Two weeks ago, I described my experience zipping through SFO's security lines. Because I have elite status on American Airlines and because I'm in the CBP's Global Entry program, I qualified automatically for TSA PreCheck.
Yesterday, TSA administrator John Pistole announced that now, any U.S. citizen traveler can apply:
Until now, travelers could only apply to use PreCheck if they were members of certain airline frequent flier programs or were enrolled in "trusted traveler" programs with the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol.
The expansion is part of the TSA's efforts to focus more attention on high-risk travelers and cut back on the screening time spent on frequent travelers.
Travelers who pay the $85 must submit to fingerprinting and a background check. Applicants who are cleared by the TSA are enrolled to use the PreCheck lines for five years.
I'd say it's worth $85 to get through security lines at speeds not seen since the last century.
Detroit has just filed for the biggest municipal bankruptcy in history:
The filing begins a 30- to 90-day period that will determine whether the city is eligible for Chapter 9 protection and define how many claimants might compete for the limited settlement resources that Detroit has to offer. The bankruptcy petition would seek protection from creditors and unions who are renegotiating $18.5 billion in debt and other liabilities.
Detroit’s bankruptcy is by far the largest of its kind in U.S. history, in terms of the city’s population of about 700,000 and the amount of its debts and liabilities, which Orr has said could be as high as $20 billion. Because of the stakes involved, and the impact on residents statewide, as well as 30,000 current and retired city workers and Detroit’s ability to stay in business, the case could be precedent setting in the federal judiciary. It could also set an important trajectory for the way troubled cities nationwide settle their financial difficulties.
It's hard to see how Detroit comes back from this. Decades of mismanagement and white flight, with an indifferent (and sometimes larcenous) state government letting it happen adds up.
Security guru Bruce Schneier suggests Snowden might not have considered all the likely outcomes:
Edward Snowden has set up a dead man's switch. He's distributed encrypted copies of his document trove to various people, and has set up some sort of automatic system to distribute the key, should something happen to him.
Dead man's switches have a long history, both for safety (the machinery automatically stops if the operator's hand goes slack) and security reasons. WikiLeaks did the same thing with the State Department cables.
I'm not sure he's thought this through, though. I would be more worried that someone would kill me in order to get the documents released than I would be that someone would kill me to prevent the documents from being released. Any real-world situation involves multiple adversaries, and it's important to keep all of them in mind when designing a security system.
Possibly spending a few years at the Moscow airport might be his safest option. But then again, his whole strategy seemed flawed from the start.
No, not more modern Pinkertons, repeating bad policy from the 1880s. This time we're repeating ancient Rome's mistakes, a parallel Atlantic writers Glenn Hubbard and Tim Kane draw out:
Before their empire fell, the Romans built walls.
They began by erecting barriers along the border following the death of the Emperor Trajan in 117 A.D., notably Hadrian's Wall, which belted Britain. Later emperors erected internal walls, even around the great city itself, to ward off barbarians. After 300 A.D., the Emperor Diocletian effectively converted the entire Roman populace into feudal serfs, walling them off from internal movement in a vain effort to stabilize the chaotic economy.
Sadly, many Americans are all too eager to repeat history.
Witness the immigration bill slowly making its way through Congress, and the feverish reactions it has inspired. In exchange for granting undocumented workers a path to citizenship, Republicans have demanded a so-called "border surge" that would double the number of patrol agents in the Southwest and build an extra 700 miles of fencing.
They make a succinct argument with a good hypothesis about why, exactly, Republicans want a useless wall on our southern frontier.
One of Josh Marshall's readers says Florida's self-defense rules are insane:
I’m a criminal defense lawyer in Wisconsin... In Florida, if self-defense is even suggested, it’s the state's obligation to prove its absence beyond a reasonable doubt(!). That’s crazy. But ‘not guilty’ was certainly a reasonable result in this case. As I told in friend in Tampa today though, if you’re ever in a heated argument with anyone, and you’re pretty sure there aren’t any witnesses, it’s always best to kill the other person. They can’t testify, you don’t have to testify, no one else has any idea what happened; how can the state ever prove beyond a doubt is wasn’t self-defense? Holy crap!
