The TSA and Me

How We Got Here

I hate flying.  It wasn't always this way.  Before the PLO began hijacking planes in the 70's, there were not even x-ray scans at airports.  In 1973, a White House directive charged airports with scanning all passengers and baggage with electronic weapons detectors.  There were occasional pat-downs when metal detectors sounded the alarm and the reason wasn't obvious.  Many were angered by the inconvenience and assault on privacy; some were totally fine with the new measures, and felt safer because of them.

Hijackings decreased.  Air travel was affordable.  Those were the halcyon days when you could walk to the gate to meet your family and friends, or shed a few tears saying good-bye.  You could watch the plane come into or leave the gate.  Your valuables, including your body, were safe from assault.

But just as violence happens outside of an airport, it was inevitable that there would be another airline attack, and it was massive.  9/11 changed America's sense of invulnerability.  The cluelessness of the George W. Bush administration ignored all the signs that would have prevented 9/11, while the paranoia of the Dick Cheney contingent ushered in the Patriot Act of 2001 and all its abominations.  It took the weenies in Congress less than two months to pass the law, and no amount of protestation over the loss of constitutional freedoms could stop them.

Imagine the chaos.  And the horror stories.

And yet, with the security business booming and Americans as insecure as ever, in 2009 the TSA got away with adding full body scanners to the myriad tortures of proceeding onto an aircraft.  Initially, they were to be used only when the walk through x-ray machine set off an alarm.  But when you've got a really fancy-ass hammer, everything looks like a nail, so in no time everyone was required to submit to having their body perused.  I said "got away with," but it wasn't easy.  People were appalled that the scanners showed their naked image.  And then there were those who were just appalled at the unnecessary invasion of privacy.   So -- being the Obama administration -- the problem was investigated and full-body scanners were walked back.  But, being the Obama administration, the problem was pursued until a new, improved full body scanner, that did not show us standing there, arms up, naked, became the new toy at the airport.  I hate to say it, but Obama did continue the march toward cutting back on freedoms in the name of security; he just did it in a more studied, scientifically researched manner.  The body scanner was once again a thing, although not used consistently, and the busier airports were far more pragmatic about enforcing their use than others:  like, for example, the Charleston International Airport, which just can't believe we aren't next on the terrorist to-do list.

So back to me.

I am 67 years old, and a New Englander.  As such, I've never been much for uninvited touching.  The TSA attacks appalled me for civil rights violation reasons, and also for personal privacy reasons.  I pretty much stopped flying after 9/11 when we all had to stand in line in order to have our suitcases opened up and watch our items fondled by gloved screeners before they were checked.  So even before the obscene full-body scanners.

I would prefer to drive two days each way to Chicago than fly.  I will in an instant choose the 23-hour Amtrak travel to Rhode Island than fly.  I miss the days of walking freely through an airport as though it was just a public building, but don't at all miss air travel as it exists today.

So there I was, this summer, with a pregnant daughter all the way over in Denver.  I honestly looked into cars and trains.  The only not-insane way to get there is flying.

And then, a month before my grandbaby made her appearance, my sister in Rhode Island died suddenly.  I booked a flight for the next day.

And had myself patted down for the first time ever at Charleston International.  The culprit appeared to be the metal in my bra.  I was upset about my sister's death, and rather than being silently stoic (which is what we are supposed to do), I said, "My sister died yesterday; I really don't need this."  The TSA agent did not respond verbally, but made sure to give me a thorough check before allowing me to put my shoes back on and get on my way.  On the way back, in Rhode Island, there was no such idiocy, and I was able to walk through the x-ray screener without incident.

A month later, my grandbaby was born, and I was once again booking a last minute flight.  I had only a short time to obsess about the upcoming screening and happier things to think about.  I was not surprised when we were all slowly and systematically herded through the body-scanners.  But, having been sure to wear a bra that while less personally secure would not be likely to set off alarms, I was still patted down.  This time not only my breasts but both my ankles.

And after a lovely week with my beautiful new grandbaby, frisked once again by what I had thought of as the more reasonable Denver TSA.

