Claire McCaskill defends TSA “Love Pats” on 11/17/10. This was before she had to get rid of her private jet and fly commercial. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/11/17/national/main7063414.shtml Now that she has to go through them she has the opposite opinion. From The Hill 11/9/11. http://thehill.com/blogs/transporta...airport-security-procedures-divide-lawmakers- What a difference a year and actually having to deal with these dirtbags makes. As the writer said so well earlier this year, “It’s no big deal until it happens to you”
Pistole said that negative incidents involving TSA, like an 8-month-old baby being patted down, were "one-offs." Seriously? "One-offs?" If these incidents really were "one-offs" we wouldn't be reading about them daily in the newspapers and online, legislators wouldn't be trying to ban the "patdowns", and people like Jesse Ventura (and others) wouldn't be filing lawsuits.
I liked the "can't please all of the people while keeping them safe" remark. If the members of the Committee are any indication, at least half of the "people" aren't happy with them. We can take solace in the fact the Pistole and Napolitano are constantly being barraged with these "one offs" in the pres and before a variety of Congressional committees. They know this is wrong and after a year are scrambling with ATR, new scanner testing, reduced pat downs, kids shoes requirements, frequent flier passes and a variety of other initiatives that weren't even on the table a year ago in an effort to contain the damage.
But it's not good enough. Not even by a long shot. TSA can implement all of the knee jerk, worthless band-aids they want to make their procedures seem more benign. The simple fact remains that infrequent flyers, dirty foreigners, and randomly everybody, is still subject to an electronic strip search of dubious efficacy, safety, and Constitutionality. With ATR, the machine must still render a nude image. There is no other way for these machines to work. An electronic strip search is still an electronic strip search, no matter what you slap on the end of it. And to Senator Clair McCaskill, please just STFU. You deserve a "love pat" a day for your insensitive, stupid remarks a year ago. Get a clue, you ignorant b*tch.
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Can anyone figure out what's going on with the formatting at Politico?? I can't get any of the paragraph breaks in my comments to show up. It's just one big mash-up of text. (Except for my first comment, which I copied & pasted from same at The Hill -- that one showed up fine. Everything else -- a mess.)
TSA isn't keeping us safe. WE (the passengers) are keeping us safe. TSA endangers everyone who transits through the checkpoint to attack on the ground, which has occurred, for example, in Moscow, Vienna, and Glasgow, and makes us all easier targets too. In addition, the numerous false alarms and other idiocy contribute to confusion and distrust of security -- and that benefits terrorism.
I've noticed that a few sites, like LA Times, have a problem with any formatted text that is pasted in to the box from Word. Sometimes it works okay from Notepad but even then I've had problem with gibberish at the front portion of the post. Usually I get tipped off when it says the word count was exceeded before I had much in there. I posted on this at Politico Wednesday using a Word file paste and didn't run into any problems so maybe it they're having a problem.
I had the opposite problem at Politico -- I typed a short, two-line comment directly in the box, with a paragraph break. Yet it wouldn't take the break. It mashed the sentences together. No matter how many times I tried to re-do it, including erasing the whole thing and starting from scratch. Yet the comment I copied & pasted verbatim from what I posted at The Hill, it reprinted perfectly. As for HTML gibberish at the front when you copy & paste from Word, I know what you mean. The Baltimore Sun (a Tribune paper, like the LA Times) does that. I'm sure it'll never get fixed 'cause they have barely anyone working over there anymore. They've cut the newsroom to beyond the bone, and they're certainly not spending money on tending the Comments sections of articles.
I wouldn't use Word for stuff like this. The free text editors you get with your computer OS would do just fine. Plus Word has, or used to have, a nasty feature in it that kept a history of anything you typed in your doc...
Oh, dear. I know that I'm incompetent at technology, but that's a feature I'd never even heard of. When we're talking Word, does that mean for all computers, PCs and Macs? I'm using a Mac.
Instead of calling out her hypocrisy, shouldn't we be welcoming her to our side and congratulating her for finally seeing the light and experience what her "subjects" experience?
Well, you have a point. I guess I'm cynical and I question how much she actually gives a sh*t as opposed to how much she's merely pissed that she had to sell her private jet. I bet if she somehow could get that jet back -- or piggyback on someone else's -- she'd suddenly lose all concern about this issue.
I expect that one of the benefits TSA will derive from the TT program, aside from needing their useless workers do even less, is that they'll have a precedent to exempt Members of Congress. Once they don't have to get groped then we'll have no chance of turning this back.
I'm not so quick to welcome her. She's as bad, or worse, than Klobuchar on this issue. It's not that grope exists per se. It seems her issue was that she had to endure it due to implanted metal because a scanner wasn't available. The members of this Committee are astoundingly out of touch on this issue, one for which they have direct oversight. They have bought, hook, line, and sinker the lie that these junkatrons are effective. Their only concern is that they be able to be scanned instead of groped, which is exactly what the grope was designed to do.
