Fritz Hollings is a moron
This isn't even about his dopey music protection schemes either. Rather, according to the Hotline (via NRO), he actually said this:

"Just keep the cockpit door closed. You can put up a sign in Arab - this is, say, type-casting, but say 'Try to hijack, go to jail."

I really don't know where to begin.

I'm actually pretty hard to offend.
But this offended me. YMMV. Got it as an e-mail forward, wondered what the source was, figured (correctly) that the mainstream humor sites couldn't be this tacky.

Indymedia, bless their hearts...

Them Again
Why do people even bother? It's such a transparent marketing ploy!

With the obvious disclaimer that boycotts are silly, I'll still steer clear of these people and suggest you do the same.

In other boycott news, now I know why we never ate at McDonald's when I was growing up. Here I'm torn because usually when people boycott McDonald's it's for totally opposite reasons. The golden arches are an international symbol of... something. Whatever it is, I really like in principle.

Right Wing Media Bias
It's amazing. This afternoon I've read two different parody sites with their take on the "what did Bush know" story: The Onion ("I told everyone that something bad would happen to America in 2001. I even said the letter 'A' would be involved. But did they listen?") and Modern Humorist (Senate subcommittee on finally sticking it to President Bush, er…, I mean the Senate subcommittee investigating the failure of our intelligence services).

To my way of thinking, they actually get it. Of course, if you're on the left and you honestly resent Bush's current popularity, it must be maddening. I don't think I've ever seen pop culture just uniformly, completely not buy into a gotcha scandal. This is so good it's actually pretty unsettling.

Mark is right
On both counts.

Commentary enabled?
Comments now definitely work on my main blog. Let's see if cutting and pasting did the trick on this one...

Not quite. It sort of works but my other blog title appears.

Okay, fixed now.

Cheney says we're fucked
What good does this do? We might be attacked but we don't know when or where. Right, I know exactly what to do about that.

Any public warning last August would probably have been at least this vague. I'm not sure how people would have reacted to such a thing then. Probably mild panic, nontrivial confusion, and then finally nothing. And then 9/11 probably still would have gone on as planned.

As usual Andrew Sullivan puts it best (May 20, 2002, entry titled "Much Ado About Nothing").

What did Bush know, etc.
The big news lately has been about this August 2001 FBI memo, warning that some Middle Easterners were training at flight schools and so on. I suppose the immediate question is, what should people have done that they didn't do? Start cracking down on Arab-American pilot wannabes? It sounds so right after the fact but you can imagine how it would have gone over with the ACLU anti-profiling type crowd before the fact. Tell the airlines, "hey, we think someone might be about to hijack a plane sometime soon"? At that point, what exactly is it that the airlines are supposed to do? Stop flying completely? Maybe adopt the kind of security regime we have now, but you just know people would complain to high heaven about how excessive it was.

Hey, even after 9/11 I'll complain to high heaven about how excessive current security measures are, because as long as nobody's willing to admit that the biggest risk factor is Arab men, the security measures don't target the actual problem.

The fact remains that 9/11 was an intelligence failure (or an "acting on intelligence" failure) and that someone, somewhere (probably multiple people, multiple places) just plain screwed up. Nobody's taking any responsbility for this; that's exactly what pisses off a lot of people, including me.

Then again, you know the biggest reason why nobody can stand up and say, "It's my fault," and actually resign over this? Same as the biggest reason why in any public situation, nobody can afford to actually say, "hey, my fault," even when it is: People would sue the pants off you if you did.

That's what the trial lawyers have brought us to, a society where nobody can be a stand-up person and do the right thing, so everyone covers their asses lest a dozen or so easily manipulated people decide that "the right thing" involves giving some lawyer $50 million and some client $100 million more. Maybe the airlines are better off in the long run not having gotten one of those "we think there might be hijackers but we don't know when or where" warnings. Say they heard something like that, but didn't do the right things because they didn't know what the right things were because they didn't know exactly what it was they were preventing. The resulting lawsuit(s) would basically end air travel as we know it.

And, speaking as someone who likes the idea of getting to Boston from here in eight hours instead of four days, that would suck.