Sex and the frequent flyer

A thoughtful, perceptive, insightful look at war, flying and x-ray machines.


Nov. 24, 2010, 12:01 a.m. EST
Sex and the frequent flyer
Commentary: Government will grope you — and kill you if needed

By Rex Nutting, MarketWatch

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — The home front is in an uproar over the war on terror, and all it took was some dirty pictures.

On Wednesday, a massive protest is planned in the nation’s airports to call attention to the latest indignity: invasive full-body X-rays and intimate searches. Objecting to the newest scanning technology that produces a nearly nude digital image of air travelers, the protesters say they’ll try to shut down the system on one of the busiest travel days of the year by insisting on time-consuming physical pat-downs.

The anger has been quietly building for months, as more and more passengers were subjected to the new imaging machines, which some say amount to “porno searches.” Even worse, those who object to posing in the virtual nude for the Transportation Security Administration can choose to have a uniformed stranger feel their genitals to make sure they aren’t hiding a bomb in their underwear.

Suddenly, the war is news again. Remember the war? It’s the endless war, the one where Americans weren’t asked to pay more in taxes or to subject themselves or their children to the military draft. It was the one where the only sacrifice that average Americans were asked to make was to give up their liberty.

A small price to preserve freedom, they told us without the slightest sense of irony.

Since the war began, our country has lied, spied, kidnapped, tortured and killed in our name and in cause of the war on terror. Thousands of American soldiers lost their lives. Tens of thousands of Iraqi and Afghanis lost theirs. More than $1 trillion was spent. Some patriots protested the loss of freedom, the incompetent execution and the losing strategy, but nothing much changed.

The war on terror continues into its 10th year, with no end in sight. We still have troops in Iraq, Afghanistan and other places around the globe. The prison at Guantanamo Bay is still open. The torture and kidnappings continue, and we know innocents are also caught up in the dragnet along with the bad guys. The bombings and attacks by unmanned drones haven’t let up, and we know innocents are also killed along with the terrorists.

And we’ve come no closer to winning this war. How could we, when we are fighting an abstract enemy? When we create one enemy for each one we kill or capture?

Since the horrible events of September 2001, we’ve asked our leaders, our military and our intelligence services to keep us safe, and damn the expense!

It was exciting, at first. America was united, by golly, just like the Greatest Generation! We got to eat freedom fries, and we got to close our eyes as our leaders marched our army into the wrong country for the wrong cause. The government asserted its right to bug our phones and read our emails, and of course we went along with it because we have nothing to hide.

As time passed, for most of us, the war on terror retreated into the background. It was only when we traveled by air that the war came back home. It was only at the airport that we remembered the war was still on: Throw your coffee cup away at the security gate, take off your belt, empty your pockets, take off your shoes, segregate your liquids and gels, don’t crack a smile, don’t question authority, do as you are told. Don’t you know there’s a war on?

Looking at the line of passengers winding their way through the security lines and on board the planes and back off again at the destination, you’d think there had never been such a complacent people resigned to their fate. Flying has become a thoroughly degrading experience: mindless security rules, long lines, long waits, no real meals, crummy snacks, cramped seats… what’s not to love?

And then sex entered the picture.

The untested full-body X-ray machines may not be effective at preventing actual threats, and they may kill more passengers with cancer than they could ever save from terrorists. But we Americans are fine with that. We’re used to the government doing stupid or self-defeating things.

But tell us that the new machines will let strangers see what we look like without clothes, or that someone will grope you if you object to the porno search, and you’ve got the makings of a mass movement that should not be underestimated.

Don’t touch my junk, indeed! We are such prudes, and so vain too! Do we really think the TSA employees want to see us with our clothes off? Or touch our privates? Working for the TSA has officially become the worst job ever.

In response to all this, Rep. Ron Paul of Texas has introduced the American Traveler Dignity Act. Isn’t a little late for that?

The pornographic aspect of the TSA’s new machines certainly is creepy, but we should focus instead on the bigger picture.

Every American should know that, when national security is on the line, the government will lie to you even as it kills you. I had friends in Utah who died from the cancer the government gave them during above-ground nuclear testing in the 1950s. Read more about the nuclear testing.

