TSA backs off

By Capt. Fogg

So you think the TSA has finally come to its senses and smartened up its ban on deadly weapons like nail clippers and pool cues? Most people, if they bother to think about it, aren't all that terrified that some 12 year old carrying his Little League bat or hockey stick is going to commandeer a 747, nor is the woman with that tiny Swiss Army knife on her keychain. The TSA has at least recognized that the hijackings of 9/11/01 were facilitated by cabin doors without locks, thanks to the refusal of our regulatory agencies to force that level of security on private business. Box cutters were secondary.

Your tiny knife with tweezers and nail file isn't really going to allow a terrorist incident or some adolescent to take over an airplane with a plastic hockey stick and so the TSA is going to acknowledge the laughter and relent -- in some cases. In customary ban-it writing style however, the descriptions of the newly permitted items seem to have been written by people being forced to relent at gunpoint or people from Mars who have never seen and are terrified of sharp objects.

So what can you take on the plane that you couldn't last week? Cigarette lighters, although you can't smoke, up to two golf clubs, ( three would somehow be too dangerous) toy bats or other sports sticks and small pocket knives with blades up to (wait for this) 2.36 inches. 2.37 is too scary to allow and a fixed blade is out for some reason known only to Martians and most mysteriously, if the handle has any curve to it, it's still a terrorist assault weapon and prohibited. My tiny mustache scissors? Sorry Osama, you and your beard don't get on the plane.

Box cutters? Even though the evidence from 9/11 really doesn't support the newspaper story, a 1" box cutter blade, half the length of Uncle Fogg's Victorinox is just too al Qaeda for the TSA.

You'll suspect that I'm going somewhere with this, but I don't need to, you already guessed that I think people who write and most passionately defend regulatory descriptions tend to be fond of tin foil haberdashery, or at least that's my opinion -- and I'm sticking with it.

(Cross-posted from Human Voices)

Rand Paul refuses TSA pat-down. But is he really a libertarian?

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Rand Paul's much-ballyhooed pat-down refusal today is, to me, a non-story, except insofar as it seems to validate his libertarian cred.

While an airport may not be the best place to make the anti-government case for civil liberties, and while I can't say I'm overly concerned about fairly aggressive airport security (without infringing unreasonably on civil liberties, of course), it's easy to understand why he did what he did.

Basically, he set off an alarm, refused a full-body pat-down, was not detained (according to the TSA), was "denied access to the secure gate area" and "escorted out of the screening area by local law enforcement," and ended up on a different flight later on after going through security without a problem.

No big deal.

But here's the thing. Paul is a right-wing libertarian. He believes in extremely limited government. And he has been fairly consistent in embracing that view. But... where was he going?

Paul, a Republican, was traveling to Washington, when he was detained [or not, as the TSA claims]. He noted earlier on his Twitter that he was planning to speak at the March for Life.

"Today I'll speak to the March for Life in DC. A nation cannot long endure w/o respect for the right to Life. Our Liberty depends on it," tweeted Rand Paul at 9:49 A.M.

As Steve Benen writes, "So, Rand Paul, always cautious about his privacy rights, balked at airport security measures. He was en route to a March for Life rally, where he'll speak to activists who don't believe there is a right to privacy. Libertarians sure are an odd bunch."

I'm actually willing to grant that there isn't any hypocrisy here. If you believe that life begins at conception and that government, even a libertarian one, has a duty to protect life, well, you do the math. Pro-choicers may not want to hear it, but it's not about privacy for these pro-lifers / anti-choicers, it's about protecting the lives of the unborn. This isn't a view that I share, but I used to (sort of, to a point), and I understand where they, or at least the more sensible among them, are coming from. It would be different if Paul were arguing against, say, contraception or same-sex marriage or otherwise trying to deny privacy and equal rights. Abortion, alas, is a different matter -- or at least can be understood to be.

And yet the tag of hypocrisy still applies. Paul, for example, is against same-sex marriage. And, unlike his father, he's pro-Gitmo.

I suppose you could say that no one's perfect, but Paul's views suggest that his libertarianism is malleable, and that he holds views fundamentally at odds with libertarianism. Indeed, he may not be much of a libertarian at all, certainly not like his father. At the very least, he's anything but consistent.

