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Early on in America’s recent dalliance with a “backlash” against the TSA, I read a news item about TSA honcho Pistole “Pete’s” early attempt to frame some sort of response to criticism. It was a combination of the industry standard bluff-and-bluster, with a sort of general rambling almost Randy Moss-ian in its fumbling aimlessness. “Yeah, just as I thought; the TSA is run by a bunch of complete tools” was my unavoidable conclusion.

And yet, maybe not quite. Certainly the people running the TSA are inept bumblers when it comes to planning and implementing genuinely useful security procedures. But in terms of public relations management, someone at least may actually be pretty crafty. Because, by the end of “National Opt-out Day,” the TSA appeared to be winning the PR war in something like a 96-0 shutout.

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Kids, an important reminder from your friends at the Competitive Enterprise Institute:

No one can predict what the transportation needs and preferences of future Americans will be. Thankfully, it is never too late for the Department of Transportation to finally abandon its long-standing commitment to central planning.

Because the last thing that you want is government departments working to anticipate and plan for the needs of the nation.

This message brought to you by the same people who brought you a creaky, overburdened infrastructure; some of the industrialized world’s slowest broadband internet speeds; and, of course, Mike “Heckuva Job” Brownie and the FEMA response to Hurricane Katrina, which demonstrated like nothing else the wisdom of a small government that stays out of the way and lets the free market provide, rather than foolishly trying to plan for a future that no one can predict.

This is a bit (fortunately just a bit) of what it’s like inside my brain on a typical day.

The Toyota Camry is, as I have noted before, a vehicle largely made by Americans in America from American parts and sold overwhelmingly to Americans, but it is still considered an “import” presumably because Toyota is a foreign-owned company. But Budweiser is now produced under the ownership of a foreign company, and last I checked it is still considered a “domestic” beer. Explain, please.

Occasionally someone will look at the calendar and say “it’s 2010, where is my flying car (or jetpack, or android sex-doll, or whatever)?” Alternately, one may look around and point to the internet, or the iPad, or photorealistic video games which one controls only with gestures, and say “the future is all around us and we don’t even notice.” I generally fall into the former camp, but driving home on the freeway on a rainy evening recently, out of the corner of my eye I glimpsed an electronic billboard, bright-as-day amidst the gray and murk, magically replace one advertisement with another while I watched. And, good or bad, right at that moment it really felt like I was suddenly living in the future. Or at any rate a movie-version thereof.

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