Tom Naughton

Dear Microsoft –

Well, my old ThinkPad laptop finally got too long in the tooth to be useful, so I bought my first PC with Windows 7 installed.  Wow, what a difference.  Now I finally understand those “Windows 7 – it was my idea!” ads you were running awhile back.

I sell a software system I designed to law firms, so I was already aware of some of the fabulous Windows 7 features.  I want to thank you for those, because they keep me busy.  Once my clients started switching to Windows 7, I went from almost never receiving tech-support calls to receiving them on a regular basis.  That’s when first discovered that you had incorporated one of my favorite ideas:

When an installation program creates a new folder and writes files to that folder, the files should all default to being read-only with permissions denied to everyone.

“This is Tom Naughton, may I help you?”

“Yes, I’m trying to attach the database, and I know I’m doing it exactly like you showed in the tutorial, but I keep getting an access-denied message.”

“Hmm, let’s fire up TeamViewer so I can see your system.  Okay, the database files are in the correct folder … the script is pointing to that folder … what the? … Let me look at the permissions … Oh, boy, everything is set to read-only and permissions are denied to everybody.  You have to manually grant yourself permissions on the database files.”

“I have to give myself permission to use the database files I installed on my own PC?”

“Yes.”

“I have no idea how to do that.”

“Well, you right-click the files, then choose Properties, then Security, then you have to click the Continue button, then … ah, never mind, I’ll do it for you.  Let me take control for a few minutes.”

I never got that call when my clients were using Windows XP, and I have to tell you, it’s great to get to actually talk to so many of them on the phone.  With email and Facebook and Twitter and all that, people just don’t spend enough time actually talking.

Here’s another one of my ideas I already knew you had incorporated:

Some common folders should be automatically marked read-only, and when users de-select the read-only option, the folder should remain read-only even after they click the Apply button — with no warning that the read-only setting wasn’t removed, of course.

I learned about that terrific feature when I started hearing from clients that they could no longer use the mail-merge feature of my software.  As per your instructions, my software installs itself in the Program Files directory.  It’s been doing that for several years without creating any problems.

So you can imagine my surprise when (after several hours of detective work) I realized the mail-merges were failing because sub-folders created within the Program Files directory are read-only and – this is the fun part – that setting can’t be changed by anyone!  Since my software could no longer create a mail-merge data file in a permanently read-only folder, the merges failed.

Brilliant!  What kind of crazy software program would ever need to write a data file inside one of its own folders?  You must have had countless software vendors beg for that read-only feature – because again, that gives us the opportunity to spend time on the phone with our clients as we walk them through moving a program out of the Program Files folder.

But I didn’t realize just how many great ideas you incorporated into Windows 7 until I bought my own Windows 7 PC and started trying to install software.  I know from working in corporate environments that the corporate IT people in charge of PC security believe the ideal computer is one that doesn’t allow anyone to actually do anything (we all stay out of trouble that way), but I didn’t expect you’d apply that philosophy to an operating system with “HOME” in the version name.  Pure genius.

I really appreciate the multiple warnings whenever I try to do something that would make the computer useful.  For example, I double-click an installation program, select “I agree” on the license-agreement screen, enter my serial number, and then – BANG! – up pops a dialog box:

A program is attempting to make changes to your computer.  Do you want to allow this?

Thank goodness for that feature.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve accidentally double-clicked an installation file, agreed to a license and entered a serial number, only to discover to my great horror that this series of inadvertent mouse-clicks and keystrokes was about to make changes to my computer.  Always being given another chance to correct this situation was my idea.

And I especially appreciate the constant warnings that only an Administrator can do whatever it is I’m about to do.  Sure, I made myself an all-powerful Administrator on the PC immediately, but the ego-boost was disappointly brief.  So I enjoy being reminded of my lofty position when I’m presented with frequent dialog boxes that say, in effect:

Only someone in the powerful role you already occupy can do this.  Click OK to continue, Oh Mighty One.

That was definitely my idea … as was this one:

When people logged into the PC as an Administrator copy files from a backup drive, they should have to go through several steps to grant themselves permission to use the files before actually using them.

Again, even with an operating system clearly named as the “HOME” version, you can’t be too cautious about security.  Just because you’re an all-powerful Administrator, that doesn’t mean you should start accessing files willy-nilly without having to take a moment and reconsider whether or not you want to give yourself permission to do so.  You may just decide you’re not trustworthy and refuse to grant yourself access.

It was also my idea to keep Administrators on their toes by making them consciously run installation programs as an Administrator even though they’re already logged in as an Administrator.  You’d be surprised how often Administrators get lackadaisical about this.

Just today, for example, I was attempting to install a package of programming tools, only to see the installation roll back time after time after the progress bar had reached 90%.  So I had to get on the phone and call a tech-support person (who no doubt appreciated the opportunity to talk to someone for a change).

“Oh, in Windows 7 you have to install that package using Administrator privileges, or it will fail.”

“But I am an Administrator.”

“Yes, but if you just double-click the .exe, you’re not installing it with Administrator privileges.”

“Say what?  I am the Administrator.”

“I know, but instead of double-clicking the .exe you have to right-click it and choose Run As Administrator.”

“So I’m the Administrator, I’m logged in as the Administrator, but if I just run the installation program, I’m not installing it as an Administrator?”

“That’s right.  You have to choose to do that by right-clicking and then clicking Run As Administrator.  Otherwise you’re not installing as an Administrator.”

“Even though I am the Administrator?”

“That’s right.”

“Who the @#$% thought that was a good idea?”

Then I remembered:  I did.

Windows 7 … it was my idea.

Thank you, Microsoft.

I’ve been mostly ignoring this blog because I’m swamped.  In addition to working full-time at BMI, I’ve had two side projects to finish, plus a speech to prepare. I’m giving that speech in less than a week.  Then I’ll be back.

Sorry for the slow replies on comments.

My Hollywood buddy Paul is relentless.  Here’s another round in our on-going email debate:

 

Round Seven – Paul

Tom –

Regarding that smallpox vaccine, I think all government contracts should be open to competitive bids.  What’s more, it surprises me Republicans haven’t jumped on this.  And if the shelf life of this vaccine is only 36 months, it strikes me as ridiculous.

But does that mean the government should never fund vaccines? No, I wouldn’t conclude that.  If indeed a real epidemic threatens, only the Federal Government has the funding to manufacture nationally sufficient stockpiles.

I mean, it’s not like we can depend on private sources to create a vaccine for 300 million people.  Nor can we expect lower-income people to pay $35 per dose to vaccinate themselves at their local Walgreens.  Only the Federal Government can implement a national effort free of charge to everyone.  With schools and local governments encouraging participation.  Which will, in fact, be necessary when the next pandemic strikes.

And pandemics aren’t the time for testing Libertarian principles.  Milton Friedman would back me here.

With regards to Medicare, let’s roll back to the summer of ’09.  At that point the Tea Party was rearing its stupid face.  Or the faces of older, angry Whites opposing health reform.  With signs that actually read “Hands Off My Medicare”.

Stupid as they are, those seniors certainly know that Medicare is essential to their survival.  A point, apparently lost on you.

No one has the cash these days to fund their own retirements.  And no one would ever inherit anything from their parents if Medicare didn’t exist.  Our parents would all go bankrupt by age 80, at the latest.

Don’t you get that, Tom? Or has your family been so lucky you really have no clue?

And if we privatize Medicare, as Paul Ryan recommends, characters like Ron Perlman will be vying for the contracts, or charging into the markets.  Politically-connected guys who get exclusive bids.  The privatization of Medicare would be their mother lode!

Therefore I prefer good old civil servants.  Administrators with no allegiance to any corporation.  And safe from getting fired when new Presidents take office.  Or when Congress suddenly shifts.

Finally Tom, I must note, the word ‘Libertarian’ forces me to use the spelling option almost every time.  This should be a red flag to anyone in your movement.  Here in Hollywood we know: hard to spell titles never sell.

Paul

 

Round Seven – Tom

Greetings, Paul –

Regarding that smallpox vaccine, I think all government contracts should be open to competitive bids.  What’s more, it surprises me Republicans haven’t jumped on this.  And if the shelf life of this vaccine is only 36 months, it strikes me as ridiculous.

It’s nice that you believe in responsible purchases by government, but surely you know that wasn’t my point.  I said in an earlier email that if the government takes over the healthcare system, decisions will be based on political connections, not what’s good for us.  This article I linked is a perfect example of what happens when self-interested government officials are empowered to spend huge sums of money on healthcare — is that too Pollyanna of me?

But does that mean the government should never fund vaccines? No, I wouldn’t conclude that.  If indeed a real epidemic threatens, only the Federal Government has the funding to manufacture nationally sufficient stockpiles.

Excuse me…  have to chuckle a bit…  did you just try to tell me that if there’s ever a drug that EVERYONE needs, the greedy pharmaceutical companies won’t be capable of manufacturing it?!! An instant market of hundreds of millions of people, and the pharmaceutical companies wouldn’t be satisfied with earning a couple of bucks per dose? That’s laughable.  We have enough Tylenol for everyone, don’t we? When the cold and flu season comes around, I don’t hear about a shortage of DayQuil.

I mean, it ‘s not like we can depend on private sources to create a vaccine for 300 million people.

You do depend on private sources to create vaccines.  The government doesn’t manufacture them; it buys them.

We have fewer domestic manufacturers of vaccines now because the Clinton administration imposed “voluntary” price controls but refused to place any limits on liability.  Since all vaccines produce negative reactions in at least a small fraction of the population, most domestic drug-makers quit making vaccines rather than put themselves in a situation where they’d be forced to accept small profits while facing unlimited liability.  That’s why we had a shortage of flu vaccine a few years ago, when our government was scrambling to find enough foreign-produced vaccine.  As I said in an earlier email, if you want a product readily available, you’d better hope to hell someone’s making a profit.

