Category Government Idiocy

Entries 59 Total

Now They Tell Us

Jan 21, ’09 11:02 AM

An AP story in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

President can’t always control unemployment rate

[...] Presidents don’t have much control over either the number of new jobs or the number of people looking for work. The labor force has more than doubled since 1953.

Likewise, the number of new jobs created in a year is determined by expansions and contractions in the business cycle — cycles that begin years, even decades, before a president takes office.

A year ago, of course, the articles in the paper seemed to assume that the president was somehow able to control the unemployment rate, that for some reason Bush et al. preferred that things go south. Though, it must be said, that we were also hearing about the ‘disastrous Bush economy’ even while the economy was booming.

Further down in the article:

Is there anything presidents can do to create jobs?

One thing: Build infrastructure.

“We built a lot of infrastructure in the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson era,” [Colgate U economic historian Michael] Haines said. “I’m sure the interstate highway system created an incredible amount of employment. We can do it again.”

This ignores the distinction between productive jobs and just jobs. You could always hire two guys, one to dig a hole and the other to fill it in again: two jobs created! Few ‘job-creation’ schemes are quite that useless, but most of them have a significant amount of futility built in; almost always, if the work being done under the scheme were work that people particularly wanted done, someone would be making money off it.

Do we need another Interstate Highway System? What else could we build that would require that kind of initial outlay without being money down the tubes? I can’t think of anything. I hear a lot about ‘crumbling infrastructure’, but I just don’t see it. I hear a lot about the need to ‘invest in schools’, but I can’t help but notice that most public school systems already spend more than all but the most elite private schools. I hear about making sure that everyone has the ‘opportunity for a college education’, but I note that graduation rates are already falling off because we’re already sending people who aren’t suited to it off to college.

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The Rule Of Law Dies A Little Bit More

Jan 15, ’09 10:19 AM

Yesterday, in Herring v. United States, the Supreme Court held:

When police mistakes leading to an unlawful search are the result of isolated negligence attenuated from the search, rather than systemic error or reckless disregard of constitutional requirements, the exclusionary rule does not apply.

Which effectively means that the Fourth Amendment now reads:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, [...] unless such an otherwise illegal search is the result of isolated negligence rather than of systemic error or of reckless disregard of Consitutional requirements.

I suppose we should be grateful that the Court still holds that reckful disregard of Constitutional requirements is still not allowed.

Or does it? We need a test case, but past decisions suggest that where drugs or sex offenders or children or any one of a number of classes of super-duper crimes are involved, recklessness in searching and seizing might be just what the Founders intended.

That this is a generally reasonable approach will be seen by anyone who studies the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and notices how they consistently give the benefit of the doubt to the government in edge cases. The Framers of the Constitution, after all, had no reason to suspect the motivations of the government; think of Thomas Jefferson. ‘I have sworn upon the altar of Almighty God eternal hostility against every form of non-isolated negligence, systemic error, and non-reckless disregard of Constitutional requirements.’

This thinking was not fully elucidated in the text of the Fourth Amendment simply because of constraints of space.

Bill O Rights

You can see how the Bill of Rights fills up the whole page. Lessons like these are why the modern legal system has its own paper size:

Paper Sizes

The real effect of this decision will be that the police and prosecutors will seek the exact location of that division between, one the one hand, isolated negligence, and on the other, systemic error. The police will now have carte blanche to search anyone they want, as long as they don’t do it so often as to make their ‘incompetence’ be systemic in a way that’s provable in court.

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'A Branding Type Of Situation'

Jan 2, ’09 9:00 AM

The airport in St. Louis doesn’t have big signs announcing that you are at the airport, and apparently this is a problem. From the story in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

The signs are part of a multimillion-dollar initiative to make the airport more inviting.

One would think that it’s the airplanes that go places that make the airport inviting. And where else in St. Louis are people going to get on a commercial airliner?

“We don’t have any (signs) now,” said Airport Director Richard Hrabko. “Other airports all over the country have monument signs that designate that it is the airport. Any other company with a large complex would have a sign out front.”

Except that you aren’t a ‘company with a large complex’. The companies you speak of are in competition against other companies that do the same thing, or much the same thing. Part of that competition involves making people aware of your existence, and aware of the fact that your company has ‘a large complex’. As a major metropolitan airport, you don’t really have that problem. People who live in St. Louis, or who want to come to St. Louis, have to use your airport, or own their own little airplane, or charter a plane to another area airport, or take the train or bus, or drive, or walk.