The same thing happened to the Sept. 11 rescue workers, who were exposed to deadly chemicals and carcinogens without adequate protection.

And now millions of Americans will receive doses of unnecessary and unwanted radiation each time they fly.

Which bothers you more? That the government will grope you, or that it will kill you?

Copyright © 2010 MarketWatch, Inc. All rights reserved.

Kamikaze Capitalism: GOP out to destroy

I am not sure, at all, who this person is, but he has a column today in Marketwatch.com with this title.


Yes, Sen. McConnell, the drama’s unfolding, powered by your vow that the GOP’s “No. 1 priority” is destroying the Obama presidency. Not creating jobs … not economic recovery … not even national security.

Where will we be in twelve months? Eighteen?

Get it? America’s losing. And we better reinvent our Kamikaze Capitalism soon. Because the New Beijing Capitalism is winning the 21st century economic race, and we’re helping them beat us.

It doesn't take much imagination or perspicacity to see that the "Western" capitalist model is damaged. The right wing's response is to prescribe more of the same failed policies, to denigrate their opponents as unAmerican, America-haters or socialists, and promise bright days ahead for those that believe.

Friedman’s Disaster Capitalism peaked under Bush, adding trillions of new debt to pay for two costly wars, huge tax cuts and an increasingly privatized government. Today even Reagan’s Budget Director David Stockman warns “his GOP has destroyed the American economy.” Yet, even as GOP bullies keep adding insult to injury telling the world that their No. 1 goal is destroying Obama’s presidency, the gutless Dems continue talking compromise, failing by refusing to stand on principle and fight dirty on GOP turf, using their weapons against them, in a ruthless political war.

President Obama will have to make a choice in about four months, and no matter how many times he calls for bipartisanship, it will be a choice between caving in to the Republicans, or fighting them head-on.

Internecine warfare

After ripping Sarah Palin, Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski isn’t mincing words about another one of her high-profile GOP critics: South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint. “I think some of the Republicans in the Congress feel pretty strongly that he and his actions potentially cost us the majority by encouraging candidates that ended up not being electable,” Murkowski told POLITICO outside her Senate office. “And I think Delaware is a pretty good example of that, and I think there’re some folks that feel that DeMint’s actions didn’t necessarily help the Republican majority.”

“So the real question is, what’s his desire?” she said. “Does he want to help the Republican majority, or is he on his own agenda, his own initiative?” Asked what she believed the answer was, Murkowksi said: “I think he’s out for his own initiative.”

Let the fighting continue.

Sarah Palin says she can defeat President Obama Just which Republican aspirant is going to just let her walk into the nomination?

Boehner’s Army

John Heilemann, who co-wrote Game change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the race of a lifetime with Mark Halperin, a book that created quite a stir earlier this year, writes a political column for New York magazine. This one is subtitled The Republican revolutionaries have problems with authority—and that may provide Obama an opening.

John Boehner: “We must remember, it’s the president who sets the agenda for our government,” he said. And though two days later he suggested that Barack Obama was in “denial” about the meaning of the midterms, Boehner offered that he and Obama “get along well,” that maybe they could hold a Merlot Meeting (rather than a Slurpee Summit). “I don’t want gridlock,” he insisted. “I don’t want squabbling.” Mitch McConnell would never go that far, for fear that his pants would catch on fire.


But McConnell's stated primary goal is to make sure Obama is a one-term president.

That 1994 is much on the minds of Boehner and McConnell comes as no surprise—since for any politically sentient being, the analogy is inescapable. Most often, of course, the parallels are drawn to illustrate the challenge that Obama faces: Can he pull a Bill Clinton, tacking back to the center, triangulating his way to reelection? Yet as the two maximum Republicans are evidently aware, the historical antecedent raises an equally urgent question for the GOP: Can Boehner and McConnell avoid the sort of grievous errors that their forebears made, which opened the door to Clinton’s revival—and yet might do the same for Obama?

It's a big question. After his election, Team Obama seemed poised not quite invincible as much as on a winning streak, yet even with legislative accomplishments, it mired down in the politics of an angry opposition and a lost spin war. Now the President seems to be floundering, to be back on his heels. It remains to be seen how things will play out.

