Get Cynical

Stephen Duckett (I don’t know either. And too lazy to google) masterfully dodges reporters by using the cookie defense.

There’s only about 400 new stories from the weekend on our lovely friends with benefits at the TSA so I’ll put them in this thread.

Pilots can now skip the pat-downs and scanners but the rest of us still have to get a federally sponsored happy ending.

Members of Congress don’t have to go through TSA security.

Earlier this week, in holding a hearing with the head of the TSA, our congressional representatives didn’t seem too concerned about the public complaints about TSA security procedures: the naked scans and the gropings. Want to know why? Perhaps it’s because, on the rare occasions that they fly commercial, they get to skip security

Ron Paul wants the TSA to just go Galt already.

Slate wonders if the TSA has ever caught a terrorist? (Short answer, no, unless you count drug smugglers as terrorists.)

Another Slate piece on why Republicans are seemingly anti-TSA all of a sudden after years of keeping quiet under W.

“I used to sit around and look at these images, dial them back, and ask myself how do I take this to Capitol Hill and not be thrown out on my head?” said Blank. “When [Bush's second TSA administrator] Kip Hawley came in [in 2005], he changed that. He saw the politics of it and deep-sixed the program. He deep-sixed it. It got revived after the Christmas bomber.”

The point about how full-body scanning got restarted is essential—it was the Obama administration picking up an idea that Republicans had cooled on. Republicans accused the administration of degrading security by dialing back war-on-terror prosecutions in the name of human rights; the response was a security measure that would affect all travelers randomly. So maybe the Drudge Report didn’t really invent a backlash against Napolitano. The backlash was inevitable. Republican trust in a sprawling and invasive security apparatus was always precarious. Its collapse leaves the TSA and the Obama administration with yet another libertarian, anti-state riot on their hands.

How the TSA Screeners feel about the new “enhanced pat downs.” (short answer, Nuremberg Defense)

Oprah’s audience reacting to news of enhanced pat downs. . (I may be wrong about that last part. Who knows what the hell Oprah’s audience is thinking.)

Blogger Bob from TSA’s blog seems to be confused between the difference of a myth and a fact.

When they think they’re off the air.

Also, Barbara Bush isn’t a fan of Mama Grizzly.

Never trust an animal who wears a mask.

I’m just gonna put these right down here….

From TucsonCitizen:

President Obama said today he sympathizes with passenger complaints about aggressive body pat-downs at airports, but his counter-terrorism aides say they are necessary to guard against hidden explosives.

Balancing privacy and security is a “tough situation,” Obama told reporters at a news conference following the NATO summit in Lisbon, Portugal.

“One of the most frustrating aspects of this fight against terrorism is that it has created a whole security apparatus around us that causes a huge inconvenience for all of us,” Obama said.

Obama cited the attempted airplane attack by the so-called underwear bomber last Christmas as justification for aggressive security measures.

From MSNBC:

A retired special education teacher on his way to a wedding in Orlando, Fla., said he was left humiliated, crying and covered with his own urine after an enhanced pat-down by TSA officers recently at Detroit Metropolitan Airport.

“I was absolutely humiliated, I couldn’t even speak,” said Thomas D. “Tom” Sawyer, 61, of Lansing, Mich.

Sawyer is a bladder cancer survivor who now wears a urostomy bag, which collects his urine from a stoma, or opening in his stomach. “I have to wear special clothes and in order to mount the bag I have to seal a wafer to my stomach and then attach the bag. If the seal is broken, urine can leak all over my body and clothes.”

On Nov. 7, Sawyer said he went through the security scanner at Detroit Metropolitan Airport. “Evidently the scanner picked up on my urostomy bag, because I was chosen for a pat-down procedure.”

Due to his medical condition, Sawyer asked to be screened in private. “One officer looked at another, rolled his eyes and said that they really didn’t have any place to take me,” said Sawyer. “After I said again that I’d like privacy, they took me to an office.”

Sawyer wears pants two sizes too large in order to accommodate the medical equipment he wears. He’d taken off his belt to go through the scanner and once in the office with security personnel, his pants fell down around his ankles. “I had to ask twice if it was OK to pull up my shorts,” said Sawyer, “And every time I tried to tell them about my medical condition, they said they didn’t need to know about that.”