Photo by Beverly and Pack

Round one of the great debt debate is over. Now we move onto rolling up our sleeves and actually start cutting. The bad news is that President Obama and Harry Reid wasted no time in calling for tax increases despite their agreement to a debt deal that included no tax increases. The good news that the spending cut targets are minimums, there is nothing stopping Congress from making bigger cuts and if we ignore all the hand wringing and the “terrorist” smears, it may not be as hard as we think.

It’s called the “Penny Plan (HR 1848),” the brainchild of Florida Congressman Connie Mack. It is ridiculously simple and here is how it would work.

• Cap spending at current 2011 levels minus net interest and then cut one penny out of each dollar in spending, that is, 1%.
• For each of the next six years, cut the baseline from the previous year (less 1%) by another penny, or 1%.
• After six years expenditures should be down to 18% of GDP, the budget will be balanced and we can start paying off our debt.
• Future budgets would be capped at 18% of GDP

Did you ever watch a business, celebrity, or government agency find itself in the middle of a media frenzy that it thinks will soon blow over and instead it only gets worse? In a way, I feel sorry for TSA Administrator John Pistole, but after listening to him try to defend what they are doing, a head slap is the more appropriate reaction. What are these idiots thinking?

Fighting the Last War

Almost every new “solution” the TSA comes out with is to fight the dismal failure they just allowed. Here are a few questions for Administrator Pistole before the TSA’s next grope:

•  How many attempted hijackings have there been by Islamic terrorists since 9/11 that have been thwarted by hardened cockpit doors or air marshals on planes? My guess is none because the Islamic terrorists moved on to the next strategy.
• Perhaps millions of shoes have been removed by passengers and run through the scanning machines. How many shoes have been found containing explosives? My guess is none because the Islamic terrorists moved on to the next strategy.
• Perhaps this question is too early to ask, but I’ll go ahead anyway, how many people have been electronically denuded and or intimately fondled that resulted in the capture of an underwear bomber? My guess is none because the Islamic terrorists moved on to the next strategy.
• How many people attempted to commandeer a plane using nail clippers? And why was a soldier, who was carrying his unloaded carbine on a military flight stripped of his nail clippers because they might be used as a weapon to take over the plane? “What about this?” the soldier asked the TSA agent, tapping the stock of his carbine.  Blank stare. “I’ll need those clippers, sir.” I am not kidding (click here to read the story). It just might be, but I doubt it that the Islamic terrorists are saying, “Why didn’t we think of that?” But is it probably more likely they are saying, “Take over a plane using WHAT???”

How About Trying Something That Works?

After all we learned from the 9/11 hijackers what did we do? We focused on nail clippers, cockpit doors, and using technology to screen flyers. But political correctness kept us then and continues to keep us stupid. Richard Reid the shoe bomber was next up.

On December 21, 2001, Reid attempted to board a flight from Paris, France to Miami, Florida, but his boarding was delayed because his disheveled physical appearance aroused the suspicions of the airline passenger screeners. Reid also did not answer all of their questions, and had not checked any luggage for the transatlantic flight. Additional screening by the French National Police resulted in Reid’s being re-issued a ticket for a flight on the following day. He returned to the Paris airport on December 22, 2001, and he boarded American Airlines Flight 63 from Paris to Miami, wearing his special shoes packed with plastic explosives in their hollowed-out bottoms.

He “aroused suspicions” and “did not answer all of their questions”. So why was this guy allowed to board a plane, ever? But board he did and he attempted to set off his shoe bomb in mid-flight. He didn’t try to commandeer the plane and fly it into a building, mind you; been there, done that. If for some unknown reason we felt compelled to allow him to fly he should have had his own air marshal, at about 6’5” and 265 rock solid pounds named Bruno who should have introduced himself to Reid saying, “Hi, the name’s Bruno, I’ll be sitting next to you personally escorting you on your flight. Have a nice day.” Instead they let Reid on the plane, and he tried to light the fuse but it would not ignite, it is presumed because of the one day delay he was walking around in the rain and profusely sweating, that he might have dampened the fuse. But don’t worry, I am sure we had many engineers working feverishly to design some technology to prevent another 9/11.

From that moment forward we could not leave home to fly without carefully checking our socks for holes so we would not be embarrassed when everyone was walking around without shoes. Naturally that was also probably the last time we would see a shoe bomber, but never mind.

Then there was the Christmas Day bomber. Here is part of his tale:

On November 11, British intelligence officials sent the U.S. a cable indicating that a man named “Umar Farouk” had spoken to al-Awlaki, pledging to support jihad, but the cable did not reflect Abdulmutallab’s last name. Abdulmutallab’s father made a report to two CIA officers at the U.S. Embassy in Abuja, Nigeria, on November 19 regarding his son’s “extreme religious views”, and told the embassy that Abdulmutallab might be in Yemen. Acting on the report, the suspect’s name was added in November 2009 to the U.S..’s 550,000-name Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, a database of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center. It was not added, however, to the FBI’s 400,000-name Terrorist Screening Database, the terror watch list that feeds both the 14,000-name Secondary Screening Selectee list and the U.S.’s 4,000-name No Fly List, nor was his U.S. visa revoked.

