thank you and Amen, Jon Walker

btw, saw plenty of hashtags and other threads like this.
makes a gal wonder if they did indeed shut off x number of machines in x number of places to make it look like us shrill hippies had nothing to complain about -

Great post Jon, thanks.

I could not agree with you more. But then, I suspect you already know that ; )

I’m still waiting for TSA’s statistical risk assessment. I suspect Beelzebub will be strapping on ice skates before we ever see one…

Tch! You’re all just rush limbaugh republicans trying to make poor Obomber look bad!

….To quote Ed Schultz.

Ed went on to say, “Soldiers sacrifice their limbs in the war so we shouldn’t feel inconvenienced by gropes and scans, we have an unemployment problem so why are we talking about this.”

I guess Schultzy never learned how to walk and chew gum at the same time.

“This is a republican attack” seems to be the smear to discredit people who complain about the policy.

That and “Soldiers loose limbs so we should make sacrifices too for the war!”

Now if you want my opinion on how to handle homeland security I’ll tell you what my good friend Michael Chertoff and the people who co own ours opinions believe.

Chertoff thinks we should have random vivisections where we pay “Chertoff Security Corp” 10 billion dollars to vivisect people who go through airports, scan every part of their body atom by atom and then download and rewrite their memories.

Chertoff believes that the billions given to Chertoff Security No Relation Corp are a wise investment and the live vivisection of americans is necessary for national security.

Ed Schultz, Chris Matthews and the other “liberal” talking heads say that anyone against live vivisection must be a rush limbaugh listener while Limbaugh and the republicans say anyone against invasive brain rewriting is a liberal communist nazi who wants to put america on the path to a single payer healthcare system.

Thanks cbl. I didn’t fly over the holiday, but have heard anecdotally that at least some of those who set off the metal detectors got the old fashioned pat downs rather than the new molestation pat downs.

I wonder if TSA will quietly back-off or whether they will be back at it after the initial hubbub subsides…

Soldiers sacrifice their limbs in the war so we shouldn’t feel inconvenienced by gropes and scans

I’m not a fan of the TV babblefest, but this has to be one of the all time most dimwitted things uttered by a pundit.

Psst, Ed, those soldiers are hypothetically sacrificing limbs and lives for our constitution (that’s the whole “they’re fighting for our freedom” argument). Do you think maybe you could get off your overpaid ass long enough to complain when some pinheaded bureaucrat tries to take the freedoms those soldiers won for you with those limbs and lives? Nope. Too much of an inconvenience for you to so much as speak up, much less put your life on the line.

Good to know.

Oh it’s even better.

In the same freaking argument he went off on the unemployment crisis and how everyone WHINING about gropes and scanners are just trying to take our eyes off the ball (?) and ignore the employment crisis.

That’s his idiot argument.

Fathead Mathews is even dumber.

His argument is, “If we’re attacked Obama will be blamed for not stripping everyone naked and examining their colons for bombs so we have to have the gropes to keep Obama’s numbers high if an attack happens.”

To be considered a member of the news left you have to be semi reasonable on good days, to be considered moderate you have to be dumb violent and greedy, to be a member of the right you have to be an opprotunistic, lying, backstabbing, be hypocritical and stark raving insane.

Jon Walker is RIGHT ! thanks for the insight and quality ASCII. it’s pathetic that the USofA has been reduced to this. it won’t end well.

I found this video to be extremely sad. To me, it shows us that the TSA has gone completely insane with power and is upset with a citizen who will dare to question them using their own regulations!!! I mean, the nerve of this woman to use copies of their own rules to say that they’re a bunch of nitwits! The insolence!!!

Terrorists (of the Islamic breed, anyway) do not hate us because of any of our policies, that’s just silliness propagated by Islamic apologists. Indeed, Islamic terrorists are not attacking only America and Americans. They’ve attacked a number of European countries and have killed more Muslims than we have. This bizarre idea that we are creating terrorism is . . . well, bizarre. For all the calls to close Gitmo, for example, have any of you considered what the terrorists held there say about that? They want to stay in Gitmo if the alternative is to be shipped back to their own homeland or to some stateside facility. How can you think that Gitmo, or even waterboarding (which was done on only 3 detainees and is done on tens of thousands of our own special forces as part of their training), is some how less humane than what they and their home nations engage in as a matter of course?

