TSA wait times 3++ hours in Houston today as employees who aren't getting paid aren't showing up for work. Expect this to spread to other airports tomorrow. Complete mess. I'm guessing the government reopens by Wednesday.
November 4, 2025·Media
TSA Lines to End the Shutdown?
Jeremy Radcliffe·article
The federal government has been shut down for over a month, but it seems like public response has been muted and mostly restricted to the predictable red and blue name-calling and blame-gaming. The 2013 and 2019 shutdowns over the Affordable Care Act and the border wall, respectively, seemed like bigger deals. Maybe we've become inured to political theater, and our national give-a-shit meter, shows us running on empty after the extended shit-show of the last five (twenty-five?) years?
But over the weekend in Houston, TSA agents stopped showing up, or enough of them did to create multi-hour security lines, which led to basically everyone including those sticklers who insist on being at the airport 2 hours before departure for a domestic flight missing their flights, which led to a social media shit-storm.
The citizens and residents of this country can put up with, and have put up with, a lot of bullshit over the last couple of decades, and we'll stand in lines, but they'd better be for something good - Taylor Swift tickets, a PlayStation 5, a chicken sandwich from Popeye's. Not for being herded through the ultimate kabuki theater (I mean, we had to take our shoes off for almost TWENTY-FIVE YEARS because one lunatic tried, and failed miserably, to use his shoe as a bomb. I am not aware that the body scanners were updated with new and improved special shoe-bomb identification technology within the last year, but as of a couple of months ago, no one has to take their shoes off anymore. I guess, by comparison, I should be grateful that the equally pointless COVID mask requirements only lasted a year or two).
Back to the shutdown and the TSA lines, which, by the way, were very democratic in their nature, at least in Houston, with TSA PRE unavailable and CLEAR seemingly only available sporadically ... could this be a common knowledge moment? A tipping point with respect to this edition of GOVERNMENT IN CRISIS: OPERATION SHUTDOWN? Some people think so:
Or maybe it will take the specter of Thanksgiving travel hell to get a deal done.
Something has moved the prediction markets substantially over the last 24 hours - yesterday, Kalshi had the breakeven date for the shutdown (the date at which the odds for being shorter or longer in duration were basically 50/50) at 2 weeks. As of now, that date is only 9 days out. On Polymarket, if you agree with John and think this shutdown will be over this week, you can still make about 8x your money in a few days, and this market is pretty liquid.
May the odds be always in your favor!
ZG
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