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TSA outrage misplaced

The big buzz this weekend is the outrage about the new pat downs and scanners used by the TSA at our airports. The right wing have their answer which is racist on its face and other complaints are misplaced.

The right wing don’t believe all people should be checked – they argue only nasty brown men need to be stopped. They also carry water for the airlines who hate strong security because it’s bad for business.

Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney U.S. Air Force (Retired) thinks that we should strip search all 18-28 year old Muslim males at the airport.
What would happen is that anyone who’s the slightest bit swarthy, black or middle eastern looking — be they Italians, Spanish, Jews, non-Muslim Arabs, North Africans, or blacks — will be summarily detained and strip searched at airports. And for how long does this continue? When does it end? Who will be wrongfully detained? But rewind a second here. The Underpants Bomber was an average-looking black man. McInerney is basically suggesting that all blacks in that age range be strip searched. All of them.

McInerney Wants to Strip Search Muslims (Blacks)

But as travelers grow more frustrated with heightened airport security, it appears Republicans are opening a new front on the privatization crusade.

A Republican lawmaker, who is faulting big government spending, is suggesting that airports dump the Transportation Security Administration altogether, and opt instead to privatize security.

And some airports, fed up with poor service in a climate where travelers are outraged about the prospect of full-body scanners, are listening.

The consideration comes after Florida Republican Rep. John Mica — a longtime critic of the TSA — wrote letters to the country’s 100 busiest airports earlier this month asking them to switch to private security.

Mica is poised to become chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, so he’ll be in a position to advance this issue.

GOP FLOATS TSA PRIVATIZATION

This weekend we had stories about a cancer survivor having to take out and show a prosthetic breast and a small child having to take off his shirt while a TSA agent patted him down.

If the pat downs and scans were done outside of airports – such as to access buildings or neighborhoods then I would agree they were unreasonable searches but in an airport getting ready to board a plane – all of us are potential terrorists so the searches are not unreasonable.

The body scans are not equal to porn unless you get freaky with pictures of white blobs.

Racial profiling just doesn’t work. What we need to do is profile based on behavior. Israelis talk to everyone entering their airport and detain those who meet certain requirements for further scrutiny.

The TSA pat downs and scans may not catch everyone but flying is not a civil right.

To the issue of more security being bad for business – terrorism is also bad for business and if your airline or airport is a known terrorist target then people will avoid you if your security is lacking like it was back on September 10, 2001 when minimum wage low skill workers were responsible for airport security.

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GOP Budget cutter Jim Jordan turns down budget cutting job

Rep Jim Jordan (R-Urbana) who for years has talked about cutting the Federal budget, complained about the spending of the current Congress, promised to cut spending and not raise taxes and was praised by a district newspaper for his promise to cut the budget, turned down an appointment to the powerful House Appropriations committee. Why would a committed budget cutter turn down a place on THE committee that writes the budget?

In a glowing editorial giving Jordan its endorsement, The Findlay (OH) Courier noted:

Jordan believes the Obama administration needs to get a handle on spending, and cut taxes, not raise them, if the country is going to fully recover from the recession.

As a member of the Budget, Judiciary, and Oversight and Government Reform committees, Jordan is positioned to push for many of the changes that the majority of voters in this district favor.

Jordan proposes reducing “discretionary spending,” which includes items outside Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and defense. He proposes reducing the payroll tax by half for one year, and reducing corporate taxes. He wants to eliminate capital gains taxes and the estate tax.

He believes unspent money from the federal government’s $700 billion bailout of banks in the 2008 financial crisis should be used for deficit reduction.

Published on October 5th 2010 on Section A page 04 Findlay (OH) Courier

You can also check other posts on my blog that quotes Jordan on cutting the budget.

Then today the website “Politico” reported:

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) was asked to be an appropriator and said thanks, but no thanks. Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), a tea party favorite, turned down a shot at Appropriations, which controls all discretionary spending. So did conservatives like Lynn Westmoreland (R-Ga.) and Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), an ambitious newcomer who will lead the influential Republican Study Committee.

Appropriations panel loses its luster

So why would Jim Jordan turn down a committee assignment that would not only fit in his campaign promises for the past couple of years but would also bring him some prestige?

He doesn’t want to have blood on his hands. The GOP has made no secret they plan on making wide spread cuts to everything except defense and giving tax breaks to the wealthy while raising taxes on the middle class.

“Anybody who’s a Republican right now, come June, is going to be accused of hating seniors, hating education, hating children, hating clean air and probably hating the military and farmers, too,” said Jack Kingston (R-Ga.), a fiscal conservative who is lobbying to become chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. “So much of the work is going to be appropriations related. There’s going to be a lot of tough votes. So some people may want to shy away from the committee. I understand it.”

Exactly. Jordan doesn’t want more proof that he hates seniors, education, the unemployed, veterans, and the other groups he voted against during the current congress.

*Update*

The Courier reported on Friday 11/19 that Jordan’s staff says the Politico report was wrong that he never had a formal offer to join the appropriations committee. However they quote his spokesperson Meghan Snyder saying that he would turn it down if it was offered. He wants to be on a special group that will make the decisions on what to cut that will then be vetted in the committee so he can do his damage more in the shadows than if he was on the committee out in the open.