Comparatively speaking, Boehner and McConnell are peas in the proverbial pod. Both are Establishmentarians to their core, who see politics and their role in promoting Republicanism in similar terms.  They are not firebrands or visionaries, but they are bone-deep partisans. For the past two years, they have demonstrated enormous discipline and skill in working side by side in the exercise of obstructionism. And for the next two, they will both be afflicted with the same headache: managing the tensions not between their caucuses but within them, as each is simultaneously energized and roiled by the infusion of a new crop of members more populist and hard-line than the guys who ostensibly command them.

Both have to appear to be mindful of the tea party rhetoric, Boehner more so.

It’s this cadre to which Boehner was catering last week when he stated flatly that “we are going to repeal Obamacare”—an obvious impossibility given the remaining, if reduced, Democratic majority in the upper chamber and the president’s veto pen. This kind of talk will only get Boehner so far with the tea-partyers, however. His allegiance to their cause will be tested early, thanks to Michele Bachmann, who announced that she intends to seek a post in her party’s leadership: that of GOP-conference chair. Leadership fights are never pretty, but this one may be especially charged, as the hot-eyed lady from Minnesota (and Tea Party Caucus founder) campaigns among her colleagues on the grounds that the new majority needs a genuine “constitutional conservative” in its top ranks—an argument containing the implicit suggestion that Boehner does not qualify as one.

There are few developments that would please me more than to see Bachmann get a leadership position in the Republican caucus. That wingnut would alienate more moderates than just about anyone else, whilst simultaneously throwing red meat to her extreme constituency.

the pressure on McConnell from his party’s anti-Establishment flank may in some ways be greater than that on Boehner—because of the presence of Jim DeMint. More than anyone, the junior senator from South Carolina is the animating spirit of the tea party. Having broken with long-standing tradition and encouraged primary challenges this year to sitting members of his own party, he has already made clear that he has no intention of backing away from his crusade for ideological purity.

How luck y can the Democrats get? Enforced ideological purity in the Republican party gives the President a chasm wide enough to drive the proverbial truck through the middle. Especially if the left insists on its own ideological purity.

In the likely event that a stalemate arises between the White House and Republicans over the budget, many tea-partyers are already champing at the bit for a government shutdown; but Boehner and McConnell, recalling how well that worked out for Gingrich and Dole, will be loath to let it happen.

Intra-party bickering; too bad we won't get to see it play out in all its gory glory.

In all of this, Obama will find opportunities to exploit. If he and his team handle it adroitly, they stand a chance of forcing the Republican leaders into a series of devil’s choices between, on the one hand, making compromises that exacerbate intra-party tensions and, on the other, satisfying the appetites of the ascendant wing of the GOP by coming across as ideological extremists to the vast American middle. The degree of adroitness required will be enormous, to be sure. Unlike Clinton, Obama will not be blessed with a foe as prone to massive overreach—and to indiscipline, messianism, and just plain silliness—as Gingrich was in 1995. The president will need to be clever, flexible, patient, and tough in roughly equal measure.

O, but he well might: the teabags will push the extreme, and will not be silent if denied. Can't wait to see the first firebrand speech Rand Paul makes.

House Democrats spar - Blue Dog won’t back down

Top House Democrats said late Friday night that they had settled on an arrangement that avoided a divisive fight for the No. 2 position in the party when it reverts to the minority in January. In a statement, Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she would nominate Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina to be the No. 3 Democrat when the party holds an internal party election on Wednesday.

But what did Limbaugh say? Rush: Clyburn could be 'driving Miss Nancy' Idiot.

After a junior year in which he almost won the Heisman Trophy, Heath Shuler was picked in the first round of the 1994 National Football League draft by the Washington Redskins. In less than two seasons — and after a few too many interceptions — he was replaced as the team’s starting quarterback. ESPN described him as one of the all-time draft busts. He might be expected to play down such a distinction. But Mr. Shuler, 38, who just won a third term as the congressman representing North Carolina’s 11th District, has turned it into metaphor. “It’s no different than me as a quarterback,” he said in an interview here on Thursday. “I didn’t play very good. So what they’d do? They benched me.”