Nor can we expect lower-income people to pay $35 per dose to vaccinate themselves at their local Walgreens.  Only the Federal Government can implement a national effort free of charge to everyone.  With schools and local governments encouraging participation.  Which will, in fact, be necessary when the next pandemic strikes.

I disagree that people can’t find a way to spend $35 to save their own lives, but again, that’s not the point.  Our government just wasted nearly a half-billion dollars on a drug that apparently isn’t even necessary, just to say thanks to a big contributor.  That’s what happens when you’re empowered to spend other people’s money.

When you say “free of charge to everyone,” are you suggesting the government doesn’t have to tax citizens to pay for the drugs, or do you mean “free of charge to people who don’t pay taxes and feel entitled to live off the earnings of others”?

And pandemics aren’t the time for testing Libertarian principles.  Milton Friedman would back me here.

I agree.  Libertarian principles should be tested long before a pandemic strikes.  Because when the pandemic does strike, we’ll learn the hard way how incompetent our government is, as the residents of New Orleans discovered after Hurricane Katrina.

With regards to Medicare, let’s roll back to the summer of ’09.  At that point the Tea Party was rearing its stupid face.  Or the faces of older, angry Whites opposing health reform.  With signs that actually read “Hands Off My Medicare”.

I didn’t see those, if they existed, those people don’t represent the majority of the Tea Party members.

Stupid as they are, those seniors certainly know that Medicare is essential to their survival.  A point, apparently lost on you.

That explains why no one lived to a ripe old age before Medicare came along.

No one has the cash these days to fund their own retirements.

That would be news to the millions of Americans with 401Ks.

And no one would ever inherit anything from their parents if Medicare didn’t exist.

That explains why no one ever inherited anything from their parents before Medicare came along.

Our parents would all go bankrupt by age 80, at the latest.

I see you still believe Medicare somehow magically causes the cost of treatment to vanish.  Same apparently goes for government-funded retirements, only in reverse – the money just appears, like magic.

I covered this in a previous email, but I’ll go ahead and re-state the blindingly obvious: Medicare simply transfers the cost of treatment to the taxpayers.  So if the cost of medical treatments will bankrupt all of our parents by age 80 without Medicare, then the taxes required to fund those same medical treatments through Medicare will likewise bankrupt our parents, along with everyone else.  Transferring a cost doesn’t reduce it.

If no one can afford to save for retirement, then the government can’t possibly fund everyone’s retirement either, because people who can’t afford to save for retirement likewise can’t afford the taxes required to fund everyone else’s retirement.  (Of course, saving for retirement would be a hell of a lot easier if our average wage-earner’s total tax burden hadn’t gone up 20% since the 1950s.)

You seem to believe government has the power to repeal the laws of mathematics.  It doesn’t.  And here’s what the mathematics say: Most of the Medicare costs seniors rack up are incurred in the last two years of their lives — in other words, they result from ridiculously expensive treatments for people who are going to die soon anyway.  So there is an alternative to going bankrupt: we accept that life is a fatal condition, as an old person without Medicare probably would.  If I were 80 years old, had a half-million dollars saved, and some doctor wanted me to plough through my savings to live a couple more years, I’d tell him to piss off.  I’d rather check out and leave the half-million to my kids.  (If I were 55, that would be different — I’d still have a lot of life and earning power ahead of me.)  But when it’s “free” medical care courtesy of the taxpayers, of course I’ll spend whatever it takes to live two more years.  Again, that’s what happens when self-interested people get to spend someone else’s money.

Here’s what else the mathematics say: when you incur a bit more debt each year, the debt grows exponentially and eventually the interest on the debt exceeds your income, unless your income somehow grows exponentially.  Many consumers have learned this the hard way, and nations aren’t immune from the math.  The United States is officially 14 trillion dollars in debt, which is outrageous, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.  Depending on whose figures you use, Medicare alone has somewhere between $50 trillion and $80 trillion in unfunded forward liability.  If we use the lower figure, that’s more than $300,000 for every working adult.  We will never pay that bill.  It isn’t possible.  At some point in the next 10 or 15 years (if we’re lucky), the interest on the debt will exceed tax revenues, no matter how high we raise taxes.  When that day comes, all these government goodies will stop.  Not just Medicare — everything.  It’s a mathematical certainty, not a right-wing theory.

So when I hear leftists whining for more government handouts, I hear children who, upon learning that their parents are in hock up to their ears, have been funding the entire household on credit-card cash advances and have tapped the last credit card, immediately demand a raise in their allowance and help with the college tuition.  They just know, by gosh, that somehow, some way, Mom and Dad can continue the spending and even increase it.

There is no free wealth.  We cannot continue spending wealth that wasn’t produced.  We’ve bled the country dry and have already taken out credit cards in our kids’ names and run those up to the limits.  You can cry a river over all the old people who can’t afford to rack up hundreds of thousand of dollars in medical treatments during their last year or two on earth, but that doesn’t change the mathematical fact that the government can’t possibly afford those costs either – and attempting to do so will only hasten the day when the government either defaults on its debts, hyperinflates the currency, or implements an austerity program that will make Greece’s austerity program look like a picnic.  Any of the above will likely cause an economic crash that exceeds the levels of the Great Depression.

Don’t you get that, Tom?

I get the math.  You don’t.  You still believe the government can create wealth and goodies out of nothing, like Santa Claus.

Or has your family been so lucky you really have no clue?

Yes, my dad did quite well financially — all because of luck.  First, there were the family connections.  His grandfather was a coal miner who emigrated to the U.S.  alone at age 13.  His father was an alcoholic railroad worker who raised my dad and his brother in a small house on the blue-collar side of town.  They shared a bedroom with one bed until my uncle left for college.  This is, of course, the kind of family that feeds directly into the old-boy network.

Dad was lucky enough to develop a childhood stuttering problem that left him insecure and painfully shy, and later lucky enough to begin working at age 15 and continue working as he put himself through college — with a few bucks here and there from his mother, who had saved money by stealing from the old man’s wallet whenever he passed out drunk.  One of Dad’s lucky jobs was hauling railroad ties on his back.  My mom remembers him being so covered in creosote, he looked like a black guy.

After he left college and became a salesman for IBM and later NCR — always afraid he’d start stuttering during a sales call — Dad was lucky enough to save like a madman.  Vacations consisted of driving to visit relatives or friends.  Weekend entertainment was playing cards with friends.  Thanks to this luck, he bought his own business at age 36, thus risking everything he’d saved, with a wife and three kids to support.

After several years of having the good fortune to work his ass off building the business, he started doing quite well — but continued saving like a madman.  He never bought an expensive car, never joined the nearby country club despite his love for golf.  Thanks to this bit of luck, he survived the early ’80s recession by paying himself a dollar a year for three years, funding the business from his savings while refusing to lay off anyone on his staff.  Despite this luck, he at one point went through a period of deep depression because he believed he’d soon have to close down his business .. thanks in part to the geniuses in the Illinois legislature raising payroll taxes in the middle of a recession, costing him an extra $40,000 in a year during which he was already losing money and running the business with his savings.  He studied for a real estate license just in case.

As he neared 60 years of age, confident his business wouldn’t sink in some future recession, he finally started treating himself and my mom to more of the good things in life…  vacations overseas, expensive golf clubs, a nicer house, etc.  He had a pretty good decade, then succumbed to Alzheimer’s.

So yes, Paul, by the leftist definition, he was a really lucky guy.  A “winner of life’s lottery,” I believe is the preferred term among leftist politicians.

My mom is now paying $5,000 per month to keep him in a nice nursing home for Alzheimer’s patients.  If she ends up in a similar home someday, if all the money my lucky dad earned throughout his lifetime is gone by the time they’re both gone, that’s fine with me.  I would never dream of asking other people to pay for their care so I can inherit his money.

And if we privatize Medicare, as Paul Ryan recommends, characters like Ron Perlman will be vying for the contracts, or charging into the markets.  Politically-connected guys who get exclusive bids.  The privatization of Medicare would be their mother lode!

Well, let’s see how that would work.  I’m the CEO of a private — and therefore profit-motivated — business.  Along comes Ron Perlman, offering to sell me a drug nobody is sure anyone needs, for the low, low price of $433 million.  How do you think that would play out? What would be the self-interested decision?

Therefore I prefer good old civil servants.  Administrators with no allegiance to any corporation.

Riiiiight.  Give a man a job in government, and he immediately ceases acting from his own self-interest and starts caring only about what’s good for society.  That’s why in the states that are going broke, you see all those selfless civil servants offering to give up part of the their ridiculously generous pensions so the pension liability doesn’t bankrupt the state.

Did you miss that part in the article where the government employees stepped in and made sure good ol’ Ron Perlman got his $433 million for a drug we don’t need? Are you still under the delusion that government employees who get to spend other people’s money don’t operate in their own interest?

But it’s libertarians who have a Pollyanna problem…

And safe from getting fired when new Presidents take office.  Or when Congress suddenly shifts.

That’s actually one of the biggest problems with civil servants.  It’s nearly impossible fire the ones who are stupid or incompetent unless they show up at work firing a gun or tell a female co-worker she looks hot in that dress.

Finally Tom, I must note, the word ‘Libertarian’ forces me to use the spelling option almost every time.  This should be a red flag to anyone in your movement.  Here in Hollywood we know: hard to spell titles never sell.

No, that’s not the biggest problem libertarians have.  A fellow comedian, of all people, explained the problem to me: “Libertarians are the most intelligent, well-informed, rational people I’ve met,” he said.  (He didn’t say “wonkish,” but that could be what he meant.)