By contrast, in the civilized world—I'm including Illinois here, bear with me—"self-defense" is an affirmative defense requiring the defendant to prove it by preponderance of the evidence. (720 ILCS 5/9-2 outlines how Zimmerman would probably be convicted of 2nd degree murder in Illinois given the facts of the case.)
When I learned the result last night, I posted a Facebook status saying: "I wonder if we should have waited until Florida was a mature, civilized democracy before admitting it into the U.S." My friends have added more than 20 comments so far, including a clip of Bugs Bunny cutting Florida loose. (I love my friends.) I wonder if this reading of Florida law changes anyone's opinion?
The New York Times on Tuesday lamented the state's decline:
In January, after the election of Pat McCrory as governor, Republicans took control of both the executive and legislative branches for the first time since Reconstruction. Since then, state government has become a demolition derby, tearing down years of progress in public education, tax policy, racial equality in the courtroom and access to the ballot.
The cruelest decision by lawmakers went into effect last week: ending federal unemployment benefits for 70,000 residents. Another 100,000 will lose their checks in a few months. Those still receiving benefits will find that they have been cut by a third, to a maximum of $350 weekly from $535, and the length of time they can receive benefits has been slashed from 26 weeks to as few as 12 weeks.
At the same time, the state is also making it harder for future generations of workers to get jobs, cutting back sharply on spending for public schools. Though North Carolina has been growing rapidly, it is spending less on schools now than it did in 2007, ranking 46th in the nation in per-capita education dollars. Teacher pay is falling, 10,000 prekindergarten slots are scheduled to be removed, and even services to disabled children are being chopped.
I lived in Raleigh for a few months and went to Duke, so it pains me to see the South's most-progressive state become its most-repressive. As the Times concludes: "North Carolina was once considered a beacon of farsightedness in the South, an exception in a region of poor education, intolerance and tightfistedness. In a few short months, Republicans have begun to dismantle a reputation that took years to build."
Update: Reader TB, writing from New York, says: "I can attribute this to one thing, and that is NC becoming more of a purple state in the last few elections. They are trying to be more punitive towards those who vote Democratic. Not to mention the abortion restrictions they are trying to pass, which McCrory promised during the campaign he would not sign."
I think he's right.
Yesterday I noted with some concern that a latter-day Pinkertons-like army had appeared outside a mine in Wisconsin. Josh Marshall follows up:
When a fishy paramilitary firm run out of a Real Estate Agency in Scottsdale, Arizona shows up in the North Woods of Wisconsin to protect some mining equipment with a slew guards sporting Death Squad chic, that’s, I have to say, a story I want to know more about. But there’s more to it than just the gonzo freakishness of the story.
It’s stories like this, I believe, where we see at the ground level some of the most interesting, terrifying and important trends in our society. This one reminds me of an amazing story from a few years back about a beleaguered town in Montana that got bamboozled by some Wall Street hucksters into floating a big loan to build their own prison. Only they couldn’t find any prisoners to fill it and ended up falling prey to a California based con-man who got them to sign a contract to make the prison profitable but also basically take over the town with his rent-a-goon police force.
Private security services are nothing new. But the trend to more paramilitary types of protection in an era of demonstrably diminished risk is something new. In addition, as our society becomes economically stratified, with a tiny segment living in a wildly different world than everyone else, you have some rational need for security but also the desire for security chic as another accoutrement of wealth or conspicuous consumption.
This dovetails with a story I read this morning from the American Bar Association Journal entitled, "How did America's police become a military force on the streets?" It discusses how heavily-armed SWAT teams busting down doors to make petty pot busts might have alarmed the Founders.