I’m still waiting for TSA’s statistical risk assessment. I suspect Beelzebub will be strapping on ice skates before we ever see one…

Yeah, a BP-style three little pig report would be nice (“cost-benefit analysis” as some people call it).
http://fromtheleft.wordpress.com/2010/05/26/bps-three-little-pigs-scenario/

BP took grief for putting a price on the Value per Statistical Life (VSL of $10 million) in their internal CBA. Ironically BP values human life than the EPA ($8 million under current regs). So by BP’s VSL, the 45,000 Americans who die every year due to lack of medical coverage imposes a cost (a death tax if you will) of $450 billion a year on the American economy. Using the EPA’s VLS, lack of universal coverage costs a mere $360 billion. Over 4 years that’s… But I digress.

It would be interesting to see the VSL for various levels of TSA security options– no security (the good old days when Elvis could bring guns on planes), pre-9/11 security (well keep the deadbolts on cockpit doors), our porno-scanner status quo to, say, bomb sniffing dogs checking all air cargo and passengers, Israeli-style preflight interrogations to… giving everyone a Top Gun-style oxygen mask and cutting the air in the main cabin (The lack of oxygen would put a crimp in most bomb designs).

I’d imagine the most cost-effective security plan would be to a modified Elvis approach, eliminate all airport security except for police sniffer dogs checking out stowed cargo then walking the cabin before takeoff past the passengers and their carryons (among other things, they’re trained to detect guns from the smell of gunpowder). We can always upgrade to bomb sniffing pigs. :o)
http://www.thorninpaw.com/mt/archives/001430.html

In the grand scheme, the terrorist threat to your life is almost incalculably small; the threat to your liberty from the security showman, however, is unfailingly vast.

You are absolutely right on this.
How can we provide fool-proof security. It is simply not possible. What if someone wishes to do harm with bare hands being trained in top notch martial arts. We are really going down the slippery slope. Instead of going for optimum, common sense security we are going for too much security and in the process we are desensitizing ourselves and our privacy issues.

What we need is old-fashioned spy work to see what the trouble makers are upto and taking safeguards to it. Lot of drudging work but it is the only effective way. On top of that push responsibility to every country for its citizen behavior and make clear that if they harm our countrymen and countrywomen they will be paid back in the same coin and follow-up on it if necessary.

What we are doing is literally and figuratively baring ourselves in the name of security which is a costly, health-wise harmful, time consuming, hassle prone, privacy issues and not to mention the most important reason of all violation of our bill of rights. For safeguarding our bill of rights we keep up with lot of stuff we do not agree with but bill of rights is very important for all of us to safeguard for future of our democracy.

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it. — Pres. Thomas Jefferson

I live in Los Angeles; I’ll be visiting my elderly father in New York for a few days before Christmas.

I told him that I’m likely to let the TSA people know I’m not happy either about porno scanners or getting groped.

Don’t do that, he said. They may not let you fly. And remember: we’re at war. Remember the bad people who knocked down the World Trade Center on 9/11.

The punchline: My father is an old New York Jewish liberal who wouldn’t be caught dead watching Fox. But the Kool-Aid is getting into his system nonetheless.

This is what we’re up against, and what we have to keep fighting.

In this case, I tried to explain the difference between war and multiple colonial occupations as well as how one major terrorist attack shouldn’t cause us to dump all our civil liberties and Constitutional rights down the trash chute. We wound up having to change the subject, as neither of us would budge.

There is a reason I use the term “statistical risk analysis” rather than “cost-benefit analysis”.

I am not interested in trying to put a dollar value on someone’s life. I am interested in the risk statistics. You got to it a bit in your own comment…

What is the risk of a person dying at the hands of a terrorist on any given flight with no security measures at all? Then, what is the incremental risk reduction achieved by each measure: checking ids, metal detectors, x-raying carry-ons, taking off shoes, ordinary patdowns, pornoscanners, molesting patdowns, and whatever screening of checked bags takes place.

