If we stick our collective heads in the sand for long enough...

they will burn off.

Based on no empirical evidence, I am guessing that rapes are actually more likely to lead to pregnancy than consensual sex because of modern family planning. A woman who is expecting sex is more likely to be using birth control than a woman who is raped.

The CIA has had the same problem, actually--I have heard complaints from their people that the single biggest problem they had was the single-year budget process, and that multi-year budgeting would make their planning much, much, much easier.

They were going to give a non-answer answer anyway. This is just an attempt to avoid any coverage of the issue.

No, on 911. Also, even if there were not other measures in place (e.g. background checks, multiple people in the cockpit, etc...), you could always keep the absurd security for the pilots only.

It's not that they're not doing a "good job"--most interactions with them are fine. It's that they're doing the wrong job.

There are enough horror stories that they get a bad rap, sure. But the bigger point is that they are doing a job that it is stupid for us to be paying for. It inconveniences every traveller in the US and it does not make us significantly safer. Secure the cockpit doors and stop worrying about bombs--if you secure the cockpit doors, all they can do is blow up the plane, and they can blow up a bus so it's a ridiculous waste of money and time to be providing absurd security.

9/11 was (1) an attack that could only work once and (2) about flying the planes. Take away the ability to fly the planes, and the plane is no longer a particularly useful terror target, it's just a target.

Don't get me wrong--I'm happy that there are people working to make terrorist attacks on the US harder. I just don't believe that the TSA is a useful way to spend those resources.

Some of us would like to see friends on other continents from time to time.

Everybody holds congress in contempt. Not many people in their right minds act contemptuously toward Article III judges. Among other things, if the TSA gets the judiciary mad at them, the TSA will begin to find the Fourth Amendment much less friendly.

Problem is, there's so much politics in the peer-review process already that the argument isn't entirely unbelievable, it's just highly unlikely. Anyone with an ear to the ground hears rumblings about science bankrolled by organizations with an agenda and presented as neutral, or about people who have been denied publication because someone on an editorial board was doing the same work and didn't want to get scooped, or about selection of big names for journals because they were big names rather than because their work was great, or about confirmation bias in clinical trials where a doc will almost subconsciously discount symptoms he doesn't like.

Obviously it's not enough to invalidate science, but the political problems make results less trustworthy and gives farfetched conspiracy theories (i.e. no global warming) a ring of truth to them. That's enough to keep them alive among the ignorant, especially because most people don't have time to learn the science themselves.

Killing people in an organization usually makes the organization weaker. So, too, does the expenditure of resources. These are the premises on which war is based. Whether it is done with swords, machine guns, bioweapons, nukes, or drones.

The choice of weapon may alter the truth of that premise by altering the willingness of people to fund, to assist, to kill for, or to die for those organizations. It will also alter the cost per kill.

As a tool, drones obviously help to kill people. The question is whether they are cost-effective and what the psychological consequences are.

Parts of the DOJ are very highly respected. The SG's office (which I think is technically part of Justice) and the Civil Right's Division, for example. And even in the slightly less-highly-respected parts, there are some very highly respected and incredibly nice people.

There are also at least some assholes and even some incompetents, but the asshole bit is kind of a natural consequence of how the US criminal justice system works. The assholes generally mean well, but they are too quick to trample on the rights of an accused criminal. This is less of a problem on the federal level, however, than it is locally.

On the other hand, courts don't give you six strikes, either. =)

IIRC, roundabouts tend to result in having more accidents but the accidents that you have are much less serious. So they're a better choice for spreading risk.

Legal malpractice claims happen, although less often than makes sense. Kind of like how doctors stick together, but you can still find doctors who testify against serious malpractice.

The ad litem attorneys were two public interest groups--Public Citizen and the EFF. Most of the attorneys there work there for well below what they would command on the private market.