Happy birthday or leave me alone? The TSA at the ten-year mark

Guest post by Justin Oberman

Justin Oberman lives in Chicago and advises companies in the transportation and security sectors. Justin is a Fellow of the Truman National Security Project and in the Emerging Leaders Program of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Prior to the 2008 election, he was a member of Barack Obama's advisory committee on homeland security. From July 2003 to December 2005, he was the TSA's Assistant Administrator for Transportation Threat Assessment and Credentialing. This is his first guest post at The Reaction.

**********

Just over ten years ago , a far-reaching and convoluted bill was enacted. It created a new government agency that most Americans think is a big hassle, if not worse.

The Transportation Security Administration, born in the wake of 9/11, enters its second decade with a list of successes and shortcomings that we should examine. As the agency's third employee, I worked at the TSA for more than four years and continue to watch it closely. The story of its formation offers lessons for homeland security and for other major policy challenges.

Some history: A day after the bill was signed, I was told to show up at Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta's weekly meeting for the launch of TSA. There, the Transportation Department's senior executives gathered along with the TSA in its entirety: two prominent Silicon Valley executives and... me, a 27-year-old Democrat who had been at the Department for four months. The Secretary introduced us and insisted that our team be helped at every turn. We were.

Headquarters was Conference Room 10246, a sparsely-furnished space with bulky desktop computers and fresh pads of paper and pens. It was the first day of school at Bureaucrat U. There we began the task of building the TSA, an organization we would affectionately, and optimistically, refer to as the world's largest startup.

Over the next 13 months, the team that built the TSA, which itself grew to hundreds of people and thousands of contractors, took in a million job applications, interviewed 125,000 candidates, hired 60,000 people, bought and installed $1 billion worth of security equipment, and set up security at 450 airports. All this under intense media and Congressional scrutiny, and in an uncertain threat environment.

The TSA's greatest success is that it restored the public's confidence in our commercial aviation system. Despite the permanent scars of 9/11, people are flying again. As a result, the aviation industry is still a pillar of the U.S. economy. More than two million people use it every day.

However, the TSA has never had sufficient resources for other parts of aviation or for mass transit, rail, and maritime, even though Congress made us cut airport staff by more than 15 percent in our second year.

Key aspects of the TSA's history are relevant today:

1. The TSA's founding legislation had 37 distinct deadlines. There was no wiggle room. Today, on major issues, poorly written bills with conflicting mandates run to thousands of pages, and affected parties block Congress' will by slowing down implementation. The TSA Act didn't permit this.

2. Surprisingly, it took longer for Congress to create the TSA than it did to pass the Patriot Act. Congress and the White House couldn't agree on whether TSA officers should be federal employees and finally, weeks later, settled on a mediocre compromise that is still inadequate (some airports can use private-sector screeners, but with extensive restrictions). Congress did cut a deal, though; today, stalemates last months or years.

3. The bill added a security tax to every ticket. Even though it has raised billions, it doesn't cover all security costs, and the airlines don't like it, but people are flying again. However, because like other taxes it probably won't be changed, new programs won't be funded.

4. The TSA was initially given wide latitude to bring in talented private-sector executives, to poach from military and law enforcement agencies, even to bring officials out of retirement. Today, it's far too difficult to onboard talent, and the cumbersome process dissuades people from service, not just at the TSA but throughout government.

Creating the TSA from a standing start in Room 10246 provides lessons for lawmakers on how to address key issues and what they should avoid.

To this day, there are few people willing to defend the TSA publicly. But the most powerful endorsement of the agency is made by millions of Americans when they head to the airport confident they'll arrive at their destination safely.

I know what you're thinking

By Capt. Fogg

My first thought was: I've seen this scenario in some cheesy Tom Cruise infected Sci-Fi movie. Apparently that thought occurred to the Nature.com editorial staff as well. The Department of Homeland Security it would seem, is testing a system to detect malicious thoughts. No really.

They call it Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST) because that's what government departments do with their doings, lest clear speech shed clear light. They make up acronyms that disguise the tunnels they dig under the foundations of liberty, but I digress. The technology purports to identify individuals who are planning to blow things up or have "malintent" as they say in the dialect.

Like a more traditional polygraph, FAST measures heart rates, among other things. Heart rates respiration and perspiration go up, after all when you're nervous about the bomb in your shorts or wishing you could throttle some thick-skull TSA twit as he gives you grief over an aspirin in your pants pocket that shows up on a scanner and starts groping you for explosives as you put your hands over your head in abject submission. Hell I'm sure I'd set off all kinds of alarm bells right now just thinking of how I've so often been treated as a felon on his way into the penitentiary instead of a tired traveler trying to get home.