It appears to me that since Trump began his ham-fisted reign, the slippery slope of the TSA during the Obama years has become free to stomp on our privacy with abandon.  The full-body scanners are either more sensitive or set to be more sensitive, TSA agents instructed to "search" far more freely than in the recent past.  Not just an overweight woman in a bra with metal snaps, but the bulge of socks fallen around the ankle will also do it.  I don't know how many of us are chosen for this, but I finally decided to stop obsessing and just watch the last time I was in line.  Way too many pat-downs, way, way too many false positives.  And way too many rights being violated.

Like the frog that is put in the pot while the water is still cold, we are now quietly allowing our bodies to be handled in a way that would have caused outrage and rebellion a few years ago.

And why should that surprise me?  There are babies being torn from their parents and put in cells and African Americans being shot for traffic violations.  We live in a country being led by a cretin that aspires to being a dictator, and is right this very minute working to close our borders, keep the press out of the White House, and cut off ties with our allies.

What is happening at our airports seems small next to having a baby torn out of your arms or being shot by a poorly-trained and/or racist cop.

But we let the "small" liberties go in the name of security.  We kept sliding down that slippery slope, at first protesting and then just shrugging and going along with the intense scrutiny required just to travel.  We have been allowing our purses to be ravaged just to go to a sporting event for years.

This in a country that won't even allow a background check before buying a gun, or restrict the sale of bump stocks and silencers.

I know this has been a long blog, but I have been thinking about this TSA thing and how it has gotten away from us for a long time.  So it is going to get longer.  Go grab a cup of coffee or a beer and bear with me.

The TSA and Breast Milk

I now have a grandbaby and a daughter who has begun to travel with her.  On her first flight, over Thanksgiving, Denver TSA agents were befuddled over how to deal with her pumped breast milk.  Obviously, she had a baby with her, what nefarious plot would require such a cover?  And yet, they sniffed, opened and had meetings over how to proceed.  It was upsetting to the point that she did not carry breast milk on the trip home, in order to avoid what should be a totally avoidable fiasco.  Which made even more burdensome the feeding a three-month-old infant in a world where nursing moms get hassled by dirty-minded wingnuts.

A quick google search located another instance of the TSA assault on breast milk, amazingly also at Denver International, you know, where you can probably smuggle out legally purchased marijuana with ease.  The blogger suggests ways to more easily get through screening, like bringing in printed TSA information to show the agent so they can learn the rules about breast milk on-the-job.  The saddest thing about this particular post, however, is that she ends by suggesting paying for the use of a transportation service to carry your milk, if you are a traveling mom with a baby at home. 

IF YOU ARE 75 OR OLDER, YOU CAN GET THROUGH TSA SCREENING WITHOUT TAKING YOUR SHOES OFF.  This means that in the defective yet watchful eyes of our government, a 75-year-old is less likely to be a terrorist than a woman with an infant.

In 2013, the TSA even changed the rule about knives in order to allow small folding knives to be carried onto a plane.  Until that decision proved so wacky that the outcry caused them to rethink it.

So women are once again singled out for the kind of personal scrutiny that is an embarrassment and a violation.  Not to mention the incredible disruption of an already burdensome process of traveling with a small child.  Why have we put up with it?  Because women have always put up with special rules and restrictions.  Just as we have put up with sexual discrimination at work, and inappropriate sexual approaches and assaults.  If this isn't an issue to be taken up by #MeToo I don't know what is.

I Decide to Sell Out

I hope to visit my grandbaby every couple of months.  In the interest of not having to deal with the abomination of a pat-down at the beginning of every trip, I decided to look into TSA Precheck.

Turns out for the low, low price of $85 for five years, you can apply for a precheck that will allow you to avoid the most humiliating and infuriating aspects of TSA screening.  I wondered just how intensive this screening would be, if it really screened out those who might be dangerous on a flight.  It seems that they run your name and fingerprints through their national database, looking for criminals and terrorists!  The good news is, if you haven't yet been up to any criminal activity, not only are you good for prescreening, I'll bet there are terrorist organizations that would love to recruit you.

