John Jacobs: The Department of Homeland Security must put into place evolving technology and procedures to protect our citizens. This is done in order to stay one step ahead of those who would do us harm. Anything less cannot and will not be tolerated.
Mark Foulon: We have tried incremental steps and they have proven insufficient.
Timothy Naftali: There's no incentive for anyone in politics or the media to say the Alaska pipeline's fine, and nobody's cows are going to be poisoned by the terrorists. And so you have these little eruptions of anxiety. But, for me, look, the world is wired now: either you take the risks that come with giving people -- not just the government -- this kind of access to information or you leave them. I take them.
"People In Government": The fine is mostly a deterrent so that terrorists cannot back out of a security check once it starts.
Jordy Yager: TSA head John Pistole told reporters Monday that he rejected the advice of media aides who advised him to publicize the revised security measures before they took effect. Terrorist groups have been known to study the TSA's screening methods in an attempt to circumvent them, he said.
AQ: Underwear should be the normal type that people wear, not anything that shows you're a fundamentalist.
Bruce Schneier: It's not much of a threat. As excess deaths go, it's just way down in the noise. More than 40,000 people die each year in car crashes. It's 9/11 every month. The threat is really overblown. [But] you have to be seen as doing something, even if nothing is the smart thing to do. You can't be seen as doing nothing.
A Little Punk Staffer, commenting on the TSA hearings: They shot themselves in the foot.
Michael Tomasky: When the other side is shooting itself in the foot, stand close by and keep handing out bullets.
David Foster Wallace: Are you up for a thought experiment? What if we chose to regard the 2,973 innocents killed in the atrocities of 9/11 not as victims but as democratic martyrs, "sacrifices on the altar of freedom"? In other words, what if we decided that a certain baseline vulnerability to terrorism is part of the price of the American idea? And, thus, that ours is a generation of Americans called to make great sacrifices in order to preserve our democratic way of life -- sacrifices not just of our soldiers and money but of our personal safety and comfort? In still other words, what if we chose to accept the fact that every few years, despite all reasonable precautions, some hundreds or thousands of us may die in the sort of ghastly terrorist attack that a democratic republic cannot 100-percent protect itself from without subverting the very principles that make it worth protecting?
Noteworthy: Timothy Naftali concludes that Americans are basically unwilling to do what it takes to decisively defeat terrorism in "peacetime", both at the level of the public and also at the senior levels of the military and government. He cites the inherent structure of American government as partly responsible for extreme political sensitivity to public pressure when it comes to imposing restrictions on the public and authorizing invasive security measures.
Todd Purdum: A day in the life of the president reveals that Barack Obama's job would be almost unrecognizable to most of his predecessors, thanks to the enormous bureaucracy, congressional paralysis, systemic corruption (with lobbyists spending $3.5 billion last year), and disintegrating media.
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