And on top of that, you already have one of the coolest, most architecturally distinctive airport terminals in the world, a real gem that could itself serve as a ‘brand’ for the airport. Too bad you people have built so much garbage in front of it that it’s nearly invisible from the outside.

lambert1968.jpg

Two of the monument signs would feature entry sculptures towering about 40 feet, with a painted aluminum replica of the airport’s logo — an airplane flying past the Arch. The airport’s name would appear on an accompanying sign.

This would be good, as it would let the traveller know that he is, in fact, at the airport in St. Louis, and not Cleveland or something. Since they wouldn’t be aware of that anyway.

It would also help get the word out about the little-known fact that St. Louis has a giant arch. Incidentally, if you attempt the stunt depicted in the logo, you are in violation of FAR 91.119 (c), which prohibits flying closer than 500 feet to any ‘person, vessel, or structure’.

_flystl_splash_images_logo.gif

“This will be very distinguished looking, very professional,” Hrabko said. “It will put a branding type of situation on the airport, which it does not have right now.”

Again, Mr. Hrabko seems to misunderstand the business he’s in. St. Louis has two airports capable of handling airline traffic, and another two that could be made to work if you needed to. Only one of these airports has scheduled passenger service. What’s the branding for? It almost sounds like the intended audience here isn’t the public, but the people who attend the Large Airport Manager’s Convention.

The chief irony here is that the St. Louis airport is actually a pretty good airport, at least from a passenger’s perspective. It’s dingy and shows signs of hard wear, and the roof leaks in places. But parking is convenient and I can pretty reliably show up 20 minutes before a flight and walk right on to a plane.

The airport management, though, doesn’t really see the airport as a passenger does, i.e. as just a place where you get on an airplane. The airport managers are there all day, every day, and so see superficial things like the lack of fancy signs as more important than they are.

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A Story That Suggests I Live In The Right Town

Jul 21, ’07 11:22 PM

The Washington Post reports:

The small town of Front Royal, in the foothills of the Shenandoahs, is taking on what town leaders and many others consider to be the scourge of Virginia.

The council is scheduled to vote Monday on a resolution that would prevent its police officers from enforcing Virginia’s “abusive driving” fees. [...] Under the Front Royal proposal, people cited for driving under the influence would still be subject to the state fees. But those charged with certain lesser offenses, such as reckless driving or driving without a license, would not have to pay. The resolution would apply only to tickets written by the Front Royal police. Anyone charged by the Warren County sheriff or the Virginia State Police, which do not come under town control, would still have to pay.

As it happens, I actually live just outside the town of Front Royal. I will be harassing the Warren County Board of Supervisors, though, to encourage them to adopt the same sensible approach.

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Food Stamp Diet

May 17, ’07 5:19 PM

A few members of Congress are engaging in a publicity stunt where they live for a week on $21 worth of food. This is the amount that the average food stamp recipient receives, according to the story in the Washington Post.

Now, this is stupid for a bunch of reasons, foremost among them these:

1. You don’t get food stamp benefits on a weekly basis; you get them monthly. You can save a lot of money by buying things in larger sizes meant to be consumed over a longer period of time — even if you’re on food stamps.

2. They’re being extremely disingenuous about this ‘average food stamp recipient’ thing. Here’s how much the food stamp program pays out:

People in
Household		Maximum
Monthly Allotment		Weekly
per person
1 $ 155$38.75
2 $ 284$35.50
3 $ 408$34.00
4 $ 518$32.37
5 $ 615$30.75
6 $ 738$30.75
7 $ 816$29.14
8 $ 932$29.12
Each additional person $ 117$29.13 and up

[UPDATE 24 September 2008: the allotments are now here. The new breakdown per person per week is:

People in
Household		Maximum
Monthly Allotment		Weekly
per person
1 $ 162$40.50
2 $ 298$37.25
3 $ 426$35.50
4 $ 542$33.88
5 $ 643$32.15
6 $ 772$32.17
7 $ 853$30.46
8 $ 975$30.47
Each additional person $ 122$30.50 and up

]

However, these are maximum allotments. Your net monthly income is multiplied by .3 and subtracted from these numbers. The idea of the program is to make sure that you’re not spending more than 30% of your net income on food. It’s probably worth mentioning that ‘net income’ here does not mean ‘net income’ in any normal sense. Your ‘net income’ is you income minus 20%, minus $134, minus $175 for each child under two and minus $175 for each other child, minus certain medical expenses, minus child support payments, minus $143 if you’re homeless, minus any ‘shelter expenses’ (including phone bills, rent, electricity, etc., etc.) that are over 50% of your income up to a limit of $417.

