Bang up job guys!

I hate air travel, but then so does most of America. To be fair, it's not generally the travel that I hate, it's the getting through security. Why? First off, I hate taking off my damn shoes. Never once in the history of air travel has a shoe bomb taken down an airplane. In fact, as far as we know it's only been tried once and that failed miserably. Now, I'm not against airport security, but having been to Israel I can say that the TSA and the civilians who make their regulations have their heads up their collective arses. Security in Tel Aviv: An exhaustive interview with what I am assuming is a trained military psychologist, all of my bag then went into the big x-ray and chemical detection machine, followed by everything getting the hand swab chemical detection, including taking out and powering up the laptop, blackberry, MP3 player and camera. And that's just to go to the ticket counter (no online check-in in Tel Aviv). Then it's another x-ray and metal detector, as in the US. When I got to Newark for my connection to Minneapolis the security was: take out laptop, take of shoes. Note that I was wearing Tevas. The whole shoes-off-liquids-in-a-baggie routine is so frustrating and humiliating, and it doesn't even work! What a hassle and for what? We have the most frustrating and reactive security policies in the world it's no wonder they don't work. The funny thing is, I didn't mind the higher security in Israel because I got the sense that they knew what they were doing, whereas I have no such confidence in the TSA. In fact, I wish our system were more like that in Israel. I don't think that we need to go to quite such extremes, but a few changes could make the experience so much better for everyone. And we could keep our damn shoes on.