Time to Say 'So Long' to the TSA's Sour Attitude

[tangent4ronpaul]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/diane-dimond/tsa-security_b_1964325.html

A recent Gallup poll has just concluded that 54 percent of Americans think the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is doing an "excellent" or "good" job at our airports.

I don't. I think the TSA is engaged in a nationwide effort to cavalierly and routinely strip travelers of their dignity. I think in some instances the system is decidedly un-American.

[...]

I guess I have two major problems with the system. First, the lines are too long and I'm perplexed because there almost always seems to be extra agents standing around not opening up the closed lanes. Second, is the demeanor of the TSA agents. There are few smiles, never any meaningful eye contact, never an attempt to make the traveler feel like anything other than a criminal. In any other business this kind of employee attitude would result in someone being fired for fear the customers would go elsewhere.

But we are captive to the airport monopoly. There is no other way to travel long distances quickly unless you're Donald Trump and you have your own private jet.

I'm hardly alone in my displeasure with this nearly 11 year old organization that is old enough to be better at what it does. Frequent TSA critic Senator Rand Paul appeared before a Florida audience recently mimicking the legs apart and hands-on-head stance travelers must assume for certain airport machines and exclaimed, "Is this the pose of a free man?"

My answer? No it is not.

The House Subcommittee on Transportation Security released a report not long ago that called TSA operations, "In many cases costly, counterintuitive and poorly executed."

Here's a stunning example: The TSA's annual payroll is more than $3 million for about 62,000 employees. Roughly 47,000 of them are the screeners you see at the airport. But, according to the sub-committee (are you sitting down?), "There does not appear to be a correlation between the TSA's staffing model and the number of travelers that need to be screened." In fact, the report said, there has been a "net decrease in the number of people traveling," in the United States. In other words, all those extra agents I've seen standing around simply aren't needed.

Here's another quick example: In 2006, the TSA spent nearly $30 million to buy more than 200 "puffer machines" that are supposed to detect explosive particles on carry-on bags. Only after the mega-purchase did they realize the machines didn't work in humid airport environments. Yes, I would call that a costly and poorly executed program.

So, who's in charge of this arm of government and why can't they make the TSA be more consumer friendly and budget conscious? Well, that would be the United States Congress but so far the current TSA Administrator John Pistole doesn't appear inclined to listen to either congress or the courts.

According to Joe Brancatelli, a travel writer who has been closely following the TSA saga and especially its failure to comply with a federal court's order to review the policy on using full-body scanners, "TSA Administrator John Pistole repeatedly ignores Congressional mandates and the law as well as those pesky federal court orders."

The TSA also dragged its feet on approving airports requests to join the "Screening Partnership Program" which allows airports to opt out of using federal agents in favor of private contractors. Only after certain congressmen got angry did the TSA begin to ramp up its approvals. Now, three major airports -- San Francisco, Orlando and Sacramento -- and 14 smaller ones have made the change.

I can't wait for the idea to spread nationwide. I've always been of the mind that private business can do things more cost effective and efficiently than a government bureaucracy that gets more bloated every year.

Now, I just hope those private contractors teach their screeners to be more polite to the customers.

[MelissaWV]

I get the gist of what the article is trying to say, but it seems to imply that being treated like criminals would be okay if only it were done faster and with a smile.

[MoneyWhereMyMouthIs2]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/diane-dimond/tsa-security_b_1964325.html

A recent Gallup poll has just concluded that 54 percent of Americans think the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is doing an "excellent" or "good" job at our airports.


That's hilarious.

[Lucille]

“They’re not the same Americans now. They crave authority,” he said. “They lust after regulation. They love being frisked, x-rayed, and felt-up at airports because it gives them a false sense of significance.”
--Bob (http://www.fredoneverything.net/Bob.shtml)

[Anti Federalist]

“They’re not the same Americans now. They crave authority,” he said. “They lust after regulation. They love being frisked, x-rayed, and felt-up at airports because it gives them a false sense of significance.”
--Bob (http://www.fredoneverything.net/Bob.shtml)

Another home run for Fred Reed.

Worthy of a full posting:



Free FallConversations with Bob

December 5, 2010

http://www.fredoneverything.net/Bob.shtml

Last week, having written that the governor of Texas wanted to invade Mexico militarily, I was multiply told that I was crazy. I am, but what has that got to do with it?

The Washington Post wants to invade Mexico.

I didn’t believe Bob, I’ll call him, a crazy friend from other times. He knocked around the Pacific for years doing things related to boats, helicopters, and fish, and currently waits in durance vile on the Left Coast awaiting his chance for a jailbreak back to the Orient.

What happened was, he came back to the US after years in Asia, and stared with horror.

Modern American men, he said (remember that he lives in San Francisco) were “ear-ring dangling epicenes with as much testosterone as you would find in a good milkshake.” He railed about cringing, boot-licking, video-game twiddling, mouth-breathing morons with their corneas sutured to the blinking screen of the lobotomy box. “The country has gone to dwarves,” he groaned.

Wow, I thought. This is good stuff. Inspired vituperation is my chosen joy, and in short supply in these effete times. But—was it true?

Mouth-breathing morons did the Apollo landings? Actual boot-lickng? Not even in Washington. Well, unless they were Guccis.

“They’re not the same Americans now. They crave authority,” he said. “They lust after regulation. They love being frisked, x-rayed, and felt-up at airports because it gives them a false sense of significance.”

Keep it coming, Bob, I thought You’re on a roll. But I didn’t believe it. No one wants a prostate exam at boarding gates from a chunky federal retard. Very few, anyway. But what can they do about it? Once the Nazis have the Reichstag, you bend over or land in the slam.