Oh, and the Illinois Legislature yesterday overrode Governor Quinn's veto, making Illinois the very last state to allow people to carry concealed guns. Because despite 11,000 gun deaths a year in the U.S.—an order of magnitude or two more than any other OECD country—having more armed people around will surely make us safer.
We're not Rome yet, but with stories like these, I give us a century or two at the outside. Unless, of course, people in the U.S. decide they don't want to live in a military dictatorship. It could happen.
Remember the Pinkertons? Well, to add to the trend of turning back the clock to the 1880s, we can now add Pinkertons with automatic rifles guarding a Wisconsin mine from environmentalists:
There’s been a battle royal up in Wisconsin over an effort to establish a big iron mining operation near Lake Superior, to be owned and operated by a company called Gogebic Taconite. The Republican legislature approved the mine in March over environmentalists’ objections. Some protests have been staged since the operation got started. But people started to get freaked out over the weekend when the company brought in what the Wisconsin State Journal calls “masked security guards who are toting semi-automatic rifles and wearing camouflaged uniforms.”
Now masked guards in camouflage carrying assault rifles do seem a bit more mid-80s Latin American death squad than protecting some mining equipment in Wisconsin. So I started looking into the security company behind the paramilitaries, an outfit called Bulletproof Securities out of Scottsdale, Arizona that Gogebic brought in for the job.
Yes, let's bring private armies back to the United States, because they worked so well before. It's all part of the fun you get when the Gini coefficient gets higher than Venezuela's.
It seems that some insurance companies have decided armed schools are too risky to cover:
But already, EMC Insurance Companies, the liability insurance provider for about 90 percent of Kansas school districts, has sent a letter to its agents saying that schools permitting employees to carry concealed handguns would be declined coverage.
“We are making this underwriting decision simply to protect the financial security of our company,” the letter said.
Jenny Emery, head of the Association of Governmental Risk Pools, said none of her members plan to withhold coverage like EMC. But many are strongly recommending other security alternatives, she said, noting that cooperatives provide some form of risk financing to about 80 percent of public entities across the country.
“I haven’t seen evidence yet that suggests people are determining that arming teachers is a recommended way to manage risk,” she said. “Far from it.”
It's rather like property insurance companies raising rates or adding riders in areas most likely to be affected by global warming: believe all the crazy shit you want, they're saying, but don't ask us to pay for it.
Wouldn't it be poetic, and so American, if insurance companies give us just the nudge away from bad public policy that we need?
Another writer has taken a look at Chuck Thompson's latest and generally agreed with him:
The [South], home to nine of the nation’s 10 poorest states, is rabidly against government spending, yet all of its states get far more in government subsidies than they give back in taxes, as pointed out by Sara Robinson in a 2012 piece for AlterNet, "Blue States Are the Providers, Red States Are the Parasites."
I live in a blue state, New Jersey, where we get about 70 cents back for every dollar in taxes we send to Washington. I work several days out of my year to support Southern states as well as Western red states like New Mexico and Arizona, which can’t support themselves. Is Kentucky a Southern state? Well, it’s red, and it receives $1.57 from the feds for every buck it pays. How does its senator, Rand Paul, justify this?
Thompson is right that we are two separate countries with irreconcilable differences on health care, gun control, abortion laws, gay marriage, voter registration, subsidies for education, the role of religion in society, the definition of patriotism and the importance of unions. It could be an amicable divorce where everyone gets what they want: Southerners want the federal government to stop spending so much money and get out of their lives, and we in the Northeast would pay lower taxes because we would no longer have to support the poorest states in the country. All the crackpots and phonies who vied for the Republican nomination for president last year—Rick Santorum, Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Ron Paul and for good measure I’ll toss in Sarah Palin—were taken seriously only because the potential nominee would have all the Southern states on their side of the ledger.
I thought Thompson was hilarious, and more than a little correct. Splitting the U.S. into two (or four) countries sounds like a good idea in some ways. Especially when I read crap like this and this.