The difference that getting "awarded" TSA Precheck (for the low, low price of $85 for five years) is that next time you are at the security line at the airport you don't have to take off your shoes or light jacket.  Then you get to go through a regular x-ray machine instead of a body-scanner, like we used to do in the old days.  And you send your carry-ons on the belt through the x-ray scanner.  In other words, you are allowed to do the perfectly adequate screening that you were allowed to do before 9/11 (except no box cutters or knives).

Here are some other effects of the Precheck:  1.  There is a lot of money to be made by security companies, and our government loves to give money away to big corporations, as with private prisons.  2.  As an added bonus, the government gets to add lots of non-criminals and their fingerprints to its database, and even better, voluntarily.

Precheck doesn't mean your privacy won't get invaded when you're not looking.  We have known since the post 9/11 days when we stood and watched that our suitcases would be opened and inspected.  I knew that checked luggage continued to be "checked" because the tie I used to minimally safeguard my suitcase from opening was frequently retied in a different way.  But after my first precheck trip, I found this brazen confirmation, kind of a TSA "Fuck You and Your Rights":

It says:  For your own safety we have the right to rummage around in your stuff.  If you tried to lock us out, we busted our way in.  And there ain't nothing you can do about it.

Think about it.  I can carry on stuff that merely gets x-rayed.  But my checked bags need to get opened.  They honestly don't have and can't create the technology for seeing what is in our bag without opening it?  Or they just want us to know they can....

When I got to Denver and was bitching about the TSA, my daughter told me about a TV series that most of you probably already know about called Adam Ruins Everything.  In this episode, he ruins the myth that the TSA screening keeps us all safer and he does it with facts and experts.  It's a great episode, and I knew it all along.

It's a sad day when intelligent Americans have willingly abandoned such critical freedoms as being able to travel without assaults on our privacy, and on our very bodies.  Young adults are submitting to these atrocities because they have grown up in a 9/11 America in which privacy has been and is being subverted going on two decades in the name of security.  Young women carrying babies are having to submit their breast milk to inspection and us older women to getting parts of our bodies touched that we wouldn't allow to happen in any other circumstance.  And I have not even addressed the horrors that minorities, especially Muslim men, have had to endure since 9/11.

These days we are feeling overwhelmed by ever more horrendous attacks on civil liberties; mostly, they don't directly involve us, unless we are a minority, in which they have become a way of life.  It is way past time we resensitize ourselves to the violations by our government to our rights.  The Trump era is nothing but a really, really red flag of what we stand to lose, and each day we are losing just a bit more of it.

When you are at the airport, and standing stoically in line waiting to see if you will be frisked, look around.  Be aware of how unlike a free democratic society this process has become.  We don't make jokes or laugh.  We don't debate, question or complain.  We stand there trying not to be noticed and singled out.  How un-American we have become.

In the words of John Oliver:  "This is NOT normal."

Lies and Lying Liars

It's those damn emails again.  If it wasn't the emails, it would be Benghazi.

Let me take a moment to be politically incorrect.  Just because you had a son who was killed serving his country does not mean you have a handle on the truth.  It turns out that Patricia Smith, who was one of the premier speakers at the republican hate-fest in July, had help from the republican party in composing her barn-burner of a speech, that accused Hillary Clinton of killing her son -- in those words -- and lying to the families about the attack.  Also turns out that the speech writer, Richard Cross, has come around to realizing that he cannot in good conscience vote for Donald Trump, and may end up voting for Hillary.

So Cross is able to walk away from a speech wherein he called the Democratic nominee for president a liar and a "killer."  Nice that he was able to at least make the public statement I guess.  How many republicans are going to make that switch, knowing just what damage a Donald Trump presidency would do to our democracy, and yet keep it a secret so as not to jeopardize their place in the party?  Isn't that a lie, a most egregious lie?

That brings me to Colin Powell, who has just covered his ass by denying that he advised Clinton to use a private server for her emails.  You may recall Colin Powell.  He is the much respected republican in whom Americans placed their trust by bringing out charts and graphs to justify our war in Iraq.