Apparently after figuring all of this, the average recipient gets $21 a week. I’m not going to bother to fact-check that. However, it is important to notice that the food stamp program does not intend you to eat on $21 a week. The clear point here is that the USDA thinks that you should spend $30 to $35 a week on food. If you cannot afford this, the USDA will fund your eating more or less up to that amount.

If, however, you can afford to spend something on food but not $35 a week, the USDA will make up the difference in food stamps.

So the members of Congress are out to demonstrate that spending 25% of the monthly food stamp claim will not feed them for a week, even though food stamp benefits are not paid on a weekly basis and even though the food stamp program will pay you more than $21 a week if you are determined to have sufficient need.

The Washington Post, of course, does not notice any of this.

What’s more, the members of Congress seem to have no idea how to do this — which is fine by them, since their whole purpose here is to show how much ‘hunger’ there is in the U.S., and that the food stamp benefit needs to be increased.

Congressman Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) posted his grocery receipt.

He spent $20.66 on corn meal; strawberry preserves; peanut butter; pasta; coffee; tomato sauce; cottage cheese; bread; and garlic.

The coffee, which has no nutritive value and which is in fact a psychoactive drug (though one that you can buy with food stamps), cost $2.50, or more than ten percent of his total budget.

Jim McGovern (D-Massachusetts) got his wife to go along with this too, and so he spent $41.70 on a ‘fajita kit’; brown rice; tuna; coffee; lentils; spaghetti; beans; peas; broccoli; bananas; potatoes; onions; apples; garlic; shredded cheese; chicken; and what he calls ‘fatty’ beef.

Now, I’m no big-city Congressman, but it seems to me that when buying food on an extremely constrained budget, one of the first things you do is not buy pre-shredded cheese. Or coffee. Or anything offered as a prepared food ‘kit’ (though in fairness that fajita kit was only $1.79).

Unless, of course, I wanted to make an extremely dubious point, secure in the knowledge that the Washington Post et al. would never point out the obvious.

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Unpredictability At The Airport

Dec 2, ’05 4:01 PM

They are changing the airport security regime again:

Under the new plan, more passengers will likely be subjected to secondary screening, and pat-downs will include arms and legs as well as the torso. More canine teams will patrol airports. Passengers also can expect more randomness at security gates so would-be terrorists won’t know for sure what they might see.

For example, an airport might require all passengers to remove their shoes one day but not the next. Some passengers may have to show their identification an extra time or have their carry-on bag hand-searched.

“By incorporating unpredictability into our procedures and eliminating low-threat items, we can better focus our efforts on stopping individuals who wish to do us harm,” Hawley said.

I’m not sure how good an idea this is. On the one hand, making the process unpredictable will presumably make it that much harder for any would-be bad guys to find some way to get prohibited items through the checkpoint.

On the other hand, though, deliberately making the process unpredictable will undoubtedly cause more delays as passengers won’t be able to anticipate what’s going to be required of them — and it’ll probably be a bust anyway because I can’t imagine the government actually doing truly random things. The government has a culture entirely based on procedure; and even if you write a procedure that says ‘vary the procedures wildly’, it’s still going to mean culture shock.

Oh the third hand, though, it appears that we will once again be able to carry pocketknives etc. onto airplanes, the government having after four years completed its procedure for noticing that these are not actually a threat.

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Central Planning In Maryland

Oct 11, ’05 5:35 PM

“We’re suffering from our success as a great community,” Floreen said. “Our real estate prices are out of sight.”

That’s Montgomery County (MD) council member Nancy Floreen, quoted in a Washington Post story about a new proposal to do something about Montgomery County’s lack of ‘affordable housing’.

Montgomery County is a victim of its own success, Ms. Floreen says. That’s an interesting way to look at it.

