November 24th is Opt-Out of Naked Body Scan Day

It started with a commercial pilots’ organization making an official statement against TSA groping, and now John Tyner, the “don’t touch my junk” guy, has taken the backlash to a whole new level. I say hooray for the American public for finally standing up and saying ala the movie Network News, “We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore!”

Like sheep to the slaughter we all walk to be photographed virtually naked or have our genitals groped and our breasts squeezed in public. This isn’t freedom. This is pure insanity.   

And now the Council on Islamic-American Relations (CAIR), America’s largest Muslim civil liberties advocacy organization has put out an alert that TSA’s enhanced procedures violate Muslim women’s religious rules not to be touched or seen naked by anyone but their husbands. (Christians and Jews don’t care about the airport free-for-all touchy feely?) The alert said if Muslim women are selected for additional pat down it should be only on their head scarves, called hijabs.  So the Muslims started this whole mess and they think they get a modesty waiver?

Just today, when Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano was asked if Muslim women were going to be allowed to opt out of the full body pat down along with the scan if wearing hijabs, Napolitano never answered directly. She simply said there would be “adjustments” and “more information to come.” Huh?

A Breast Squeeze Here, A Breast Squeeze There

We’ve all seen the Internet  videos the last week showing young children and old women being patted down. But it’s the groping of the genitals and squeezing of breasts by the opposite sex that is the worst. Reports are that for women who have been sexually molested that it is triggering post traumatic stress. And then there’s the problem of teaching children how not to be touched only to have them molested “by authorities.” Can you imagine the utter humiliation of a teenage girl having to go through this? The entire family has passed screening, but the 16 year old girl has to be patted down, have her breasts squeezed and her genitals felt. So what’s it gonna be Missy? Don’t get home or “submit?”

We also all know that with an extra 50,000 TSA agents hired to do the groping, there are bound to be, not a few, but a lot of agents who cross the line.  Horror stories and videos have already surfaced along with agents being caught in lies when they didn’t know they were being recorded.

Body Scan Images HAVE Been Saved

The worst lie of all is that the public is repeatedly told that the scanners cannot store or transmit any of the images. The U.S. Marshall service ADMITTED to storing 35,000 naked images at just one courthouse in Orlando.

Shahruky Khan

And then there is the well-publicized story of the hunky Indian actor Shakrukh Khan whose naked body scan at Heathrow International Airport was printed and shared among security staff. It’s obvious that one of the agents where Khan was being scanned alerted the person checking the image.  Can you imagine Angelina Jolie going through the scanners? One  guy calls another and next thing you know the guy screening in the back room pulls out his cellphone and snap, snap, snap.

My own brother is a TSA agent. I haven’t talked with him about the subject because I know his heart is in the security aspect of the issue and he’d probably poo-hoo whatever I said. But I do know that now having to deal with the public like this is probably not his idea of a fun day at the office. Can you imagine the collective groans when TSA agents were told the new procedures? I mean really, take a look at most of the people in line with you at the airport next time. Very few would you want to grope.

I’m all for enhanced security and even being inconvenienced for the safety’s sake. But I so object to public molestation, and that’s what this has come to.

A Facebook page has popped up for support of not flying until this fiasco is resolved. Ron Paul has joined the movement calling for November 24th to be “National Opt-Out of Naked Day” of naked body scanners.  That’s right, the day before Thanksgiving when most folks are flying. The movement recommends flyers opt-out, which is their right, and be patted down in public by TSA, then share their experiences. A bit overboard if you ask me. But it’s a method.

I for one will make arrangements to drive whenever possible when I need to travel.  How about you?

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Our Government Funds Programs to Make Us Fatter

For several years the government ran an advertising campaign touting the consumption of dairy products as a way to lose weight. Problem is, it wasn’t true.

After the campaign began, several million dollars was spent to substantiate the government’s claim – after it had already claimed the weight loss effect.  None of the researchers, including one funded by the government, could find anything to prove their claims. The government even got angry at the researcher they hired and threatened to “audit” her work. And the campaign continued.

An ad in People magazine claimed: “Clinical studies show that people on a reduced-calorie diet who consume three servings of milk, cheese or yogurt each day can lose significantly more weight and more body fat than those who just cut calories.”

