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TSA Got Everything It Wanted For Christmas
OverTheGeicoE writes "It looks like Congress' recent jabs at TSA were just posturing after all. Last Friday, President Obama signed a spending act passed by both houses of Congress. The act gives TSA a $7.85 billion budget increase for 2012 and includes funding for 12 additional multi-modal Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response (VIPR) teams and 140 new behavior detection officers. It even includes funding for 250 shiny new body scanners, which was originally cut from the funding bill last May."
$7.85 billion is the budget, not the budget increase.
The TSA didn't receive a $7.85 billion budget increase, according to the article, their total budget is $7.85 billion with an increase of $153 million over the previous year.
For comparison, the entire budget of the National Science Foundation, across all programs and disciplines, is $6.87 billion.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
As opposed to some other month?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_industrial_complex
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_On_Drugs
Palm trees and 8
TSA. Keeping you safe from terrorists like this one:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/10/18/1027775/-TSA-Arrests-Me-for-Using-the-Fourth-Amendment-as-a-Weapon-(Tales-from-the-Edge-of-a-Revolution-2)
One party fought for public option health care.
Not very hard, and what they passed instead is a bloated taxpayer funding of giant lobbyists (insurance and pharma).
They fought for increased taxes on those who can afford it,
Not very hard, they have one house and the Presidency, and they gave in.
rather than insisting that taxes only ever go down.
Not very hard. In fact, they pushed for some of the tax cuts.
They fought against the enormous and expensive blunder that was the Iraq war.
Not very hard. They signed the paper that gave Bush and the Neocons the authority to do whatever they damned well pleased. Obama even started some new policies, like summary execution of United States citizens.
They fought against allowing unlimited corporate money to influence politics.
Not very hard. They said they were fighting for it, but when Citizens United went through the Supremes, they threw up there hands in surrender.
They fought against torture.
Not very hard. We're still doing it.
They fought against teaching creationism in school.
This is one of the theatrical wedge issues. Notice how, for all the stage presence they demonstrate in the fight, no actual policy changes have happened?
they fought for the rights of gays and women
This is also a theatrical wedge issue. The only slight difference is that public opinion fell heavily on the "change the military policy" side, so one tiny corner of gay policy got changed. Until gays have they same rights as non-gay citizens, they are still not showing true support. How many of them are fully invested in truly equal rights for gays? How's Obama's position on gay marriage? They don't even get the half-a-loaf that is civil partnerships. Has there been a single substantive change in non-military policy regarding gay rights?
That is why we call this political theater. Because all the supposed support amounts to sound and fury signifying nothing.
Gridlock, you say? Hardly! We have made enormous changes in our policies, domestic and foreign. We have signed treaties and created sweeping new laws. We have completely revised our interpretation of the Bill of Rights. We have discarded any notion of respect for the War Powers Resolution.
All the truly significant changes in United States policy, happening at a truly blistering pace, are authoritarianism and expansion of monopolies and barriers to entry (copyright, patents, trademarks, insurance, drugs importation). The dramatic changes are all one of two things; the ability to control dissidents (enemy or patriot, foreign or domestic), and government influencing cashflow into the pockets of major corporations that do a lot of lobbying.
Look at the substantive change. If the substantive change does not match the rhetoric, questions must be raised. Show me substantive change, and I will believe that the rhetoric is more than theater.
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