Slate magazine has a good article by Christopher Hitchens on the United State’s panicked, irrelevant and offensive grope-and-scan airport security initiatives. A small excerpt:

Perhaps you can begin to see where, as they say, I am going with this. In order for us to take them even remotely seriously, our Homeland Security officials should by now have had no alternative but to announce a series of random body-cavity searches some months ago. At least that might have had a deterrent effect and broken the long tradition of waiting for the enemy to dictate all the terms, all the time. It is a certainty that this deadly back-passage tactic will be tried. It is equally a certainty that it will find us even more defenseless than before.

I agree with the point Hitchens makes — G&S is ridiculous, intrusive and creepy. And it won’t even work. There isn’t a single al Quada terrorist who’ll be caught by a scan or a balls-squeeze. (There might well be a few Americans with marginal personalities and firearms permits who snap violently at the prospect of having their genitals searched for bombs, though.)

But it’s one thing to say grope-and-scan is dumb and futile. What I want to know is, is this airport security affecting your travel plans? And that’s this week’s poll question–as always, it’s located on the right side of the page. Have at ‘er!