Surely You Can't Be Serious

Is it December already?  Holy cow when did that happen?  Oh well, I hope all the turkey has been digested.  Because if it hasn’t, you should probably throw it away at this point.

So, apparently the Transportation Safety Administration has stepped up security at airports across the country.  Travelers will have two options; pass through the high-tech, new-fangled X-ray/electromagnetic body imaging scanners, or opt for the old-school, low-tech full-body pat-down by a TSA agent.  Some people are upset about this.

In the interests of full disclosure, I don’t fly all that often.  And by “don’t fly all that often” I mean about once every three or four years.  That said, I am not particularly offended by said security measures.  I guess if I can get from South Bend to Seattle in four hours on a none-exploding aircraft and have someone fondle me in the process I’m not really going to complain.  I suppose it might depend on whom it is doing the fondling.  But I can understand why some people aren’t thrilled about either option.  Why should some stranger making $13 an hour get to see me naked at the airport just so I can start my vacation a few hours earlier?  In the wake of four hijackings and four thousand deaths in September of 2001, Americans insisted they were ready to put up with more than a little inconvenience in order to ensure public safety.  Nine years later we seem to be having second thoughts.  What I do find amusing is where we’ve decided to draw the line separating what we are willing to accept in the name of safety.  Renditioning people to foreign countries to be “interrogated”, beating them, freezing them, photographing them naked stacked in pyramids, nipping them with dogs and drowning them until they broke were/are all perfectly acceptable security methods.  But someone “touching our junk” should be grounds to have them arrested.  Is anybody under the illusion that many of the same people demanding a halt to unreasonable bodily searches would be the first people in front of the camera demanding to know why the government failed to provide full body scanners at airports to prevent a bombing, were one to occur?

As part of his effort to focus on debt reduction following the drubbing in last month’s election, President Obama announced this week that he will request a two year wage freeze for all federal employees.  The proposal, one among several expected in the coming weeks, would save the Treasury about $60 billion over ten years.  Obviously a drop in the bucket compared to what needs to be done, but why not start with the low-hanging fruit.  Hopefully future proposals will address more significant, systemic budgetary issues, like the ballooning cost of Medicare, the bloated defense budget and the deficit-exacerbating tax cuts scheduled to expire in three weeks.  For a little perspective on how the numbers stack up, see below.  (chart from CNNMoney.com)

  

I remain completely unconvinced that most of those elected to Washington in November on a platform of fiscal responsibility, have any interest in fiscal responsibility - largely due to the fact that the people who sent them there aren’t really interested in fiscal responsibility either.  In a Wall Street Journal poll released on November 18, respondents were asked if they preferred Congress use spending cuts or tax increases to balance the budget.  A whopping 70% expressed opposition to cuts in Medicare, Social Security and defense (only 27% in favor), while 59% opposed any increase in taxes.  Apparently people think we should reduce our debt by increasing our expenditures as we decrease our revenue.  No wonder this country is getting it’s butt whooped at math.  Barack Obama and Paul Ryan might just be the only two people in DC interested in reducing the deficit.  Good luck to you both.  Let me know how it turns out.

The Pentagon released the results of its year-long “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” impact study on Tuesday.  Absolutely unsurprisingly, 92% of military members surveyed said they did not object to lifting the ban.  Additionally, 69% acknowledge they have served or are currently serving with gay or lesbian personnel.  Even though 30% of respondents indicated they felt that repeal would affect their unit’s ability to train well together, only 10% felt it would affect their own ability to train well with their unit.  That’s the old “of course most people are bad drivers, I’m just not one of them” syndrome.  Let’s get this out of the way.  This policy is stupid.  It is absolutely ridiculous that we tell some young men and women that they can give their lives in service to their country - as long as no one knows they’re gay.  In the words of one special ops soldier interviewed for the report,

“We have a gay guy [in the unit].  He’s big he’s mean and he kills lots of bad guys.  No one cares that’s he’s gay.”

A lot of people in this country were convinced that allowing blacks to serve in the military would ruin “unit cohesion.”  They were exposed as fools and racists.  A lot of people were convinced that women had no place in the military, and would ruin “unit cohesion.”  They were exposed as idiots and sexists.  Far fewer people remain convinced that allowing homosexuals to serve will ruin unit cohesion.  Repeal this law and expose those people for the frauds they are as well.

The big news of the weekend was the release of some hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. State Department cables by WikiLeaks.  Persons who have nothing better to do with their time than to comb through millions of lines of text seem to think there is nothing particularly sensitive revealed in the documents.  The information dump mostly seems to be an exercise in an international game of “tell me what you really think of that guy,” which, while amusing for it’s gossip value, has little to no bearing on the price of tea in China.  However, there is a broader point to be made.  We have entered an age of involuntary transparency.  Regardless of whether or not we think secrets should be kept, they won’t be kept.  Someone, somewhere, somehow will discover them   and post them online for all the world to see, and there is little anyone can do to stop it.  This wasn’t the first classified information dump, and it certainly won’t be the last.  According to Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, several American banks and pharmaceutical companies are next on his hit list.  There is no longer any such thing as privacy, no such thing as “off the record.”  It’s all out there in the ether, waiting to be consumed by persons who were never intended to consume it.  We will have to adapt accordingly.

Finally, actor Leslie Neilsen passed away last week.  Although he starred in many serious films during his career, he was perhaps best known and loved as Dr. Rumack in Airplane! and Lt. Frank Drebin of Police Squad! and the Naked Gun series.  Call him an actor, call him a comedian, call him an all around great guy, just don’t call him Shirley.