Big Infantilizing Government
Via @mpetrie, Mark Steyn at NRO:

I saw a fellow in a "Don't Tread on Me" T-shirt the other day. He was at LaGuardia, and he was being trod all over, by the obergropinfuhrers of the TSA, who had decided to subject him to one of their enhanced pat-downs. There are few sights more dismal than that of a law-abiding citizen having his genitalia pawed by state commissars, but him having them pawed while wearing a "Don't Tread on Me" T-shirt is certainly one of them.

The column is actually about the ridiculous way we are all treated like we are 4-year-olds in America, with big, ugly-ass fluorescent lime pedestrian signs going up:

The oncoming army of lurid lime signs uglies up an already decrepit Main Street. They dominate the scene, lining up in one's windshield with the mathematical precision of Busby Berkeley's chorines in Gold Diggers of 1935. And they make America look ridiculous. They are, in fact, double signs: One lime green diamond with the silhouette of a pedestrian, and then below it a lime rectangle with a diagonal arrow, pointing to the ground on which the hypothetical pedestrian is likely to be hypothetically perambulating. The lower sign is an exquisitely condescending touch. A nation whose citizenry is as stupid as those markers suggest they are cannot survive. But, if we're not that stupid, why aren't we outraged?

What's the cost of those double signs -- 300 bucks per? That's the best part of four grand we don't need to have wasted on one little strip of one little street in one small town. It's not hard to see why we're the Brokest Nation in History: You can stand at almost any four-way across the land, look in any direction, and see that level of statist waste staring you in the face. Doesn't that count as being trod on?

If you can't cross the street adequately by looking both ways, the institution caring for you shouldn't let you leave the facility without supervision. Otherwise, I believe people have been crossing streets, mostly alive, since the invention of the horse-drawn carriage, and after the invention of the automobile. Disclosure: I did it a number of times last night and lived to tell.

And related to the bit about the TSA, let's encourage people to wear clothes to their TSA gropings with the Fourth Amendment printed on them. In case you were wondering:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.