I have no idea about what else this electro-mechanical night club bouncer measures and I'm not sure it invades any privacy that hasn't already been taken away by the cowardly traitors who passed the "Patriot" Act. I'm too lazy and too unwilling to provoke myself into another Lewis Black style tantrum to read the " Privacy Impact Assessment" our bureaucratic brethren at DHS have given us. I'll leave that to you. Besides my loathing of people who seem to exist only for the purpose of inserting that fly-blown and putrid metaphor into every sentence, it was written, most revealingly, by someone any German speaker will recognize as the Devil himself: Hugo Teufel III, Chief Privacy offer at the DHS under George W. Bush.

Does it work any better than the Polygraph does at detecting the evasions of sociopaths? It would have to, since those tend to be the people we're looking to put on no-fly lists and of course we won't have the results interpreted by a seasoned professional, but rather someone who was promoted from K-Mart security officer last week.

No, it's the stuff of B movies or sarcastic Dr. Strangelove sequels or even Orwell novels, but perhaps we've lost the ability even to see what the politics of fear has done to us in our cringing, cowardly new century.

(Cross posted from Human Voices)

Tea Partier’s nude photo drama fuels TSA paranoia

By Nicholas Wilbur

Baseless Paranoia isn't a Christian folk band, but if it were Michele Bachmann would be the lead singer.

The Tea Party representative from Minnesota recently added herself to the ever-growing list of Republicans who abhor the space-bubble etiquette violators known as TSA scanners. The reason was not constitutional in nature, surprisingly. It did include a riff about airport security privatization, not surprisingly. But mainly it was personal: Bachmann will avoid TSA scanners because she fears naked pictures of her will turn up on the Internet.

We have always known that there is a vein the size of a fire hose that pumps paranoia into the organs of the Tea Party. What we didn't know, until now, is that the 54-year-old founder of the Tea Party caucus in Congress is a World Wide Web virgin who so trembles at the unknown ether world that she has proposed handing over our national security to the unregulated whims of profit-based corporations in order to thwart potential voyeurs.

It will probably not calm this Heartland harpy to know that beyond the websites and blogs that spew left-wing propaganda, advocate atheism, denounce farm subsidies, demand logic-based political discourse, and lament the intellectual decline of the conservative demographic, there is also a cache of risqué photos of Bachmann already circulating the Internet.

And yes, some of them show the milk maid farm girl of the Breadbasket in the nude. Others show her drinking cocktails with suggestive expressions on her face. Another shows her in the seductive pose of pin-up model. A few show her as the subject of the Spanish Inquisition-era painting, The Naked Maja. And at least one shows her in the least flattering light of all – as a 54-year-old woman (wrinkles, stretch marks, sagging baby feeders, and all.) For all ye who hath grappled with the curse of curiosity, rest assured that none of the photos are worth viewing.

Nor would I recommend sharing the photos with Bachmann. That would be like giving The Origin of Species as a Kwanzaa gift to your creationist Catholic mother-in-law. It would be like showing a copy of the president's birth certificate to your Fox News-addicted grandfather. It would be like returning from a hunting trip and dropping an elk fetus on the dining room table for your six-year-old daughter to dissect as practice for achieving her dream of one day becoming a veterinarian.

Such brisk exposure to the World Wide Web might cast Bachmann into the solitary confinement of a priest's confession chamber for the rest of her life.

Then again, it would be irresponsible to become an enabler of such hyper-paranoia. The truth, as they say, will set you free. So perhaps we should free Bachmann of her ignorance and open her eyes to how ridiculous it is to criticize airport security on the hypothetical basis of leaked nude photos.

The fact is, TSA scanners make us cringe not because they are an infringement on our freedoms, but because we can't accept the fact that we are imperfect beings. We are a nation of fat people living in a hypersensitive society where a blemish is akin to sin, and we will stop at nothing and invest in anything to hide this reality from ourselves.

The makeup, the girdles, the loose-fitting clothing, the attempts by "big-boned" women to draw attention to their oversized breasts – via low-cut blouses and push-up bras – in hopes of drawing attention away from their oversized arses, thighs, and midriffs – these are all zealous yet failed attempts at over-emphasized vanity.

