Happy Valentines Day from the TSA!

hat tip Craig Schmuckatelli

73 persons on the terrorist watch list are currently working at US airports.

Mark Steyn writes this report on hosting Rush Limbaugh's show last Tuesday:

I began by noting the recent debacle at the TSA. Not content with a 96 per cent failure rate when it comes to detecting prohibited items, the TSA was also entirely unaware that 73 persons on the terrorist watch list are currently working at US airports. These are the guys you see at the airport zipping straight past the security line - the baggage handlers and bathroom cleaners and concession-stand employees, the fellows with the security badges that enable them to bypass the downtrodden throng of bedraggled Americans shuffling shoeless past the federal genital-gropers. And 73 of the guys with those security passes are on the terrorist-watch list. They're the "known wolves" - the ones who, after the atrocity, are revealed to have been in the official databases all along, as with the Boston Marathon bombers and the panty bomber and the fellows who wanted to kill Pamela Geller in Texas. Seventy-three known terror suspects managed to get jobs at US airports. I wonder how many would-be terrorists not known to the watch-list compilers are also gainfully employed at O'Hare and LAX and the rest.

I would have liked to have heard what the homeland-security honchos had to say for themselves at today's scheduled Senate hearing, but about 40 minutes into the show the Senate hearing on security breaches at the TSA had to be evacuated because of a security breach. That's almost too perfect a summation of the Big Security State - except that 90 minutes later the White House press briefing room also had to be evacuated because of a "suspicious package".

It didn't last long, fortunately. The "suspicious package" turned out to be the President's missing ISIS strategy that someone had left in a brown paper bag under Helen Thomas' seat. But, as I said on the air, I couldn't recall the IRA ever pulling off the simultaneous evacuation of both Buckingham Palace and the Houses of Parliament.

We also explored The New York Times' latest Marco Rubio scandal du jour: It took him years to pay off hundreds of thousands of dollars of mortgage and student debt! Oh, and he once treated himself to an $80,000 speedboat! Everybody knows that, when a normal politician is hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, all he has to do is give one $700,000 speech on African diarrhea to a bunch of Saudi princes. As for the boat, David Jack Smith Tweeted:

You know if the NYTimes thought they could get away with it, they'd call Rubio: Speedyboaty Gonzales

...On the other hand, despite all their attention to Marco Rubio's stop-sign infractions, the Times in its remorseless forensic examination of candidate motoring records has absolutely no interest in this:

Mocking the NY Times for all the attention they've given Marco Rubio's driving record, Mark Steyn revealed something today from Hillary Clinton's past that should put the NY Times to shame for focusing so much on Marco Rubio's speeding tickets.

He explains how Clinton's limo driver, back in 2001, in what he calls a 'driving Miss Hillary' situation, crashed through an airport security fence at 35mph with her in the back, injuring a police officer and only stopping because the police officer needed medical treatment.

~And, of course, I noted bachelor presidential candidate Lindsay Graham's wish for a "rotating First Lady". We've all felt the need for one of those. And we chewed over the parlous state of free speech in the American academy, where "safe space" is a euphemism for "one-party state":

The 'safe space' is a totalitarianism concept and where cultures go to die. If you're wondering why free speech is on the rocks in the United States and around the free world it's because our children are being held hostage in the safe space the first 20 years of their life.

Read more here.

TSA's Failure Rate in Detecting Bombs and Weapons? Ninety Five Percent!

CNN reports,

The Department of Homeland Security said Monday that the acting administrator for the Transportation Security Administration would be reassigned, following a report that airport screeners failed to detect explosives and weapons in nearly every test that an undercover team conducted at dozens of airports.

More here.

TSA doesn't know if its bomb-detecting machines are operational

Elizabeth Harrington writes at Washington Free Beacon,

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has such poor management over its airport security equipment that the agency does not know if its screening machines are working, according to an audit by the Office of Inspector General.

American lives may be at risk due to ineffective maintenance of its equipment, which has cost taxpayers $1.2 billion.

Read more here.
I had my own experience with those machines last month.

I survived a TSA patdown

"Hold out your hands, please," said the nice young man. He then ran a little device over my hands and asked for backup assistance. A very business-like woman told me that my hands had tested positive for explosives residue. Right away I realized what it was: for five days I had been using organic dish soap at my kids' house in New Mexico. I told the young man that, and his reply was, "Organic? That should have been better than regular dish soap."

I replied, "Yes, you would think so, but it is not. I regularly use the Walmart Great Value dish soap for sensitive skin, and it doesn't shrivel up my skin like that organic dish soap. See how wrinkly my hands are?" He wasn't buying it, and called three big burly men over. They asked me to take everything out of my pockets, take off my belt and shoes, and go into a scanner and raise my hands high.

