TSA Backlash Week: Emmett Tyrrell, Modern Patton

Good stuff: "John Tyner, missed his flight completely owing to his protest. He greeted the Transportation Security Administration staff, camera in hand, in San Diego. He had opted for the pat-down in place of the scanner, but he warned, 'If you touch my junk, I'll have you arrested.' Yes, he referred to his genitalia as 'junk.' Well, speak for yourself, Mr. Tyner. Now he is threatened by the TSA with an $11,000 fine. That is a bit stiff. He missed his plane. That is enough, but Tyner might keep things in perspective. America is at war."

Emphasis added. The opening speech of George C. Scott's "Patton," as rewritten by Emmett Tyrrell:

MAN: Ten-hut!

(SILENCE)

(BUGLE PLAYS)

Be seated.

PATTON: Now, I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making some other poor dumb bastard feel him up in line for the 6:25 am flight to Wilmington.

Men all this stuff you've heard about America not wanting to take a flight, wanting to stay out of the scanners and security lines is a lot of horse dung. Americans traditionally love a flight. All real Americans love the sting of battling their way through shoe-removal checkpoints.

When you were kids you all admired the champion marble shooter the fastest runner, big-league ball players, the toughest boxers. NOW it's time to find out who really does have the toughest boxers. I kid, I kid.

Now some of you boys, I know are wondering whether or not you'll chicken out under fire. Don't worry about it. I can assure you that you will all do your duty -- that you will, in fact, get very comfortable brushing your hands against the inner thighs and genitals of dozens, perhaps hundreds of passengers a day. Thousands per week! Uncountable thousands in a month!

The airline passengers are the enemy. Wade into them! Feel their junk! Carress them in the belly!

There's another thing I want you to remember. I don't want to get any message saying we are "holding John Tyner's testicles. " We're not "holding" anything. We're advancing constantly. We're not interested in holding on to anything except the passenger's balls. We're going to hold on to him by the nose and kick him in the ass. We're going to kick the hell out of him all the time and we're going to go through him like crap through a goose!

All right, now, you sons of bitches, you know how I feel. I will be proud to lead you wonderful guys into Denver International Airport anytime, anywhere.

That's all.

(ANNNNND: SCENE!)

Obama: Crony Capitalist or Socialist Hack?

I have a few friends who need to listen to Dave Weigel:

"Since inauguration day the Dow is up 41 percent, and the S&P is up 49 percent.

Can you use this to argue that Barack Obama's presidency has been an economic success? Oh, I don't think so. Unemployment, foreclosures, bank closures, and other much more important metrics are much worse than they were when he was inaugurated. But the recovery of the stock market, outpacing the recovery of the economy, is unusual. Ronald Reagan was inaugurated at the start of a growing recession with the Dow at 950.68; it closed at 1,021.25 on November 19, 1982. That was a rise of 7.4 percent from inauguration to the post-midterm weeks.

I see two things here. One: The lefty critique of Obama as an incompetent crony capitalist continues to make more sense than the conservative critique of the president as a radical anti-capitalist. Two, politicians are hacks who'll use any economic data they can find to make their points, and ignore the data once it stops making the points."

TSA Backlash Week: OK, Smart Guy, What Do We Do Then?

Mother Jones' Nick Baumann talks to security experts about how to make flying safe without making security procedures so damned invasive: "All three experts favor scrapping most of the security measures that people hate—and not necessarily replacing them with anything. Ideally, the money that was saved wouldn't be spent on airport security at all: it would be spent on trying to stop terrorists before they got to the airport. That means better-funding law enforcement and intelligence."

A couple of suggestions in Baumann's piece -- which, really, read the whole thing -- caught my attention. One is that airport lines actually need to move much more quickly, because those stagnant queues are themselves a pretty good target for an airport attack. The other is to introduce truly randomized screening of passengers:

That means that while the majority of passengers wouldn't face the invasive security checks they face now, every passenger would face the risk of a thorough search. Terrorists can't avoid or plan for truly random enhanced searches, like they can with protocol-, background-, and profiling-based searches. You don't want terrorists to be able to plan their way around your security. You want them to have to get lucky.

