Reid to TSA: Smile

Even Harry Reid is down on TSA. Maybe losing the Asian whales in Vegas will wake some people up. But I'm not holding my breath.

http://www.lvrj.com/news/reid-to-tsa-smile-146181975.html

 

Sorry, but this is idiotic. He is lame and weak. Smile and say hello??? "Hello, there, I'm your friendly TSA molester. Please drop your drawers and allow me to probe. Don't worry -- it's For Your Safety!"

If he -- or any of those dunderheads -- really gave a (expletive deleted), they'd dismantle this criminal agency.

 

Yeah. So "very open" that we weren't allowed to know what was going on.

This entire article has one loser quote after another. It's mind-boggling. They want to increase tourism, but don't address the reasons why tourism might be down in the first place. And spending more money to "promote" the USA overseas?? Yeah, that'll do it. Spend more money on smiley advertisements, but god forbid you should rein in your abusive, power-tripping thugs at home. Unbelievable.

 

Unfortunately, the point at which they need to start has been lowered. Being nice to travelers at the checkpoint is no longer the number one priority. First they have to quit cussing at us & throwing hot coffee in our faces. Then we can focus on making them more socially refined, which will be quite a challenge.

 

Reid is going to listen only enough to keep the natives off his neck. They're not where his money comes from. He's already been paid off by the industries profiting from the security hysteria and DHS largesse.

The only way to make senators actually work for their own state is to repeal the 18/17th amendment and have them be appointed by state legislatures again as the founding fathers advised.

 

The best thing we can do in the meantime is to vote against anyone who currently holds office. There needs to be a cleaning of house, no pun intended, and maybe after a few babies get thrown out with the bathwater the rest of the legisleeches will realize the people are pissed off and that their job security is by no means guaranteed. At the very least we open doors for the election of the kind of people that current legislators don't like and consider "disruptive." With a little luck, a few firebrands will find themselves handed an opportunity to make old, complacent, washed-up legislators very, very uncomfortable.

When in doubt, vote incumbents out.

 

Reid is such a sleazebag. An antagonist straight out of Atlas Shrugged.

 

Good luck to them - I and others have been advising would-be foreign visitors to avoid the US for a while now. Commonly I'll see someone on Slashdot or Consumerist or another site that deals with travel and/or politics claim that they were considering visiting the US but are having second thoughts. My response is to tell them to please stay away, that I'm not being uppity or arrogant or xenophobic but rather that I truly feel my country does not deserve to be rewarded with their tourism dollars until it stops playing the petulant child, grows up, gets over 9/11, and treats its citizens and the members of the global community with respect.

I can only hope that the adage about bad word-of-mouth being three times more apt to spread than good word-of-mouth holds true and the extra marketing dollars will go to waste, forcing officials to regard the problem of the continued existence of TSA.

 

Oooh, CW, I love "legisleeches"! Thank you -- I'm going to steal it!

 

CW, your use of "petulant child" reminded me of this comment from long, long ago. I've never forgotten it because I thought he put it so poetically (and because he never got the sh*t I did for talking about the abuses of the National Security State). Bolding is mine:

 

"No cause what ever" = B.S.

I would offer no apologies whatsover for putting Saddam & his evil sons out of business, nor for going into Afghanistan & sending One-Eye Omar scooting over to Pakistan on his motorcycle.

 

Sorry, can't agree. It was war-mongering, plain and simple. And now they're trying to do the same thing with Iran. War is a means of making money for the military industry. And of keeping the sheeple in line.

Funny how we had no problem dealing with Saddam Hussein when it suited us, of selling him the very chemical weapons he used against Iran, of publicizing cheery photos of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with him. Then he was our "friend." Until he became our enemy. This is historical fact, not lefty fiction.


Shaking Hands: Iraqi President Saddam Hussein greets Donald Rumsfeld, then special envoy of President Ronald Reagan, in Baghdad on December 20, 1983.

 

Historical fact is that Saddam & his henchmen murder tens of thousands of his own people, perhaps hundreds of thousands.

Good riddance, and as I said, no apologies. You can try to rewrite history all you want, but in the end it won't matter. Nobody misses Saddam Hussein.

He became our enemy because he took us for granted, thought he had us in his pocket, and decided to take advantage of the situation and invade Kuwait. He miscalculated.