But Jordan’s press secretary, Meghan Snyder, said Thursday he never was offered a seat on the powerful committee.

“There’s a lot of talk about it. He never got a formal call,” Snyder said.

Even if he did, Jordan would not accept an offer for the committee, she said.

Jordan’s focus is becoming chairman of the Republican Study Committee, she said. The group of 116 House Republicans seeks to advance a conservative social and economic agenda. He could find out this week if he got the chairmanship.

“He’s interested in being the conscience of conservatives,” Snyder said.

Jordan is not the only House member to campaign for spending cuts and then appear indifferent about the Appropriations Committee. A scarcity of Republicans wanting to be on the Appropriations Committee was the focus of the Politico article. Campaigning for reduced government spending made better politics than cutting spending will be.

Jordan: Not asked, but not interested By Lou Wilin published 11/19/2010 Findlay (OH) Courier

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In political discourse, cable maybe minuscule but broadcast news not helping

Cable news punditry may reach a small hardcore section of voters but their broadcast news brethren seem to follow their lead which doesn’t contribute to accurate information for the average voter.

Cable news is like fantasy football leagues for the political wonks. The audience for the pundits on cable never rises above 3 million total viewers. But viewership is never close to the average number of voters in the US (in 2008 there were 133 million total votes cast). The broadcast news channels have more viewers (ABC, NBC, CBS) with an average of 14 million a day. Even radio has more of an audience than cable TV news channels.

Of all those shows, only O’Reilly gets significantly above two million total viewers. By contrast, NBC’s nightly news program doubles O’Reilly’s ratings in both total viewers and in the coveted 25-54 bracket. Even CBS, the lowest rated of the three, easily outdraws cable, and both broadcast and cable news face the same aging demographics: the median Fox News viewer is 65, two to three years older than the median broadcast news viewer, and CNN and MSNBC aren’t far behind.

But outpacing all of TV news is radio, and that’s where Koppel and other media observers should be focusing their attention. At first glance, radio may look like a conservative-dominated field. Rush Limbaugh’s weekly audience of 15 million dwarfs any television news program, and even Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck’s radio audiences are several times their TV audiences.

In fact, though, NPR provides a counterweight both to conservative talk radio, and to the charge that both sides have equally partisan media. Twenty-seven million people listen to NPR each week, and its morning and evening news programs get fourteen and thirteen million weekly listeners respectively, just behind Limbaugh.

The Tiny Cable News Universe

But the conclusion of the article quoted above – that the audience is small – is beside the point. It seems the drivers of broadcast news follow cable’s lead in deciding what is news and the coverage of the issues and often either give misleading information or don’t squash outright lies quickly enough.

* Polling data during and after last week’s midterm elections suggested that many Americans genuinely believe President Obama has raised their taxes — even though the reality is that our president actually lowered them for most of us. This means that people trust pundits like Rush Limbaugh, a major force behind spreading that lie, over the numbers on their own tax returns.
* Another recent phenomenon? Half of new Congressmen don’t believe in the reality of global warming. It’s not that they don’t just disagree on the source or the severity of the problem. They flat out don’t think the world is getting warmer–despite the evidence outside their windows.
* The new Congress will probably try to restore millions of dollars of funding for scientifically inaccurate, largely disastrous abstinence-only curriculum in schools, many of which have been shown to spread lies like “condoms don’t work” and “abortion causes cancer.”
* News outlets picked up a wildly inflated and completely outlandish claim from an Indian blog that Obama’s trip abroad cost $200 million a day–and listeners have swallowed it. (In this case, the White House flat-out denied it.)
The scary thing is, these kinds of rumors have a way of taking root in the popular consciousness. Just as the election season began heating up earlier this year, Newsweek published a list of “Dumb Things Americans Believe.” While some of them are garden-variety lunacy, a surprising number are lies that were fed to Americans by our leaders on the far-Right. This demonstrates that media-fed lies can easily become ingrained in the collective memory if they’re not countered quickly and surely.

16 of the Dumbest Things Americans Believe — And the Right-Wing Lies Behind Them

Another example is the media blow job NBC gave to former President Bush who is trying to sell a book. Matt Lauer, looking for his Frost-Nixon moment, never pushed Bush hard enough to actually answer questions about his presidential screw ups like Katrina and the Iraq war. I mean when the biggest nugget from the interview was Bush being hurt by the statement of a rapper just made me sad for journalism.

Broadcast media does a disservice to the citizens of this country by letting cable news pundits lead them by the nose and giving up their needed advocacy for the truth. Just ask a follow up question – please!

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Thirty percent stayed home on election day

The pundits and Republicans are wrong. The election result wasn’t a rejection of the Democratic agenda, 30% of the electorate stayed home, disappointed in the results of the Democratic majority. The GOP won by default – not by mandate.

A new CBS News poll finds that a majority of Americans are either disappointed by the outcome of last week’s midterm elections or simply don’t much care.

While 40 percent do say they are pleased by the election outcome, that’s a significantly smaller percentage than the 58 percent who were pleased following the 2006 midterm elections.

Poll: Disenchantment Remains After Midterms

(h/t Daily Kos)

Still bad for the country but also means that Democrats should maintain their positions on issues like letting the Bush tax cuts to expire.

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