It was a dramatic presentation, that included an actual vial of something that we believed could wipe us all out, and leaving us quaking and convinced.

  

What we knew about Powell was that he was a smart man, and a moral man.  He could not possible lie to us.  But his very belief in his own goodness has made him vulnerable.  He may not have consciously lied about WMD, but he sure as hell convinced himself of things that were not facts.

Colin Powell, whose testimony may have been the most persuasive argument for the war in Iraq, ten years later, apologized for getting it wrong.  And despite the agony the nation has endured because of his goof, we all said, "How about that honesty?  What a good guy."  And he was off the hook. 

So when he steps up to deny that he had advised Hillary to use a personal email server, I would like us all to take this with a grain of salt.  Because although he has made comments indicating that he is opposed to Trump's anti-Muslim rhetoric, he continues to protest that he is still a republican.  He is a man who is tormented by his own belief that he must always do the right and moral thing.  Meaning that if he does something, it must be right and moral.  You see, I can get tangled up just trying to explain poor Colin Powell's moral pretzel.

If we were to wander into the dark, dark days of the Bush administration, we would find lies buried under lies, lies of omission, lies of self-deceit, outright lies.  All committed in the name of patriotism and keeping the homeland safe.  And there is Colin Powell, trying to keep up with the evil Cheney and his minions, and the gullible and persistent Bush.  How does a moral person live in these twisted corridors of power?  Apparently, he convinced himself that because they were so certain, they were right.  And the proof of how powerful was that self-deception is in the power of the false presentation Powell made to the United Nations, and the world.

So as far as emails go, I would wonder about something like this:    

while former Secretary Powell used a personal email account during his tenure as Secretary of State, he did not retain those emails or make printed copies.”

I would imagine that there is a great deal that Powell is not telling us about his email practices, and much that we have not been privy to regarding those actual emails.  A lot has been buried about the Bush/Cheney administration.  Based on what we do know, a lot was covered up under the smoke and destruction of two towers.

Unlike a Congress that did not want to make waves and a subsequent administration that wanted to put a very bad eight years behind us, republicans realize that they gain power by making war.  The symbols, the chants, the repeated accusations, they have all made for a very successful republican party.  Trump appears to be planning his next enterprise from the ruins of his presidential race, just as each failure in his life has led to greater profit.  But the republicans have their sights set on keeping Congress and controlling the states, and they can only do that by minimizing the very powerful Clinton candidacy.

So while whatever oversights Colin Powell may have made, whatever lies he may have told, or truths he may have omitted, will never be questioned, Hillary Clinton continues to be stuck under a magnifying glass turned up so high that flaws become facts.  Meanwhile, Trump courts Vladimir Putin, his lies about every business dealing he has ever had are glossed over, and he polishes a debate style that amounts to, "No, YOU are!"  And the dirtbags on the right continue to raise questions that have already been answered, and that have never been asked of a person holding public office before.

Bush and Cheney's neglect led to the loss of 3,000 lives, and 6,000 injured.  Their bad judgment led to 4,500 American deaths in Iraq (as of 2014).  Trump mocks Obama for saying "ISIL" instead of "ISIS."  Rudy Giuliani, whose neglect of recommended safety implementations after the Twin Tower bombing in 1993 left the towers more vulnerable and harder to evacuate, and police and firefighters with inadequate communication networks -- yes, THAT Rudy Giuliani -- incredibly, unbelievably, is now saying that in the eight years prior to Obama's presidency, we "didn't have any successful radical Islamic terrorist attack in the United States."  Well, except for the one.

And even though Donald Trump, under new management, is only just learning how to say hateful things without having to own them, the republican party continues their drumbeat of lies and attacks.  And Colin Powell, not having had the experience of being under that magnifying glass, treated with respect after making the case for the costliest mistake in American history, is standing with his party, denying any wrongdoing, and denying any part in Hillary's email fiasco.  Did he do what she said?  I'm going to guess that between the two accounts, there is the truth, and that in the end it is no more important than any of this email nonsense.  Powell could help by saying he doesn't recall, but there is the need to cover his ass, and to justify his own behavior.