And eventually released him. I agree with his assessment, and would vote that way, for new leadership.

The Democrats’ achievements in the last Congress, Mr. Shuler said, are unpopular with the public because the party’s leadership has been too reflexively partisan. He says a more moderate approach is needed.

True enough, as far as it goes, but, why is it that when the right is overly partisan few people characterize it so and call for a "more moderate approach"?

Steele's first opponent

Former Michigan Republican Party Chairman Saul Anuzis announced this morning that he will run to be chairman of the Republican National Committee, becoming the first -- though almost certainly not the last -- candidate in the race against Michael Steele "We cannot be misled by our victories this year," Anuzis wrote in an announcement posted on his blog. "Chairman Steele's record speaks for itself. He has his way of doing things. I have mine."

Debatable point

Pelosi: 'We Didn’t Lose Because of Me'  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she has the “overwhelming support” of fellow Democrats in her bid to become minority leader in the next Congress, and says she’s not to blame for the Democrats’ mid-term debacle. She might be technically correct, but when a team loses badly the manager gets fired. She should step aside.

Dealing with the deficit

Paul Krugman is not impressed with the Commission, in the least.

Count me among those who always believed that President Obama made a big mistake when he created the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform — a supposedly bipartisan panel charged with coming up with solutions to the nation’s long-run fiscal problems. It seemed obvious, as soon as the commission’s membership was announced, that “bipartisanship” would mean what it so often does in Washington: a compromise between the center-right and the hard-right.

And:


It’s no mystery what has happened on the deficit commission: as so often happens in modern Washington, a process meant to deal with real problems has been hijacked on behalf of an ideological agenda. Under the guise of facing our fiscal problems, Mr. Bowles and Mr. Simpson are trying to smuggle in the same old, same old — tax cuts for the rich and erosion of the social safety net.

Gerald Seib, of the Wall Street Journal (wherein he qualifies as a moderate), called it differently: Deficit-Cutting Chairmen Call Washington's Bluff.

Matt Miller, who writes a column for the Washington Post (I have an email subscription to his column; I think I first read him on the Daily Beast), opines on the Simpson-Bowles Commission, also. Miller fancies himself "a Radical Centrist." I suppose he does not want to be tarred as a Liberal. Or call himself a Progressive.

21 versus 22. As I wrote in The Post a few months ago, the Bowles/Simpson plan to hold spending to 21 percent of GDP as the boomers age is a dangerous fantasy. All you need to know is that Ronald Reagan ran government at 22 percent of GDP when 76 million baby boomers weren't retiring. Today we're on the verge of doubling the number of folks on Social Security and Medicare. The Bowles/Simpson size of government goal is a fantasy -- it will not happen. Unfortunately, this wrongheaded goal undermines much of what they propose, since it's the organizing feature of their proposal.

2037. The co-chairs don't balance the budget until 2037! The outer limits of the ambition of a commission set up to get our fiscal house in order is thus a 27-year plan to balance the budget? Oy. The most you can say is that it's faster than the plan offered by that other falsely-hailed fiscal conservative, Paul Ryan, whose "Roadmap" wouldn't balance the budget until the 2050s!

He also criticizes them on health care, social security and gas taxes.

China to top US

Here’s a finding that will have any red-blooded American spluttering into his cornflakes. According to the Conference Board, a highly respected economic research association, China will overtake the US as the world’s biggest economy by 2012, or within two years.

Any? Point taken, nonetheless. That fact, and this picture, surely will infuriate many.

.Many people, especially those who already dislike Barack Obama, will take umbrage at the sight of the US president bowing to the Communist (or to a sheik or emir), ignoring the picture of George W Bush holding hands with the King of Saudi Arabia.

And this will add fuel to the fire:  Wednesday, Obama was in Jakarta, the capital of the world's most populous Muslim nation, issuing a call for trust and cooperation. He lived in Indonesia as a boy from 1967 to 1971 and found himself flooded with memories. "Let me begin with a simple statement: Indonesia is part of me," he said in Indonesian language, drawing cheers from the audience of more than 6,000 mostly young people at the University of Indonesia. Obama took care in his remarks to note that he is Christian; back home in the U.S., he continues to fight erroneous perceptions that he is Muslim..

