Fuck its silent in here.......

[PenPho]

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/broward/fl-tsa-strip-searches-20111205,0,2669917,full.story

Three South Florida women, all elderly and with medical problems, say Transportation Security Administration officers made them take off their clothes during the screening process at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport last week.

All three, one with a defibrillator, one with a colostomy bag and the other with diabetes, say they were forced to disrobe in a private room at the same terminal.

"This was outrageous," Lenore Zimmerman, 84, who winters in the Wynmoor Village condominium complex in Coconut Creek, said on Monday. "For some reason, they decided I look like a terrorist."

The TSA says no improper strip searches were conducted – in that none of the women were improperly touched – and all standard protocols were followed...

...

Zimmerman said prior to catching a JetBlue flight to Fort Lauderdale on Nov. 29, she asked TSA officers to bypass the body scanner machine because has a defibrillator. She also requires a wheelchair while traveling.

She said she was taken to a private room and asked to take off her pants and underwear. She said officers wanted to see a back brace she needs to wear after recent spinal surgery.

"They didn't touch me, but they told me to pull my pants down," said Zimmerman, a widow, adding she felt humiliated. "My blood pressure after the incident was 189 over 90, and it shouldn't be that high."

She said she missed her 1 p.m. flight but caught one two and half hours later.

...

Linda Kallish, 66, of Boynton Beach, was scheduled to be on the same flight as Zimmerman. Because she is diabetic, she has a glucose monitor that checks her blood sugar every five minutes strapped to one leg and an insulin pump strapped on the other.

After she set off the metal detector, a female TSA officer ordered her into a private room and told her to take her pants off, Kallish said. She said the officer didn't touch her.

"So I took my pants off and showed it to her," Kallish said. "She just looked at it and said, 'Have a nice trip.'"

...

In a third case, Ruth Sherman, 88, of Sunrise, was returning home from New York on Nov. 29, when TSA officers noticed the bulge from her colostomy bag, accord to CBS News.

"This is private for me. It's bad enough that I have it. I had to pull it from my sweat pants and I had to pull my underwear down," she told a correspondent for WCBS, a New York television station. "You don't do that to anybody. I felt like I was invaded."

...

TSA officials noted whenever a person opts out of the body scanner, secondary screenings, including pat-downs, are conducted "in a manner that treats all passengers with dignity, respect and courtesy."

Intrepid Reader: PenFoe

"If these people have nothing to hide, then they have nothing to worry about. So drop your drawers, you old bag!"

Hey Strawprude...there's a difference between walking through a body scanner machine and having to disrobe in a private room in front of someone.
I still don't care personally, but I recognize the difference.   

That said, let's go case-by-case for a second here.

The first case involves a woman who couldn't go through the body scanner and couldn't (presumably?) go through the metal detector because she was in a wheelchair. 
What would you have them do here? Pat down? Would that be better?

The second case involves a woman who set off the metal detector with a foreign device. In order to get a better look at it, they asked her into a private room to inspect further and immediately let her go. 

The third case doesn't sound like it involves any issues going through a scanner or metal detector, not sure why that wasn't an option, but they saw something unfamiliar and wanted to get a quick peek at it.  This one sounds a little fishy, unless there were no body scanners available or she refused to use one.

If you're against profiling (which I assume you are), and there's probably not a tremendous government surplus available for improving recruiting, hiring and training of TSA reps, then what's left? 

[J. Walter Weatherman]

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/broward/fl-tsa-strip-searches-20111205,0,2669917,full.story

Three South Florida women, all elderly and with medical problems, say Transportation Security Administration officers made them take off their clothes during the screening process at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport last week.

All three, one with a defibrillator, one with a colostomy bag and the other with diabetes, say they were forced to disrobe in a private room at the same terminal.

"This was outrageous," Lenore Zimmerman, 84, who winters in the Wynmoor Village condominium complex in Coconut Creek, said on Monday. "For some reason, they decided I look like a terrorist."

The TSA says no improper strip searches were conducted – in that none of the women were improperly touched – and all standard protocols were followed...

...

Zimmerman said prior to catching a JetBlue flight to Fort Lauderdale on Nov. 29, she asked TSA officers to bypass the body scanner machine because has a defibrillator. She also requires a wheelchair while traveling.

She said she was taken to a private room and asked to take off her pants and underwear. She said officers wanted to see a back brace she needs to wear after recent spinal surgery.

"They didn't touch me, but they told me to pull my pants down," said Zimmerman, a widow, adding she felt humiliated. "My blood pressure after the incident was 189 over 90, and it shouldn't be that high."

She said she missed her 1 p.m. flight but caught one two and half hours later.

...

Linda Kallish, 66, of Boynton Beach, was scheduled to be on the same flight as Zimmerman. Because she is diabetic, she has a glucose monitor that checks her blood sugar every five minutes strapped to one leg and an insulin pump strapped on the other.

After she set off the metal detector, a female TSA officer ordered her into a private room and told her to take her pants off, Kallish said. She said the officer didn't touch her.

"So I took my pants off and showed it to her," Kallish said. "She just looked at it and said, 'Have a nice trip.'"

...