Let us not give credence to someone who was part of the most deceitful and destructive administration since Richard Nixon.  And let us demand that attention is paid to the lies and the liars that would see Donald Trump be president in order to maintain their own grip on power at the risk of the country. 

The Stupids Run for President

As if there weren't enough to worry about, I am reading Lights Out: A Cyberattack, A Nation Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath by Ted Koppel.

In light of President Obama's final State of the Union tonight, I am going to say that the parade of creeps -- and their supporters -- lined up to take charge is the stuff that nightmares are made of.

Based on the performance of the circus act known as the Republican Congress, we are in big trouble.  We currently have our crazy uncle holding the purse strings to our country, their kids are all eight-year-old bullies, and because they are religious freaks who don't believe God wanted them to use birth control, there are a lot of those bullies around.  They may not be smart, but they know how to riot and they are allowed to carry guns.  They may not understand how the world works, but they know how to line up at the polling place and push that button that says "R."

Those right wingnuts in Congress have taken the shock of 9/11, followed by war and a "great recession" and used those horrific events to train the bullies to set their sights on a black president, a woman leader in the House, and the poor and minority people of this country.  The Tea Party voters may not be good at math, but they make up for it with enthusiasm:  wipe out food stamps and NPR and we can get rid of that nasty federal deficit.  Build that wall and we'll have good jobs again, get rid of Muslims and all those white people carrying guns will stop shooting up theaters and churches.

I recently caught a minute of a Rand Paul event on C-Span in which one of those geniuses in the town hall crowd was railing about a government that can't control companies that pollute the environment with things like oil spills.  I should have taped it, because I still don't believe I really heard it.  "You idiot!"  I shouted at the woman.  "Don't you know who that IS?"  Rand Paul, who would get rid of the EPA, who believes government regulation is bad, bad, BAD.

It takes me back to the beginning days of the Obama administration, when the Tea Party turned up to protest in DC, complaining about the poor public transportation, which had been caused by Tea Party budget cuts.

Which brings me back to cybersecurity.  Because while fools like Ted Cruz are implying that "carpetbombing" our enemies will keep us safe, those who truly control the country, like Wall Street and all those companies that have their hands on the electric grid, can't be made to share their vulnerabilities with the federal government or each other in order to make them safe from cyberattack.  Like Nikki Haley a couple of years ago, I imagine once our enemies attack Congress will give us a free year of credit reports.

We're holding on to our guns while the smart psychopaths are working on the capability of pulling the plug on our government and industry computers.

And our candidates for president?  Clueless.  What they do know is how to get the crowd riled up.  Much like Barnum and Bailey, they know there is a sucker born every minute, and those suckers are happy to wave their guns and get in line at the voting booths.

And, by the way, I'd like to stop hearing that these are people who have been hurt by economic downturns.  Take a look at the people turning up to cheer for Cruz and Rubio.  They are teachers and small business people, they are trading in their economy cars for trucks and SUV's again, and they never have to worry about whether to see a doctor or repair the roof.  They are pissed off because they have been given permission to be pissed off, and it feels good to have someone to blame, even if they aren't entirely sure what they are angry at.

And if that's how to get elected, our bunch of republican candidates are happy to point them in a convenient direction.  The Stupids are not only running for president, but are waving their guns and cheering, and lining up to vote.  

Homeland Insecurity

Last August, I took my husband to the National Institute of Health in Bethesda for a chemotherapy treatment.  He had warned me of the serious security measures that were in place.  He wasn't exaggerating.  We each had to show ID, then get out of the car and walk into a building that was equipped with the kind of scanners set up at airports these days.  While I ran myself and my purse through the scanners, my car was being checked out for bombs.  Having passed inspection, I was given a one-day photo ID and we were sent on to the hospital.

It was a beautiful, warm day, and I decided to explore the area, and walk to downtown Bethesda for lunch.  I walked out the other side of the compound (for it truly was a compound), past a manned guard booth, and out the gate.  As I so often do, I misjudged distance, and what I thought would be a one-half hour walk turned into over an hour, each way, in the Maryland heat.

