More Arm-Waving

The Republicans are again trying to gerrymander Texas, the Dems in the Texas state senate have headed to Albuquerque, the Texas governor is authorizing bounty hunters to bring 'em back, and the New Mexico governor has told his state troopers to arrest any such bounty hunters for kidnapping. "Meanwhile," writes Joshua Micah Marshall, "House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, the ultimate author of all this ridiculousness, is off on a tour of the Middle East where, one would imagine, he'll fit right in."

Those bright bunnies at the TSA -- the people who can steal whatever they like from your checked baggage -- are cutting back on air marshals on high-risk flights if the air marshals would have to stay in a hotel.

Meanwhile, everyone has had a field day lambasting the Pentagon's silly plan to start a futures market and terrorism gambling parlor. (Nobody seems to have mentioned that this plan, when rolled out next month, would have violated gambling and racketeering laws in addition to common sense) The same DARPA site boasts a number of other strange research projects that seem to have slipped through the radar. Genisys, for example, "will reinvent database technology" and obsolete today's relational databases -- and plans in one year to invent, code, deploy, and field-test large-scale systems that, were they possible, would dominate multi-billion dollar markets.