To begin to understand the problem, please consider this map. Clicking on it will pop up a (much) bigger version:

Dc Area Montgomery Map

This is a map of all the properties listed in the Washington, DC multiple listing service on August 20, 2005, plotted by location and colored by price. The colors run, from least to most expensive: blue, green, light yellow, dark yellow, orange, red, purple. The exact values vary from map to map, but on this one, they are:

ColorMinimum
Price		Maximum
Price
Blue$0$341,000
Green$341,000$441,000
Light yellow $441,000$551,000
Dark yellow $551,000$649,000
Orange $649,000$748,500
Red $748,500$1,501,000
Purple$1,501,000

Montgomery County, Maryland is outlined in black. The county actually extends pretty far north, off the map; about 60% of it is shown here.

But even seeing only this part of the county, it’s clear what’s going on: Montgomery County is not so much the ‘victim of its own success’ as it is the victim of the fact that it’s illegal to build anything in half the county. Half the county is protected farmland, through which it’s impossible to build a badly-needed road. The lack of a road and bridge connecting the outlying Virginia suburbs (and Dulles Airport) to northern Montgomery County limits where you can effectively commute from if you work in the county; that demand, and the fact that nothing can be built in half the county, push up real estate prices.

If your goal is to inflate the price of your real estate, I heartily suggest that you hire Montgomery County planners as consultants. They have done a very good job.

But the constant complaining out of Montgomery County seems to suggest that their actual goal isn’t to inflate real estate prices. At the moment, the crisis seems to be that police officers, firefighters, and teachers — of which Montgomery County has many — can’t afford to live there.

The Montgomery County Council will consider a proposal today to require that 10 percent of homes built in new developments near Metro stations be set aside for middle-class families being priced out of the county’s soaring real estate market.

[...]

Such a program would be geared toward county employees — including teachers, firefighters, police officers and nurses who make too much to qualify for Montgomery’s affordable-housing program but not enough to buy a house or condominium at market rate, [Council Member Steven A.] Silverman said.

Silverman is expected to run for county executive in 2006.

One of his probable opponents in the Democratic primary, former County Council member Isiah Leggett, has called Silverman’s solution inadequate to meet middle-class housing needs. Leggett, instead, backs a more intensive approach: building entire housing developments with the majority of homes set aside for middle-class families.

Housing projects. For the middle class. This is what it’s come to, in Montgomery County.

I cannot help but notice that middle-class people (in this case, people making up to $100,000 a year, so genuinely middle-class) in the United States generally have no problems finding and buying the things they need on the open market. Cars, clothing, food, globe-trotting vacations: quite a large fraction of the world’s industrial output is dedicated to meeting the needs of middle-class Americans.

But they can’t afford to live in Montgomery County, Maryland, because the county has variously restricted where you can build; what you can build; how you can build; and who you can sell to. New residential construction in the county has to have sprinklers throughout; new developments have to have 12.5% of their units set aside for the county’s existing affordable-housing program; and at the moment, you are not allowed to start any new construction in the county thanks to a permit moratorium enacted this summer.

In Chevy Chase, there’s a separate six-month town moratorium on construction, intended to fight what they call ‘mansionization’. They don’t want mansions in Chevy Chase: they apparently want just what they already have: million-dollar three-bedroom bungalows.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is ‘success’, as in ‘being a victim of success’. Because certainly those sprinkler systems, and the costs incurred by builders when they’re hit with unannounced moratoria, and the cost of leaving half the county’s land empty are borne by someone else, and not the hapless would-be Montgomery County resident.

So the proposal, to further correct this housing shortage that arises out of the county’s interference, is, of course, more county interference. Already, if you make less than 70% of the median income, you qualify for Montgomery County’s bureaucratic affordable-housing program, where builders are required to build housing that is rented or sold at below-market rates in exchange for being allowed to build anything at all.

Now, the proposal is to force builders to subsidize another class of housing, this to be rented or sold at below-market prices to people based partly on their income but also on whether they work for the county.

This means that the county can continue to pay these people wages that do not allow them to live in the county, but that the county can nevertheless increase these people’s effective compensation by requiring builders to pay part of the teachers’, firefighters’, and cops’ salaries in the form of subsidized housing.