In a third case, Ruth Sherman, 88, of Sunrise, was returning home from New York on Nov. 29, when TSA officers noticed the bulge from her colostomy bag, accord to CBS News.

"This is private for me. It's bad enough that I have it. I had to pull it from my sweat pants and I had to pull my underwear down," she told a correspondent for WCBS, a New York television station. "You don't do that to anybody. I felt like I was invaded."

...

TSA officials noted whenever a person opts out of the body scanner, secondary screenings, including pat-downs, are conducted "in a manner that treats all passengers with dignity, respect and courtesy."

Intrepid Reader: PenFoe

"If these people have nothing to hide, then they have nothing to worry about. So drop your drawers, you old bag!"

Hey Strawprude...there's a difference between walking through a body scanner machine and having to disrobe in a private room in front of someone.
I still don't care personally, but I recognize the difference.   

That said, let's go case-by-case for a second here.

The first case involves a woman who couldn't go through the body scanner and couldn't (presumably?) go through the metal detector because she was in a wheelchair. 
What would you have them do here? Pat down? Would that be better?

The second case involves a woman who set off the metal detector with a foreign device. In order to get a better look at it, they asked her into a private room to inspect further and immediately let her go. 

The third case doesn't sound like it involves any issues going through a scanner or metal detector, not sure why that wasn't an option, but they saw something unfamiliar and wanted to get a quick peek at it.  This one sounds a little fishy, unless there were no body scanners available or she refused to use one.

If you're against profiling (which I assume you are), and there's probably not a tremendous government surplus available for improving recruiting, hiring and training of TSA reps, then what's left? 

You're right.

Ineffective security theater that makes us feel safer by asking elderly women to drop their pants is the only option if we want to perpetuate that illusion that we're doing something—anything—about the terrorists.

[PenPho]

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/broward/fl-tsa-strip-searches-20111205,0,2669917,full.story

Three South Florida women, all elderly and with medical problems, say Transportation Security Administration officers made them take off their clothes during the screening process at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport last week.

All three, one with a defibrillator, one with a colostomy bag and the other with diabetes, say they were forced to disrobe in a private room at the same terminal.

"This was outrageous," Lenore Zimmerman, 84, who winters in the Wynmoor Village condominium complex in Coconut Creek, said on Monday. "For some reason, they decided I look like a terrorist."

The TSA says no improper strip searches were conducted – in that none of the women were improperly touched – and all standard protocols were followed...

...

Zimmerman said prior to catching a JetBlue flight to Fort Lauderdale on Nov. 29, she asked TSA officers to bypass the body scanner machine because has a defibrillator. She also requires a wheelchair while traveling.

She said she was taken to a private room and asked to take off her pants and underwear. She said officers wanted to see a back brace she needs to wear after recent spinal surgery.

"They didn't touch me, but they told me to pull my pants down," said Zimmerman, a widow, adding she felt humiliated. "My blood pressure after the incident was 189 over 90, and it shouldn't be that high."

She said she missed her 1 p.m. flight but caught one two and half hours later.

...

Linda Kallish, 66, of Boynton Beach, was scheduled to be on the same flight as Zimmerman. Because she is diabetic, she has a glucose monitor that checks her blood sugar every five minutes strapped to one leg and an insulin pump strapped on the other.

After she set off the metal detector, a female TSA officer ordered her into a private room and told her to take her pants off, Kallish said. She said the officer didn't touch her.

"So I took my pants off and showed it to her," Kallish said. "She just looked at it and said, 'Have a nice trip.'"

...

In a third case, Ruth Sherman, 88, of Sunrise, was returning home from New York on Nov. 29, when TSA officers noticed the bulge from her colostomy bag, accord to CBS News.

"This is private for me. It's bad enough that I have it. I had to pull it from my sweat pants and I had to pull my underwear down," she told a correspondent for WCBS, a New York television station. "You don't do that to anybody. I felt like I was invaded."

...

TSA officials noted whenever a person opts out of the body scanner, secondary screenings, including pat-downs, are conducted "in a manner that treats all passengers with dignity, respect and courtesy."

Intrepid Reader: PenFoe

"If these people have nothing to hide, then they have nothing to worry about. So drop your drawers, you old bag!"

Hey Strawprude...there's a difference between walking through a body scanner machine and having to disrobe in a private room in front of someone.
I still don't care personally, but I recognize the difference.   

That said, let's go case-by-case for a second here.

The first case involves a woman who couldn't go through the body scanner and couldn't (presumably?) go through the metal detector because she was in a wheelchair. 
What would you have them do here? Pat down? Would that be better?

The second case involves a woman who set off the metal detector with a foreign device. In order to get a better look at it, they asked her into a private room to inspect further and immediately let her go. 

The third case doesn't sound like it involves any issues going through a scanner or metal detector, not sure why that wasn't an option, but they saw something unfamiliar and wanted to get a quick peek at it.  This one sounds a little fishy, unless there were no body scanners available or she refused to use one.

If you're against profiling (which I assume you are), and there's probably not a tremendous government surplus available for improving recruiting, hiring and training of TSA reps, then what's left? 

You're right.