And if you're a man with a complex about having TSA workers mock your less than Herculean genitalia, do what others in your position have done: overcompensate with intelligence. With a million bucks in your pocket, you can hire your own airport security. With a trophy wife on your arm, self-esteem won't matter.

If you fear a grainy x-ray image of your figure being leaked to the web, stop eating at McDonald's, begin an exercise program more vigorous than lifting your fat ass out of the sofa for a second serving of Häagen-Dazs every night, and, most importantly, stop worrying about what you aren't.

As for Bachmann, she's a 54-year-old woman who has brought five beautiful children into the world. A lifetime supply of Victoria's Secret lingerie, Cover Girl, and Mary Kay will not turn you into a pencil-thin supermodel. So get over it. Web surfing voyeurs jacking off to ultrasound images of your pixilated silhouette should not be a source of paranoia.

Especially not when there are Kenyan colonialists turning this country into a socialist state populated by pot-smoking liberals bent on upending the Constitution and stomping on the graves of our Founding Fathers. Get your fucking priorities straight.

There's no need to start calling for Israeli interrogation-style airport security just because our body parts don't point in the same direction they did as vestal maidens and strapping young lads.

I can promise that a TSA image of Michele Bachmann wouldn't go viral. Most of us already know what a middle-aged woman looks like nude (we can all thank Kathy Bates for the hot tub scene in About Schmidt for that revelation).

We expect more from our elected representatives in the United States Congress than this.

(Cross-posted from Muddy Politics.)

Bigotry will destroy Glenn Beck before porn or paranoia

By Nicholas Wilbur

On a brisk Connecticut morning in November, Glenn Beck mastered the art of multitasking by simultaneously praying to God, reading from Psalms, and thinking (a difficult enough task unto itself) about all of the conspiracies his left-leaning critics might create in order to ruin his reputation, get him fired, and destroy the wonderful "fusion of entertainment and enlightenment" he provides to the American masses on television and radio every week.

Thinking aloud during a Nov. 12, 2010 radio program, the 46-year-old talk-show mogul explained that he is not into drinking or drugs (having overcome both addictions in his 30s thanks, in part, to Mormonism). Then he said this:

I—uhh—you know—I'm not—I'm not into ch—I'm not even into—I was going to say I'm not into child pornography. I'm not only not into child pornography, I'm not into pornography. I'm not into any of it.

If his critics hadn't previously thought to capitalize on Beck's real or imagined struggle with pornography, they did after he stuttered his way through this awkward on-air denial. Why diffuse arguments that aren't being argued? Why defend allegations that aren't being alleged? Why offer unsolicited defenses against invisible attackers?

Some might say he was covering his tracks and preparing his faithful, if ever-dwindling audience for an onslaught. Others might say Beck is a porn addict.

I say Beck is finally starting to believe all the fearmongering, the paranoid prattle and the anti-government right-wing conspiracies he spews daily on TV and radio.

As unfortunate as it may be for those who hoped and prayed that Beck had a kiddie porn dungeon in his multi-million-dollar mansion, it turns out that the Beck backlash has nothing to do with his allegedly non-existent porn addiction. His fall from radical right-wing grace will not come from personal problems but from the anti-Semitism, racism, and general bigotry from his own mouth.

From news reports last week:

Jewish Funds for Justice (JFSJ), a charity that campaigns for social change, delivered a petition with 10,000 signatures to Fox News Thursday demanding that talk show host Glenn Beck get the pink slip.

The petition began in November, according to PoliticsDaily.com, after Beck hosted a three-segment program on philanthropist George Soros, whom Beck accused of ushering fellow Jews into the gas chambers as a 13-year-old boy and stealing their land.

Beck also made headlines last week when New York's WOR (710 AM), "one of the city's two biggest talk radio stations" announced it was dropping Beck's program due to poor ratings.

And these are only the most recent efforts to undue Beck's chokehold on sanity.

The website StopBeck.com began in July 2009 as a non-profit effort to "(hold) Beck accountable for preying on racial anxieties, employing vitriolic rhetoric, propagating sexism and disseminating willful distortions."

