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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."
Here we are owing all sorts of money, and now we are giving a whole lot of money that doesn't exist, to a program that has yielded no worth? What's to gain? I've heard all of the bad news about TSA, and all the molesting, and violations that they commit, with no reprocutions. But please, someone explain to me what is it that the Government really benefits from this.
Perhaps a bad comparison, I support owning a firearm. I have family and friends who have use their guns in defense, so I see some benefit, among all the risks. But I do not own a gun, or have one in my home. Why? Because I have never been in a situation that I required a gun.
This is like posting armed guards in my upper middle class neighborhood home!
Indoctrinate : to instruct especially in fundamentals or rudiments Educate : to develop mentally, morally, or aestheti
I'm not thrilled with the security checkpoints at airports, but I do understand that an airplane can be turned into a giant guided missile that can take down a skyscraper. It may be that extreme measures are appropriate for security at an airport.
But how does it make sense to send a VIPR team to search people getting on or off a train? How do you justify that? Are they going to drive the train off the tracks and blow up a building?
"Oh maybe someone has a bomb in his luggage." How often do trains get blown up in America? What are the odds here? And even if the security becomes 100% effective on trains, what about bombs set on the train tracks? Searching train luggage seems completely futile to me.
Has a VIPR team ever caught a terrorist or found a bomb, ever?
Remember, we send people to prison for not paying taxes, or maybe take their homes away. Should we really be using tax dollars for VIPR teams?
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Then run yourself. Find other people who feel the same way you do and get yourselves organised. Get people to run for office, everywhere from School Boards to President. Tell people about the issues you feel strongly about, and tell them how you plan to deal with them.
Or just sit around on the Internet and complain about it, like everybody else does.
I'm 49. Sometimes that feels really old, sometimes not. But I absolutely concur with theVP that America now is almost unrecognizable, politically and culturally, from the America when I was a kid.
I'm sure people my age from every previous generation said the same thing. Something tells me that most of them said it with pride, not sadness, anger, and frustration.
You are most definitely correct that the President cannot reduce funding by fiat. It does say here that the President gave his assent to a spending bill that appropriated this money to the TSA.
The President does wield considerable power over the legislatiave process by virtue of his possession of the power of veto. I believe that even though a new President wouldn't be able to change everything right away, he could put considerable pressure on Congress to move in a certain direction by using the veto and the bully pulpit. Consider that if it became apparent that Americans have chosen a new direction by electing, say, Ron Paul, Congress-critters would receive a clear message that if they did not co-operate with the new President, they might be replaced with someone who will.
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$7.8 billion
Think of the science NASA could do with that cash being wasted to frisk old people for their pill bottles!
Or, if you're one of the NASA haters, think of all the children who won't get an adequate education/vacination/lunch/foodstamps for that money.
But damn tootin' if one of them grandmas thinks she can pass off a bottle of Midol, our Skies Are Safe(tm)*
* (For values of safe equal to We Covered Our Butts come election time. Deal not available in major markets, near large cities or in New York state. Remember: you only need to give up a little freedom or the terrorists win. Vote TSA again, next election.)
"You cannot have a General Will unless you have shared experiences. You cannot be fair to people you don't know."
Frankly... if you're being mocked... you're obviously not being ignored. :)
However, you should seriously look at the real issue with modern protests... pretty much anything "Post hippy". Protests can have legitimate, decent looking and well presented people involved with them. But it doesn't take long for the "Causies" to come running. These are pretty much the tea party of causes. They read the head line and haul ass to be part of the protest... they don't know what the protest is really about, but they come running.
Occupy Wall Street was pathetic. I mean really. A bunch or whiny little cry babies who were protesting what was happening on wall street without having the slightest clue about what it was. They were just pointing at the gamblers in expensive suits and saying "It's your fault". The wall street assholes were responding by saying "I didn't hear people complain when we increased the value of their 401Ks by 300%" which in itself was idiotic since if that money were invested in building companies instead of being day traded or high speed traded, then those people would be adding 100% more money themselves, then maybe the investment would only rise by an equal 100% given a 200% yield at the time, but the artificial inflation of the dollar would be dramatically less during the same period of time and that 200% increase would actually yield substantially greater buying power for the 401K holder. Let's also remember that most of those people who are so dependent on their 401K will need to "borrow from it" during their unemployment since their money is being used to gamble instead of secure the health of the companies they work for. The protesters didn't understand any of this... the most vocal ones were the ones who got the Ph.D. in social anthropology, ran up $200,000 at prestigious schools by using loans to live for 8 years instead of working a job and now are pissed that they aren't qualified for anything other than wearing a paper hat at McDonalds... or working as a professor in social anthropology at a lesser university.
Let's be straight about this... if you go to the university and you study something. Before you decide to run up $200,000 in debt in a Ph.D., you should identify whether you can pay back the loan using one of the jobs that are realistically attainable in your chosen field. No one forces a person to run up $200,000 in debt. If you're studying computer science, make sure that what you're studying is applicable to a real job... not some imaginary job that Oracle, Microsoft or IBM are claiming will be hot in 5 years. What's worse is, if you're an engineer, then your job description is always going to be "Find a way to solve a problem using the tools available to you. Then make it happen". So, if you're an engineer who couldn't plan that there would be problems like "I will need to find a job that will pay down my loans" followed by "I have graduated, now I need to find a way to pay my loans". etc... Then you are in fact the shittiest engineer on the planet. You can't even handle the simplest requirement of being an engineer which is "People come to you to find ways to solve problems.".
So, when you see an engineer on wall street talking about how they couldn't figure out a way to solve their own problem... umm... really? Get off your ass and figure it out. You want to know why you don't have a job? It's because you suck at what it is you're supposed to do.
Modern protesters are a joke. What's worse is that protesters don't generally understand the first thing about politics. The fact is, if everyone who participated in occupy wall street would have each chipped in $10 and then collectively used that money to hire a few lobbyists to go straight to the politicians... far more would have been accomplished.
Protests have their place. But the fact is... raising $10 from each person opposed to the TSA and running a real campaign with lobbying and campaign contributions to politicians willing to make the change desired would be so much more effective than any form of protesting. It is impossible in modern times to run a protest without the freaks showing up and ruining all your credibility and making you look like a laughing stock.