"Therefore, I am going to sign an Order instructing the Secretary of Homeland Security, Markwayne Mullin, to immediately pay our TSA Agents..."

"... in order to address this Emergency Situation, and to quickly stop the Democrat Chaos at the Airports. It is not an easy thing to do, but I am going to do it! I want to thank our hardworking TSA Agents and also, ICE, for the incredible help they have given us at the Airports. I will not allow the Radical Left Democrats to hold our Country hostage any longer. Thank you for your attention to this matter!"

Trump writes, at Truth Social.

Question: How is he doing this? Answer: It's not easy! But he's going to do it. Perhaps he means: Go ahead and sue me and at least the workers willbe paid until the courts stop me... if they dare.

In other news from the edge of executive power: Trump is putting his signature on U.S. currency.

UPDATE: Trump gets results: "The Senate voted early Friday to fund the Department of Homeland Security except for its immigration enforcement and deportation operations.... The measure, which passed the Senate by a voice vote at around 2:20 a.m., does not include funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement or the Border Patrol..." (NYT).

"'I was so distraught when I heard this news last night,' said Senator Tim Kaine... who for years has opposed adding flights at Reagan..."

"... and warned of the dangers posed by overcrowding the D.C. airspace. 'I will not be able to rewatch the speech I gave on the Senate floor about it because it would make me too upset,' he added. Last year, as the Senate debated the latest round of additional flights, Mr. Kaine said he feared the prospect of people sticking a microphone in lawmakers’ faces after a tragedy and saying 'you were warned and you voted for it anyway.'"

From "Congress Approved More Flights at Reagan Despite Warnings of Danger/Lawmakers repeatedly added flights despite fears of delays and accidents" (NYT)(Congress has repeatedly voted to increase the number of daily flights at Reagan National Airport, adding departures that made life more convenient for lawmakers...).

"Therapy llamas patrol Portland airport to relieve passenger stress."

 WaPo reports.

Airports around the globe use a variety of methods to inject some Zen into one of the busiest travel periods of the year. They decorate their halls in holiday lights, host carolers and concerts, and bring in therapy dogs for group canine counseling.

Portland does all of the above. True to the city’s quirky spirit, it also invites local camelids to the airport to canoodle with passengers....

Canoodle!!

Wikipedia etymology:

When the JFK airport scanner revealed a cat inside a woman's luggage, the traveler said it wasn't his cat.

I'm reading "A real cat scan: furry friend in case found by airport scanner" (London Times).

"'An officer called and asked if I wanted to press charges,' the cat’s owner, named only as Alix, told the New York Post. Alix, 37, said the cat, named Smells, had been found in the luggage of her house guest and the official 'wanted to know if there was any reason he was trying to steal my cat and go to Florida.' She assured him that it must have been a mistake. 'Our cats really like to check out bags and boxes and apparently one of them climbed into his suitcase,' she said. 'It was just an accident.'"

ADDED: Here's the scanner photo. I can't believe the person who packed the luggage didn't know!

Here are 8 TikToks to delight or vex you. Let me know what you think.

 1. "Ever since I was told that corn was real, it tasted good."

2. Yes, there is a burger bra. The question is what to wear with it.

3. For the European person — the coolest places in America.

4. Mr. Jeff's Musical Gizmos is open. 

5. Do you know the song my recently departed mother loved?

6. Getting searched at the San Francisco airport. (This can't be real, can it?)

7. Approaching the volcano in Iceland.

8. Glen Campbell and Leon Russell play "Jambalaya."

"Airline lounges, bastions of civilization in airport terminals that are now often overstuffed with irritated passengers, thanks to flight delays and cancellations..."

"... have long been the retreat of the frequent-flying elite, forward-class ticket holders and those with expensive credit cards. Now, with leisure travelers leading the recovery of the airline industry as business traffic lags, some clubs have made it easier for relatively infrequent fliers to claim a few predeparture perks, while others — including Delta Sky Club, which adopted a new rule that no user may enter the club more than three hours ahead of their scheduled flight — grapple with growing pains.... Historically, legacy carriers... have operated lounges for passengers flying in first and business classes.... Increasingly, lounge users are not airline devotees, but holders of expensive credit cards.... 'Everybody has some kind of privilege now with Amex or miles or buying in,' said Patrick Rollo of Providence, R.I., who travels frequently for his work in real estate. 'So, everybody’s going to the lounge.'"

From "The Democratization of Airport Lounges No longer just for the flying elite, these havens from chaos are easier to get into now, with the crowds to prove it" (NYT).

Forward class? The top-rated comment:

Just 3 TikToks to tide you over. I was highly selective! Let me know what you liked best.

1. Just how excellent can an airport be?

2. The exquisite subtlety of the dish towel.

3. Mr. Horse Girl.

"TSA to deploy more floppy-ear dogs because they're less scary than pointy-ear dogs."

The LA Times reports.