Karma's a bitch sometimes.

He again took us for granted and tried to play us a second time.

Karma tends to get really nasty when she's ignored the first time around.

Starting with Iraq, there have now been a series of regime changes in the Middle East and North Africa, with several more yet to go.

The left is always claiming the they're "trying to build a better world" but they always seem to leave the heavy hauling for others to take care of.

While you're showing pictures, can you find us one of the Clintons feasting with the elite in North Korea while the peasants are worked to death on subsistence diets?

 

I've been doing the same at other places as well for some time now. I have family and friends in Europe that no longer holiday in the States because of the never-ending stories of how we mistreat visitors to our country. If I were to email them a link to this story they would just look at it as a stupid joke.

One other thing for Napolitano to consider before she tells all the TSA employees to get chatty; not every culture views these kinds of exchanges with complete strangers favorably.

 

I'm not going to defend the Clintons.

And I don't have to defend Saddam Hussein to say we shouldn't have invaded Iraq. We shouldn't have invaded Iraq. We also shouldn't have been selling him chemical weapons, the use of which we later decried. There's more than enough hypocrisy in this country to go around.

And it would be nice if karma actually worked. Then there'd be more justice in the world. As it is, there's rarely justice. The U.S. commits crimes left and right, but doesn't pay. Because might, still, too often, makes right. Although "terrorism" (so-called only when Others do it) may be coming back to bite us. Maybe that's karma.

 

From the article:

"They're getting feedback from their international guests that the attitude of TSA when it comes to international visitors isn't what it should be," one meeting participant said.

They're just hearing this now? Who are these people?

We've all been hearing it for years. I chaired a conference way back in 2005 and had people tell me personally that they weren't coming to the conference because they didn't want to go through immigration or deal with the TSA. 2005.

 

No kidding.

Is it less of a rape if your rapist smiles at you?

 

It is incorrect to say that we sold him weapons. We didn't.

There were a large number of licenses for the export dual-use products which can be (reverse) engineered to produce WMD and which ended up in Iraq.

It is also incorrect to state that the United States (implying the U.S. government) sold these dual-use technologies to the Iraq. They didn't.

I suspect you have little or no actual knowledge as to how export control & compliance is done. Export controls (with some exceptions) are self-administered by companies. Only certain technologies and final recipients (e.g. North Korea) require formal approval. As a principal engineer with a very large company, I've been trained in export compliance (nothing special, even entry-level engineers some of the training in their first year), not so much as to apply the controls as to know how the process works and how to categorize products & technologies that are being transferred. The actual control is done by an export compliance department, which must sign off on any transfer before the traffic office will arrange a shipment. Even emails might have to be logged and in some cases receive prior approval. Note that this is in a company which strives to give almost every "exempt" employee an understanding of both the export compliance system and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and which has an ethics officer at every level as well as anonymous avenue for reporting issues. If I a see problem, I can choose to report it openly through what's called a "corrective action request", discreetly to an ethics officer, or anonymously.

Problems come about with companies that don't or won't spend the time, effort & resources to develop & administer these controls. In a free country & free market with tens of thousands of companies & millions of employees, the government can't just step in & do it all.

Problems also come about when the final recipients of these products try to arrange purchases through straw buyers. A straw buyer could be anyone from a warehouse or reseller in a 3rd (permitted) country to a university "research institute" that is just a sham for the final recipient. The seller is responsible for licensing a transfer to the final recipient, but people eager to book a sale (and collect a commission) might stop short of that requirement. In other words, you are responsible for knowing your customer. What you don't know & try not to find out can be costly in the end.

Iraq has been an oil exporter with economic ties to much of Europe and Asia for several decades. It doesn't surprise me in the least that Iraq has gotten its hands on this stuff. If North Korea (about as impoverished a pariah as one can be) can produce missiles & nuclear weapons, what would have stopped Iraq?

 

They were suffocating so somebody cut a hole in the paper bags & some noise got in along with the air.

Next time use plastic & wrap it real tight.

 

An international social club I belong to was expecting 6-8 European guests in May. They cancelled without explanation. I don't think it's exclusively due to the TSA and CBP, but they're not "inviting", that's for sure.

I don't think smiling and saying "Hi!" are going to mitigate theft, insulting questions and sexual assault.