“And that’s your problem.  I find your arguments very convincing and very logical.  But most voters aren’t logical.  They’re emotional.  And until you can learn to play hardball against the team that tells the voters that shrinking the size of the government is going to kill babies and old people, you’re going to lose.”

He was right.  So the government will continue to grow and take on debt, and someday in our lifetimes it’ll go totally bust.  Then everyone will lose.

Tom

This is part six of on-going email debate between me and one of my leftists pals from Hollywood.

 

Round Six — Paul

Tom:

With regards to Roosevelt, you confirmed my point; measuring FDR against the man who never was.

Roosevelt and Churchill shared aristocratic backgrounds .  And their politics were not as different as you imply.

As a member of Parliament in the early 1900′s, Churchill supported unemployment insurance! And the regulation of sweatshops and mines .  Churchill was, in fact, quite close to Prime Minister Lloyd George .  A Welshman of modest origins who championed working people.

And though he was a disaster for working Americans, you voted for Bush Jr .  Confirming my suspicions that Libertarians vote Republican .  They are, essentially, a wing of the party .  So when Libertarians disown Republicans it is essentially disingenuous .

The Tea Party disowned Bush mainly because of TARP .  But the bailout was actually cheap .  Most of that money has been paid back; a largely under-reported story .  Less than 50 billion is outstanding .  Which is pocket change compared to a meltdown of the markets.

They would have melted because Citibank was teetering .  Another under-reported story .  And yes, Citibank, ‘was’ too big to fail .  It’s collapse, on top of AIG and Lehman Brothers, would’ve triggered a crash like ’29 .

I just think that TARP should have come with the restoration of Glass-Steagel .  And it seems absurd that banks are fighting Dodd-Frank which was largely watered-down from it’s initial form .

Nevertheless I believe that bailout showed the necessity of a central bank .  And your historic analogy, concerning the Fed’s creation, is actually a little off .  J P Morgan functioned as our central bank before the Fed was born.

In fact, the Fed was actually created to get that function away from Morgan .  And interestingly Morgan died shortly afterwards.

Regarding the Crash of ’29, you describe it as a correction .  One that warranted no response from government .  This view overlooks the extent of phony paper issued then as common stocks .  Like the phenomenon of ‘holding companies’ .  Which were exactly that .  Companies marketed as stocks whose only business was holding stocks.

And strangely layers of holding companies would clump like stupid geese .  Swallowing and defecating one continuous line of string .  So when the crash finally came, all those holding companies went down in a line.

But the ’20′s were, on paper, at least, a Libertarian paradise: unfettered capitalism and small federal government .  No SEC or FDIC .  Agencies whose missions would later seem quite obvious .  But whose missions Libertarians continue to dispute.

Though if you’re measuring FDR against the man who never was, you can dispute Global Warming while your state is literally burning (from epic drought conditions) as Rick Perry did .

Here’s what I don’t get .  When it comes to government, Libertarians are puritanically cynical .  Imagining levels of rot warranting wholesale purges .

Yet when it comes to private enterprise, Libertarians see the best in folks .  Like anyone in a suit and tie is probably a good family man .  And one can just assume they’re principled and honest.

Isn’t that a paradox? This paranoid Pollyanna mix? But again, if you’re measuring FDR against the man who never was, nothing has to make any sense.

Every day financial pages report malfeasances .  Like Inside-trading scandals, wire fraud indictments, juiced-up stocks, currency manipulations, toxic spills, faulty product deaths, etc, etc, etc.

And if you don’t see these stories, you’re not tracking finance .  You’re probably watching FOX or listening to Limbaugh.

Inherent in capitalism is a history of buccaneering .  Going back to Francis Drake .  And New England privateers .  A certain degree of piracy has always been attendant .  A reflection perhaps on mankind more than economics.

So again it seems peculiar that Libertarians have this Pollyanna streak with regards to business .  What’s more, in this age of multi-nationals, so many businessmen live beyond our borders .  Hatching schemes we might view as common piracy.

Here I feel compelled to note that Libertarians are ideologues not unlike Soviet style Communists .  Subscribing to philosophies everyone must buy*.  Which leads to puritanical purges .  Like we’ve seen with the Tea Party .

But Tom your arguments would impress The Cato Institute .  Where you should have a fellowship .  Think of the prestige!
You could use your wonkish talents to crank out wonkish papers .  That other Libertarians will think are simply brilliant .

If you need a reference call on me .  I will tell the Koch Brothers that Tom Naughton is politically reliable!

Paul

 

Round Six — Tom

Hey, Paul –

With regards to Roosevelt, you confirmed my point; measuring FDR against the man who never was.

No, I measure FDR by the bone-headed policies he instituted.

Roosevelt and Churchill shared aristocratic backgrounds.

So did Bush and Gore.

And their politics were not as different as you imply.  As a member of Parliament in the early 1900′s, Churchill supported unemployment insurance! And the regulation of sweatshops and mines.  Churchill was, in fact, quite close to Prime Minister Lloyd George.  A Welshman of modest origins who championed working people.

This is a minor detour away from the larger issues, but Churchill was, you recall, the leader of the Conservative party .  In the 1945 election, when the voters ousted him in spite of his inspiring leadership during the war, the Labour party campaigned on promises to create full employment, a tax-funded universal National Health Service, and a cradle-to-grave welfare state.  Churchill was against this creep towards socialism, as evidenced by one of his many famous quotes:

“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”

And though he was a disaster for working Americans, you voted for Bush Jr .  Confirming my suspicions that Libertarians vote Republican.  They are, essentially, a wing of the party.  So when Libertarians disown Republicans it is essentially disingenuous.

Most libertarians I know have concluded that we stand a better chance of taking over the Republican party than launching a successful third party, since our system is skewed in favor of a two-party system — same strategy employed by the “progressives,” who took over the party that was essentially the racist party of the Old South for many generations.

Given a choice between a Republican who agrees with libertarians on perhaps 50 percent of the economic issues and a Democrat who believes the key to prosperity is to raise taxes and expand the welfare state, I’ll vote for the least objectionable choice every time.

By the way, how is the Great Savior Obama’s economic program working out for the working American so far? I seem to recall something about unemployment being high, in spite of the trillions in “stimulus” spending.

The Tea Party disowned Bush mainly because of TARP.  But the bailout was actually cheap.  Most of that money has been paid back; a largely under-reported story.  Less than 50 billion is outstanding.  Which is pocket change compared to a meltdown of the markets.

The story is “under-reported” because it isn’t true.  The “it’s almost all paid back!” story is Obama administration P.R.  nonsense.

Let’s take just one example: GM.  Officially, they’ve paid back $4.7 billion of a $6.7 billion loan.  But that doesn’t count the other $40+ billion GM sucked up from the taxpayers in the form of GM stock purchased by the government.  The Obama administration also put $13 billion of bailout money in an escrow account, and GM largely “paid back” the $4.7 billion by tapping that account.  In other words, they “paid back” the government loan with government money.

You can read up on the full shenanigans here:

http://reason.com/archives/2010/04/27/gms-phony-bailout-payback

Even if GM somehow manages to pay back the full amount, the government has no business taking taxpayer money and “investing” on our behalf in a failing business.  (Next thing you know, they’ll give a half billion or so to a solar-energy company that will go bankrupt a year later.)

They would have melted because Citibank was teetering.  Another under-reported story.  And yes, Citibank, ‘was’ too big to fail.  It’s collapse, on top of AIG and Lehman Brothers, would’ve triggered a crash like ’29.

No company is too big to fail.  The system meltdown threatened by the banks and the Fed was an excuse to save a lot of politically powerful and wealthy bankers and investors from taking the financial bath they had coming to them.  Instead, the Fed bought up a bunch of worthless mortgages (with money created out of thin air and backed by taxpayer IOUs), transferring the losses from the investors who willingly engaged in the risks to ordinary citizens who didn’t.  This also only postponed the day of reckoning, when the artificial expansion of the economy produced by magic Fed money will collapse.

[NOTE to readers:  I recently finished reading "The Big Short," an excellent book by Michael Lewis (author of "Moneyball") on the Wall Street meltdown.  He agrees that letting AIG and the big banks fail without any federal intervention would have caused a financial meltdown.  But he contends that the solution should have been a carefully managed bankruptcy and transfer of assets of each company, not a slew of bailouts.  Back to the debate ...]

Nevertheless I believe that bailout showed the necessity of a central bank.  And your historic analogy, concerning the Fed’s creation, is actually a little off.  J P Morgan functioned as our central bank before the Fed was born.

Pardon me while I laugh my ass off for a few minutes before responding …

…  Okay, that’s enough.  Paul, the housing bubble and inevitable meltdown was CAUSED by the existence of a central bank.  Take away the central bank, and people can only borrow capital others have saved.  The Federal Reserve enabled and encouraged the borrowing frenzy to occur by creating new magic money out of thin air so the banks could continue lending and lending, even after they’d exhausted the pool of qualified borrowers.  The only reason we “need” central banks to provide bailouts when economic bubbles finally burst is that central banks cause the bubbles to occur in the first place.  Without a central bank, a borrowing frenzy can’t happen.  If you have an explanation for how a borrowing frenzy can go on without a central bank, please share it.

In fact, the Fed was actually created to get that function away from Morgan.

You believe that story, eh? And I guess if you read that Rockefeller was publicly opposed to the creation of the Fed, you’d also believe he was actually against it? Rockefeller and other rich bankers publicly opposed the Federal Reserve as a ploy to convince the public that the Fed must be bad news for rich bankers, even as they were working behind the scenes to make sure the Fed was created.  The ploy worked.  Years later, it became public knowledge who was at the secret meeting on Jekyll Island during which the Fed was concocted.  One of them (can’t remember which) fessed up in a magazine article 30 years later.

