The Daily Parker

Not only does Ben Gurion Airport have, by every measure, more effective security than at U.S. airports, but they move passengers through more quickly, too:

Despite facing dozens of potential threats each day, the security set-up at Israel's largest hub, Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion Airport, has not been breached since 2002, when a passenger mistakenly carried a handgun onto a flight. How do they manage that?

The first layer of actual security that greets travellers at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion International Airport is a roadside check. All drivers are stopped and asked two questions: How are you? Where are you coming from?

"Two benign questions. The questions aren't important. The way people act when they answer them is," [Rafi Sela, the president of AR Challenges, a global transportation security consultancy] said.

Officers are looking for nervousness or other signs of "distress" — behavioural profiling. Sela rejects the argument that profiling is discriminatory.

In other words, more emphasis on people, less on technology. Will body scanners protect us against the next idiot who tries to blow up an airplane? Maybe; but watching people is probably more effective. Says Sela:

"First, [Israeli security is] fast — there's almost no line. That's because they're not looking for liquids, they're not looking at your shoes. They're not looking for everything they look for in North America. They just look at you," said Sela. "Even today with the heightened security in North America, they will check your items to death. But they will never look at you, at how you behave. They will never look into your eyes ... and that's how you figure out the bad guys from the good guys."

That's the process — six layers, four hard, two soft. The goal at Ben-Gurion is to move fliers from the parking lot to the airport lounge in a maximum of 25 minutes.

Instead, we're investing in body scanners, which have created a completely different kind of idiocy:

We're willing to ethnically profile, do all sorts extra-judicial surveillance, maintain massive databases of hundreds of thousands of people who have some vague relationship to extremism, torture captives, condemn people to hours unable to go the bathroom on planes, even launch various foreign military adventures, but when it comes to submitting to a quick scan that might show a vague outline of boobs or penises (almost certainly no more than is exposed in most bathing suits), that's a bridge too far.

Something about that doesn't compute to me. And what I like about this is that there's no clear partisan division on this one. Everyone seems to agree. It just tells me that at some level we're not really serious about this.

No, we're not really serious about this. It's theater. And it will continue until enough people care more about security than silliness.

Do you have the feeling you're no better off today than you were ten years ago? That's because, probably, you aren't:

It was a decade with basically zero job creation. ... And private-sector employment has actually declined — the first decade on record in which that happened.

It was a decade with zero economic gains for the typical family. Actually, even at the height of the alleged “Bush boom,” in 2007, median household income adjusted for inflation was lower than it had been in 1999. And you know what happened next.

It was a decade of zero gains for homeowners, even if they bought early: right now housing prices, adjusted for inflation, are roughly back to where they were at the beginning of the decade.

... What was truly impressive about the decade past, however, was our unwillingness, as a nation, to learn from our mistakes.

Happy new year!

After five visits to O'Hare in 8 days, I'm going to stay in one spot for at least a week. Yesterday's 9:45 flight took off at noon, getting me home two hours before I'd planned (even the CTA cooperated), and except for having to get up at an obscenely early time this morning, everything went well.

Still, I have space for one more gratuitous photo of Half Moon Bay, which is a wonderful place to visit:

I'm leaving this:

For this:

THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN CHICAGO HAS ISSUED A WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY FOR SNOW...WHICH IS IN EFFECT UNTIL 9 PM CST THIS EVENING.

At least I'll get there earlier than planned. I tried to get on the 11:30, but because the 7:30 had left at 9:30, and the 9:45 was delayed, they put me on the 9:45 which actually leaves (we hope) at 11. So instead of 7 hours at home before traveling again tomorrow, I get 9. I hope.

Update: Well, the 9:45 actually now leaves at 1pm, in theory, leaving me almost exactly no better off than the original plan. We'll see.

Half Moon Bay, Calif.:

A few minutes earlier:

In honor of the most sweeping legislation since Medicare, it's good ol' Bill:

That's Chicago's weather today. Except I'm not there, I'm here:

Also, if you live near a Peet's Coffee, they're giving away free cups of coffee all day.

Sullivan thinks the President has done extremely well:

The substantive record is clear enough. Torture is ended, if Gitmo remains enormously difficult to close and rendition extremely hard to police. The unitary executive, claiming vast, dictatorial powers over American citizens, has been unwound. ... Domestically, the new president has rescued the banks in a bail-out that has come in at $200 billion under budget; the economy has shifted from a tailspin to stablilization and some prospect of job growth next year; the Dow is at 10,500 a level no one would have predicted this time last year. A stimulus package has helped undergird infrastructure and probably did more to advance non-carbon energy than anything that might have emerged from Copenhagen. ... Relations with Russia have improved immensely and may yield real gains in non-proliferation; Netanyahu has moved, however insincerely, toward a two-state solution; Iran's coup regime remains far more vulnerable than a year ago, paralyzed in its diplomacy, terrified of its own people and constantly shaken by the ongoing revolution; Pakistan launched a major offensive against al Qaeda and the Taliban in its border area; global opinion of the US has been transformed; the Cairo speech and the Nobel acceptance speech helped explain exactly what Obama's blend of ruthless realism for conflict-management truly means.

The Beltway cannot handle all this. And that's why they continue to jump on every micro-talking-point and forget vast forests for a few failing saplings.

But when you consider the magnitude of shifting from one conservative era to one in which government simply has to be deployed to tackle deep structural problems, the achievement is as significant as his election year.

People have a hard time grasping everything that the President has accomplished because people have short attention spans. But when we look back on his first year from 2020 or 2030, it will be obvious.

You know the truly fun part about traveling through O'Hare five times in one week in December? Not knowing when that will happen:

Delta [says] it is about to issue a weather bulletin allow passengers in 10 states to change tickets without penalty starting today through Dec. 27th. Those states are Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, Wisconsin and North and South Dakota. They are encouraging folks to try to change travel plans to get out ahead of any storms if possible. Delta has hubs in Detroit and Minneapolis-St. Paul.

No one has started pre-canceling any flights yet – but stay tuned. That may happen tomorrow.

At least, if either of my next two flights gets[1] delayed, I'll be stuck in one of my two favorite cities in North America. Sigh.

[1] Note to the grammar police (you know who you are): "either...gets" is correct because "either" is a singular pronoun.

Once again in Reagan National Airport, our hero pauses to reflect on the great pile of snow that landed on the city three days earlier. I have to say, it really is pretty:

Another view, around back:

We even got delayed for 15 minutes by a motorcade: not the President's, the Vice-President's. Still, I feel like I've had the full D.C. experience.

Forty minutes until boarding...then I get to pass through O'Hare for the third time in five days.