In what seems to me a perfectly sensible response to Richard Reid's failed shoebombing attempt, it is now illegal to carry a cigarette lighter aboard an airplane... You see, the reason Reid's plot failed is that he tried to set off his shoe's fuse using MATCHES, which are hard to light (and still allowed on planes), whereas, if he'd had a Bic to flick, we'd have another tragedy to memorialize.

but I think the reason Reid's plot failed is that he was a CRAZY MOTHERFUCKER.

Though come to think of it, what an awesome ad campaign for Bic! "Successful Terrorists use Bic brand Lighters." Woe is the lighter ban.

i agree with you that banning lighters makes perfect sense and should have been done years ago. matches should be banned as well.

however, i think what amy is trying to get at is making people take off their shoes is a pretty weak in terms of making us more secure.

real security will be an expensive investment in our infastructure- including port security and scanning all baggage that goes onto your plane. those are real things we can do that will potentially save a lot more lives than the fake sense of security they've given us by making us remove our nikes.

if there was just some sort of funding option for investing in our security infastructure. if there was just some tax cut to the uber-rich that we could repeal....

Sorry guys... Went for sarcastic, but it looks like my pitch was pretty wide. I meant to imply that the safety of airline passengers is served neither by having us offer our sneakers for inspection at the security station, nor by having us surrender our cigarette lighters (but not our matches) before boarding. It seemed to me that this reaction to the Reid case illustrated nicely the continued bumfuzzlement of our Dept. of Homeland Security, thereby reinforcing (rather than detracting from in any significant way) Amy's original point (which, btw, wasn't too hard to parse).

In March of this year London transportation officials made it very public exactly how much they had spent to reinforce their transit system in the wake of the Madrid bombings. There is some speculation the attack was timed with a mock terrorist attack being held at that location. Further they weren't able to stop military grade explosives from crossing into their borders despite getting a national ID system rolling and what have you.

Our transportation officials want $6,000,000,000 to make our public transit more secure but I know that doesn't mean individual buses, cargo shipments, and bridges will be guarded by man, dog, and gadget. It means that areas of importance, the cash cow (those cities that are the archipeligo of democrat freedom), will likely become checkpoint central to digicam avenue while our airport screeners will finally get to use those fancy new scanners that can see through peoples clothes.

I'm still a big fan of the (in Dubya's voice) "hey al Qaeda...we'll stop being dicks and mend all the fences we broke if you'll stop killin' us and our friends" strategy of securing the nation.

If you had the funding to secure this nations transportation infrastructure...how would you spend it in a way that doesn't impede our freedom but keeps out those who want our blood as much as our nation wants theirs?

and you have us all lost. :)

hhz has a good point. can we really defend our way to security? can we really provide absolute security even if money was no object?

we need to ask ourselves: is our foreign policy helping us make more friends, or enemies in the world? cafta, the war, etc... dems have a lot of work to do if they want to make us more secure. and while protective police type services can be nice, the most important wark has nothing to do with guards and check points in our ports and subways.

and by the way, to back up the need for the 'peace' strategy... our entire notion of al qaeda is an overblown myth that started with the testimony of a paid informant during the trial in new york for the 98 embassy bombings in africa. there are no sleeper cells, no centralized commmand structure, and bin laden didn't even use the name al qaeda until after he heard that's what america called it after 9-11 he realized the power that the fear associated with that name would give him.

want to learn more about this? check out the bbc doc: "the power of nightmares" stronger and more shocking than farenheit my friends. it's not available in the US yet, but i bet you could download a copy from somewhere. if you need help let me know...

I'm not asking for absolute security. Obviously it's not possible if we want to live outside of total military rule. Even if we were under total military rule. I'm asking that the people who make & influence our policy decisions have some grasp of logic and can see that there are things more important in life than protecting the economic interests of Hanjin Shipping Company.

Not that I have anything against Hanjin. Actually, I'm kind of pro-Hanjin.

we need to ask ourselves: is our foreign policy helping us make more friends, or enemies in the world?

I hope this is a rhetorical question, because I think we all pretty much know the answer. America's foreign policy has, perhaps since the beginning of the existence of an American foreign policy, made us more enemies than friends, in many periods exponentially more enemies.

I think I get what you're saying though-- that there wouldn't be all these people who hate America if there wasn't so much to hate; and the current administration has done a damn good job of making us hatable... though it's not a trait that distinguishes one presidential administration from another.

Anyway, my point is, it's going to be a really fucking long time before we tame the International Climate of America Hatred, by force or by actually deserving respect. In the meantime, we may as well get some good people with logic-capable brains together who can come up with an actual, innovative, plan for increasing our security and protecting innocent people, as much as possible, from being murdered.

We haven't seen anything like that yet, and right now, security-wise, we're standing on the top of a hill wearing a gas mask and no pants, wondering why our ass is getting cold.

we would make security decisions (and a whole lot of other decisions) based on actual research done by people heavy on brain and light on agenda. Instead of on reactionary idiocy, blind devotion to the latest technological innovation despite no evidence of efficacy, security personnel fetishization of women's cleavage, etc.

Like I said, dreamworld.

Maybe we are too much cocky and too little scared. I sort of picture luggage screeners in Israel as being a little more committed to their jobs than luggage screeners in the US. Not to put the way Israel does things on a pedastal-- none of that from me, for sure-- but I do mean to point out that we think we're invincible.

In both behavior and age, the United States is the adolescent of the global family. Moody, unpredictable, self-involved, convinced it's always right, never shuts up, horrible acne. Also we never get our chores done and we sneak out the window to go get drunk and stoned on the railroad tracks, even when we're grounded, and when the cops catch us we say it wasn't us.

if there was just some sort of funding option for investing in our security infastructure. if there was just some tax cut to the uber-rich that we could repeal....

But what could it beeee????

In both behavior and age, the United States is the adolescent of the global family. Moody, unpredictable, self-involved, convinced it's always right, never shuts up, horrible acne. Also we never get our chores done and we sneak out the window to go get drunk and stoned on the railroad tracks, even when we're grounded, and when the cops catch us we say it wasn't us.

5 out of 5. best comment yet on bd.org

as i am drunk on railroad tracks right now. or at least i wish i was.

can we really defend our way to security? can we really provide absolute security even if money was no object?

nope. we can't. it's that simple. but, there are things that we can do to make us more safe in the short term.

in the long term, true safety will indeed come from international cooperation, economic aid, global debt relief, stopping the US's continual support of dictatorships for short-term goals, encouraging democracy (not in the bush mold, though), reworking NAFTA, CAFTA and the WTO... well, a hell of a lot of stuff to be honest.

but, in the short term, we should be spending more money on port security. it makes sense to me.

the all too common internet irony/humor mistake.

try the [irony] tag next time.

No matter how much we spent on COPS and the community policing programs during the Clinton years (you remember them, back when government invested in people, not just home equity loans and interest only financing)....we never brought the murder rate down to zero.

The difference between now and then:
When the country made the COPS program a priority we significantly reduced violence. Now that we are gutting it, we are seeing violence rise.

We cannot, and should not try to prevent terrorism absolutely (because the only way to do that involves a complete irradication of civil iberties), however we can prevent terrorists from easily killing huge numbers of people, and we can reduce the number of people who want to become terrorists.