Regarding the Crash of ’29, you describe it as a correction.  One that warranted no response from government.  This view overlooks the extent of phony paper issued then as common stocks.  Like the phenomenon of ‘holding companies’.  Which were exactly that.  Companies marketed as stocks whose only business was holding stocks.

And strangely layers of holding companies would clump like stupid geese .  Swallowing and defecating one continuous line of string.  So when the crash finally came, all those holding companies went down in a line.

Which proves the crash of ’29 wasn’t a correction how, exactly? Sounds like a rather dramatic example of a correction to me.  Stupid behavior was punished.  That’s what corrections do — if the morons in government don’t start bailing out the morons in the market.

But the ’20′s were, on paper, at least, a Libertarian paradise: unfettered capitalism and small federal government.  No SEC or FDIC.  Agencies whose missions would later seem quite obvious.  But whose missions Libertarians continue to dispute.

It’s not unfettered capitalism when the Federal Reserve is creating new magic money out of thin air to allow a borrowing frenzy to continue.  In real capitalism, you can’t borrow capital that doesn’t exist.  As Paul Schiff aptly described our latest borrowing frenzy and subsequent bust: Yes, the bankers and investors acted like a bunch of drunk teenagers.  But the Federal Reserve provided the endless supply of alcohol and encouraged them to drink it.

Though if you’re measuring FDR against the man who never was, you can dispute Global Warming while your state is literally burning (from epic drought conditions) as Rick Perry did.

Not sure I see the connection there, but I don’t dispute that the earth warms and cools in cycles.  I definitely dispute that we can say with anything remotely resembling scientific certainty that humans have zip to do with it.  But if you want to cite a drought as proof of man-made global warming (because droughts never happened before the late 20th century, right?), then I’ll share a few headlines and leads from news stories of the past few years with you:

Rare October snow brings winter landscape to NY.

This winter has been one of the toughest in decades, with temperatures today reaching as low as -38C in large areas of the Midwest.

Germany marked record low temperatures for the third day in a row on Thursday

Charlottes Pass at 13 degrees below average set a new Australian record for cold today at -13 degress celcius.  This sets a new cold record for April for anywhere in Australia

If it seemed cold to you in Green Bay on Saturday, it was.  The high temperature for the day, reached at 9:50 a.m., was 52.  That set a record for the lowest high temperature for June 6, according to the National Weather Service office in Ashwaubenon.

Northern Arizona residents were digging out Tuesday from a storm that left record snowfall in Flagstaff, knocked out power to tens of thousands, shut down two major interstates and kept children out of school.

Snow fell as the House of Commons debated Global Warming yesterday — the first October fall in the metropolis since 1922.

By the way, it’s 27 degrees in Tennessee this morning — 13 degrees below the historical average.  Newsflash: the weather changes.  Always has, always will.

Here’s what I don’t get.  When it comes to government, Libertarians are puritanically cynical.  Imagining levels of rot warranting wholesale purges.

Yet when it comes to private enterprise, Libertarians see the best in folks.  Like anyone in a suit and tie is probably a good family man.  And one can just assume they’re principled and honest.  Isn’t that a paradox? This paranoid Pollyanna mix?

I’m sitting here trying to figure out if you’re just yanking my chain, or if you’re actually that ignorant of what libertarians believe.

Going all the way back to Adam Smith’s free-market treatise “The Wealth of Nations,” libertarians have contended that humans act in their own best interest, period.  It’s because of this self-interest (or greed, if you prefer) that Smith warned against allowing government officials to have control over the economy — he knew full well that eventually the smart greedy merchants would get together with the smart greedy government officials and rig the game so they could all get rich together at everyone else’s expense.

Smith also pointed out that when businesses can’t get rich by leveraging the coercive powers of government (that is, when free markets exist) they are forced to compete with each other, which leads to higher efficiency, lower prices, and better products.  As I stated in an earlier reply, when I created a trademark docketing system that was far less expensive than what was already on the market, it wasn’t because I have warm fuzzy feelings towards trademark attorneys.  I created that system because I’m self-interested — I wanted their money — and yet the trademark attorneys benefited.  The reason New Yorkers can buy beef in the local grocery store isn’t that ranchers in Texas love New Yorkers and want to take care of them.  The beef arrives in New York because the Texas ranchers are greedy.

When government stays the @#$% out of the way, the only way a business can get a consumer’s money is to offer a product the consumer wants at a price the consumer can afford.  Good intentions have nothing to do with it, as any libertarian economist would happily tell you.  That’s why you’ll never see a libertarian marching in the streets and whining like a five-year-old after figuring out that corporations care more about profits (egads!) than people.  We don’t expect corporations to care about people.  We’re adults.

The reason we’re cynical about government is that government gives coercive powers to self-interested people (which is bad enough) and then gives those self-interested people the ability to spend other people’s money (which makes matters worse).  In free-market exchanges, there is no coercion.  You can’t make me buy your product or invest in your company .  You can only try to persuade me.  But morons in government can take my money and invest it in GM or Solyndra, without any worries about bad investments costing them a dime personally.  That’s the difference.

If anyone is suffering from a Pollyanna complex, it’s today’s “progressives,” who (against all evidence) believe that when people take a job in government, they immediately cease acting out of their own self-interest and start making decisions based on what’s good for the rest of us.

If the heads of Fannie and Freddie are paid bonuses based on the size of their total mortgage portfolios, a libertarian would fully expect them to boost their own pay by lowering their mortgage standards and buying increasingly risky mortgages from the banks, allowing and encouraging the self-interested bankers to keep writing those mortgages — which is what happened.  When the housing meltdown occurred, we didn’t whine about how greedy and irresponsible the bankers were.  We pointed out how Fannie, Freddie, Congress, the Fed, etc., created a perverse set of incentives that practically guaranteed the self-interested bankers would do exactly what they did.

By contrast, in 1985 — before those asinine incentives were created — my best friend was turned down for a mortgage even though he was an attorney employed at a large firm and had a 10% down payment.  The bank wouldn’t write a mortgage for anyone who didn’t have a 20% down payment.  Why? Because they were greedy, and without Fannie and Freddie taking all the risky mortgages off their hands, the self-interested decision was to minimize risk.

But again, if you’re measuring FDR against the man who never was, nothing has to make any sense.

No, I judge FDR by the bone-headed policies he instituted.  But now that I think about it, I’ll happily measure him against Harding.  During the steep recession of 1921 — which was worse than the first year of the Great Depression, with manufacturing declining by something like 40% and stocks declining rapidly — Harding ignored the advice of Herbert Hoover, who wanted to engage in corporate bailouts and massive spending to prop up the economy.  (Yes, Hoover — your “laissez faire” guy.) Harding said the market needed to be allowed to clear itself of the malinvestments, and it did.  The recession was over a year later.  Too bad Hoover didn’t learn the lesson.

Every day financial pages report malfeasances.  Like Inside-trading scandals, wire fraud indictments, juiced-up stocks, currency manipulations, toxic spills, faulty product deaths, etc, etc, etc.  And if you don’t see these stories, you’re not tracking finance.  You’re probably watching FOX or listening to Limbaugh.

Again, I’m not sure if you’re yanking my chain or simply ignorant of what libertarians believe.  In case it’s the latter, I’ll fill you in: Libertarians believe in voluntary exchanges between free adults.  If a company defrauds you, it isn’t voluntary — you weren’t given what you agreed to.  If a company poisons my land or water, I didn’t volunteer for that.  If a product kills or maims me, I didn’t volunteer for that, and the company that produced it should be held liable.

You seem to believe libertarianism means corporations are never punished for anything.  That’s simply not true.  Libertarianism means 1) if I want to make a voluntary exchange with someone else and we agree to the terms, you don’t get to step in and stop us simply because you don’t believe our deal is good for you, and 2) you don’t get to force me to make exchanges I don’t want to make.  In other words, we all get to act like free adults living in a supposedly free country.

Inherent in capitalism is a history of buccaneering.  Going back to Francis Drake.  And New England privateers.  A certain degree of piracy has always been attendant.  A reflection perhaps on mankind more than economics.

I seem to recall incidents of buccaneering and plundering long before capitalism ever came along.  Yes, of course, it’s a reflection on mankind.  To repeat, libertarians believe people are self-interested — including those who work in government.

So again it seems peculiar that Libertarians have this Pollyanna streak with regards to business.

See above.  You are criticizing an attitude libertarians don’t hold.

What’s more, in this age of multi-nationals, so many businessmen live beyond our borders.  Hatching schemes we might view as common piracy.

If they’re hatching a scheme to sell me products I’ll willingly buy, it’s not piracy.  If they’re bribing government officials to get deals they shouldn’t have, then the problem is the self-interested government officials being empowered to rig the game, which makes them worth bribing.

Here I feel compelled to note that Libertarians are ideologues not unlike Soviet style Communists.  Subscribing to philosophies everyone must buy* .  Which leads to puritanical purges.  Like we’ve seen with the Tea Party.

Hmmm ..  I must’ve missed a few newscasts.  When the Tea Party members start dragging people away to gulags? What I’ve seen are people exercising their right to protest against the actions of their government.

But as far as subscribing to philosophies everyone must buy, have you paid any attention to what’s happened on college campuses? Nitwit leftists routinely stealing all the copies of the campus conservative newspaper? Students charged with “hate speech” for putting up posters advertising a speech by the (black conservative) author of “It’s Okay to Leave the Plantation”? A history student in California given an F and told by his professor to undergo therapy because he wrote a paper supporting the war in Iraq? Students attempting to physically attack Ann Coulter when she gave a speech on campus? Another of her speeches canceled because of student riots? Give me a break …  leftists are some of the most intolerant people on the planet.

