News roundup, 18 March 2026

- Pete Hegseth, in a press briefing, made the flippant remark "We will keep pushing, keep advancing. No quarter, no mercy for our enemies". The thing is, the very act of someone near the top of the chain of command saying this may be a violation of American law going back to the Civil War, not to mention international law. 

- Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center in the US, has resigned, saying that he "cannot in good conscience" back the war on Iran.

- The partial government shutdown in the US and resulting shortage of TSA security screeners means that some smaller airports may have to close, just in time for Spring Break. That could get interesting for Florida businesspeople who gleefully supported Trump until now.

- The Israel question is starting to become an issue in Democratic primaries. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is spending huge amounts of money on primary campaigns, but there seems to be a generational shift that has caught AIPAC off guard.

- New polling from Leger suggests that 60% of the electorate says that the province is on the wrong track, but a strong plurality (48%) would still vote for the UCP if an election were held now. I guess as long as being on the wrong track is worse for women, ethnic minorities and LGBT* folks than it is for straight white dudes, Albertans are fine with it.

- Speaking of the UCP, their former candidate Caylan Ford, who had to exit the race after some of her comments came to light, is trying to sue the news outlets that reported on said comments, including the CBC, the Toronto Star, and Press Progress. A lawyer for the Broadbent Institute, which operates Press Progress, has pointed out that "you cannot be defamed by your own words". I should hope the courts will agree, but don't worry about Ford, she should be fine; all she needs is a GiveSendGo campaign to raise enough money from the rubes to more than cover her legal bills.

Has the TSA finally gone too far?

The recent intensification in US airport security has gone over extremely poorly, and with good reason. Consider what they did to this woman:



Now truth to tell, I'm not sure whether or not X-rays are actually harmful to breast milk. X-rays are a form of ionizing radiation, and not good for living tissue, but I'm not sure how much effect they'd actually have on the milk. Still, I can't blame anyone for preferring to be safe than sorry, especially if it says in the rules that breast milk doesn't have to go through the X-ray. And for trying to point out what the rules actually say, she was put through hell. And I'm sure this is far from the only example of such harassment; if there's anything unusual about this case it might be the fact that the victim was white.

The thing is, even when the rules are followed things are crazy enough. Consider this point raised by Roger Ebert:

It appears that not a single TSA agent has declined to perform a full-body pat down of airline passengers. That includes patting down small children. They're not patted down on a routine basis, but on some occasions they can be and they are. A child under 12, sometimes way under 12, may be required to remove outer clothing and be touched on such areas as the genitals.

This is so high on the WTF scale that it beggars the imagination. All this makes me wonder, though, if there might not be a silver lining of sorts to this very dark cloud. While I'm not sure I'd go so far as the Bishop of London, England in saying that flying is a sin, it is the worst form of travel from a climate perspective, and I suspect that a lot of people will start to think hard about whether they really need to fly after being submitted to indignities like this a few times. It would be interesting to track Greyhound and Amtrak ticket sales before and after the new policies came into place. Of course, if there are signs of a major shift, the airlines will start to lobby for the TSA to be put into the train stations and bus terminals too; can't have unfair competition after all.

And what will happen to tourism? Even if the Americans eventually submit meekly to this stuff, will people whose own countries don't put them through this stuff every time they fly want to visit a place like that? I certainly have no enthusiasm for flying to the US any time soon, that's for sure.

And, predictably, a lot of people are saying that the solution to this problem is to only do it to brown people.