A Washington Post article, TSA Slated for Dismantling, suggests that the incompetent, mismanagaged, wasteful & inefficient, cost doubling, undertrained & corner-cutting, repeatedly failure-prone, safety illusion creating, rights violating, privacy violating (& cover up promoting), thievery enabling, sexual harassment promoting, hypocritical security side-stepping, long line creating, nail clipper, scissor, pocket knife/tool, tiny toy gun and cigarette lighter-confiscating, peanut butter sandwich thieving, elderly & disabled harassing, on the job sleeping, air marshal hemorrhaging, employee health hazard creating, and just generally awful Transportation Security Administration may soon be a thing of the past, or will at least have a much reduced role. The TSA director is also stepping down. One only wonders why this hasn't happened sooner...

But whatever will we do without federal airport security screeners to stage a little security theater for us to make everybody feel safe? Well, a return to private screeners is pretty easy to imagine - just another form of deregulation. But I tend to favor the radical suggestion of magician/comic Penn Jillette, who suggests that we Make The Terrorists Do the Profiling.

Well, I feel a little more justified in my earlier post on the TSA and my recent article in the Record that expands on the post:

"Security at U.S. airports is no better under federal control than it was before the September 11 attacks, a key House member says two government reports will conclude."

Here are a few more excerpts:

"'A lot of people will be shocked at the billions of dollars we've spent and the results they're going to see, which confirm previous examinations of the Soviet-style screening system we've put in place,' Rep. John Mica, R-Florida, told The Associated Press on Friday."

[...]

"On January 26, Homeland Security's acting inspector general, Richard Skinner, testified that 'the ability of TSA screeners to stop prohibited items from being carried through the sterile areas of the airports fared no better than the performance of screeners prior to September 11, 2001.'"

[...]

"A year ago, Clark Kent Ervin, then-inspector general of Homeland Security, told lawmakers the TSA screeners and privately contracted airport workers "performed about the same, which is to say, equally poorly.'"

I'm not even looking for this stuff anymore, folks. It's just what I come across when I pull up CNN to find out the latest in new Pope news. (I note that he went from "controversial" to "arch-conservative" in about an hour, and is now back to "conservative" in the headline of the Reuters Story posted on Yahoo! News. Ah, but he's still "arch-conservative" in the text of the article - whew!)

Anyhow, I'm shocked, shocked to hear of waste and corruption at one of my favorite government agencies, TSA.

" A Transportation Security Administration official spent $500,000 on art, silk plants and other decorations for a new operations center and then went to work for the vendor after leaving the agency, according to a report from the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general."

And there's more - basically bureaucrats living high off the hog while on the public dole. Fitness centers, towel laundry service, cable televisions at work stations, etc. Gov't credit card abuse and lack of accounting oversight, plus active attempts by high-ranking TSA officials to stymie investigations into the expenditures, are to blame for the costs.

A government agency that lacks accountability and spends with wild abandon - does it get any more predictable than this?