So, nearly three hours after I left, I walked through the gate looking like someone who had crossed the desert and was hoping the end was truly in sight and not a mirage.  The same gentleman was at the guard post, and he indeed stopped me.  Apparently, not too many people walked out the gate, and he remembered me.  And yet my one-day pass proved inadequate ID, he also made me show him my driver's license.  And then told me I needed to go around to the front of the complex and go through the full security process again....

The look I must have given him seemed to convince him a) that I wasn't much of a threat, and b) had I to walk around to the front I might have ended up being admitted as a patient, bad public relations for NIH if nothing else.

As I pondered this strange experience, and later talked to my husband about it, we wondered if there was some top-secret highly dangerous research going on that would require these extreme measures.

But no.

In Pay Any Price, by James Risen, he talks about what he calls the "war on normalcy" that has been going on since 9/11.  It is of course a tremendous boondoggle, costing us billions of dollars, in the name of national security.  What all these security corporations have sold to our fear-mongering politicians is the ability to continue to win elections by instilling terror in the populace.  And what we have gotten in return is a nation that trembles in its boots, although we have had far fewer terrorist attacks than we had in the 60's and 70's on our soil.

What have we lost?  Our airports, once the place for reunions of families and friends, are now war zones.  There was once a time when people could walk to the gate to see their loved ones off.  Hell, there was once a time when you could bring a bottle of your own water onto a plane.  I am told that if you are over 75, you are exempt from taking your shoes off as you go through screening, but that's only until the feared jihadis put a 76-year-old on board.

On December 26, at a wonderful, small local movie theater, I was astounded to learn that they were checking bags.  Granted, the woman who was charged with this ridiculous task conducted the most embarrassed and cursory search I've ever undergone.  But still....  And then I realized that this was the big, bad opening of The Interview, a totally goofy, mediocre comedy that had recently struck fear into the hearts of Americans, worried that Kim Jong Un's warriors would be storming our theaters.

What else have we lost?  In Charleston, when I first moved here, I was enthralled by the First Night festivities.  Locals and tourists walking the streets downtown, with what seemed like hundreds of free and inexpensive performances in churches and theaters.  My daughter played the fiddle with Na Fidleiri, and we wandered in and out of other performances throughout the night.  I thought it just couldn't get any better than this.

Then, after 9/11, First Night disappeared, pretty much without a peep.  I have looked it up, yearningly, from time to time, and what it has come down to is a few hours of performances -- "family entertainment" and specifically "non-alcoholic" -- on Marion Square.  And lots of advertisements for restaurants.  A tragic loss, in the name of protecting us from terrorism.

Seems we have terrorized ourselves these past fourteen years.  In the name of security, we have taken away community, and warmth, and freedom to walk the streets, the airports, the theaters of our country.

And, need I add, the real terror really lies in the hypocritical freedom to carry weapons, weapons not to hunt, but to wage war on others in our communities, with no checks or controls.  So it hasn't been Al Qaeda that has terrorized our schools and theaters, it has been unbalanced individuals with access to assault weapons.  And those fear-mongerers whose purpose is to maintain their power of office refuse to legislate gun control.  But are happy to keep us from going about our lives as though life were normal.  Our insecurity is what keeps our politicians secure.

When Your House Is Falling Apart

Our government has been following some very bizarre rules for tending to things.  It's so bizarre that I have found myself thinking of it in terms of psychiatric illness.

We could probably start with the shock of 9/11.  There we were, thinking we were the greatest nation in the world, infallible, struck in our hearts (in America heart=wallet) in the full light of day by renegades armed with weapons we left lying around unguarded.

Post traumatic stress disorder?  Not only were we looking over our shoulder and under our bed for the next attack, our corporate funded president couldn't figure out how to fast enough get those dollars to flow.  No conversation about the death and destruction of the Twin Towers could happen without focusing on the economic devastation.