(Wish I could remember who did this …  someone parked a car with Kerry For President bumper stickers on it in an ultra-conservative voting district.  Nothing happened to it.  He also parked a car with Bush-Cheney bumper stickers on it in an ultra-liberal voting district.  Tires slashed, key scratches, window broken.  When leftists preach tolerance, what they mean is that they tolerate white liberals, black liberals, Asian liberals, Catholic liberals, Jewish liberals, atheist liberals, straight liberals, gay liberals, and transgender liberals.  If you’re not a liberal, they’ll start — strangely, I might add — comparing you to the people who ran the Soviet purges.)

But Tom your arguments would impress The Cato Institute.  Where you should have a fellowship.  Think of the prestige! You could use your wonkish talents to crank out wonkish papers.  That other Libertarians will think are simply brilliant.

I appreciate the sarcastic compliment, but they wouldn’t be impressed by me.  They already know what I know, plus a lot more.  I’m still trying to put my finger on your definition of “wonkish,” however.  Near as I can tell, it’s something like “studies subjects before developing opinions on them and cites facts with references in debates instead of spouting opinions.”

Tom

It was a mid-week standup show on the Norwegian Dream, and the small auditorium was rocking.  Cruise-ship audiences are a comedian’s dream — they’re on vacation, they’re relaxed, they’re ready to have fun.  Some of them started laughing at my first setup, before I even got to the punchline.  It was one of those “I can’t believe I get paid for doing this” shows.

Partway into my set, I noticed a big man with graying hair sitting in the front row.  He was laughing as much as anyone, but also writing on a yellow pad.  A reviewer? I wondered.  Someone the cruise line sent to get feedback on my act?

An hour later, after changing into jeans and a t-shirt and then grabbing a late supper at a buffet, I was walking past one of the many bars on the ship when I heard someone call my name.  It was the note-taking man, sitting at the bar and waving me over.  A muscular young guy sporting a crew-cut was sitting with him.

“Can I buy you a beer?”

“Sure, that would be great.  Guinness.”

“Good man.  That’s my beer too.”

He shook my hand and told me his first name, then introduced me to the crew-cut.  They told me how much they enjoyed my act.  They appreciated that I kept it family-friendly and clean.  I told them that’s what the cruise ships require, but it’s also my style in the comedy clubs.

The crew-cut saw a friend making time with some attractive young women at a nearby table and went to join them.  The older man pointed to his yellow pad, which was sitting on the bar.

“I hope you don’t mind, but I took some notes during your act.  I’m not stealing your material or anything, but … well, I hope this doesn’t sound too strange for a guy my age, but now that I’m retired, I’ve been going to some amateur nights at a comedy club.”

“No kidding?  How’s it going?”

He gave a dismissive wave.  “I’m no good yet.  I see someone like you, getting all those laughs without having to do dirty material, and I just don’t know how you do it.   So I take notes, trying to figure out what makes your stuff so funny.  I hope you don’t mind.”

Over another Guinness, I gave him my quick seminar on humor, the various forms a standup bit can take, how to create the surprise that gets the laugh.  He jotted down more notes as we were talking.

“I really appreciate you taking the time to help.  I tell you, I just admire the heck out of what you people do up there.  You’re spreading joy, you know?  It’s a great thing.  If I had it to do over again, that’s what I’d want to do, spread some joy, make people feel good.  I’m hoping I can still do that now.”

“You said you’re retired.  What did you do?

“I was in the Marine Corps pretty much my whole adult life.”

“No kidding?  Doing what?”

“Ahhh …”  He took a sip of Guinness.  “Well, I hope you don’t think any less of me, but I was a sniper.  Then when I got too old for that, I trained snipers.”

“Why on earth would I think of less of you for that?”

“Sorry.  I guess it’s just my stereotype of Hollywood and show-biz types.  You know:  anti-military, thinking snipers are all bloodthirsty killers, that kind of @#$%.”

“Yeah, that is a pretty common attitude in Hollywood.  But between you and me, I can’t stand Hollywood.”

That seemed to perk him up.  “Let me buy you another Guinness.”

“Thank you.”

“No, thank you.  I really appreciate you letting me pick your brain.”

I told him he could return the favor by telling me a bit about his life as a sniper, since I’d never met one before and probably never would again.  So, somewhat hesitantly at first, he did:  being in the field alone, disguised as foliage, crawling toward a target at a rate of maybe a couple of feet per hour to avoid detection.  No meal breaks, no bathroom breaks, no water breaks, bugs crawling up in your clothes and biting at you, all the while knowing one sudden movement or one sneeze would get you killed.  Finally, you’re in range, and then …

“It’s not like being on the line,” he said.  “You don’t fire at enemy soldiers a couple hundreds yards away and watch them drop.  It’s one man in your sights, you’re looking at his face, probably looking into his eyes.  Then you pull the trigger.  It’s personal.  It can get to you.”

“Wow.  I guess it could.”

“Well, I did what had to be done, you know?  But that’s what I mean about if I had a chance to do it over.  You get to a certain point in your life, you want to do something meaningful, something that makes people happy.”

It was only because of the Guinness that I was willing to disagree with a rather large retired Marine who’d been drinking.

“Can I tell you something?”

“Sure.”

“I’m flattered that you like my act and admire what I do.  But in the scheme of history, guys like me aren’t worth a @#$% compared to guys like you.”

“What?  How the @#$% do you figure that?”

“How many standup comedians you figure they’ve got in North Korea?”

He smiled.  “Never thought about it.  Probably none.”

“Right.  And there probably aren’t any standup comedians in Iran either, and if there are, they sure as hell have to watch what they say if they want to keep on living.”

A chuckle.  “I guess they would, yeah.”

“I can be a standup comedian because I live in a free country.  And the only reason I live in a free country is that at certain times in our history, starting with the Revolutionary War, some really tough mother@#$%ers like you stood up and did what had to be done.  I read a lot of history, and I don’t remember any of our presidents ever responding to a national emergency by yelling, Holy crap! Get the Secretary of War on the phone and tell him to send in the standup comedians!”

He laughed and slapped the bar.  Whew.

“I think it’s great you want to try being a comedian.  I hope you do.  But even if it doesn’t work out, I hope you remember guys like me get to do what we do because of guys like you.  So let me buy you a Guinness now.”

“No, I’m buying you a Guinness.  But I appreciate what you said.”

The crew-cut eventually rejoined us, and over the next few hours I learned it’s not a good idea for a middle-aged comedian to go drink-for-drink with a couple of Marines.  When my head started spinning, I stood up and announced I should get myself to bed.

The retired Marine stood up and said he should do the same.  He reached out and shook my hand, slipping something into it, then walked away.  The other Marine noticed what I was holding.

“You know what that is?”

“Some kind of coin.”

“That’s a Scout-Sniper’s coin.  It’s an honor.”

“Cool.”

“Seriously, don’t lose that, and don’t sell it on eBay, okay?  The man just let you know he considers you a brother.  It’s an honor.  I don’t even have one of those yet.”

“I won’t lose it.  I promise.”

Five years later, I still have the coin.  I’m looking at it right now, remembering my Marine buddy from the cruise.  Tomorrow night, as I enjoy the Independence Day fireworks with my wife and my girls, sitting on a blanket in a public park and feeling happy and safe and free, I will remember him again.

I hope you’re well, my friend.  I hope you made it onto a comedy stage somewhere and spread a little joy.  But even if you didn’t, I hope you understand that men like you have been spreading joy for 235 years now.  The joy is called freedom.

Happy Fourth of July.

Ever since we moved to Tennessee, my wife has been dreaming of buying a big plot of land somewhere and becoming more self-sustaining, raising chickens and goats, growing our own vegetables, and fishing in the many nearby waterways. We currently live in a subdivision and will for at least another year, but when school let out for the summer, she reminded me we don’t need our own mini-farm to go fishing.

My girls are huge fans of Man Vs. Wild, Survivorman, Dual Survival, The Alaska Experiment, and pretty much any show where people have to kill their own food, so as soon as they heard my wife mention fishing, they began begging me to take them shopping for fishing rods. So I did, figuring two fishing rods would be enough for the family. Then both girls selected pinks ones. Frankly, I’m not secure enough to stand around in public waving a long pink stick, so I chose a third fishing rod in a manly shade of deep green.

The trouble with owning fishing rods is that after a couple of days of using them for make-believe fencing matches, the kids actually demand to go fishing. Since there’s a public fishing area on the Harpeth River less than three minutes away, I quickly ran out of excuses. We went fishing on Monday.

I’ve held a fishing rod in my hands maybe three times in my entire life. My dad’s interest in lakes and rivers was limited to figuring out how to retrieve his golf balls from them, and when I once asked about perhaps taking my brother and me fishing someday, he patiently explained that fishing is just an excuse to sit in a boat and drink beer, which we could do in our own back yard.

So even though I’m 52 years old, this whole fishing business was all new to me … which became painfully evident when we climbed down the steep banks of the Harpeth River and opened our little plastic boxes of tackle.

“What’s that for?” my wife asked as I stood there flipping a wire semi-circle back and forth over some spool-thing attached to the rod.  (This was after I’d spent ten minutes figuring out how to keep the spool-thing from falling off the rod.)

“Uh … I think the line goes around it. Or over it. Or under it. I don’t know.” We took turns seeing who could spend the most time fussing with the spool-thing without accidentally accomplishing anything useful.

Fortunately, two teenage girls who were fishing a bit downstream recognized that when a grown man stares at a fishing pole for more than two minutes without moving, it’s a subtle cry for help. With the born-and-bred southern hospitality that makes this area such a pleasant place to live, they set down their poles and came over to serve as instructors. After feeding the line through some ring-things on the pole (which, as it turns out, you have to screw together first) and demonstrating how a reel works, one of them even tied a hook onto my line for me. Then they both moved a safe distance away.