Ineffective security theater that makes us feel safer by asking elderly women to drop their pants is the only option if we want to perpetuate that illusion that we're doing something—anything—about the terrorists.

As I simultaneously argue this in the SBox...

How do you know that the security is ineffective?
Because they don't catch a lot of bombs?

If we're not going to profile, then what's a realistic alternative?

[Wheezer]

How do you know that the security is ineffective?

They just publicly demonstrated that wearing a bag of shit is a perfectly good way of introducing explosives onto a plane. Fuck, pair 'em up, put the detonator in the glucose meter, and you're good to go.

[J. Walter Weatherman]

[morpheus]

NEWTMENTUM!

EDIT: this was funnier when it was Gary Busey clad in pink footie pajamas.  It turns out that someone else at the event was the one in the pajamas.

[Chuck to Chuck]

"That's one of the things that I like about (Mitt Romney) — because he's been consistent since he changed his mind," - Christine O'Donnell

[morpheus]

Seriously, Barney?

(could also have gone in the DDD thread)

[Quality Start Machine]

Seriously, Barney?

(could also have gone in the DDD thread)

(||)

[Gilgamesh]

When you need to write (and really feel your writing), you turn to a typewriter; when the corporate world gets you down, you become a farmer:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/21/farming-young-people_n_1162575.html

(apologies for HuffPo)

[J. Walter Weatherman]

http://www.desipio.com/messageboard/index.php?action=post;quote=248645;topic=7174.4500;num_replies=4509;sesc=fb2736a55dc7569eb7e312a6b4e731d3

How do you know that the security is ineffective?
Because they don't catch a lot of bombs?

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2011/12/tsa-insanity-201112

Has the nation simply wasted a trillion dollars protecting itself against terror? Mostly, but perhaps not entirely. "Most of the time we assess risk through gut feelings," says Paul Slovic, a psychology professor at the University of Oregon who is also the president of Decision Research, a nonprofit R&D organization. "We're not robots just looking at the numbers." Confronted with a risk, people ask questions: Is this a risk that I benefit from taking, as when I get in a car? Is it forced on me by someone else, as when I am exposed to radiation? Are the potential consequences catastrophic? Is the impact immediate and observable, or will I not know the consequences until much later, as with cancer? Such questions, Slovic says, "reflect values that are sometimes left out of the experts' calculations."

Security theater, from this perspective, is an attempt to convey a message: "We are doing everything possible to protect you." When 9/11 shattered the public's confidence in flying, Slovic says, the handful of anti-terror measures that actually work—hardening the cockpit door, positive baggage matching, more-effective intelligence—would not have addressed the public's dread, because the measures can't really be seen. Relying on them would have been the equivalent of saying, "Have confidence in Uncle Sam," when the problem was the very loss of confidence. So a certain amount of theater made sense. Over time, though, the value of the message changes. At first the policeman in the train station reassures you. Later, the uniform sends a message: train travel is dangerous. "The show gets less effective, and sometimes it becomes counterproductive."

Terrorists will try to hit the United States again, Schneier says. One has to assume this. Terrorists can so easily switch from target to target and weapon to weapon that focusing on preventing any one type of attack is foolish. Even if the T.S.A. were somehow to make airports impregnable, this would simply divert terrorists to other, less heavily defended targets—shopping malls, movie theaters, churches, stadiums, museums. The terrorist's goal isn't to attack an airplane specifically; it's to sow terror generally. "You spend billions of dollars on the airports and force the terrorists to spend an extra $30 on gas to drive to a hotel or casino and attack it," Schneier says. "Congratulations!"

What the government should be doing is focusing on the terrorists when they are planning their plots. "That's how the British caught the liquid bombers," Schneier says. "They never got anywhere near the plane. That's what you want—not catching them at the last minute as they try to board the flight."

[J. Walter Weatherman]

Heh...

http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/2011/12/gay_marriage_amy_koch_michael_brodkorb.php

The gay and lesbian community of Minnesota has issued a letter of apology to recently resigned Senate Majority Leader Amy Koch for ruining the institution of marriage and causing her to stray from her husband and engage in an "inappropriate relationship."

"On behalf of all gays and lesbians living in Minnesota, I would like to wholeheartedly apologize for our community's successful efforts to threaten your traditional marriage," reads the letter from John Medeiros. "We apologize that our selfish requests to marry those we love has cheapened and degraded traditional marriage so much that we caused you to stray from your own holy union for something more cheap and tawdry."

[Gilgamesh]

Fuck liberals sometimes: http://www.thenation.com/article/165317/world-really-safer-without-soviet-union

[J. Walter Weatherman]

Fuck liberals sometimes: http://www.thenation.com/article/165317/world-really-safer-without-soviet-union

Today I learned that Mikhail Gorbachev is a "liberal."

[Wheezer]

If there's anything more amusing than neo-Nazis crying MODS, I'm hard-pressed to come up with it at the moment.

I thought you might say something like that after seeing what he posted. This bitch just trolls around the movement for info on what activists are doing so that he can throw a wrench into it. Why he does this, I don't know.

I reported his post to mods. Remains to be seen what they'll do.
__________________
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