John Boehner flies commercial, just like you and me:
As he left Washington on Friday, Mr. Boehner headed across the Potomac River to Reagan National Airport, which was bustling with afternoon travelers. But there was no waiting in line for Mr. Boehner, who was escorted around the metal detectors and body scanners, and taken directly to the gate.
I really don’t see what all the hubbub is about. These filthy proles are just never happy with anything we give them.
Got a message today via some tin cans, and dig this, there wasn’t even any strings hookin’ ’em up. They helped me recall that it was behind bars, amongst 400 cons, that I enjoyed the best Thanksgiving of my life. Me and the other guys, we filed in from the yard, those of us who weren’t in solitary, and got in a big ol’ line outside the dining hall. As we filed through the chow-line, we go to take as big a helping as we wanted, ’cuz I guess even in the calaboose, Warden Viglietta recognized the need for overindulgence on that day of all days.
We had plastic plates just brimming with pressed turkey and sweet potatoes and green beans. After a brief interruption when one of the new guys tried to swipe a cleaver from the kitchen, Joey “King” George got up on a chair and he recited a passage from Pilgrim’s Progress. “A man there was, though some did count him mad, the more he cast away, the more he had.”
Then man, we just all dug in. Joey King’s punk Junior The Weatherman got a jug of applejack that he’d been fermentin’ since the Fourth Of July, and we passed it along under the table, spikin’ our cider when we were free from watching eyes. I remember that “Dog” Hanson even got a little wacked on the stuff; he stabbed a guy just for pinching his yams. Little Billy Boner tried to get a round of Christmas carols going, even though it was a month early.
The mellow sweetness of a pumpkin pie off of a prison spoon is something you will never forget.
Molester, pervert, disgusting, an embarrassment, creep. These are all words I have heard today at work describing me, said in my presence as I patted passengers down. These comments are painful and demoralizing, one day is bad enough, but I have to come back tomorrow, the next day and the day after that to keep hearing these comments. If something doesn’t change in the next two weeks I don’t know how much longer I can withstand this taunting. I go home and I cry. I am serving my country, I should not have to go home and cry after a day of honorably serving my country.
It’s just as bad for them as you might imagine. Read the whole thing.
(via Instapaper)
This is probably another good time to remind you all that all of us were carrying actual assault rifles, and some of us were also carrying pistols.
Well worth a read to see just how far the TSA goes, even when dealing with soldiers returning from one of our forever wars.
Setting the CIA aside for the moment, I’m hard pressed to come up with a better example of a rogue and seemingly uncontrollable agency in the federal government.Also: I’d wager this is likely to be the one and only link to Red State you’re ever going to see here. So live it up.
Nope. Never had someone in Uniform do the terrorism. Never. Ever.
If a domestic terrorist chooses to execute his (or her) cunning plan by enlisting, deploying for some period of years into an active war-zone, surviving said deployment, and then flying back on a plane full of other military personnel at which point the stunning plan can become known: to seize control of and crash the airplane on which they are all flying using a pair of nail clippers, then so be it.
I’m sorry, but I think that’s a level of “risk” with which a free society can live.
This is probably another good time to remind you all that all of us were carrying actual assault rifles, and some of us were also carrying pistols.
Well worth a read to see just how far the TSA goes, even when dealing with soldiers returning from one of our forever wars.
Setting the CIA aside for the moment, I’m hard pressed to come up with a better example of a rogue and seemingly uncontrollable agency in the federal government.
Also: I’d wager this is likely to be the one and only link to Red State you’re ever going to see here. So live it up.
Mr. Obama still has immense power, if he chooses to use it. At home, he has the veto pen, control of the Senate and the bully pulpit. He still has substantial executive authority to act on things like mortgage relief — there are billions of dollars not yet spent, not to mention the enormous leverage the government has via its ownership of Fannie and Freddie. Abroad, he still leads the world’s greatest economic power — and one area where he surely would get bipartisan support would be taking a tougher stand on China and other international bad actors.
But none of this will matter unless the president can find it within himself to use his power, to actually take a stand. And the signs aren’t good.
Glenn Beck is the moderate center of Fox News; Bill O’Reilly is its liberal wing.