The beauty of this scheme is that the builders will have no choice but to raise prices on the housing that they are allowed to sell at market rates. If — to use an extreme example — the county required builders to give away 20 houses for every 80 they were allowed to sell, those 80 would have to be sold for 120% of the price they’d otherwise sell for. This would price them out of the reach of more people, who would then clamor for someone to subsidize housing for them. Essentially, the county is supporting its housing subsidies through a hidden tax on all unsubsidized housing in the county; this tax, in turn, increases the demand for subsidized housing and thus the power of the county in granting ‘relief’ from the pain that they are themselves inflicting.

Who will be next? Which group of people will be the next to be priced out of Montgomery County’s ‘open’-market housing and to petition the county for relief? My money is on retail workers.

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Insight From The Courtland Milloy Column

Sep 5, ’05 11:56 AM

Today’s Courtland Milloy column, of all things, puts forth a good point of view on the debacle in New Orleans. The column is largely the story of one Michael K. Brackett Sr, a poor, presumably black man from Washington, DC.

Michael K. Brackett Sr. was standing outside his apartment in Southeast Washington on Saturday, taking a break after hours of watching televised coverage of Hurricane Katrina. He’d come to regard the rising floodwater as a metaphor for his own life struggles, and now he looked depressed.

“In this world, it’s who has money and who don’t,” said Brackett, 53, holding a beer in one hand and a newly purchased lottery ticket in the other. “I can’t tell you how tired I am of being one of the ones who don’t.”

I like the juxtaposition or the bad grammar, the beer, and the lottery ticket on one hand, and the wish to not be poor on the other.

Brackett goes on to say something that has not, to the best of my knowledge, appeared anywhere else in the Washington Post recently. On the subject of evacuation and shelter for ‘white’ people versus for ‘black’ people in New Orleans:

“I don’t see race having anything to do with how poor people were treated,” he said. “There were rich black folk in New Orleans, and they got away. I’m not trying to put anybody down. If I had money, I’d move away from this congestion, get me a nice house out in the woods, just like the rest. But this system seems geared towards only helping those who already have a piece of the pie.”

Hallelujah, someone’s got some sense. Except that Mr. Brackett misses the point — possibly understandably considering his perspective — that the people who ‘already have a piece of the pie’ don’t need help — or at least not as much help. It’s not a matter of the city having sent word to all the people making more than $100,000 a year, telling them to get out ahead of the storm: rather, those people listened to the same warnings that went out to the Lower 9th Ward, and evacuated of their own accord.

A lot has been said recently about the inability of poor people to evacuate, given that the New Orleans evacuation plan, as executed, appears to have been predicated on the use of private cars. These complaints seem a little dubious to me; while the city should have done more to deal with people who couldn’t come up with transportation of their own, I can’t believe that 20% of the population of the city — that’s the number I’ve heard most often — had neither a car, nor any friends with cars, nor any money with which to rent a car or buy a bus ticket. Some of them, certainly: but not 20%.

Maybe the causality, in at least some cases, runs in the other direction. Maybe the poorest people are so poor because they lack the ability to take in new information and to make good decisions based on it.

We can’t say that too loudly, though because it might be considered racist. But somehow it’s not racist to suggest that the poorest people of New Orleans (nearly all of whom are black) apparently don’t have the sense to come in out of the rain, so to speak, unless some government agency handles the entire process for them.

Did the government fail these people? Yes, it did, and what’s more it failed in one of the few things that I think everyone would agree is a legitimate function of government.

But this seems like a failure of government mainly in the sense that the government is a reflection of society. The sovereign individuals of the low-lying areas of New Orleans failed to adequately take care of their own needs, expecting the government to do it for them; the city and the state, in turn, seem to have been expecting the federal government to handle everything for them; and the federal government appears to be — or to have been, at least, for a few days — fumbling around, focusing on means instead of ends.

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News Flash: Government Is Bumbling, Inefficient

Sep 2, ’05 10:48 PM

This week, there have been a lot of conspiracy theories offered as to why chaos is enduring in New Orleans, days after it flooded in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina.