Much as I adore my wife, she has a couple of annoying habits … one of which is being good at things she’s never tried before. On my birthday several years ago, she joined me for a round of golf on a par-three course. Since she’d never so much as taken a practice swing at the range, I gave her a two-minute lesson while we waiting on the first tee. Apparently wanting to flatter me as an instructor, she responded by landing five of her nine tee shots on the green. If she could putt a little better, we’d be divorced by now.

So I wasn’t surprised when she pulled a decent-sized fish from the river about thirty seconds after casting her first line. She held up the fish for the obligatory picture, then dropped it into a cooler filled with ice.

I spent the next three hours proving that if water-logged sticks provided complete protein, I could feed my family with nothing more than a fishing pole. I also caught several large rocks. Unable to reel in the rocks, I kept having to cut my line and start over. That’s how I discovered that fishing line is specially formulated to tangle itself into impossible knots no matter how carefully you try to unwind it. I also discovered that with the proper flick of the wrist, it’s surprisingly easy to toss a hook into the highest branches of a tree. (Since I was facing the river, the tree limbs I hooked were of course above and behind me.)

My six-year-old caught a fish that was too small to consider eating, so she threw it back. By the end of the expedition, my wife’s fish was the only one in the cooler.  But it was big enough for a meal, so we drove home feeling victorious. We came. We saw. We caught our own wild food.

After thumbing through some recipes for fish, my wife set the cooler on the kitchen counter and reached in to retrieve the main course. At that point, she turned to the rest of us with an excited expression and said, “BWAAAAAAHHH!!!” – which is this cute way she has of saying, “I know I’ve been expressing a lot of enthusiasm lately for getting back to nature and sourcing more of our food by raising chickens and goats on our own mini-farm someday and learning to fish in the local waters in the meantime, but up to this point in my life the only fish I’ve cooked came from grocery stores and fish markets where you know for a fact the fish are really and truly dead when you pick them up, and while I assumed putting a fish on ice for four hours was 100 percent fatal, it turns out this fish is still alive and kicking, which I must admit I found somewhat surprising.”

After dropping the wriggling fish back into the ice chest, she ran to her computer to read up on how to humanely kill it. Then she went to the toolbox to retrieve a flat-head screwdriver. I was beginning to wonder if she’d just learned how to disassemble the fish and remove the spark plugs, but then she grabbed it, set it on a cutting board, and jammed the screwdriver into its head behind the right eye.

“Uh, honey … are you sure you didn’t get your instructions from an online guide for mob enforcers?”

“That’s what you’re supposed to do with a fish. That’s where the brain is.”

Confident she’d dispatched the fish once and for all, she grabbed a knife and made an incision in the belly. Then she stopped cutting to remark, “BWAAAAAHHHH!!” – which is this cute way she has of saying, “It turns out I missed the brain and jammed the screwdriver into whatever you’d call the fish version of a neck, which you would think would be enough to kill a fish even if you do miss the brain, but it turns out they’re tough little creatures, and this one is still alive and kicking, which I must admit I find somewhat surprising.”

The fish — which by this point had been frozen, stabbed in the neck with a screwdriver and partially gutted with a knife — was looking at her with a fish-eyed expression I interpreted as “For the love of God, lady, just @#$%ing kill me already!” I suggested she might also want to water-board the fish for good measure, but she explained that fish don’t mind water-boarding and I should really shut the @#$% up now. Then she grabbed a cleaver and did a Marie Antoinette number on the thing.

To her credit, she calmly finished cleaning the fish and cooked up a tasty fish-and-tomato stew. When I asked later if this experience had dampened her enthusiasm for becoming a latter-day pioneer woman, raising and catching and killing her own food, she said no.

Good. I’m looking forward to the first time she goes after a live chicken.

Snow in Chicago on Christmas Day

Almost Ready to Go

Before we even left Tennessee, we had to perform some Santa Claus tricks. Alana, my five-year-old, began asking for an electric car months ago, and we decided we were okay with getting ripped off and bought it for her. No, it’s not a Smart Car … but the pink Barbie Camaro we ordered from Wal-Mart is approximately the same size, only with more leg room.

We managed to keep the big box hidden in the garage — one of the many advantages of having a garage full of large, useless items — and informed Alana that even though we’d be in Chicago on Christmas morning, we’d asked Santa Clause to leave the car under the tree at our house. (Fortunately, Santa doesn’t charge extra for multiple deliveries.)

We’d also picked up a Wii for Sara, my seven-year-old. She didn’t ask Santa for a Wii, but after playing with one at a friend’s house some weeks ago, she came home and declared it “totally cool.” We decided to leave that under our own tree as well, if only to maintain a state of sibling equilibrium when we returned.

So after loading up the car and getting the girls strapped in, I had to make an excuse to go back inside and move the car from the garage to the living room. I was worried the girls might become suspicious. They’re used to seeing their mommy run back inside. In fact, my wife likes to play a travel game called Is The Coffee Pot Off?!  The object of the game is see how far from home she can get to me to drive before turning around so she can run in and check the coffee pot. But that’s her role in the game.  Once I leave the house to take a trip, I don’t go back inside unless I see flames in my rearview mirror.

I announced that I may have forgotten a suitcase and went inside. The girls never wondered why it took Daddy 10 minutes to determine if a packed suitcase was sitting inside the front door. During those 10 minutes, Daddy — who has a bad shoulder that will probably require surgical repair soon — was trying to lug a big box up a short flight of stairs while mostly using one arm to do it. Daddy was also saying lots of words that weren’t very Christmas-like.

Off We Go

With Santa’s extra deliveries in place near the tree, we took off for Springfield, Illinois. On most car trips, my daughters counter-synchronize their bladders to make sure I’ll be exiting the highway in search of a bathroom at least every 45 minutes. For some reason, they forgot this time. I was impressed with myself for making good time until I saw a sign announcing the distance to Louisville, Kentucky. I experienced a strange mental discomfort … something didn’t feel quite right. Then it hit me: we pass through Louisville on the way to Chicago, not Springfield. I’d been driving on auto-pilot. So we got to see far more of the Kentucky countryside than I’d planned as we spent two hours working our way west on two-lane highways.

Springfield

It was while we were staying at my mom’s house in Springfield that I began to suspect my daughters might be on their way to having a perfect Christmas. (It seems to me we get perhaps one or two perfect Christmases during childhood — I remember two.)  They built a snowman in my mom’s front yard. They charmed my mom with compliments such as “Grandma, I just love the floppy skin on your neck!” They loved the presents they opened after our big family dinner on December 23rd. They were delighted to see their cousins (my brother’s three sons), who are all old enough to be their uncles but also young enough to get down on the floor for piggy-back rides and wrestling matches.

Sara was also delighted to discover that my sister owns a Wii, which is attached to my mom’s big-screen TV. I was somewhat less than delighted (late at night, when no one was watching) to discover that my ineptitude at real sports is exceeded only by my ineptitude at Wii sports. Wii not only kicks my butt at tennis (on the beginner setting), it then insists on replaying each of my bad shots in slow motion. All that’s missing is an audio track recorded by one of the playground bullies from my childhood, saying, “You call that a backhand, weenie-boy? Man, you really suck!” But that would be cruel, so Wii settles for finishing each round by showing my Wii character bowing its head in shame as YOU LOSE appears on screen.

After trouncing my sister at tennis, golf and bowling, Sara again declared Wii “totally cool” and told me, “I wish I would’ve asked Santa Claus for one of these!” I reminded her that Santa wouldn’t be leaving the North Pole for another day and promised I’d try to get a message to him. She said to tell Santa it was okay if he left a Wii at our house, along with Alana’s electric car.

Perfect.

Off We Go Again

Word of advice to people still out there looking for love: forget about looks, personality, and other inconsequential traits. Marry someone whose parents live within driving distance of yours. That way you don’t risk winding up in divorce court after one too many debates about which family to visit each Christmas.

Springfield to Chicago is less than four hours in the car — unless it’s snowing, which it was when we left for Chicago on the morning of Christmas Eve. Eventually the snow was blowing more or less sideways, so the wipers on our van stepped up and responded by efficiently clearing the splatters from the entire windshield, except for a large area at eye level on the driver’s side. I alternated between making myself artificially tall and artificially short to see where the heck we were going.

After spending winters in both Illinois and Tennessee, I realize there’s a difference in how southern bad drivers and northern bad drivers respond to snowy roads. The southern bad drivers assume any amount of snow makes driving impossible and stay home, living off the canned goods they ran out to buy when they first heard snow was in the forecast. The northern bad drivers assume traction on a snowy road is exactly the same as traction on a clear road and continue zipping along at 75 miles per hour. Both sets of bad drivers end up ceding the roads to us cautious-but-willing drivers … but the southerners are sitting at home, while the northerners are sitting in their cars, hoping their cell phones can find a signal down there in the ditch. In a 100-mile stretch on Interstate 55, I saw nearly a dozen vehicles that made unplanned exits.

Chicago

My girls and their six-year-old cousin Marzhan all know that Santa won’t slide down the chimney into a house where any kids are still awake. We emphasized the urgency of the situation by browsing to NORAD’s Santa Tracker on a computer and showing them that Santa was already in South America and could turn north at any minute. They understood. They wanted to go to sleep. They just couldn’t.

Every 90 seconds or so, one of them would appear at the top of the stairs and announce, “I can’t sleep!” They said this as if we were refusing to hand over the magic sleeping potion and were perhaps conspiring to deprive them of gifts from Santa. I finally informed them that if they crawled in bed and didn’t make a sound, Santa would probably be fooled into thinking they were sleeping and leave them their presents anyway. Once they were persuaded to stop jumping out of bed to tell us they couldn’t sleep, they fell asleep.