But TSA Administrator David Pekoske said... “We find the passenger acceptance of floppy-ear dogs is just better,” he said. “It presents just a little bit less of a concern. Doesn’t scare children.”

Had you ever noticed the floppy-ears/pointy-ears difference in scariness? I don't know about the ears per se — clearly a German Shepherd is scarier than a Labrador Retriever. But...



Come on!

AND: Consider the lop-eared cat...



Less scary than an up-eared cat? I think not!

Please please please love our airport.

Is Singapore trying too hard?

"Most readers have spent time in Airportland. We know its particular wan light; the general flatness..."

"... that makes the incline of jetways such a shock; its salty, sugary, and alcohol-infused cuisine; its detached social ambiance; its modes of travel (the long slog down the moving walkway, the hum of the people-moving carts, the standing-room-only shuttles, the escalators, the diddly-dup diddly-dup of roller bags, and — oh, yes — the airplanes); its fauna (emotional-support animals) and flora (plastic ficus); its mysterious system of governance; its language.... [W]hy Gate? Well, apparently there once was an actual gate, which stayed closed until the propellers of the plane were safely tied down and the passengers were free to pass through and board from the tarmac.... Take concourse. It’s from the Latin, meaning 'flowing together,' and outside Airportland it generally refers to an open area where passageways meet and people gather. In French, concours means 'contest.' At the airport, the concourses are simply wide corridors, usually designated by letter, but if you like you can think of them as flowing, since they’re usually filled with a stream of humanity, and it often feels like a contest simply to reach the gate without incident....."

From "The Language of Airportland" by Lucy Ferriss (Lingua Franca).

"They did exactly what they should have done, which was treat me like anybody else... Next time, I’ll be more observant about getting stuff out of my briefcase."

Haley Barbour, the ex-Governor of Mississippi, goes to the airport with a handgun in his briefcase. Gets arrested. 

"Mega-donor urged Bannon not to resign/Trump’s strategist threatened to leave the White House after clashing with Jared Kushner."

Politico reports:

Five people, including a senior administration official and several sources close to the president, tell POLITICO that Bannon, one of Trump’s closest advisers, has clashed with the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who’s taken on an increasingly prominent portfolio in the West Wing. Bannon has complained that Kushner and his allies are trying to undermine his populist approach, the sources said.

Republican mega-donor Rebekah Mercer, a longtime Bannon confidante who became a prominent Trump supporter during the campaign, urged Bannon not to resign. “Rebekah Mercer prevailed upon him to stay,” said one person familiar with the situation....

It's good to have 5 sources, but I can't tell what happened that justifies the verb "clashed." That could mean a lot of things, and I'm suspicious that journalists antagonistic to Trump are eager to impose a chaos template. (It seems to alternate with the evil template.)

Politico observes that Kushner's power has "ballooned":

He has helped to expand the authority of two senior West Wing officials who, like him, are less ideological in nature: former Goldman Sachs executives Gary Cohn, who is now chairman of the National Economic Council, and Dina Powell, the deputy national security adviser for strategy. The national security directive removing Bannon from the NSC explicitly authorized Powell to attend the National Security Council's Principals' and Deputies' Committee meetings.

I'm familiar with the name Gary Cohn only because I just read — in a NYT interview transcript —  Trump's reaction when Gary Cohn sneezed:

TRUMP: God bless you. You O.K., Gary? That was a pretty tough one. I’ve got to make sure my man is all right.

I don't know if Trump and Cohn have a sneeze-and-response routine to break the tension. It happened right when Maggie Haberman was bearing in, looking for specifics about which U.S. airports really deserve to be called — as Trump had put it — a "horror show." But I'll assume it was a random sneeze, and Trump loves to spontaneously switch topics. It's fun. It makes him look cute and smart (or so he may think). And it makes it hard for others to keep up even as he looks as if he's not racing ahead. He's manifesting distractability, and it makes them think he's less competent. But everyone laughed, and Trump got away with never saying exactly which airports are a horror show. 

Oh, yes — do I seem distractable? — there's all that chaos around Trump. Bannon and Jared are clashing. Cohn is sneezing.

And Rebekah Mercer is... holding people together? I know who Rebekah Mercer is, because I read Jane Mayer's piece in The New Yorker, "THE RECLUSIVE HEDGE-FUND TYCOON BEHIND THE TRUMP PRESIDENCY/How Robert Mercer exploited America’s populist insurgency":

[Robert Mercer] poured millions of dollars into Breitbart News.... By 2016, Breitbart News claims, it had the most shared political content on Facebook, giving the Mercers a platform that no other conservative donors could match. Rebekah Mercer is highly engaged with Breitbart’s content. An insider there said, “She reads every story, and calls when there are grammatical errors or typos.” Though she doesn’t dictate a political line to the editors, she often points out areas of coverage that she thinks require more attention. Her views about the Washington establishment, including the Republican leadership, are scathing. “She was at the avant-garde of shuttering both political parties,” the insider at Breitbart said. “She went a long way toward the redefinition of American politics.”

