows and headphones, etc.

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I despise flying despite having done it routinely since I was 6 months old. And it’s getting worse rather than better.

The problem, I think, is that flying has become a commodity. Aside from frequent flier programs and other incentives, most of us book our travel based entirely on cost and scheduling convenience. Carriers that offer better service (larger seats, decent meals, more generous baggage allowances, friendlier waitresses, and so forth) simply can’t pass on the costs in that environment, leading to a race to the bottom. Those who truly want — and can afford — a good experience fly First Class. Otherwise, you’re essentially on a flying Greyhound bus.

Only vaguely apropos to anything above, I found this odd vintage add whilst Googling for art to illustrate the piece:

Not only has airline travel changed rather substantially in the intervening years but so, apparently, has the conception of motherhood. In more ways than one, frankly.

Image: Clayton Barrel

The Star Pupils Edition OTB Caption Contest^TM is now over.

(AP Photo/Xinhua, Ren Yong)

✰ THE WINNERS ✰

First: floyd – Unfortunately; the third brother got sad one day and drowned!

Second: Steven Taylor – Them TSA guys are sharp dressers!

Third: Elmo – Mmmm …. carrots.

HONORABLE MENTION

Cowboy Blob – Ocular Jocularity

yetanotherjohn – The Sauron party rally was sparsely attended.

FormerHostage – At least they didn’t go as testicles.

William d’Inger – Cloning experiment contaminated by squid genes.

Justgroovy – I said the “Ides” of March, you doofus, not “eyes”.

Bithead – Waiting for Nod

ℛODNEY’S BOTTOM OF THE BARREL

Tempting the fates

Unfortunately for Frodo, Sauron’s children continued to flourish in Newark, New Jersey and plotted for the day when they would return to vanquish Middle Earth (Ipse Dixit — circa May 2004)

Don’t treat us like children, we’re wearing Big-eye pants

Queer eye for the Cyclops guy.

“We don’t work together, there is no ‘I’ in ‘TEAM.’”

The Monday Contest runs a little soft in the rear end.

Steven Royster, Spokesman for the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Consular Affairs, had this to say of the tragic cyclone which has killed tens of thousands of people in Burma:

When a crisis like this strikes around the world, the Department of State’s first thought is for the safety of American citizens. As the storm brewed offshore, colleagues at the American Embassy in Rangoon issued two messages to Americans in country with advice on how to prepare for Nargis.

The Attackerman is outraged and snarks, “Don’t be surprised if that gets quoted in the next bin Laden tape.”

But, um, isn’t the first thought of the United States government supposed to be for the welfare of its own citizens? Those people our government is of, for, and by? Those people whose ancestors ordained its Constitution “in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity”? Who, you know, pay for the government to begin with?

Indeed, I’m given to understand that “The mission of the U.S. Department of State is to create a more secure, democratic, and prosperous world for the benefit of the American people and the international community.” Notice the order?

It’s not as if we’re not offering millions in aid to the Burmese victims, with many more millions doubtless to come. (If the murdering thugs who run the place accept it, of course.) We’re pretty generous at times like this. That doesn’t mean we don’t look out for our own, first.

Abu Muqawama’s Charlie unleashes a diatribe against Lee Greenwood and, especially, the “miserable, treacly song” for which he is most known. Noting that the old warriors at a weekend Special Forces gathering “stood for it like it was the National Anthem,” she asks, “Is this some sort of Army thing? Does graduating from the Q course leave you totally devoid of a sense of irony? And at what point did Lee enter the pantheon of sacred songwriters?”

A fair question.

I never attended the Q Course and wouldn’t have graduated had I done so. But my Army experience, which began with a cadetship the same year “God Bless the USA” hit the charts, is that the Powers That Be apparently thought that song highly motivational, as they played it every damn chance they could. As an 18-year-old embarking on something serious, it had its desired effect. By the time I turned 20, it made me want to wretch. By my mid-20s, it made me want to do more than merely manage violence.

Then again, I wasn’t a career soldier. Most of my comrades-in-arms who stayed with it, many of whom are about to retire at the rank of lieutenant colonel, are simply decidedly less cynical than I am. Those old Green Berets have a highly developed sense of irony. But it’s quite different from the one Charlie and I have.