I’m a natural night-owl and didn’t bother crawling into bed until 2:00 AM. My girls bounced on the bed roughly 47 minutes later and announced that the sun was coming up and therefore it was clearly time to go downstairs. It’s only after becoming a parent myself that I finally understand why my dad always looked so exhausted on Christmas. (Given my dad’s famous lack of ability to use simple tools, I suspect he was often up until nearly daybreak, cussing about labels that read: SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED.)

Once again, the girls were delighted with their gifts — then delighted all over again when they found notes from Santa in their stockings, informing them that the electric car and the Wii would be waiting for them at home.

They ate several pounds of treats constructed entirely from high fructose corn syrup and/or white flour, then burned off the excess fuel by engaging in an all-day snowball fight with a gang of cousins. The snow was deep enough to look like Christmas, but not enough to shut down the city.

Perfect.

And Back Again …

After a few more days of visits with aunts, uncles, cousins, second cousins, and relatives I can’t quite identify, we drove home. Sara spent much of the trip listening to her new MP3 player. We figured it must’ve come with a few songs pre-loaded, which it did, but it turned out she was mostly listening a Suze Orman audiobook titled Women & Money: Owning the Power to Control Your Destiny. I suspect she’ll be asking for a bigger allowance soon, and perhaps a 401k.

The closer we got to home, the more often Alana reminded us that she was soon to be the owner of an electric car, courtesy of Santa Claus. She didn’t see any good reason she shouldn’t take it for a test drive in the dark after we got home. Fortunately, it was raining when we pulled into the driveway, so she decided the test drive could wait. My wife hurried inside to turn the big box so the Wal-Mart delivery sticker wouldn’t be facing forward (something Daddy forgot to check while lugging the box upstairs and muttering bad words).

The girls bounded inside after her. As my wife and I carried in the luggage and the gifts, the girls were practically bouncing around the living room.

“Look! That’s my caaaaaaar!”

“Santa got me the Wii! Look, Alana, I got a Wii!”

“This is the best Christmas present EVER!”

“This is the best Christmas present ever, too!”

Yes, they’re just toys. Yes, Christmas is too commercial, Christmas shopping can be a hassle, and Christmas travel can be tiring. But kids don’t know that, and they shouldn’t. For them, Christmas can still be perfect. And when it’s perfect for them, it’s pretty darned good for us too.

Some years ago, I was the lead programmer for a small software company started by a couple in their garage — literally.  As the wife side of the team once said during a looooong day, “This would be a great business if not for the @#$%ing customers.”

Okay, I’m glad I have customers, but one of them has me swamped tonight and it’s going to be a late one.  Next week it’s off to grandma’s.  So Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, Happy Festivus, etc.

Back in 2011.

Well, can’t resist one smarty-pants observation before going:  Tennessee is having its coldest December since 1942.  Florida recently broke a record-cold temperature that stood for 160 years.  Predictions are that this will be the third winter in a row with below-normal temperatures.

So I think I know why Al Gore moved to Santa Barbara … the cold weather in Tennessee was freezing his brain and making it difficult for him to preach about the dangers of global warming.

Now I’m going.

For the first time in three years, we’ll be spending Christmas in Illinois, visiting both sets of grandparents. Last year, we were still newcomers to Tennessee, and I wanted the girls to experience Christmas in their new home. The year before, we elected to stay in Burbank — mostly because the year before that, we made the mistake of flying during Christmas week.

The trip to Illinois was merely a hassle … up at 4:00 a.m., carrying kids and luggage and car seats to a taxi, then into the airport, then through the terminal and onto the plane, then through another terminal and onto another plane, then to a shuttle for a two-hour ride from St. Louis to Springfield.

The trip back from Chicago, however, was a nightmare. The first sign of trouble came in the form of snowflakes as my father-in-law was driving us to O’Hare. They weren’t big snowflakes, mind you, and there weren’t many of them yet. But I’d spent most of my adult life in Chicago and knew a blizzard could be following those little snowflakes into town.

Yup. By the time we boarded the plane two hours later, snow was piling up on the runways, and delay notices were piling up on the departure and arrival boards. I tried to remain very calm and zen about it all, just accept that we were going to miss our connecting flight in Dallas, but the pilot suckered me into optimism by backing away from the gate a mere 20 minutes after our scheduled departure. Well, how about that … our layover in Dallas is nearly two hours, so we’ll even have a time to spare.

As it turned out, we’d backed away from the gate just in time to be approximately the 100th airliner in line for takeoff. An hour or so later, when we were perhaps third in line for takeoff, the pilot announced that the wings were covered with ice and he couldn’t risk flying. I was hoping a platoon of mechanics would drive out to the runway and jump on the wings armed with little plastic ice-scrapers, but the pilot taxied to the terminal, where greenish liquid sprayed from a huge nozzle removed the ice.

Still feeling cautiously optimistic, I convinced myself we might just make that connecting flight … after all, when O’Hare slows down, the whole system slows down, so the connecting flight could be delayed somewhere as well.

An hour later, after our second long stretch sitting in line to take off, the pilot announced that we needed another de-icing and taxied to the terminal again. I checked my watch. Without the snow, we would be landing in Dallas right about now. I become psychologically disjointed in these situations because while my body is where it is, my soul moves on to where it’s supposed to be — in this case, walking through a terminal in Dallas. The two would have to get along without each other until we arrived home in Burbank.

We finally landed in Dallas hours after our connecting flight had taken off. The airport was so over-crowded, I expected to see hordes of people bathing in a river somewhere in the middle of the terminal. I walked to the American Airlines desk at what was supposed to be our connecting gate and asked the uniformed, perky blonde if there was a later flight to Burbank.

“There’s one more flight leaving in three hours, but it’s sold out.”

“So what can you do to get us home?”

“Here’s what I’m going to do: I’m going smile sincerely and suggest we put you on the stand-by list for that flight, then overcome your doubts by reminding you that since you have small children, you’ll receive priority stand-by status. Now of course, you don’t actually stand a snowball’s chance in hell of getting on the plane since we overbook our flights even when it’s not a jam-packed holiday week, but this way I appear to doing something to help, when in fact I’m really just looking forward to watching you, your wife, and your two little girls spend three hours trying to avoid cramping up while sitting on the hard floor since, as you’ve noticed, there isn’t an empty chair anywhere within 10 square miles of the airport. The good news is that you’ll get some much-needed exercise every time one of the girls has to pee, because we broke the plumbing in all the nearby bathrooms.”

That isn’t exactly what she said, but it’s what she meant.

Three hours later — after the uniformed, perky blonde had herded all the passengers onto the plane and bribed some overbooked ticket-holders into surrendering their seats — I asked her what we should do now, seeing as how the priority stand-by status didn’t work out. She told me I’d need to go ask someone at the American Airlines ticket counter and pointed towards a security exit.

My wife stayed with the girls, who’d long since dozed off, and I walked the five or six miles to the American ticket counter. The line was only half as long as I’d expect if John and George came back from the dead and announced that the Beatles would perform exactly one reunion concert, tickets on sale tomorrow exclusively at Yankee Stadium window #23.

“Can I help you?”

“Yes, we missed our connecting flight. When’s the next flight to Burbank?”

“Tomorrow morning.”

“Fine. I need four –”

“It’s sold out. They’re all sold out tomorrow.”

“What?”

“Everyone’s trying to fly to the Burbank-Pasadena airport for the Rose Bowl.”

“So when’s the next flight with open seats?”

“Sunday.”

“This is Friday.”

“I know that, sir. Would you like to book a flight on Sunday?”

“No. Put us on another airline, fly us into LAX, just get us home tomorrow. I’m not spending two days in Dallas.”

“Let’s see … here’s the best I can do. You can fly to Seattle tomorrow morning, then take an Alaskan Airlines flight from there to Burbank in the afternoon.”

“Dallas to Seattle to Burbank.”

“That’s right.”

“How long is the layover in Seattle?”

“Four hours.”

“I’ll take it.”

So I bought the tickets and stood in yet another line to get through security. The crack TSA agent examined my tickets then held up a hand.

“You can’t come in here, sir.”

“Why not?”

“These tickets aren’t for today.”

“Yes, I know that. They’re for tomorrow. These are the earliest flights I could get. But my wife and girls are inside waiting for me because I hoped I’d find a flight for tonight.”

“Well, you can’t go inside with these tickets.”

“Okay, then, now what? Is someone going to make an announcement so my wife knows I’m stuck out here and can’t get back in?”

“We don’t do that.”

“Uh-huh. So … I guess I’m supposed to stand here for, say, an hour or two until she finally comes looking for me?”

“Can you call her on a cell phone?”

“If she had a cell phone I could call, why would I be talking to you right now?”

“I don’t know. She ought to have a cell phone.”

“Look, you can have somebody follow me in there if you think I’m security risk, but I need to let my wife know I’m out here and we’re stuck in Dallas until tomorrow.”

“I’m sorry, sir. That is of course a logical and reasonable request, but I work for the federal government and was therefore specially trained to follow rules for the sake of following rules, even when they make no sense whatsoever. In fact, if I demonstrated any initiative or capacity for independent thinking, I’d be sent to Guantanamo and forced to eat fattening foods while undergoing re-education.”

That’s not exactly what he said, but it’s what I heard.

As I was wondering exactly much jail time I’d pull for punching the crack TSA agent in the nose, an older African-American woman whose badge identified her as being on the janitorial staff heard part of our conversation and took pity on me. She volunteered to find my wife inside and asked for a description and gate number. Fortunately, the crack TSA agent didn’t consider this bit of kindness to be a terrorism threat and let her through.