The goal – to persuade sponsors to stop advertising on Beck's programs – has paid off. According to The New York Times, Beck has lost about 300 sponsors since StopBeck began:

His show now averages two million viewers, down from a high of 2.8 million in 2009, according to the Nielsen Ratings. And as of Sept. 21, 296 advertisers have asked that their commercials not be shown on Beck's show (up from 26 in August 2009).

The Nielsen ratings for 2010 put Beck at 2,248,000 average viewers, but StopBeck has continued contacting sponsors directly and requesting that they discontinue their financial support of the vitriol Beck contributes to the national dialogue.

According to a Jan. 10, 2011, update, Beck's United Kingdom program has been running without ads for nearly 11 months because of these efforts.

Beck's conspiracy theory of how progressives are trying to ruin his reputation and "take him out" with a smear campaign on his character have proven mere products of his own paranoia. Devotees of the self-described "progressive hunter" should rest assured there is no such pornography conspiracy, although it is possible that one is in the works considering the prevalence of the subject in Beck's broadcasts.

This is the guy, after all, who coined the terms "common-sense porn," "conservative porn," and "Chris Christie porn" after frothing at the mouth over the New Jersey governor's rant against the education system and the prevalence of bad teachers.

This is the guy who acted out a potentially Oscar-winning orgasm on live radio after airing a clip on Sept. 4, 2008 of Sarah Palin, who was railing against the evil emperor of the Senate, Harry Reid:

Yes! Yes! Stop for a second. When she started to say this stuff, man, it was downright – it was conservative porn. This is as close as you get, yeah, thank you. Thank you! Oh, yeah. Now play the rest of that clip.

In a repeat performance on May 24, 2010, Beck once again came close to staining his Jesus jammies during an interview with Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly, during which O'Reilly was offering some rather flattering feedback about Beck's occasionally accurate political hunches:

Keep talking, man. This is like porn to me... This is like Bill O'Reilly porn. Keep talking, Bill, keep talking.

This is the guy who titled the transcript of his Jan. 8, 2009 radio program, "Porn, yes... NYT no," and asked, "What's the difference between porn and The New York Times? I don't think there's any difference. Tell me, you read The New York Times; you read pornography. You feel dirty after doing both, don't you?"

Those who have experienced the wholly encompassing power of addiction know how easy it is to fall back into it. Beck is one such person, having struggled with and successfully overcome alcohol and drug addictions earlier in his career. So when Playboy magazine published an opinion column titled, "Why Glenn Beck is a Symptom of What is Wrong with America" in its November 2009 edition, it was not surprising that the rightly-guided Beck wouldn't even look at it – wouldn't even read the "hit piece" against him – for fear of the wandering eye and the successive gateway drug-like plunge into the depths of a (repeat?) pornography addiction.

He gave a quite vivid, even heartfelt description of how "deadly" porn addiction can be:

It's no longer like it's a magazine that comes, it's now the Internet and it's just a wormhole and you just start going down into this wormhole and you don't get out and before you know it, you know, the husband is downstairs at 2:00 in the morning spending, you know, a couple of hours online and then the whole relationship with the family just changes. And before you and it just gets worse and worse and worse. It's really dangerous stuff.

This is also the guy who described the TSA machines at airports as "porn scanners":

The enhanced patdown was created as an alternative option to the porn scanner. Remember a few weeks ago, none of us wanted to go through the porn scanner. So they decided, well you don't have to do that. We'll pat you down. You get the porn scanner or you get felt up.

This is the guy who mused during a March 8, 2010 program, "I don't know if I bought kiddie porn or what's going to happen now, but it was a great movie." He was talking about the Roman Polanski film, The Ghost Writer.

And this is the guy who, as recently as Jan. 13, 2011, couldn't help including porn stars in his letter to Americans after the Tucson shooting.

I challenge all Americans, left or right, regardless if you're a politician, pundit, painter, priest, parishioner, poet or porn star to... denounce violence...

All of this is to say that Beck doesn't have, never has had, and never will have any sort of obsession with or addiction to pornography.

To insinuate that he does is cheap, baseless, and dishonest – because everyone knows bigotry will destroy the Beck legacy long before pornography does.

(Cross-posted from Muddy Politics.)

Craziest Republican of the Day: Eugene Delgaudio

By Michael J.W. Stickings

I've been quite busy the past couple of days, so I'm only now getting to a few stories that I've been wanting to blog about. Like this one -- which takes our CRD series to a whole new level (until you remember that they're crazy like this a lot). Via Jonathan Chait, Virginia's WTOP reported on Wednesday on a local Republican who would appear to be as ignorantly bigoted as they come:

A conservative Loudoun County lawmaker says controversial airport pat-downs by the Transportation Security Administration are part of a "wide-scale homosexual agenda."