It’s because so many National Guard people are in Iraq; it’s because Chimpy McBushitlerburton hates black people; it’s because the evil Bush Administration spent all the levee money on penny whistles and moon pies. My favorite lunatic explanation is that this is all the result of some kind of Pentagon weather control machine gone wrong (or maybe this is JUST WHAT THEY WANTED!!!!1)

But I have not seen anyone suggest the obvious: that the government is solely in charge of every aspect of these people’s lives right now, and that the government is not particularly competent, particularly when the task at hand requires adaptability. In the aftermath of enormous government screw-ups, you always hear that the officer/bureaucrat/agency ‘acted according to procedure’. Generally speaking, if in government work you display some adaptability — even if you make the right call — you get reprimanded (and, in some cases, prosecuted). On the other hand, if you massively screw things up by following procedures, well that’s okay then.

So government workers will tend to watch things go to hell, as long as they go to hell according to procedures. The AP reports:

Thousands of people stranded in two swamped parishes south of New Orleans are just as desperate for supplies as those trapped in the city but can’t get the attention of federal disaster relief officials, their congressman said Friday.

And to make matters worse, says Rep. Charlie Melancon, D-La., he was unable to deliver that message to President Bush during his visit to New Orleans because the president’s security detail couldn’t clear him to board Air Force One.

After waiting 90 minutes Friday while a U.S. marshal using a satellite phone repeatedly tried, and failed, to contact Bush’s plane – located just 300 yards away at New Orleans’ Armstrong airport – a disgusted Melancon left.

Now, it might be the case that an additional meeting between two politicians wouldn’t have improved things any; but if this is the kind of stone wall of bureaucracy and frustration that a congressman runs up against, what hope does a mere citizen have?

Maybe it’s for the good, though: Americans do seem, on balance, to like their government weak and ineffectual: most of the time, the government’s incredible incompetence foils a lot of their mischief and leaves us freer.

In the last few decades, though, government in the United States has gained a lot of what I call iron fistery: I think this is primarily the result of the drug ‘war’ and the increasingly adversarial relationship between the government and the people that we’ve got as a result.

I got these pictures from here.

Picture121Sm

These guys are presumably U.S. Marshals; they seem to have showed up today, and they are guarding the courthouse and so forth.

Picture082Sm Picture188Sm

They are guarding the courthouse, it would seem, against families of refugees, who cannot use the sidewalk but must walk on the street instead. In the middle of the day. Because it’s not as if all federal buildings haven’t been retrofitted to be fortresses these days — and one of those kids might have a truck bomb in his bag.

The government, having claimed for itself a monopoly on force, has failed to maintain law and order in the city for the past several nights — so they’re going to use their authority to shove mere citizens off the sidewalks.

That’s not important in itself: there’s not a whole lot of traffic in New Orleans these days, so the street is as good as the sidewalk. In what universe, though, does this make sense? I’ll tell you: in the universe of the bureaucrat, who has a procedure somewhere that tells him to put marshals out on the sidewalk for the purpose of intimidating the people who pay their salaries.

This doesn’t look like an organization that can make decisions or set priorities. This is why I’m a libertarian. It’s not that I think that people don’t have obligations to their fellow members of society; it’s not that I think that people should be free to do whatever they like. It’s that the evidence seems to show, clearly, that government is far too blunt an instrument to do the things that are asked of it. While the government screws around, holds press conferences, and pats itself on the back, individuals like Jabbar Gibson take advantage of what’s at hand and solve problems:

Jabbar Gibson

Jabbar Gibson is the 20-year-old driving the school bus in this picture. He grabbed the keys from the wrecked office of the school bus yard, started the thing up, drove around picking up something like eighty people, and drove to Houston. They stopped three times for fuel along the way, collecting money from the people on the bus each time.

When they got to the Astrodome, the authorities at first didn’t let them in, because they weren’t official evacuees. Because, you know, the important thing is to make sure that people fleeing a destroyed city are doing it according to the official procedures. Christ.

In the coming days, the authorities will probably arrest him for stealing the bus. In the coming months, they’ll hold hearings and conclude that the government officials who didn’t use the buses in the first place to evacuate the city were ‘following procedures’.

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TSA Security Changes

Aug 15, ’05 12:19 PM

The Washington Post reports that changes are being considered by the TSA, specifically that they are considering loosening their search and seizure (i.e. ‘screening’) procedures to be more ‘customer-friendly’.

We will leave aside for the moment the murky of issue of just who TSA’s ‘customers’ are. Airline passengers are the ultimate consumers of their services, but we can hardly be said to be their ‘customers’.

