Remora

Limited Inc plans, God willing, to take a trip on a plane again some day (correcting an earlier version of this post that pinged on Alan's grammatical radar -- see comments). Nobody, to put it mildly, has been calling for our services lately. Is media dead, or like Elvis is it out there in hiding, its death a huge fake-out? Well, that's a story to cry about at some later point. More relevant point is that we would like, really, not to have to confront villains on our flight. It is part of the wish list that includes not running out of gas, getting the dinner from the first phase of when the hosts are handing them out (I hate it when I have the seat that is just above the dividing line, so I get the dinner and drinks last), and not setting next to a whacko. Yes, I prefer flying undisturbed by gun or knife or even tweaser toting loonies stalking down the aisle, none of that. But securing airline customers from such unpleasantness seems to be a very low priority in D.C. right now. A high priority is making sure that companies like Argenbright Security keep raking in the dough. Here's the WP story
Shaping a Compromise on Airport Security by Ellen Nakashima and Greg Schneider

The grafs about Argenbright, apparently the nation's largest provider of airport security, strike a comic note:

"Last month federal investigators found that Argenbright was employing security workers who did not speak English at Dulles International Airport. When investigators gave a skills test to 20 Argenbright workers at Dulles, seven failed. The company was already on probation for serious security violations last year at the Philadelphia airport, for which it paid $2.3 million in fines and restitution and several managers went to jail.

"Argenbright Security was founded in Atlanta in 1979 by Frank Argenbright, who sold the company in December to Securicor PLC of Britain for about $175 million. Workers from Argenbright were on duty at Dulles and at Newark International Airport when terrorists hijacked flights from those locations on Sept. 11."

The house repubs and our C-i-C Bushypoo seem to believe that the old system should be fluffed up like you fluff up the pillows for the guests, after which the attention will be off it, money will flow, and we can all go to sleep again. I sometimes forget that capitalism's unremitting focus on profit produces, in times of stress, a blindness to prudence ever surprising to the outside observer, or victim. Let's see if short term memory loss is the norm in Congress, or a mere aberration.