Butler, I loved your "The Seige of San Francisco" article, as well as your blog post that first introduced the story. I concur with your reader's email about the downtown Detroit fed flyway. I not only work down there, but I live close to the Selfridge ANG air base (way north of downtown) that he mentioned. On some Saturdays the feds fly their birds very low over the residential areas, back-and-forth - surely it's a show of force, but people, generally speaking, seem to like it. The worst flyover ever was before game #1 of the World Series at Comerica Park two years ago, which is right across the street from my office. I was on a conference call with colleagues from out-of-state, on the 21st floor, and these things came right between the downtown high rises and buzzed the building at a volume that was deafening. People on the other end of the line said it sounded like the building blew up. The message to take from this is that if I drink a couple of beers and get behind the wheel, I am a menace to society because I might be too impaired to drive safely, and therefore I might injure or kill someone. So arrest me and throw me in jail because I "could have" caused harm. If I drive way over the speed limit, the same concept applies: I might kill someone so I am deemed to be driving recklessly, and the penalty will be mega-fines. And on and on. But how do those situations compare to a band of jets doing ultra-risky flyovers between downtown high-rise buildings in a very populated city during the middle of a weekday?

To answer my own question, as the Free Republic types would say, we're just a bunch of soft wimps because we don't worship the power of our imperial military.