After observing for several weeks, and noticing several occasions when her whereabouts were unaccounted for (we are both attorneys, partners together, and are almost always together) ...

Good heavens. Being "almost always together" with an eagle-eyed, attentive spouse who is also a professional colleague and a business partner sounds exhausting. Who wants to see that much of one person -- even someone they're married to?

Well, okay, Mr Green, maybe you do. But it seems to me that your wife is bored, frankly -- frustrated by routine and the omnipresent consistency (I bet you try very hard to be consistent) of this one man who fills her every waking hour, day in and day out -- and that she lacks the psychic tools necessary to build a productive outlet for her frustration.

What I hear Cary asking, Green, is if you have it in you to help her develop those tools -- if you have what it takes to thrill her, to startle her into seeing in you the risk and uncertainty she craves. Someone else in this forum suggested personally threatening this other man in some vivid and grotesque fashion. Imagine his next testicle-shriveled conversation with her after that. Imagine that on her mind the next time she saw you. Ha!

Or you inform her you are going out for the evening without saying where or what your plans are, and if she wants to find out she has to come and see for herself where the night will lead. Or you take a nice sight-seeing excursion in a plane together, and only at 20,000 feet does she learn that the return trip is by parachute.

Yes, it's work, and it's dealing with her somewhat on her terms, not yours. But she was worth marrying in the first place, wasn't she? So she's worth some effort now, right?

Right?

... of the tragedy of the commons. In this case the commons are the national airspace, and public terminal infrastructure.

The FAA is under pressure from the industry to be as generous as possible in its assessment of what a terminal's capacity is. They won't start applying the brakes until they're under equivalent pressure in the other direction, and at present there's nobody out there with the same level of interest, and deep enough pockets, to provide the necessary countervailing influence. It will never come from the industry itself.

A national lobbying organization for airline passengers -- something like what the AAA used to be for drivers -- might do it, but Americans have become so reflexively hostile to mass citizen organization that nothing of the sort seems likely.

As for rail, it's a nice idea but from my own experience with the breakdowns, delays, and mind-numbing nimby-imposed slowness of even the high-speed rail system in the Northeast Corridor I have to say that in practice it is an extremely dubious proposition. I will take my chances flying out of Logan any day over taking my chances with Amtrak.

Al Quaeda has been a "persistent and evolving terrorist threat," and the subject of innumerable National Intelligence Estimates warning of their continuing efforts to attack the US, for fifteen years. Until the Bush administration and the grotesque incompetence of the neoconservative "realists", all of al Quaeda's efforts to attack the US on home soil failed, largely due to careful intelligence gathering, good interagency cooperation, and a top-down commitment to counterterrorism on the federal level.

There are only two reasons this is newsworthy: one is the irony that similar such estimates were exactly what Bush's people willfully ignored in the year leading up to the September 11 attacks.

The other is that even here, in a supposedly non-political assessment of a supposed actual threat to the nation, Bush's goons can't bring themselves to admit in print that there has been any consequence of the last six years of their ridiculous maladministration. Even a grade schooler knows that "the fading memory of 9/11" is not the greatest threat the US faces in terms of international cooperation -- it is the low regard the rest of the world holds for us and our government.

So, Editor, could you elaborate on what Salon considers to be the news here?