It is not too uncommon to see the West Wing television show have some important points about governance and the process of governing. With the help of Lawrence Lessig last evening's show made a very important point about constitutional democracries. It is the culture not the document that matters. There is a critical lesson here for Iraq. One country, group of people, military, etc., no matter how well-meaning can choose the form of government for another people. Perhaps the most important phrase in the United States Constitution is "We the People," not you the former subjects of an evil dictator, not you the people of China, but We the People.

Andy Bowers of Slate has an article about the problems related to the ease by which someone could get on an aircraft without having their true identity checked. He suggests the problem is simple to fix. I'm not so sure. As Bowers notes in the articles there are plenty of tech savvy, intelligent people out there who might like to do harm. They can easily, as Bowers did, modify a boarding pass in a few minutes. They could, however do much the same thing with a traditional boarding pass, not just the home printed one, or with slightly more effort produce counterfeit government documents. Anyone who has been around a college for long knows that the ability to get one's hands on fake id's is not limited to international spy-masters. Changing the homespun printing of boarding passes will, for a time, possibly make travelers believe they are more secure. It is all really mostly illusion anyway. The name-based no-fly-list is based on a fallacy itself that a terrorist would use their name or noms de plume to purchase tickets in the first place.

As has been noted elsewhere, yesterday's Super Bowl had by far the best halftime show. There is some irony that a year ago CBS was exposed to one of the worst ever FOX, which is much more likely in general to have some questionable programming, has the best ever.

On the other hand, perhaps scared away by the titillating half time show last year the advertisers were anemic at best. Ford's Mustang Convertable and FedEx's Ten things required in ads weren't bad, not great either, CareerBuilder.com's ad(s) might have been better if it was one instead of a repetitious series that was old by the second version of the ad. And what is it with the Olympus creative team, I mean photo-copy team, whose ads are amongst the most blatant wanna-be-rip-off ads. Great way to launch a new product.