[My study] found the exposure [from millimeter wave scanners] to be about one-fiftieth to one-hundredth the amount of a standard chest X-ray. [I] calculated the risk of getting cancer from a single scan at about 1 in 30 million, which puts it somewhat less than being killed by being struck by lightning in any one year, [and] while the risk of getting a fatal cancer from the screening is minuscule, it’s about equal to the probability that an airplane will get blown up by a terrorist.
Former Half-Term Governor Sarah Palin: There’s nothing different today than there was in the last 43 years of my life since I first started reading. I continue to read all that I can get my hands on — and reading biographies of, yes, Thatcher for instance, and of course Reagan and the John Adams letters, and I’m just thinking of a couple that are on my bedside, I go back to C.S. Lewis for inspiration, there’s such a variety, because books have always been important in my life.
Jonathan Chait: Does anyone find this remotely believeable?
Lemkin: No, I do not, but unlike you and your brethren I don’t have access to ask her a (fucking) follow-up. Howsabout you pry ever-so-gently for a little plot information from “The Screwtape Letters” or for a particularly moving or trenchant letter from Adams? I know, I know: shrill. Sorry. But, honestly, it’s hard to tell just what journalists spend their time doing. That time certainly isn’t spent preparing.
Imagine if the political elites in our country were forced to endure the same conditions at the airport as business travelers, families, senior citizens, and the rest of us. Perhaps this problem could be quickly resolved if every cabinet secretary, every member of Congress, and every department head in the Obama administration were forced to submit to the same degrading screening process as the people who pay their salaries.
The American Traveler Dignity Act. Good on you, Ron.
But: more to the point, it would be nice to see the conversation moved from being specifically about the scanners to a more general “the scanners are an entirely pointless invasion of deeply personal rights” realm. These scanners are a multi-million dollar boondoggle entirely aimed at stopping the underpants bomber of last year. They will do nothing whatever to stop the cecum bomber of 2011 or the vagina explosions of 2013. That we refuse to have this conversation, ever, is precisely why the next attack will succeed. Better to mark such a memo “classified” and hope nobody goes looking for it. Same with the memo on how these porno-scans are in fact saved and will inevitably get out; I’m surprised we don’t already have an airport scan of some celebrity. Likewise classify any health-related studies. And classify anything about the impact on pilots forced to go through this entirely needless screen daily for the rest of their careers. In the next fabulous version, your junk will be super-imposed on a stick figure! Won’t that be better for everyone? Left unasked, of course, is is this thing likely to stop any attack ever mounted, planned or attempted, past or present? Because it’s not clear it would have detected the very attack they point to when demanding the scans occur. It certainly wouldn’t have prevented 9/11; that fact is absolutely clear. I’m quite sure that any systematic testing of the assertion that these scanners offer no measurable improvement, if it’s been tested at all, is classified. File next to “what we deem as incredibly dangerous liquids in volumes greater than 3oz shall be stored in trash barrels directly adjacent to large concentration of passengers waiting in line.”
Listening to the tone of the recent hearings, I was unsurprised and yet still deeply troubled to hear that, mostly, the top concern was that this approach (apart from any particular utility or drawback) at least makes observant Muslims uncomfortable. I especially loved the back-slappy interchange between TSA chief John Pistole and John Ensign (R-Nev) who apparently agree that the most important part of any security technology or invasion of privacy is that it irritate Muslims. Does extending this underlying theory mean that if I agree to shave while in line I can thus skip the porno-scans?
Just as troubling, though, was the easy acceptance of the entirely false equivalency of “screened” airplane (using millimeter wave) and “unscreened” airplane (not using) and the relative preference a theoretical passenger would assert. Yes, we know a lot about everyone’s junk as they get on that “screened” plane, but it’s not actually any safer. And so far as I can tell from the transcripts I’ve found, not one Senator raised the issue of actual security improvement through this technology. In fact, they’ve only added a particularly demeaning bit of security theater to the already frothy mix of half-assed fixes to yesterday’s problems. And I guess that’s all we’re after anymore: The terrorists are coming; look busy!
It’s facile but still telling to point out that around 400,000 people have died in car accidents since 9/10/2001. About 3500 have died in domestic terror attacks since 9/10/2001. Feel free to compare and contrast national auto safety policy to national airline security policy.
Lemkin 