Much more about Robert and Rebekah Mercer at that New Yorker article. Back at the Politico piece, we see that Jared Kushner supposedly thinks that Rebekah and Robert Mercer "have taken too much credit" for Trump's victory and that he has "misgivings about their go-it-alone approach to outside spending boosting Trump’s agenda."

“If Bannon leaves the White House, Bekah’s access and influence shrinks dramatically,” said the GOP operative who talks to Mercer.

"This is going to be a rough summer. There is no doubt about it. This is why we are talking about people getting to the airport a little earlier than planned."

Or how about a little later? Like... never.

(Quote in the post title is from Gary Rasicot, "recently appointed to a newly created position as the T.S.A.’s chief of operations," from a NYT article titled "Catching a Flight? Budget Hours, Not Minutes, for Security.")

Althouse at the airport — a 10-point list.

1. A slow internet connection is like being stupid, but only if you are stupid enough to keep trying to use the internet when it’s going slow.

2. The internet connection here at McCarran Airport is slow, but I had the wit to open a document in Word and start typing this list, so I am at least that unstupid.

3. I got flagged for a pat-down search and had to wait to enter the air-poof booth until a female patter-downer arrived. I was most concerned about my bag, from which I was separated. My money, my cards, my laptop, my iPhone, my iPad, my keys, my glasses, my boarding passes.

4. I expressed concern and was told “There are more security cameras here than at the White House,” but all that meant to me was that they’d have pictures of the person who swiped my bag.

5. But I had to wait and wait for the female patter. A bulky, slow-moving couple blocked my sightline to my bag, and I considered telling the immense bald-headed TSA agent who’d called for the female that he should just go ahead and pat me down himself, because I’d rather have some strange man feel me up than lose eye contact with my bag of money, devices, and papers.

6. The female whom I’m presumed to prefer arrives and asks me if I have any special sensitivities and what’s the use of saying you’re damned right I do?

7. She says she’ll have to touch my “fancy skirt,” which — what? — is that supposed to relax me or compliment me or amuse me? It sounds like something a criminal would say before roughing you up. She grimly and lightly performed the task.

8. The thought I am never flying again formed at #3, but I resist saying it out loud. How boring and useless the information/threat would be to the security lady.

9. I mellow a bit after it’s over, then get annoyed again as I realize I don’t know what chemicals and radiation and seeing-you-naked technology was inflicted upon me in that booth.

10. Now, I’m at the gate, very early, drinking black coffee and typing a list.

"Portland hipsters celebrating, mourning beloved airport carpet before its removal."

"News of the removal of the green, blue and pink geometric-patterned floor, set to be completed this fall, has triggered an overwhelming response from fans worldwide... There are over 42,000 photos of the flooring with the #pdxcarpet hashtag on Instagram alone."

ACLU challenges the rejection of this ad by the Portland airport.

"The ACLU has no position on forest practices, but an important part of our mission is to prevent government censorship of expression... The Port of Portland refuses to allow advertising they conclude is too controversial or political and that is exactly the type of content-based restriction our constitutional free speech protections are designed to prevent."

"First came social seating, enabling travelers to sit next to people with similar interests in flight."

"And then came the infamous Miss Travel, which had the travel industry asking 'Dating site or prostitution?' And now, we’ve discovered MeetAtTheAirport.com. Which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like."

Movie star is confronted by a printout from the airport scanner that showed his genitalia.

And he autographs it.

“I was in London recently going through the airport and these new machines have come up, the body scans. You’ve got to see them. It makes you embarrassed – if you’re not well endowed,” said [Indian actor Shahrukh] Khan....

On the downside: Airport personnel are going to be looking at all of us naked and will have the power — if they choose to violate official policy — to print out pictures that could be distributed and displayed anywhere. On the upside: Shahrukh Khan is well endowed.

Innocent kiss? Or kiss of death?

"A videotape of the Newark incident shows the man embracing a woman at the C-1 security checkpoint before she passes through passenger screening.... The man, who was not a passenger, walks past a spot where a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officer should have been stationed to move closer to the woman... The woman holds up a rope meant to keep unscreened people out of the secure area so that the man can pass underneath, and they walk hand-in-hand toward the boarding area before disappearing from view...."

The fact that these two individuals kissed and walked hand-in-hand does not and should not wash away suspicion. If it did, terrorists would know how to stage a security breach. Have male and female confederates. The woman passes through security and then lets in the man, who has whatever weapons/bombs on him that may be desired. The two act like lovers, and the TSA workers sit back and think ain't love grand. A few hours later, hundreds of human beings are blown to pieces.

"Even a pat-down thorough enough to simulate foreplay, however, won’t protect us completely..."

"... not from a threat that sounds even more absurd than an underwear bomb and that is also more alarming: the butt bomb."