Now, I'm not talking so much about people who lost their jobs because their livelihood was so totally disrupted.  Nor am I talking about those who lost the family members who provided them financial stability.  (And as I write these two sentences it chills me that we are talking about dollars and not lives, but I am trying to reconstruct as honestly as I can.)

The trauma that shook the country may not have been financial, but to our corporate-owned government that terrorist attack was all about money.  As Al Qaeda intended.

That's when the bucks started flowing.  Tax cuts and subsidies flowing to Wall Street and airlines.  We couldn't do enough to get those businesses going again, while the financial aid to families, including those first responders we heralded, was quite a bit slower to come around.

And there is where our obsession has been since then.

A convenient excuse by the Bush administration to feed its constituency, in W.'s own terms, "the haves and have-mores."

It only naturally followed that corporate America took what it felt it had always had coming, Congress shocked into being afraid to say no, believing every lie and passing it on.  The American people were easy.  We believed every scary story we were told.

And here we are in 2013.  Our bridges are falling down.  Our children are going hungry.  And those who are responsible for guarding the country's purse strings run up the debt to feed the corporate beast, and continue to tell us to tighten our belts and stop whining.

Pass the farm subsidy and the oil subsidy and the subsidies to the pharmaceutical industry.  But cut back on food stamps and the arts.  Feed the dinosaur, starve the hummingbird.

The uproar from the voters can barely be heard.  Those who question this bizarre philosophy of taking good care of the wealthy so they don't punish us by taking away our jobs are too busy, too tired, too overwhelmed, too confused to yell.  And the most fearful, the most psychologically vulnerable, are fed fears about the debt, the poor, Obamacare, and urged to stand up and shout.  And they do.

What will it take for the sane but tired of us to stand up and yell louder?  When our house is falling apart and whatever we do to keep it together no longer works, is this when we will rise up in anger?  When we have nothing left to lose, is that when we will no longer be afraid to risk being struck down?

A Sad Day

We all remember the tragedy and horror of 9/11.

And just in case you may not have noticed the date, you will see that your inbox has touching and patriotic emails from the likes of Tim Scott, and even Jim DeMint has condescended to reach out to us.

It is appalling to me that they take advantage of the tragedy to sound the drumbeat for patriotism, talk about the bravery of the first responders and the loss of lives on that day.

Because when it comes to putting their votes where their mouths are, these people consistently vote against people like first responders, against healthcare and benefits for the military who have volunteered to protect us since that day.  They preach about the value of life and vote against bills that would make our lives safer and more secure, like gun control.  And they brag about how they fight for freedom, and then vote for the right to control a woman's body, prevent her from taking care of herself and her family the best way she can.

Maybe our right-wing Tea Party "patriots" need to do a little more reflecting on 9/11, and a lot less politicizing of it.

Still Protecting Us from Terrorists

I opened a savings and checking account at a credit union yesterday.  Apparently, I hadn't done anything like that for some time.  Even though the account I was opening was small, requiring the less onerous senior savings plan, the credit union required two proofs of identification, not just a driver's license.


They also did a credit check.


This seems strange, because I am depositing money, not applying for a loan.  I have to admit, I probably wouldn't have known she was doing it if she hadn't told me, and if she hadn't informed me that she was required to do this credit check because of the Patriot Act, I probably wouldn't have questioned it.  Shame on me.


But she did let me know she was pulling up the credit report, and told me my score and what it meant.  We shared snide comments about how the government requested unnecessary private information, claiming to be protecting us from terrorists, and were able to do this just because they could.


But then I got home and started to wonder about this.  Apparently, banks are not required to pull up a credit report, but they are required to confirm a person's identity and note any unusual financial activity.  The requirement, since 9/11 and the Bush regime, is apparently so frightening that banks have taken the easiest way out by accessing as much private information as they can.  And your credit report is easy.


You also don't want to come in to big amounts of cash out of the blue, or your account could be frozen while the bank reports you to the government.


But, said the online banking article from 2006, most people won't be affected by this; they won't even know it is going on.


So just hope you're one of those many people who haven't got a clue that the government has got your bank's eyes on you.