That's probably not as race-based as Charles Krauthammer would prefer, but still.

The Best Health Care In The World

Not here:

"Britain's health service makes it the only one of 11 leading industrialised nations where wealth does not determine access to care – providing the most widely accessible treatments at low cost among rich nations, a study has found.

The survey, by US health thinktank the Commonwealth Fund, showed that while a third of American adults 'went without recommended care, did not see a doctor when sick, or failed to fill prescriptions because of costs', this figure was only 6% in the UK and 5% in Holland."

David Brooks Knows The Internet Happened, Right?

David Brooks laments the loss of the American middle-brow, and the resulting demise of Newsweek and other magazines that could show the rubes in flyover country how to aspire to New Yorkiness.. But he completely and utterly misdiagnoses what went wrong:

These magazines also inflamed a million imaginations. Smart boys and girls got a glimpse of a wider world. The implication was that their current lives were insufficient, but they could read about John Foster Dulles or Georgia O’Keeffe and gain access to a higher realm that they might someday join.

About a generation ago, this earnest self-improvement ethic came under attack. People no longer believed that there was such a thing as a common culture that all educated Americans should study and know. The new ethos valued hipness, not class.

Moreover, the self-esteem hurricanes blew across the landscape. You don’t have to read or listen to boring stuff to possess character. You are wonderful just the way you are.

I won't deny the influence of the cults of hipsterdom and self esteem here, but Brooks is being remarkably obtuse. They're not the reason that smart boys and girls don't read Newsweek anymore. (Believe it or not, I had my own subscription when I was in high school, waaaaaay back in the 1980s.) What happened is that the Internet happened. I've written about this a million times.

Want to know about politics? Well, a smart kid can read Brooks' own New York Times online, every day, the way I never could in the 1980s. Want to learn about or listen to opera? (Brooks laments that Albuquerque kids no longer get much national opera coverage.) You can watch the best opera in the world live on the Metropolitan Opera's website. Want to know more about literature, avant garde dance, indie bands, politics, foreign affairs, fashion? There's no end to the possibilities! Brooks is wrong to suggest there's no audience for this stuff anymore, even if he's right that it's fragmented. The truth is that more people have more access to the high- and middle-brow culture than ever did during his Golden Age. Newsweek hasn't suffered because people stopped caring about self-improvement. It suffered because there were faster, better, more direct ways to do it. Brooks sometimes sounds like a doctor who only knows how to diagnose one disease; it doesn't matter at all what the symptoms actually are.

U.S. Deploying Tanks in Afghanistan

It's true that, as part of counterinsurgency, you still have to kill the enemy. And it's furthermore true that Pete Mansoor, the first director of the counterinsurgency center at Fort Leavenworth -- back when it was run by Gen. Petraeus -- came from the armored brigades. I got to interview him during that period and asked him how tanks could make a good counterinsurgency tool: it struck me as counterintuitive. I don't recall his answer, but it must not've struck me as terribly convincing. (It was otherwise a great and enlightening conversation. Mansoor, as history has already recorded, is pretty smart.)

You fight a war with the tools you have, I suppose. But U.S. forces have eased up on long-range bombing from the air in Afghanistan because it too easily can kill innocents instead of the targeted insurgents. I guess I'm skeptical that a tool that allows you too hit targets a mile away will be a significant improvement on that.

TSA Backlash Week: An Excuse For Racial Profiling?

If Charles Krauthammer has his way:

"We pretend that we go through this nonsense as a small price paid to ensure the safety of air travel. Rubbish. This has nothing to do with safety - 95 percent of these inspections, searches, shoe removals and pat-downs are ridiculously unnecessary. The only reason we continue to do this is that people are too cowed to even question the absurd taboo against profiling - when the profile of the airline attacker is narrow, concrete, uniquely definable and universally known. So instead of seeking out terrorists, we seek out tubes of gel in stroller pouches."

