I loved the following quote from Salon’s Oct 12th Ask the pilot:

“At this point, the whole apparatus of concourse security is little more than a stage presentation, a theater of the absurd, choreographed to the cowardly notion that confiscating shampoo bottles and forcing airline captains to remove their footwear actually makes us safer. How we got here is an interesting study in reactionary politics, fear-mongering, and a disconcerting willingness of the American public to accept almost anything in the name of “security.” We have come to equate intrusiveness and inconvenience with safety.”

I agree whole-heartedly. The TSA workers in Tampa on Thurs only reinforced my feelings with the following pronouncement: “all electronics bigger then a CD must be scanned separately.” Leandra and I remarked that we didn’t even know what that meant – longer? wider? heavier? And of course they took a half-empty water bottle from an elderly woman. Sigh. The idiocy of it all…