Joltin' Joe

Love that Biden, if it is Biden.

Steele be gone

Could anyone not have anticipated this? From the very beginning of his tenure, it was clear he was a caretaker.

Turning their attention to the 2012 presidential election, Republican leaders are digging in for a battle over control of the Republican National Committee, judging that its role in fund-raising, get-out-the-vote operations and other tasks will be critical to the effort to topple President Obama.

So far, the effort has been tentative, with Mr. Steele’s most ardent opponents working behind the scenes to persuade an alternative to run against him — fearful that any overt moves will create a backlash in Mr. Steele’s favor among those committee members who tend to view the establishment in Washington with suspicion.

Of course, as long as Steele in chairman he, also, is part of the establishment, as are those teabags that propose they are not. Nonetheless, McConnell and Boehner are trying to play both sides of the field, establishment and teabags.

After the elections

Pelosi will run for leader She should not run, but should bow out gracefully.

Debunking the myths of the Midterm Every one seems to be repeating the same words, with little original thought.

Olbermann suspended schmuck

Black and Republican and back in Congress Even the New Mexico governor is a Latina.

Tea party's fervor Zealots.

Latino milestones

GOP senators fight over failure

As I said below, let the civil war begin.

Long-simmering tensions within the Republican Party spilled into public view Wednesday as the pragmatic and conservative wings of the GOP blamed each other in blunt terms for the party’s failure to capture the Senate.  The back-and-forth following an otherwise triumphant election amounted to a significant ratcheting up of the internecine battle that has been taking place within the GOP for the past year.

Don't Worry, Be Happy!

Not every observer is repeating the same mantra; this one actually seems to have original thoughts. How interesting. Lawrence D. Bobo is W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard.

There are good reasons to be hopeful after the midterm elections. Just look at what happened in 1994. For Democrats, this election is worse than the 1994 midterm with regard to losses in the House; Obama's losses are worse than Bill Clinton's. Obama, however, has presided over a far deeper recession. At the time of the 1994 midterm elections, the national unemployment rate was around 6 percent. Today unemployment is closer to 10 percent, indicative of much more widespread economic uncertainty and hardship. And this is almost certainly the principal reason that Obama's midterm setback in the House involves nine more seats than Clinton lost.

I'd like to see what the numbers were for total voters. Plus, Harry Reid won, the not-witch and Angle lost.


The difference here is the state of economy. To wit, this election is not a repudiation of a liberal agenda run amok or of an Obama administration out of touch with the American people. It is a loud declaration of deep disappointment with the weak and uneven pace of the economic recovery after a catastrophic economic downturn.

How interesting, that he sees the same evidence others see, and interprets it rather differently.


So the 2010 midterms were a setback for Democrats. Let's remember that this outcome was completely foreseeable in light of the economy. Republicans will celebrate with some measure of justification. But the presumption that Americans have repudiated Democrats and endorsed Republican ideology, or that Obama's electoral fate is now sealed, is just plain wrong. Assuming the economy continues to improve and the Democrats, including Obama, heed the lessons of Massachusetts, I'm feeling pretty good about 2012.

Ditto, I guess.

New sheriff is town

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) pledged on Wednesday to investigate both Barack Obama and George W. Bush with his newfound subpoena power when he takes over as chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. “I’m going to be investigating a president of my own party, because many of the issues we’re working on began [with] President Bush or even before, and haven’t been solved,” Issa said during an interview on MSNBC’s “The Daily Rundown.”

How long before he gets muzzled? Let the civil war begin.

Team Obama Blaming Rahm

his old colleagues in Washington aren’t too happy about it. Some of them shake their heads in disbelief that Emanuel would bolt at precisely the juncture when the Democrats needed to shape their strategy and message during the homestretch of what everyone knew would be the toughest election cycle in years.

They're simply in denial.  It wasn't his absence for a few weeks that cooked 'em. As an article in today's NY Times points out (Democrats Outrun by a 2-Year G.O.P. Comeback Plan ), it has been a long time coming. If they need to blame Rahm, they're missing the point: it is they themselves that are to blame, all of them.