Eugene Delgaudio, a Republican representing Sterling on the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors, made the comments in a widely distributed e-mail sent in his capacity as president of the conservative nonprofit Public Advocate of the United States.

In the e-mail -- reported by WUSA9 -- Delgaudio also says the TSA's non-discrimination hiring policy is "the federal employee's version of the Gay Bill of Special rights."

"That means the next TSA official that gives you an enhanced pat-down could be a practicing homosexual secretly getting pleasure from your submission," he wrote.

That's right, this guy thinks the TSA's enhanced airport security is all one big gay conspiracy to get action. It's hard to know where to begin, but, really, why bother? If you honestly believe this, you're not just an ignorant bigot but a complete and utter moron.

I'm no fan of all this enhanced security (or whatever you want to call it), much of it supposedly justified through trumped up (if not outright manufactured) threats and promoted through government- and industry-sponsored fearmongering, scaring Americans into a state of terrified submission, accepting ever more authoritarianism and to give up their freedom to a creeping police state, but this, needless to say, is ridiculous.

It is, of course, incredibly insulting to gays and deeply ignorant of their sexuality (and all of our sexuality). As if this is how they get off. As if they're incapable of having meaningful sexual relations.

But, again, why bother? Delgaudio and the many who think like him are stupid, crazy, hateful people.

But maybe this is just the usual homophobia of the self-loathing right-wing bigot. Maybe he gets turned on by these pat-downs and is lashing out. And maybe he needs not just a pat-down but a full-body erotic massage, to set him, er, straight. (Yes, it would move.) The TSA wouldn't do it, but I'm sure he can find someone who would.

The creeping police state of Orwellian America

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Sometimes liberty isn't snatched away through the revolutionary actions of a Pol Pot. Sometimes it just erodes away. I've described Hugo Chavez's use of slice-by-slice "salami tactics" in Venezuela, and it's an appropriate analogy:

In the first episode of the great Yes, Prime Minister, "The Grand Design," new PM Jim Hacker meets with the government's chief scientific advisor to discuss defence policy. The advisor, a hawkish Austrian, argues that the Soviet Union would use "salami tactics" to take over Europe, that is, a "slice-by-slice" plan with no one slice so grave as to compel the West (or the U.K., in this case) to respond militarily. (The 16 YPM episodes originally aired on the BBC from 1986-88.) At each slice/stage of the scenario, he presses Hacker -- What would it take for him to act? An incursion into West Berlin? Or would the Soviets have to go so far as to take over the Reform Club, one of London's old political establishments? Would he ever respond with nuclear weapons? Probably not.

My point here is not to make a case for military action against Venezuela, but it is clear that Hugo Chavez is using salami tactics in his drive to establish so-called "Bolivarean" socialism -- that is, his own national-socialist autocratic rule -- in that country. I wrote about this last week: "Sometimes revolution can be achieved without sudden, dramatic bloodletting." There are a number of different prongs to Chavez's continuing revolution, a number of slices. They may be examined individually, but they are best understood as variations of the same, as components of a single overarching plan. The nationalization of industry, the seizure of private property, repression of dissent and opposition, control of the media, one-party rule, rule by decree, and, soon, the removal of constitutional impediments to the permanent and perpetual rule of the leader himself.

The pattern is clear. One slice, then another, and another, and another, with no one slice so grave as to compel anyone to act...

This is happening in America now, too, is it not? Yes, there are many who are standing up for freedom and civil liberties, but what success are they having? Freedom has been opposed for a long time by corporatist elements -- including what Eisenhower famously called the military-industrial complex -- but the speed with which government and its private-sector and media allies apply slice upon slice has grown markedly since 9/11 and the supposed emergence of the Islamist-jihadist terrorist threat as the justification for the Patriot Act, domestic surveillance, racial/ethnic/religious profiling, anti-Muslim bigotry, the TSA's intrusive airport pat-downs, and so on. Read 1984. What's happening in the U.S. may not be so blatantly obvious, but do you see what's going on? If not, wake the fuck up.