Wild thought (This column doesn’t do organized. It may be related to pharmacology, in another universe, long ago.) Here’s my plan to close the budgetary deficit. TSA can pre-screen travelers into budding teenage lovelies, hunky guys, and unaccompanied children. Then it can rent out the groping lanes respectively to dirty old men, Bruce and Lance, and leering pederasts. I estimate you can get, say, a grand an hour. Maybe a bulk-lot contract with the Vatican.

I think it’s brilliant.

Having left the American male in ruins, he lit into the American female. (He really talks like this. It’s genius.) “Villainous overweight lemon-sucking shrews with thick ankles. They lurk in Hurman Resources departments like misandrous hagfish. They loathe men after the third inexplicable divorce. Eat ice cream out of the box and watch Oprah.”

It was artistry. I wasn’t sure it was true. Of course, I wasn’t sure it wasn’t. Such women existed but, having recently been in California, I found most to be pretty, agreeable, and nicely if casually packaged in attractive threads. I wasn’t married to them, though.

Still, there did seem to be a certain softening of what I had thought to be the national character. For example. I no longer saw many Harley hogs, with that wonderful guttural potatopotatopotato, straddled by hairy anti-social behemoths with tatoos saying “Born to die hard,” and “This end up.” No long-nosed choppers with ape-hanger handle bars.

The only Harleys I saw had male-menopausing proctologists perched atop like laying hens on a riding mower.

Other indicators pointed to the decay of the American spirit. Drunk driving as a creative form had gone to the great winding road in the sky. And if anyone suggested arming airline pilots, the stewardi all moaned, “Ohhh, I’d be tho thskared.”

But had the land of Kit Carson and Killer Kowalski really undergone the collective enmushment that Bob claimed to see? Authority worshipping? He aargued that invertebrates were making a comeback after going out of style in the Triassic or whenever. The guys, especially.

“Buncha pussy-whipped chimps.” Come on, Bob, there are tons of exceptions. "Exactly. Exceptions."

I had to grant a degree of truth to the diagnosis. The US is indeed the first estrogenated, forcibly feminized society, at least as regards atmosphere and hormone levels. Anything remotely masculine, like punching guys out in bars, or dodgeball, or riding a bike without a helmet, or swimming without a Caost-Guard approved flotation device and seven life guards, has been pretty much wrung out of the country. (Until recently I didn’t know that freeze tag was violence.) This is because women control the schools, set the tone of the country, and prefer security to freedom, which is bass-ackwards from a guy’s point of view. Of course women don’t want to nuke China. There are trade-offs, I guess.

(The only point that I would call Bullshit on. Hillary Clinton. That is all. - AF)

Bob further thinks we’ve turned into a nation of office tubers. He adverts sourly to the cubiculization of America, once the country of Evel Knieval and Junior Johnson. “See, Fred,” he said, “kids grow up assuming that they are going to spend their lives in little squares, as box-gerbils staring at screens, and it has altered them genetically. They aren’t actually becoming square to fit the spaces, at least not yet, but they have become torpid and easily frightened. It comes of having six-foot horizons all day. You can never tell what might be waiting in ambush out there in the world.”

That’s true. The average Joe is no longer a brawny back-hoe operator with triceps flapping like wattles and a six of Bud in a styrofoam cooler from the NAPA auto-parts outlet. Like God intended.

I fought back. I told Bob that cubiculization was necessary. Federal figures show that 157 million Americans work in offices, and three people in factories. This just shows how complex modern factories are, that they need so much supervision. It isn’t turning us into a nation of milquetoasts and popinjays, I said, who drink coffee with funny names while polishing their piercings.

Yes, I knew that the Army had just lowered physical standards again, and probably carried recruits around the obstacle course on fork lifts. I argued that it was to save their strength for combat, though.

Then I remembered: America is afraid of cap guns, which no longer exist. Of bottle rockets and pocketknives and Islamo-Mahmuds curled beneath the bed. And America is afraid of children. Puzzled boys of eleven are led from school in handcuffs for possession of a water pistol. A cop who would do it ought to go into hiding from embarrassment, but nothing embarrases anyone any longer. Ye gods and little catfish, I thought. Bob’s right. The country is afraid. Of everything.

How did this happen? Fear of toys, kids in chains and stuffed with Ritalin like paté geese. Women gobbling Prozac, porky army recruits who belong in buns, with ketchup.

Then Bob, who has no morals, sent me the CBS poll:

“Poll: Four in Five Support Full-Body Airport Scanners.”

Oh god. We really are turning into a nation of quivering weasels. I figure TSA is just a symptom, like fingers dropping off a leper.

[heavenlyboy34]

“They’re not the same Americans now. They crave authority,” he said. “They lust after regulation. They love being frisked, x-rayed, and felt-up at airports because it gives them a false sense of significance.”
--Bob (http://www.fredoneverything.net/Bob.shtml)
LMAO!!! Fred Reed FTW. :D:cool:

[Pericles]

What is so really sad is that Fred is right.

[heavenlyboy34]

This part is classic-
I had to grant a degree of truth to the diagnosis. The US is indeed the first estrogenated, forcibly feminized society, at least as regards atmosphere and hormone levels. Anything remotely masculine, like punching guys out in bars, or dodgeball, or riding a bike without a helmet, or swimming without a Caost-Guard approved flotation device and seven life guards, has been pretty much wrung out of the country. (Until recently I didn’t know that freeze tag was violence.) This is because women control the schools, set the tone of the country, and prefer security to freedom, which is bass-ackwards from a guy’s point of view. Of course women don’t want to nuke China. There are trade-offs, I guess. So true.

[Revolution9]

What is so really sad is that Fred is right.

Fred is always right.

http://www.fredoneverything.net

rev9