Colorado woman who refused TSA groping accused of groping TSA agent

Two wrongs don’t make a right: A Colorado woman who refused a TSA patdown has been accused of groping a TSA agent.

Though her behavior appears to have been an assault and therefore the arrest apparently justified, why is it that this woman gets charged with a crime while all around her TSA agents freely do exactly the same thing repeatedly to innocent Americans and are never charged as well?

The answer has to do with power, wielded by the government to dominate its citizens, and done so in a complete defiance of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

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β€œRe-election is the farthest thing from my mind.”

We need more elected officials like this:

β€œRe-election is the farthest thing from my mind,” said Representative Tom Reed, a freshman Republican from upstate New York. β€œLike many of my colleagues in the freshman class, I came down here to get our fiscal house in order and take care of the threat to national security that we see in the federal debt. We came here not to have long careers. We came here to do something. We don’t care about re-election.”

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Wither the Arctic Icecap?

In a paper published today in Geophysical Research Letters, climate scientists have estimated the distribution and trends for the Arctic icecap from 1980 through March 2011. What they have found is a significant decline in older ice on top of an overall declining trend that showed a strong but partial recovery since 2008. The graph below, from the paper, illustrates clearly these trends.

Arctic Ice, 1980 - 2011

What this means for the icecap itself remains unclear. As the scientists themselves note in their conclusion:
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“Dominate. Intimidate. Control.”

“Dominate. Intimidate. Control.”

Now, thanks to TSA Chief John Pistole’s determination to “take the TSA to the next level,” there will soon be no place safe from the TSA’s groping searches. Only this time, the “ritualized humiliation” is being meted out by the serpentine-labeled Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response (VIPR) task forces, comprised of federal air marshals, surface transportation security inspectors, transportation security officers, behavior detection officers and explosive detection canine teams. At a cost of $30 million in 2009, VIPR relies on 25 teams of agents, in addition to assistance from local law enforcement agencies as well as immigration agents. And as a sign of where things are headed, Pistole, himself a former FBI agent, wants to turn the TSA into a “national-security, counterterrorism organization, fully integrated into U.S. government efforts.” To accomplish this, Pistole has requested funding for an additional 12 teams for fiscal year 2012, bringing VIPR’s operating budget close to $110 million.

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