TSA screening is a bad, ineffective policy. Racial profiling would be, too. Instead of alienating everybody with invasive measures, let's just alienate the brown people! And without actually improving our security! Forbes' Abigail Esman:

According to a recent report by the Bipartisan Policy Center’s National Security Preparedness Group, statistically speaking, the one most likely to be a Muslim terrorist is the sandy-haired guy in jeans. In fact, according to the report, the majority of Muslim jihadists in America are white and born in the USA (21%) – the one exception being Somali immigrants, who top the list at 31%.

That fact explains such figures as Colleen LaRose, aka “Jihad Jane,” and Daniel Patrick Boyd, the North Carolina drywall contractor indicted in 2009 on charges of training others to wage jihad.

Terrorist ideology is just that: an idea. It's not genetic, can't be seen in the color of a person's skin or the length of their beard. TSA Backlash Week has a good reason for existing, but the answer to the problem isn't to shove it off onto foreigners and minorities.

Leaving The Middle Class For Poverty

A very depressing article:

"The Census Bureau recently reported that the poverty rate in the United States rose to 14.3 percent last year, the highest level in more than 50 years.

Texas and Florida saw the most people fall below the line. In Florida alone, 323,000 people became newly poor last year, bringing the state's poverty total to 2.7 million.

The numbers tell another tale as well: Nationwide, in black households such as Walker's, income plunged an average of 4.4 percent in 2009, almost three times the drop among whites. The number of blacks living below the official poverty line - $21,756 for a family of four - increased by 7 percent in just one year."

Public Won't Be Silenced At Philly City Council Meetings

I've not covered City Council in Philadelphia, but I have elsewhere, and I can tell you that public comment sessions can be a mix of the provocative and tedious. Still, I've got to think thatthis is good news for Philly governance: "The state Supreme Court, in a 4-3 ruling made public yesterday, says Council has been violating the state's Sunshine Act by refusing to allow people to comment on legislation during Thursday's weekly sessions. Council argued that allowing people to comment in committee hearings before legislation is considered by the full Council was adequate."

I don't know that this will lead to any improvements around town. And some of the council members do a pretty good job of listening to their constituents, from what I can tell. But I don't have a problem reminding everybody that it's our government, not theirs.

Philly Police Corruption Watch

That's expensive: "Over the past three fiscal years, city taxpayers have shelled out $31.6 million to settle lawsuits brought against the department. The majority of the payments - $20.8 million - went to settle complaints of civil-rights violations by police officers, according to figures provided by the city's Department of Finance."

Good Morning!

May be slow blogging today. I'm certain there will be TSA Backlash Week entries, however.

TSA Backlash Week: John Pistole Gets The Business

The leader of the TSA went before the Senate today to defend his agency's invasive airport screening techniques. Apparently he demanded to be given pat-down before giving the green light to the technique:

"“Yes, it was more invasive than what I was used to,” said Pistole. “Of course, what’s in my mind … is what are the plots out there, how are we informed by the latest intelligence and latest technology and what do we need to do to ensure the American people that as they travel that we are being thorough.”

“So yes, it is clearly more invasive. The purpose of that is obviously to detect the type of devices that we had not seen before last Christmas. I am very sensitive to and concerned about people’s privacy concerns and I want to work through that as best we can.” 

Pistole told a separate panel of senators yesterday that the pat-down technique is so thorough that, had it been used, it would have thwarted the suspected Christmas Day bomber, who allegedly hid an explosive device in his underwear. "

Is it churlish to note that the Christmas Day bomber actually was thwarted? Sure, he got through airport security, but once he started trying to accomplish his evil act, the plane's passengers and crew intervened. And it seems to me that ought to be OK. The man was stopped without body scanners and without invasive patdowns -- as, incidentally, was Richard Reid, the "shoe bomber" who forced all of us to take off our footwear every time we go through security. Al Qaeda keeps failing, and we keep ratcheting up security anyway. God help us when and if they're successful again. The anal probes probably won't be far behind.