Let 'em do the math

Let the spending cuts begin.

I am looking forward to seeing what the Republicans propose, other than repealing the health care law.

That was, after all, what Republicans campaigned on. Ohio's John Boehner, soon to be House speaker, promised "a new approach that hasn't been tried before in Washington—by either party. It starts with cutting spending instead of increasing it." Retiring Sen. Evan Bayh (D., Ind.) says Democrats should back a freeze on federal hiring and pay. Sen. Dick Durbin (D., Ill.) says, "We're going to be giving on spending."

Now he says that?

But as Republican spending cutters move from wooing voters to legislating, they confront two realities: Cutting government spending in general is popular; specific, substantial spending cuts are not. And bringing down the deficit by spending cuts alone, particularly cuts in annually appropriated domestic spending, is, well, arithmetically challenging.

Election campaign is on

In a Stratfor article on 26 October 2010, George Freidman wrote:

Reversals in the first midterm election after a presidential election happened to Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. It does not mean that Obama is guaranteed to lose a re-election bid, although it does mean that, in order to win that election, he will have to operate in a very different way. It also means that the 2012 presidential campaign will begin next Wednesday on Nov. 3. Given his low approval ratings, Obama appears vulnerable and the Republican nomination has become extremely valuable. For his part, Obama does not have much time to lose in reshaping his presidency. With the Iowa caucuses about 15 months away and the Republicans holding momentum, the president will have to begin his campaign. U.S. Midterm Elections, Obama and Iran | STRATFOR

Nice: two years of campaigning have just ended, two more years of campaigning have just begun.

Obama now has two options in terms of domestic strategy. The first is to continue to press his agenda, knowing that it will be voted down. If the domestic situation improves, he takes credit for it. If it doesn’t, he runs against Republican partisanship. The second option is to abandon his agenda, cooperate with the Republicans and re-establish his image as a centrist. Both have political advantages and disadvantages and present an important strategic decision for Obama to make.

If he moves to the center more, his liberal base will howl and largely abandon him, and the right wing will chew him up: they don't want him as an ally; they want to defeat him.

I'd like to see it, too

In Market Watch (a Wall Street Journal sibling, thus, also, a Murdoch property), a columnist puts it bluntly: You win, Rand Paul; now balance the budget. If it were so easy as they said on the campaign trail it could be.

The only realistic way to balance the budget is to grow the economy. So maybe all those angry tea partiers will be pacified and start buying things again. And then all those companies that belong to the Chamber of Commerce, comfortable that the Republicans have their backs on taxes and regulation, will start investing again. Then the economy will boom, tax revenues will rise and, before you know it, we’ll be back in surplus again. But I don’t think so.

Nor do I. The anger won't end simply because the election is over: they still socialism to defeat, fully. O, and that communist in the the White House, too.

So Senator-elect Paul might go to Plan B. He and fellow travelers like Mike Lee, Utah’s freshly minted senator-elect, would filibuster the move sometime next year to raise the federal debt ceiling from its current $14.3 trillion to accommodate rising entitlements and interest payments. This, according to a current of thought circulating inside the Beltway, would lead to a default by the U.S. government — a wonderful way to balance the budget overnight.

Imagine what the markets would do: fall, and fall precipituously.

It can’t happen here, you think. But if I were a foreign investor, I’d start pricing a little default premium into Treasurys, because the level of economic ignorance and political irresponsibility in some of the lawmakers elected Tuesday is hard to overestimate.

 Perhaps impossible to overestimate.



What will happen now? More posturing, more hot air. The Bush tax cuts will be extended in a lame-duck session. But then McConnell and Boehner will try to ride herd on their new caucus members, and Obama will try to grow a backbone so he can start vetoing any bills attempting to roll back his signature legislation. 

And then Rand Paul will balance the budget. Or not.

We'll see.

Can they hear him? DO they care?

Obama Vows to Work With G.O.P. After ‘Humbling’ Losses


G.O.P. Leaders Vow to Repeal Health Law

When is he simply going to throw down the gauntlet and dare them to make his day?