.gov/blog

The TSA has its own blog where travelers can snipe about various inconveniences and injustices perpetrated against them. ("When can we quit this charade and begin to carry our water and toothpaste with us again?" and "I think you seriously need to stop stealing toiletries from people" are just two stellar examples.) As far as I know, the TSA is the only government agency to start a blog.

It's pretty funny, actually.

According to the AP (I haven't read the entire blog):

"TSA learned that certain airports were requiring passengers to remove all electronics from carry-ons. TSA investigated and found out that local TSA offices set up the exercise. TSA had the exercises stopped and posted a "HOORAY BLOGGERS!" message.
"Blackberrys, cords and iPods began to flow through checkpoints like the booze was flowing on Bourbon Street Tuesday night (Fat Tuesday of course)," the post read in language that was surprisingly glib for a government agency. (White says the blog is written in a style that is consistent with the blogosphere.)"

Saying this is "surprisingly glib" is like saying the Wayans brothers have gone "slightly awry" in their recent movie choices. (Or, hey, all of their movie choices.)

The success of the blog, in terms of helping people understand why things happen as they do and allowing for feedback that occasionally makes a difference, and in terms of showing a sense of humor in a government typically as funny as a child born with Tay-Sachs (that is, not funny at all), makes me wish other government agencies would follow suit.

After all, my Lenten activity of last year -- sending one-line letters to the White House, reading "President Bush: I completely disagree with you," each of the forty days (figuring it would be useless to detail my reasons, or even the subject of disagreement, since he's notorious for not reading even reports he commissioned) -- would have been so much easier on a blog. I could have simply logged on and pasted my sentence into the comments, obviating stamps, printing onto new sheets of unrecycled paper and envelope-licking.

Of course, the blog would be dull, dull, dull. "Stay the course," "hang in there," "just kidding about Harriet Miers": It would be the same stuff over and over. The most interesting thing about it would probably be searching out the grammatical errors -- and that only to weirdos who like that sort of thing.

So I would spend hours reading it, in other words.

The TSA does delete some comments from its blog, but only if they "contain foul language, threats, attacks, or require TSA to divulge sensitive information." If FEMA had its own blog, it would likely have to lift the ban on foul language.

There's a risk that government agency blogs, if universal, would quickly be squeezed of all their surprising glibness by the only thing produced rapidly and in great quantity by the feds: regulations.

Still, I suspect that if every agency had its own blog, at least half of them would be funnier than SNL is now.