TSA Backlash Week: Col. Nathan Jessup Gives Us An Earful

Emaw channels Nathan Jessup, now working for TSA:

"You want the truth? You want the TRUTH!? You can't handle the truth! Son, we live in a world that has airports, and those airports have to be guarded by men with latex gloves. Who's gonna do it? You? You, Mr. Jillette?

I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom! You weep for your groped genitals and you curse the TSA. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know: that the groping of your private parts, while tragic, probably saves lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives!

You don't want the truth, because deep down in places you don't talk about on your blogs and on Twitter, you want me in that airport! You need me in your underwear! We use words like 'bend over', 'spread 'em', 'cop a feel'. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something."

Will Congress Pass An Internet Censorship Bill?

Funny what Congress can pass when it gets the gumption. Not unemployment benefits. Not tax cuts for the middle class. Not a nuclear arms treaty with the Russians.But this?:

A bill giving the government the power to shut down Web sites that host materials that infringe copyright is making its way quietly through the lame-duck session of Congress, raising the ire of free-speech groups and prompting a group of academics to lobby against the effort.

The Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) was introduced in Congress this fall by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT). It would grant the federal government the power to block access to any Web domain that is found to host copyrighted material without permission.

Opponents note that the powers given the government under the bill are very broad. Because the bill targets domain names and not specific materials, an entire Web site can be shut down. So for example, if the US determines that there are copyright-infringing materials on YouTube, it could theoretically block access to all of YouTube, whether or not particular material being accessed infringes copyright.

Activist group DemandProgress, which is running a petition against the bill, argues the powers in the bill could be used for political purposes. If the whistleblower Web site WikiLeaks is found to be hosting copyrighted material, for instance, access to WikiLeaks could be blocked for all US Internet users.

Apologies to Raw Story for quoting so much of their story. Good news for them: If the bill passes, they can shut down my blog!

That said, I don't know if Raw Story is being alarmist here or if the bill has a real chance of passing during the lame duck session. If so, the public should raise holy hell. Congress can pass bills that serve powerful interests, but sits on its hands for stuff the rest of us want? You can't possibly be cynical enough.

Hat Tip: Emaw.

NJ Pastor: Quit Facebook or Leave The Church

Inky: "The world's biggest social network can lead married people astray, says the head of the Living Word Christian Fellowship Church in Neptune, N.J. So, in his Sunday sermon, the Rev. Cedric A. Miller will announce that married church leaders have to log out for good, or get kicked out."

I'm not the position of offering church leaders advice, but in this socially networked age it seems to me that telling people that Facebook is sinful is like telling them that, oh, walking downtown is sinful. It's a semi-public square that can be used for good or ill.

If I were a church-goer, my recommendation would be to encourage couples to use Facebook in a way that's mutually accountable -- like, say, everything else in their marriage. But temptation can find you anywhere. If you're not going to use Facebook because of that, you'd best not even walk outside. There's really attractive women out there.

Rush Limbaugh and Race

Adam Serwer:

"I think it's wrong to suggest that opposition to Obama's agenda is 'race-based,' because that suggests conservatives would feel differently if Obama weren't president. I think the GOP's general positions on the issues would be the same if Hillary Clinton were president.

What's clear, though, is that conservatives deploy racially tinged rhetoric against liberal policy priorities and Democratic politicians, and that Obama being president has a lot to do with these arguments being used. Rush Limbaugh wouldn't be comparing him to gang members if he weren't black. With Clinton, Limbaugh's sexism, rather than his racism, would be amplified. So while it might be unfair to suggest people are conservatives because they're racists, it's entirely fair to ask why conservatives are comfortable with their most prominent ideological figure's casual use of racism as a political bludgeon"

TSA Backlash Week: Kevin Drum's Meh

Kevin Drum can figure out what the big deal is: "In fact, I think it's a pretty good sign of a country gone insane that this — TSA screeners occasionally viewing a vague outline of your body — is what's finally driven everyone over the edge. Shoes, laptops, liquids, wands, special screenings, warrantless wiretaps, you name it. They annoyed us, but we accepted them. But this! Finally left and right can unite in outrage over government run wild."

