It certainly can mean that…but it doesn’t necessarily mean that. I will agree that our current security regime seems to only ratchet up and never down but that’s because of sloppy implementation and an unwillingness to treat the public as adults.
So, how do you roll back a security state? Ideally, by establishing metrics by which you can establish at what level of risk you’d be comfortable removing security rules. And that can be done at any point of the process (it’s not too late to start now!). We should be able to answer pretty simple questions like 'What needs to change in the security environment for us to X (be able to put shoes back on, not go through X-ray machines, not have our email read, etc.). If the powers that be can’t give us answers that’s the bad sign that we’re in the ever escalating security state.
The other part of this is we need to (finally) have an honest discussion and tell the public that 0% risk is simply an unrealistic standard and we’ll never be immune to terrorists, crazy gunmen, etc. I won’t hold out hopes for that…
Resources are not meager, and the deficit is shrinking. You may be right about taxing (some) drugs, but a much simpler solution is to tax the rich.
But I like your point about a cultural shift. Fear begets fear, and security theater does not make us feel safer - it does the opposite. The first mission of the Bush Administration was to ensure that Americans were terrified of terrorists, and that’s one place you have to give props to the Obama team. When terrorists are treated like two-bit criminals, they are robbed of their power to terrify.
I don’t think they’re doing everything they could, but it’s a lot like the War on Drugs. When the public is locked into fear, steady pressure over a long time may be the only way to loosen its hold. Just boldly throwing off the shackles will only wake up the fearmongers, and get a politician canned in a hurry.
One issue that keeps the TSA going is that it has found a niche where it can play simultaneously to both sides of the aisle. On the left, it caters to hoplophobia - it’s keeping those scary and dangerous weapons away from us! Surely if it saves even one life it’s worth it! And on the right, it caters to authoritarianism - it’s a visible sign that the gummint has good strong men running it! Those who would like the decisions to be evidence-based have their voices drowned by all the shouting.
And we may well be past the point where informed debate is impossible. The US now has dissidents seeking, and receiving, asylum in other nations. A nation that expels its dissidents cannot hear the voice of reason through the fingers it has thrust in its ears.
Tax the rich? Blame Bush?
So do you have any real, valid points that you didn’t read on a bumper sticker 8 years ago?
Cause clearly, the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania is not ramping up a global war on terror, doubling down on unconstitutional power grabs, and exponentially increasing the deficit with this kind of continual, stupid financing of wasteful, stupid govt programs.
I missed the part in the debt talks where he admitted that we’ve got a huge spending problem and there’s hundreds of govt branches that were due for a serious pruning.
I love how partisanship creeps in to all of these discussions - as if the DNC and the GOP were anything other than differing management styles for the same organization.
I share concerns about a permanent security state, we must work to avoid that. However aviation has been an attractive target in the past and will be in the future. I fly weekly and mostly find the TSA a bearable annoyance, if you pay attention to the rules and deal with them politely, the vast majority of the time you get the same in return. Given a choice of flying on a plane with passengers who have been subject to screening or one where they haven’t, I would almost always choose the former.
California is certainly NOT the most democratic state in the country. It’s not even majority democrat, and according to Gallup ( http://www.gallup.com/poll/114016/state-states-political-party-affiliation.aspx )doesn’t even make the list of the top ten (DC, RI, Mass, Hawaii, Vermont, New York, Conn., Marlyand, Illinois, Delaware - not sure why DC is treated as a state there though). It’s like people who think Texas is the most Republican state when it… really isn’t.
Also California politics is weird and terrible California politicians remains unsurprising.
Well that’s a bit of a feel good scenario though, isn’t it? The TSA is only as good as the last attempt, and yet they still miss a lot of things. Plus, unless something has drastically changed since the TSA began, cargo is not examined very carefully, so what is loaded onto the plane is not considered as much as who gets on the plane.
So they’ve had zero reason to harass my elderly mother who has pins in her feet. They made her travel experiences so much harder than they had to be, and she’s just a former schoolteacher who had a bad foot injury. She has no motive other than visiting her grandchildren, and every time she goes through airport security she’s put through pure hell and treated like some kind of terrorist. I could not hate them more if I tried.
Yeah, Cory, but they’re only saying that because they want to expand into more places. Below is a link to what is actually their “rebuttal” of accusations that they are stopping people along Tennessee highways. Their argument is basically that they didn’t do the stopping, but they were participating in a training program. They’re certainly not admitting they’re unnecessary by any stretch, even privately.
Now reading a book of “speculative fiction” called “Christian Nation.” What if McCain and Palin had won in 2008, and McCain promptly died? What if Palin & Co enacted legislation that made the tenants of Christianity (as interpreted by dominionist and recontructionist theology factions) the nation’s law? The plot – and the legislation – is driven at one point by coordinated attacks even simpler than flying planes into buildings – just a few shoulder rockets fired from below flight paths when planes are most vulnerable, on take-off and landing.
Yes, it is a novel, and there may be something I’m missing. But that does sound plausible, and it doesn’t require terrorists to remove their shoes…
The writer’s prose may not be stellar, but the book’s premise is terrifying. By comparison to the religious ideologues, the annoyance of the TSA is but a flea bite.