I'm a committed civil libertarian on this. I understand the need for some degree of security, but beyond what's absolutely essential (like what we were used to at airports, for example), we shouldn't budge an inch. Because it's a slippery slope. If you aren't vigilant in defence of your freedom, you'll wake up one day to find it gone.

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At Reason, which espouses a libertarianism I generally reject, Radley Balko addresses one of the latest and most revealing slices:

Janet Napolitano said last month that we should expect to soon see tighter restrictions at bus, train, and marine transportation centers, too. Here's a report about TSA, Border Patrol, and local police setting up a checkpoint at a Greyhound station in Tampa. Note how quickly preventing a possible terrorist attack expands to include catching illegal immigrants, and preventing drug and what sounds like "cash smuggling." (It's hard to tell from the audio.) Note also the complete and utter reverence the local news report bestows on these government agencies, who after all are merely "teaming up to keep your family safe."

A liberal blogger wrote to me in an email this week that libertarians who call the TSA pat-downs a violation of their civil liberties do a disservice to actual violations of civil liberties. It's not difficult to envision the day where anyone wishing to take mass transportation in this country will have to first submit to a government checkpoint, show ID, and answer questions about any excess cash, prescription medication, or any other items in his possession the government deems suspicious. If and when that happens, freedom of movement will essentially be dead. But it won't happen overnight. It'll happen incrementally. And each increment will, when taken in isolation, appear to some to be perfectly reasonable.

If you care about your freedom, and about being free in America, don't stand for this.

This is what Jon Stewart was talking about

By Edward Copeland

To paraphrase the old Clinton campaign battle cry, "It's the media, stupid."

When the whole TSA media explosion began, it was one of those rare stories where all sides of the political spectrum seemed to agree from the likes of Jane Hamsher at Firedoglake to an assortment of conservative talking heads. It even had its own variation of "Don't tase me, bro" with "If you touch my junk, I'll have you arrested" before true horror stories came out of passengers who had colostomy bags broken and urine collection bags ruptured, women who had their prosthetic breasts which they got after cancer surgery moved around as if they were puzzle pieces, etc. (Read Capt. Fogg's post for some of the examples.) It all pointed to improper training. Well, cable can't stand something like that, so they had to find political sides.

Suddenly, the left decided the whole issue was raised by neocons and the right to try to use racial profiling, even though days earlier they agreed with some of the ridiculousness of the system that still doesn't really add to protecting our skies nine years after 9/11. What makes this completely nonsensical and infuriating is that there is real news going on.

North Korea attacks a South Korean island in the most serious engagement between the two countries since 1953 in the same week we learn that North Korea has built another uranium enrichment facility. Do cable news shows want to discuss the serious implications of this? They could even put a political spin on it, if they wanted, as Jon Kyl continues to oppose the latest START treaty for no apparent reason.

I just watched Ed Schultz throwing a conniption fit about racial profiling and the TSA and Rush Limbaugh and I just couldn't take it anymore and I did what I do more and more when I need reasonable news coverage: I watched PBS' the NewsHour. They, of course, had in-depth coverage of the Korean situation as well as the fake Taliban negotiator, a promising drug that might actually prevent HIV infection and details of the financial reform. In fact, they went an entire hour without mentioning the TSA or what the cable channels would have you believe is today's other story of monumental importance: Prince William and Kate Middleton have set a wedding date!

Of course, I'm not even mentioning MSNBC's corporate synergy with NBC by using its nonstop coverage of the TSA imbroglio to play the Saturday Night Live skit about it from last weekend about it (which they do every time there is a new SNL on) as if it's an essential part of illustrating the story. Chris Matthews went as far as calling it the greatest SNL sketch ever. It aired on Olbermann, Maddow and O'Donnell last night and Morning Joe, Hardball and Schultz today.

Politico's Mike Allen had a funny tweet earlier today pointing out that Good Morning America actually did lead with the North Korean situation, but the Today show actually chose to go with the wedding date. As Fran Lebowitz said in the wonderful documentary about her that premiered on HBO last night, Public Speaking, I remember when news used to mean information.

It's like Jon Stewart said during his interview with Rachel Maddow. Was the Juan Williams story really as important as cable news made it out to be? No, but it fit their narrative and their template. There are far too many important things going on both domestically and overseas to waste our times on this nonsense anymore. Our "leaders" in D.C. can play politics, but they've lost the ability and the interest to govern and none of the talking heads on either side have any role in governance. Enough.