So we caught a shuttle to a nearby hotel and spent $95 for a room — that was the stranded-passenger discounted rate — and another $50 or so for room-service sandwiches. The girls, whose bodies and souls were still together, considered a night in a hotel a grand adventure and spent much of the time chasing each other around the room and jumping on the beds. By the time we all fell asleep, it was after midnight.

Our flight to Seattle was scheduled to leave at 8:00 a.m. on Saturday. Not wanting to risk being stuck in Dallas another day, we arrived at the terminal at 6:30 a.m. The line to get through security was only half as long as if Jesus had announced he’d make an appearance on earth for exactly one day to heal the sick and answer all metaphysical questions, tickets on sale tomorrow exclusively at Yankee Stadium window #23.

As we eventually discovered while moving forward at the rate of three millimeters per minute, the crack TSA team only had one scanner working. Waves of college kids heading to the Rose Bowl entered the terminal, spotted friends far ahead of us in line and nonchalantly cut in to join them. The crack TSA team did nothing about it.

We finally made it through the one working scanner at 8:02 a.m. — two minutes after our flight was supposed to leave. I was just pulling our bags off the conveyor when a crack TSA agent approached me.

“Excuse me, sir, you and your family need to step over here with me.”

“What?! Our flight is leaving!”

“Random security check, sir. We have to search your bags.”

“Did you hear me? Our flight is about to take off!”

“Sorry, sir. If your number comes up, we have to search your bags.”

“You’re kidding, right? In all of aviation history, has an airplane ever been hijacked by parents traveling with their little kids? Just write down that the bags were fine and let us go.”

“I’m sorry, sir. That is of course a reasonable and logical request, especially since there’s a very good chance I’m about to make you miss your flight after you just spent 90 minutes standing in line because most of our security equipment isn’t working. But I work for the federal government and am therefore allowed to draw a paycheck without any concern whatsoever for pleasing the public I’m supposed to serve. In fact, unlike someone with a real job in the private sector, I can regularly annoy the hell out of the public and still remain employed, which is great, because I happen to be an incredibly stupid and annoying person. And even if I weren’t naturally stupid, I’d still have to pretend to be stupid, because if I demonstrated any initiative or capacity for independent thinking, I’d be sent to Guantanamo and forced to eat fattening foods while undergoing re-education.”

That isn’t exactly what he said, but it’s what I heard.

So the crack TSA agent ambled over to a table, took my tickets and examined them as if they might contain secret go-codes for an Al Qaeda operation, then opened our bags and examined the contents as if I’d bet him $500 he couldn’t guess the thread count on the girls’ t-shirts. When he finished with their bags and moved on to mine, I told my wife, “Go! Go to the gate and tell them I’m on my way.”

When the crack TSA agent finally closed my bag, I yanked it off the table and ran. Halfway to the gate, I reached into the coat pocket where I’d been carrying our tickets. Nothing. Empty. Then it hit me: the crack TSA agent had taken them before beginning his bag-search.

I ran back to the security station and saw the tickets sitting on a counter, unattended. Anyone could’ve taken them. The crack TSA agent looked over just as I snatched the tickets. I held them up and hissed, “Nice job, genius. Very secure.” Then I ran faster than a 49-year-old with a bum knee is supposed to run. A flight attendant was waiting at the gate, ready to close the door behind me.

In the Seattle airport, we found a play area for kids. The girls played, my wife read a book, and I drank coffee. Lots of coffee. We ate lunch in a food court, walked around the airport, went back to the play area.

We boarded the Alaskan Airlines flight for Burbank, and the plane pulled away from the gate on schedule. As we were in line for takeoff, the pilot clicked on the intercom:

“Uhhhhhhhhh …. Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve just been informed that the Naughton family is on board today, so we’re going to pretend we have an electrical problem and go back to the terminal and have our mechanics spend an hour and a half pretending to fix it.”

That’s not exactly what he said, but it’s what I heard.

So an hour and a half later, we were in air. When we landed in Burbank, I went to the baggage claim and watched one person after another pluck bags from a dwindling collection on the conveyor until I realized ours weren’t going to show up. I walked to the Alaskan Airlines counter.

“Can I help you?”

“Yes, we just landed and our bags aren’t here.”

“Can I see your ticket?”

“Sure.”

“Let’s see … oh, you were originally supposed to come in on American. Your bags got here yesterday. American has them.”

“They didn’t put us on a plane, but they put our bags on the plane?”

“Yes. You’ll need to get your bags from them. Unfortunately, they’re gone for the day.”

“Say what?”

“They don’t have any more flights coming or going today, so their people are all gone.”

“So they have my bags locked up somewhere and I can’t get them.”

“Yes, I’m sorry.”

“They also have the car seats for my girls.”

“Oh. Oh, yes, that is a problem. I’m sorry. There’s nothing we can do.”

We hailed a cab outside and hoped the cabbie wouldn’t notice that two of the passengers were very much on the short side.

“Where you going?”

“San Jose Avenue in Burbank. Near Magnolia and Glenoaks.”

“Okay, let me … wait, where are your car seats?”

“Locked up in an American Airlines closet somewhere. We can’t get them until tomorrow.”

“I’m sorry, I can’t take the kids without car seats. I could lose my license.”

My wife tried calling some friends who drove mommy vans with car seats. Nobody was home. I spotted a starter for the taxis and asked him if he had any suggestions.

“Some of the taxi vans have flip-down car seats. Let me get on the radio and try to find one. It could be awhile.”

It was awhile, but a van finally came to rescue us. We walked through the door of our townhouse a mere 28 hours later than we’d originally planned. We put the girls to bed and ordered a pizza. I watched TV, drank Guinness, and waited for my body and soul to merge.

This year, we’ll wake up when we feel like it, toss the suitcases in our van and drive home for the holidays. No security checks, no naked-image scanners, no TSA groping, no missed connections, no sitting on the floor in an airport. Yes, it’s a day-long drive, but I don’t mind driving. Compared to what the airlines and the TSA put us through these days, eight hours on the road is a walk in the park.

Just one more reason I’m glad I left California.

Thanks to the geniuses at the Transportation Safety Administration and the Department of Homeland Security, you now have two choices if you decide to fly: a virtual strip-search or a very real feel-up. The Muslim Mad Bombers who scared us into submitting to this nonsense like a bunch of sheep must be laughing themselves silly. (Well, since they’re sexually repressed, there’s a slight chance they’re outraged … but I doubt it.)

As John Tyner (the now-famous “Don’t touch my junk” passenger) found out, if you refuse to walk through a body-scanner, the only other option the TSA allows is a full pat-down that includes your genitals if you’re a male and your breasts if you’re a woman. (They didn’t specify if they’ll also touch the breasts of overweight men.) You can read full details about Mr. Tynan’s experience — which ended with him being escorted out an airport and threatened with a $10,000 fine — on his blog.

How revealing are the body-scanners? Here’s all you need to know: A TSA agent who was scanned as part of his training was arrested some days later after attacking his co-workers with a police baton — because they kept making jokes about his small penis. I don’t believe the only way for the TSA to stop terrorists is to know whether or not you’ve been circumcised.

The TSA has responded to public outrage by assuring us that TSA screeners aren’t allowed to take pictures or keep digital copies of the scans. Well, I guess that settles it. As we all know, civil servants never break the law, and government computers have never been hacked. You may now rest assured that those images of your naked wife and naked children will never, ever be swapped by perverts in internet newsgroups.

But oops … there’s already been at least one case of federal officials saving body-scans.  Just wait until the celebrity body-scans start showing up on the internet.

I plan to fly as little as possible from now on — the stupidity of airport security has rekindled my love for making long drives while listening to books — but when I do fly, I think I’ll opt for the feel-up. But instead of arguing with the federal molester, as Mr. Tyner did, I plan to express my full cooperation with something like, “Oh … oh, yeah … higher, big boy … don’t stop, it’s just getting good.”

From a P.R. standpoint, I don’t think it was a good idea for Mr. Tyner to refer to his anatomy as “junk.” When I hear “Don’t touch my junk,” I picture someone with poor personal hygiene — which, if anything, makes me feel sorry for the TSA agent on junk-checking duty.

The federal molesters don’t deserve sympathy; the molested passengers do. So if the goal is to embarrass the TSA into dropping the “we must molest you for your own protection” policy, we as citizens need to express our outrage in terms that don’t denigrate our own privates. I’d suggest any of the following alternatives:

• Don’t bump my lump.
• Don’t jack my hammer.
• Don’t pet my dog.

But of course, it’s impossible to shame the federal government. We’re talking about people who can open a charge account in your child’s name, run it up to the max, increase the credit limit, run the account up the max again, and then congratulate themselves on their compassion. Compared to that, how could anyone be embarrassed for mandating a little groping?

Since we can’t stop the TSA from petting our dogs, we should at least demand that the government make the experience more pleasant and more equitable. For starters, I don’t see any reason the TSA agents need to be fully clothed. They’re working indoors in a temperature-controlled environment, so I believe they should be required to work in their underwear at least, and preferably completely naked. I’d feel considerably less violated if I knew my molester was every bit as embarrassed as I was.

Also, if a guy is going to pet my dog, I want to get to know him a little first. As long as we’re required to show up at airports two hours before our flights actually leave, we should be able to meet the federal gropers in an airport bar, have a few drinks together, tell some jokes, and share some childhood memories. If all goes well, if there’s some chemistry between us, we can agree to meet later for the groping.  If not, we’ll just be friends.

Finally, and most importantly, the groping should be (at the passenger’s discretion) a mutual experience. When the TSA agent says, “I need to touch your groin area now,” you should be able to answer, “Fine. But I need to touch yours first. Or we can do it together if you prefer.”

After all, there’s no guarantee the federal groper doesn’t have a bomb stuffed in his pants. I need to know. And as the TSA has made clear, we can’t let personal privacy get in the way of national security.