When I did that, things got worse. It seems my shirt had made yellow spots in three or four places on their screen. "Oh, I said, I can explain. You see, where I have been living the last five days, they do not have a dryer. It's on a mesa top near Santa Fe. After I washed my clothes, I hung them out to dry on a fence." I thought to myself, maybe the wind blew in some radioactive particles from the Los Alamos Nuclear grounds. The men took me to a private screening room.

Then they found three suspicious bottles: Sinus Rinse. The man was now getting a look of concern on his face. I said, "It's just water, salt, and baking soda." He asked, "Why does it have a hole in the top of each bottle?" "That's where you squirt it into your nose," I answered. "It really works. Try it the next time you have any problems with your sinuses."

After patting me up and down and sideways, they let me proceed to my waiting flight. When I saw smiles replace their looks of deep concern, I thought it might be a good time to share with them something I had read on the internet, probably at Chateau Heartiste. "You know, we could replace all the TSA employees and machines if the airlines would just seat all the alpha males in aisle seats and tell them to look for anyone acting suspiciously." Then it hit me: there probably aren't enough alpha males left to fill the aisle seats.

Update: This explains it all!

The fabric

At PJ Media Robert Spencer writes:

Last Sunday, in his message congratulating Muslims on Eid al-Fitr, the holiday marking the end of the fasting month of Ramadan, Barack Obama wrote: “Eid also reminds us of the many achievements and contributions of Muslim Americans to building the very fabric of our nation and strengthening the core of our democracy.”

What are some of those contributions? Spencer can think of five.

5. Getting us here in the first place
Every schoolchild knows, or used to know, that in 1492 Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue and discovered America while searching for a new, westward sea route to Asia. But why was he searching for a new route to Asia? Because the fall of Constantinople to the Muslims in 1453 closed the trade routes to the East. This was devastating for European tradesmen, who had until then traveled to Asia for spices and other goods by land. Columbus’s voyage was trying to ease the plight of these merchants by bypassing the Muslims altogether and making it possible for Europeans to reach India by sea.

4. Slavery
... if it weren’t for the Islamic slave industry on the African continent, there would have been no slavery in the New World, and none of the attendant national traumas that reverberate down to this day. This means, of course, that one way that Muslims have contributed to building the very fabric of our nation is by setting in motion the chain of events that led to ongoing racial tensions in the U.S., and ultimately to the election to the presidency of Barack Obama.

3. The Marines
...“From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli…” The line from the Marines’ hymn commemorates the Marines’ actions during the First Barbary War (1801-1805), the first war the United States fought against Islamic jihadists. The war came about because President Thomas Jefferson refused to accede to the Barbary states’ demands for tribute payments – demands made in accord with the Qur’an’s dictum that the “People of the Book” must be made to “pay the jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued” (9:29). The Barbary pirates, also acting in accord with Islamic law regarding the kidnapping, enslaving and ransoming of non-Muslims, were seizing American ships and enslaving the crews, demanding exorbitant ransoms for their release.

The Marines put a stop to all that, and the line from the Marines’ hymn shows how pivotal their actions on the Barbary coast were to forming the Marine ethos. So for the Marines, too, we have Muslims to thank.

2. A drastically weakened economy
...Osama bin Laden explained that he mounted the 9/11 jihad terror attacks in order to weaken the American economy. In October 2004 he exulted: “Al-Qaeda spent $500,000 on the event, while America, in the incident and its aftermath, lost — according to the lowest estimate — more than $500 billion, meaning that every dollar of al-Qaeda defeated a million dollars.” Then there are the further billions lost since 2004, and the billions wasted on the nation-building misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan – such that if he were alive today, bin Laden could look with satisfaction on an America with a severely weakened economy, high unemployment, and no imminent prospects for genuine recovery.

We experience the effects of this every day in a thousand ways, large and small – in an America that is poorer, uglier, meaner, more dangerous, less productive and less efficient than it was on September 10, 2001. A veritable contribution to the fabric of our nation indeed.

1. The TSA
Once romantic and even glamorous, air travel today is an uncomfortable, uncertain, unpleasant, inhospitable, cramped affair involving intrusive and inefficient security procedures that annoy and humiliate travelers. At least everyone is humiliated equally. Passengers are poked, prodded, threatened, herded like cattle, beleaguered with delays, and treated as if they were criminals in a politically correct attempt to avoid focusing on the true source of the problem.

Meanwhile, the TSA and the Department of Homeland Security are two new bloated and ever-growing bureaucracies, further draining the already depleted American taxpayer.

And that, surely, is the crowning contribution that Muslims have made to “building the very fabric of our nation” as it stands today.

Read more here.