I take his point: We've been headed to this moment for awhile. But there's an element of political snobbery when you roll your eyes at people protesting the invasion of their privacy because they didn't protest soon enough for your tastes. Rather than see this as an opportunity, perhaps, to re-open the discussion about what government is doing to us in the name of security, Drum becomes the political version of a hipster who liked Arcade Fire's older stuff. I respect and rely on his work, but this rant is a little silly.

TSA Backlash Week: The LA Times Thinks Anal Probing Would Be Going Too Far

In a provocatively titled editorial, "Shut up and be scanned," the LA Times asserts that body scans and pat downs aren't too intrusive at the nation's airports. Luckily, the paper does offer an answer to the question, "How far is too far." Unfortunately, the answer is: "Pretty far":

"In reaction to the new high-tech scans, suicide bombers may well switch to buses and trains rather than airplanes, or airborne killers might resort to inserting explosives into their body cavities, where the machines can't detect them. So, it's reasonable to ask, what's next? Anal probes at the airport? It's safe to say that if the TSA gets to that point, it will have crossed the line, and it might be time to explore less invasive methods."

I think that's a joke. Is that a joke? I ... can't really tell.

Dunno. Seems to me that reasonable people can agree that a reasonable level of privacy starts somewhere farther from your person than your colon. But I'm not certain the LA Times is being reasonable here. The headline offers up the peevish counterresponse of those who are so afraid of terrorism they're willing to give up just about any level of personal freedom to avoid it. Anal probes? That might be too far, but go ahead and look at me naked. JUST SHUT UP AND BE SCANNED! And there's no point in such cases suggesting to such folks that their chances of dying at the hands of terrorism is roughly the same as being struck by lightning in a car crash. The fear is already there, embedded like a particularly persistent tick. One hates to use a cliche, but it's true: In such cases, the terrorists really have won.

A Small Word In Defense of George W. Bush

Ruth Marcus, I think, largely has this right: "In short, Bush inherited a budget in healthy shape. He left it in tatters. The faltering economy played a supporting role, but the chief factors were of Bush's making: his tax cuts, his wars, his prescription drug bill. Without these, the country would have been running surpluses during his tenure. The wars will wind down, but the price of the tax cuts and prescription drug bill will climb even higher over the next decade."

The only thing I'd say in even mild defense of Bush is to suggest that the formulation "his wars" is only half right. Iraq was a terrible blunder, but the decision to go to war in Afghanistan was a rational reaction to the 9/11 attack; there's something off-note about calling it his war when Americans were all on board, and in fact probably would have chased from office any president who didn't respond to the attack in similar fashion. Marcus is right, though, that Bush is the first president to put a war on the credit card. His attempts to evade responsibility for the country's budget problems is very far from convincing.

We Had To Destroy The Village In Order To Save It

NATO is demolishing entire Afghan villages because some houses have been booby-trapped by the Taliban:

"While it has widespread support among Afghan officials and even some residents, and has been accompanied by an equally determined effort to hand out cash compensation to homeowners, other local people have complained that the demolitions have gone far beyond what is necessary.

It would also seem to run counter to Gen. David H. Petraeus’s counterinsurgency strategy, which calls for respecting property as well as lives, and to run up against recent calls by President Hamid Karzai for foreign forces to lower their profile and avoid tactics that alienate Afghan civilians. There have been no reports of civilians casualties from the demolitions."

Counterinsurgency is about protecting and winning the support of the population. Wonder how well home demolitions will achieve that goal?