Don't touch my junk!

By Capt. Fogg 

I remember once, long ago, arriving at O'Hare airport well after midnight with a pair of hungry, thirsty, overtired and near hysterical pre-schoolers following a full day of airport delays and stormy air travel that began in Jamaica. The agony of enduring hours of waiting and seemingly microscopic baggage inspection is impossible to forget as was the large Orwellian banner demanding "PATIENCE - A DRUG FREE AMERICA COMES FIRST." From my point of view, it sure as hell didn't justify the trauma and I don't have to add that it wasn't and still isn't 'drug-free;' but those were the good old days. They didn't strip search my five-year old.

Yes, sure, a majority of Americans are willing to put up with the ritual humiliations that now accompany air travel; those same people that don't worry much about driving their luxury trucks at 100 while talking on the phone -- at night -- in the rain. Odds are they haven't had to experience more than being asked to remove a belt or their shoes or having been chastised by someone in a too-tight polyester uniform and rubber gloves about which size Zip-Loc they put their shampoo and toothpaste in or even having 'terrorist tool' nail clippers confiscated. Of course many of us still haven't been through the full-body cameras and the rude, abrupt, "up against the wall" attitudes of TSA tyrants. Many have been and many are now fed up with what's being mocked as Security Theater. Fed up is a euphemism here of course but in this week of peak air travel, some of us will undergo an attitude adjustment and begin to use more direct words.

Some will elect to deprive some unseen gnome of viewing their nakedness, or that of their spouses and children and choose a "manual" search. It may be more 'manual' then they expected. ABC News producer Carolyn Durand claims that:

The woman who checked me reached her hands inside my underwear and felt her way around. It was basically worse than going to the gynecologist.

The Raw Story reports that women have had to remove prosthetic breasts for "inspection." One man had a urostomy bag ruptured by TSA's claws and had to board an airplane while soaked with public humiliation and urine. Keep in mind, that no probable cause is involved here since profiling would be insulting. Keep in mind that you probably can't get there by Amtrak and driving to grandma's house may be more dangerous than flying.

Of course, to me, the government's power to stick their fingers in your hooha is far more offensive than its power to prevent the bus company from making some of my friends sit in the back seats and expel them from the Woolworths lunch counter, but then I'm not a Tea Party "Patriot," I don't support Rand Paul's discomfort with anything infringing on absolute property rights, and I'm not an oil company either. Neither am I like the troll who used Raw Story's comment section to rave about supporting the "Terrorist State of Israel." I'm just sick of arguable ends being used to sanctify extreme and offensive methods. I'm tired of losing my freedom to other people's fear and my country to the neurotic and fearful mob.

(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)

Liberty is a terrorist

By Capt. Fogg

The story goes like this: you're told you can no longer work at your current job and you can no longer find employment in your profession because your name is on a government list. The government won't confirm or deny it, so you can't go about demonstrating that you've been falsely put on it because you have no idea of what you've been accused of or why -- or even that the list exists. As far as you know the list is only there to keep you from working.

No, it's not a newly discovered Franz Kafka novella, it's the story of Erich Scherfen, a man who served honorably in the US military and during the Gulf War. He's currently employed as a regional airline pilot, but has been told that he can no longer fly because the TSA has him on a "terror" list -- a list that no one is allowed to see, not even to demonstrate that it's all a mistake.

But wait -- aren't we guaranteed the right to confront our accuser? Don't we get a day in court? Doesn't the government have to show we've committed a crime before taking our rights away? Hell, no, not in the Republican fascist hellhole full of apathetic consumers and mewling, cringing cowards that we used to call a free country. The "terror" list itself is the most terrifying thing about our pathetic pretend democracy and more pathetic for the fact that the only organization anywhere who will stand up for this man, the ACLU, is the favorite demon of the ruling party.

Of course they know why Scherfen is so terrifying and so do I -- he's a Muslim and his wife, an American citizen, was born in Pakistan and came here as a kid. His crime is flying while Muslim. Our crime is not giving a damn. Our crime is not storming the Bastille, dragging the bastards out of their offices and pillorying them. But we don't, we mumble about the Pledge and God on the money and them damn "Libs" in the ACLU and how John McCain will deal with "terror" much better while freedom itself is on the "terror list" and cannot fly.