U.S. State Department officials said in Congressional testimony that the State Department had wanted to revoke Abdulmutallab’s visa, but U.S. intelligence officials requested that his visa not be revoked. The intelligence officials’ stated reason was that revoking Abdulmutallab’s visa could have foiled a larger investigation into al-Qaida.

Abdulmutallab’s name had come to the attention of intelligence officials many months before that, but no “derogatory information” was recorded about him. A Congressional official said that Abdulmutallab’s name appeared in U.S. reports reflecting that he had connections to both al-Qaeda and Yemen. The NCTC did not check to see whether Abdulmutallab’s American visa was valid, or whether he had a British visa that was valid; therefore, they did not learn that the British had rejected Abdulmutallab’s visa application earlier in 2009. The British did not inform the Americans because the visa application was denied to prevent immigration fraud and not for a national security purpose.

He bought his ticket with cash. The ticket agent refused to allow him to board the plane because he did not have his own passport, but somehow he and a “smartly dressed man” talked their way around that and he boarded the plane.

Always Two Steps Behind

So now, all of us are getting our freedom and dignity removed so that the next underwear bomber, who will never come, won’t blow up a plane. So now we have printer cartridges filled with explosives being shipped in the cargo hold. What are the full body scanner’s going to do about them? Nothing. We will have to spend millions more developing full cargo scanners and while we are working on that, the terrorists will be figuring out how to detonate explosives carried in a body cavity of a person on a plane. The new full body scanners cannot currently see into body cavities. So just imagine what the TSA will roll out after that attempt. “Just grab your ankles, this won’t hurt a bit.”

It’s Time to Get Serious Rather than Clever

It’s time to back off on the machines. Technology can be a very useful tool, but it cannot be used as a solution for all problems and this is coming from a guy who spent over 20 years in Information Technology. We need to go back to some very old, but very effective tools: brains, eyes, ears, and nose. Apply the technology resources where they will do the most good, handling information and getting the right names on the right lists to keep people off planes who are dangerous. Make their lives inconvenient by making them travel by boat, train or car, rather than putting the rest of us through hell.

The TSA should have agents checking the people,  rather than looking at monitor screens and IDs. Study their eyes, their demeanor, how they look, how they move, their behavior focusing particularly on Islamic males between the ages of 20-40. It is not racial profiling it is terrorist profiling. If anyone causes a TSA agent to feel the least bit wary, do not hesitate to politely ask that person to step out of line and question them. If the agent is not satisfied, take the person to an interrogation room and give them a detailed interview and if need be give them the full body search and if that means you have to do that to 10, 20, 30, or 50 people of similar age, color, sex, national origin, and religion in a row, do so without hesitation and brook no interference.

Between the shoe bomber, the Christmas Day bomber, and the Times Square bomber we got very lucky. But it is not as if we didn’t have the opportunity to stop them using our brains, eyes, ears and noses. We didn’t need the sophisticated technology that we so fervently pursue and believe in and we didn’t use the tools we have had for thousands of years.

I am not optimistic that we will get control over this problem. What we probably need is fewer TSA agents who are more highly paid and more thoroughly trained in behavioral analysis, but the current topic of discussion is how we can unionize all the TSA workers. That’s what we need now folks, a great way to protect the incompetent TSA workers and discourage the good ones to the point of quitting to do more interesting and less restrictive work.  Let’s start using our heads.  The American people are outraged because they don’t see the intrusion worth the risks.  If the TSA can’t figure it out perhaps they shold consult the Israelis.  Or is this administration too busy turning them into our enemies too?

Remember the stimulus package that had to pass immediately or we would face economic catastrophe?  Recently released data from the Commerce Department show that the economy was recovering before the stimulus went into effect.  Unemployment has risen above what the Obama administration said it would if the stimulus passed, but oh well, Congress approved and the president signed the legislation to spend $787 billion of your money.

The Next Boondoggle

Now President Obama is trying to ramrod through the Cap and Trade legislation that will put another enormous burden on taxpayers and we have to do this now, immediately, imperatively, or south Florida will be under water and polar bears will be extinct.

A 98 page report from a veteran in the EPA garnered this response from his boss, Al McGartland:

“‘The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision,” he wrote, according to the e-mails released by CEI. “I can only see one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office.’ ”

Who is the EPA working for?  Is this a government of the people or of the statists?  So because they won the election, the policies of their most extreme supporters must be put in place, no matter how large the bill or how effective the policy.  If it is a sham, too bad, they want it…they shall have it and you get stuck with the bill, the loss of liberty, and them telling you how to live your life.

The Problematic Report

Here is the essence of the report , written by EPA scientist Alan Carlin,  that the EPA finds so damning:

Carlin compiled a 98 page report that pointed to some inconvenient facts that call the connection between CO2 emissions and global temperature into doubt, at a time when the President is pushing “urgent” carbon emissions regulation through the Congress. From FOXNews.com:”Specifically, the report noted that global temperatures were on a downward trend over the past 11 years, that scientists do not necessarily believe that storms will become more frequent or more intense due to global warming, and that the theory that temperatures will cause Greenland ice to rapidly melt has been ‘greatly diminished.’ ”

But hey, on the other side of the ledger you have Al Gore and he has a Nobel prize and an Academy Award, so who are you going to believe?

The global warming threat may be in the process of being debunked but the fiscal threat from the Obama Administration will cause far more damage if we don’t take urgent steps to stop them.