I suspect, but do not have the data to prove, that the incremental reduction of risk provided by the pornoscanner and molestations is essentially zero. At that point, it doesn’t matter what value one places on a person’s life or even a pornoscanner, the technique is useless and therefore unnecessary no matter the cost.

That is why TSA hasn’t done such an assessment and it is why I think there is a snowball’s chance in hell that they will ever do so. There is a lot of money to be made in theatrical productions and the producers like Skeletor and Pistole want a return on their investment.

I watched that video yesterday. While the TSA is engaged in security theater; terrorizing the elderly, the handicapped, young children and now breast-feeding mothers, baggage handlers and others with direct access to planes remain exempt.

http://www.salon.com/technology/ask_the_pilot/2010/11/22/tsa_screening_of_pilots

Couple this with the fact that backscatter machines were turned off or roped off during Thanksgiving travel and you come to the realization that the screening of passengers has nothing to do with catching terrorists.

Your assumption is only true if its true that Al Queda et al target planes for the convenience or the show, which is a variation of the Bush/Obama argument that they “want to kill Americans.”I think Bin Laden has made it clear on a number of occasions, as have his lieutenants, that their attacks are primarily aimed at economic targets, that the point of the Cole, 9/11 etc was to lure the Big Bad Wolf into the Brier Patch to cripple it economically. Dead Americans are secondary, “collateral damage” you might say. Airlines are critical to globalized trade as well as travel and are extremely vulnerable to small, even unsuccessful attacks. Disruptions cause ripple effects in the economy as well as the political scene – see the underwear bomber or the booby-trapped toner sent via cargo. I think airlines are intrinsic to the Al Queda strategy (if there is such a thing)and will remain so.

This is easy: THE TERRORISTS HAVE WON

Well to paraphrase some rabblerouser or another, you may not be interested in cost-benefit analysis, but the cost-benefit analysis is interested in you. Its a very important topic (not a fan of Cass Sunstein, but at least he understands that much).
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/magazine/16Sunstein-t.html?pagewanted=all

Its a necessity of life that we have to triage limited resources and an accurate, unbiased CBA is one tool– but certainly not the only tool– to ensure we do so in a fair, equitable way. That’s actually what I was thinking about when went on that HCR tangent above (and I apologize to Jon and his readers for going off topic for a minute).

The world has all too many people (as Wilde said of cynics) who know the price of everything and the value of nothing. If, as our friends at BP assert, that a human life is worth $10 million, then a needless death is a tax that drains $10 million from our most precious resource, our human capital. If the President (assuming he actually cared) had framed HCR as the means to eliminate the $4.5 trillion in death taxes (ha ha, I wonder if Frank Luntz has a trademark on that) our economy will pay over the next decade, he could have rammed that down the throat of the GOP and the CBO (metaphorically I mean, their lives have value too) when they complained that universal coverage was “too expensive”.

Obama only met his self-imposed $1 trillion cap by waiting four years (and by making it too expensive even then). By starting in four years instead of this year, he chose to waste $1.8 trillion in human capital in order to save a fraction of that in financial capital. And that’s why you should be interested in cost-benefit analysis.

You’re correct in so far as statistics go, “risk assessment” is the most accurate way to study these issues. But as a political matter, people don’t know how to count statistics, everyone knows how to count money. For example, multiply $8 million (to use the EPA number) x 300 million Americans. That means the assets of the United States (not even counting our natural resources or capital stock) are at least $2.4 quadrillion (i.e. $2400 trillion). Weighed against that, the public debt backed by the people of the United States is, what, $13 trillion (and a third of that is held by the govt itself). Our idiot leaders are suffocating the economy because they’re terrified of basically a rounding error.
/rant off. :o)

I just read Jeffrey Rosen’s WaPo piece on the scanners. He’s wring. They’re constitutional- read here.