Anyway. This may surprise regular readers, who might be forgiven for thinking that I find everything annoying and everyone incompetent, but I have generally found the TSA to be much more pleasant to deal with than the rent-a-cop firms that previously screened airline passengers. The only real problem I have with the TSA is their inconsistency, particularly from airport to airport. Some places, you have to take off your shoes and will get yelled at if you do not figure this out on your own and do it; other places, you get yelled at if you start taking off your shoes. Whatever. At least the shoe thing makes some sense: someone did actually try to blow up a plane using a bomb concealed in his shoe.

The ban on small knives is harder to understand. Some accounts hold that the September 11 hijackers used knives variously described as ‘box cutters’ or ‘Stanley knives’ (not precisely the same things) to overpower the airplanes’ crews and take control. Okay, fine: let’s assume that this is true. Does anyone actually think that this would work a second time? I don’t. A few people might get hurt before the knife-wielding hijackers were subdued by passengers and crew, but that’s about it.

So I think it’s great that they’re thinking about getting rid of this silly restriction. I’m tired of having to stow my little three-inch-long pocket knife in my checked baggage.

But other things they’re considering seem, well, a bit silly to me. The Post reports:

The proposal also would allow ice picks, throwing stars and bows and arrows on flights. Allowing those items was suggested after a risk evaluation was conducted about which items posed the most danger.

A ‘throwing star’ is really nothing other than a kind of knife that’s optimized for throwing. In the confines of an airplane, it’s not likely to be too dangerous: so I suppose I can see allowing these. Still, how many people carry throwing stars around with them, as compared to pocketknives?

But the other two items, ice picks and bows and arrows, leave me scratching my head. Who the hell carries ice picks with them? And why would they possibly need one on an airplane? We don’t allow guns on airplanes, because we have decided (for better or for worse) that airplanes should be weapon-free zones. Knives can be weapons, but aren’t always: I’m not sure that the same is true of icepicks.

And who needs to take a bow and arrows into the cabin of an airplane? Competition bows are expensive, delicate, and fairly large things: I’m sure there are complicated and expensive containers for them, and that any serious archers on the way to a big meet (or a run-in with the Sheriff of Nottingham) send them as checked luggage. It seems like it would be a good idea to ban archery equipment from the cabin just to speed the loading and unloading of the plane.

More:

The TSA memo proposes to minimize the number of passengers who must be patted down at checkpoints. It also recommends that certain categories of passengers be exempt from airport security screening, such as members of Congress, airline pilots, Cabinet members, state governors, federal judges, high-ranking military officers and people with top-secret security clearances.

All of which sounds fine: members of Congress have so much opportunity to do harm to society on a daily basis from the comfort of their offices that we don’t need to worry about them blowing up airplanes: ditto governors, cabinet members, judges, etc., and it’s better to expend the screening resources on others — though I don’t think that anyone who has to run for election would ever want to be known to be excused from screening.

Nevertheless, this is an idiotic idea. First, you’ve got the problem of identifying all these people. It would be impossible: you’d have to create some kind of ID card that’s difficult to forge, but that by its very nature would be uncommon. With only about ten thousand of these in circulation, the chances that a given screener would have ever seen one before (and thus be in a position to positively identify a forgery) would be miniscule.

Second, how and where do you draw the line between people who do and do not have to be screened? High-ranking military officers would be excluded? What about Our Brave Boys And Girls who are laying it on the line in Iraq? Don’t we trust them? What about all those hard-working SEIU and AFCME members who don’t have top-secret clearances? Why should they have to submit to the indignity of screening, just like a lowly citizen?

Excluding anyone from screening would be a mistake. You’re creating an opportunity for fraud, and you will wind up with a situation where more and more groups are arguing to be excluded from screening.

Yet more:

The proposal also would give screeners discretion in determining whether to pat down passengers. For example, screeners would not have to pat down “those persons whose outermost garments closely conform to the natural contour of the body.”

Well, Nicole could avoid being screened then, at least. But discretion? Discretion is the last thing you want in this situation. Not only are you then putting your screening policies into the hands of the people at the lowest level of your organization, but you’re opening yourself up to lawsuits. What do you think the chances are that TSA screeners would exercise their ‘discretion’ to let an Arab-looking guy through, eh?

This is worse than security theatre: this is security community theatre,

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