An excellent article in the New York Times reports how the government continues to push the sale of cheese with big marketing dollars while at the same time scolding the public for obesity.

The Dairy Management is the creation and an arm of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, our obesity police these days. The NYT article says that while the Dept. of Agriculture is putting out literature recommending we ask for whole wheat pizza crust and half the cheese, Dairy Management is helping Dominoes sell more pizza by showing the company how to add more cheese to its pizzas.

With consumption of cheese has nearly tripled in the U.S. since 1970, American waistlines have followed suit.

I remained dumbfounded at the continual conflict of interest actions when it comes to recommendations for Americans to eat more healthily.

We Must Start With the School Cafeterias

School cafeteria food is my pet peeve. My daughter complains that the only salads offered at her school are tiny dreadful inedible creations.  She goes for the pizza line daily because she says that’s the only one she can get through and still have time left to eat. She also mentioned that this past summer, she dropped ten pounds rather quickly by simply not eating school cafeteria offerings. When she attended a private school in middle school, she was thrilled to partake of its fabulous salad bar. But not in her public school.

Why is it that schools cling to their soft drink machines and the high fat and refined carbohydrate foods that offer our kids little nutrition?  The answer is he same as why the government promotes the very eating habits it warns against –because that’s where the money is. Follow the money.

The our schools should do the same  thing many parents do at home and that’s only make nutritious food available. Why is this concept so darn hard?

Florida Voters Need to Support Driving Tests for the Elderly

Thank  goodness my elderly relatives don’t know I write a blog. They probably couldn’t navigate their way to it online even if they did.  They can’t figure out how to sign on to the computer even with written instructions, but they feel fully competent to continue driving those moving missiles down our highway. And that’s what scares me.

I have one elderly relative who had multiple strokes, could barely get her right foot into action, but by God, she was going to drive and no one was going to stop her. Back into the car she went soon after she spent several weeks in the hospital and rehab.

In Florida, there are no laws that require the elderly to be retested to get their driver licences renewed. It’s mind-boggling to think of the number of 90 plus year olds, much less the over 80 group, that continue to drive down the road at half the speed limit, with their blinkers on, oblivious to what’s going on around them. Lord help us all if they need to react quickly.

There are only two states – Illinois and New Hampshire – that require the elderly to pass road tests. In 2004, Florida began requiring those 80 and older to pass a vision test. While that state hasn’t kept track of the accident rate among that age group since the law was enacted, it has said that the vision test requirement did remove 17 percent of  drivers 80 years old and older from the roads.

Taking the keys away from independent elderly relatives is truly taking your life in your own hands. It’s often a prolonged process of arguing, praying and ultimately convincing your loved one they are dangerous to themselves and others. I have one relative who got her 93 year-old mother to agree to turn over her keys if she failed the test given by Brooks Health. She passed the written test rather well, but failed the road test miserably. And she stood by her agreement and turned over the keys.

There are few legislators in Florida willing to jeopardize their support from the older voters by enacting laws to require driving tests. It’s hard to blame them. A way to get then off the hook is to initiate a constitutional amendment to require testing. My guess is that everyone under 60 will vote “yes.”

Most older drivers say they’ll know when they gave gone beyond their ability to be on the roads safely. I disagree and liken it to the drinker who thinks he hasn’t been affected by the five drinks he’s already had or the sunbather who keeps laying out thinking she is burning. Like them, the elderly drivers think they have it under control until they hurt someone.

What can we do to keep that from happening?

Yes, Virginia There is A Lover Telling All

Under the category of “What Was She Thinking?” — Virginia Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, would be justified in  kicking herself and her husband about right now. It was a foolish move indeed on her part to call her husband’s sexual harrassment accuser Anita Hill earlier this week and leave a message that she still wanted an apology from Hill after nearly 20 years.  (Oh, wouldn’t you have loved to have been a fly on the wall when Hill listened to THAT message.)

Now, Clarence Thomas’ former lover of five years (1981-1986), a retired judge herself, has come forward  with information that corroborates a lot of what Hill testified were Thomas’ patterns of sexual harassment. Testimony that has dogged Hill since and brought skepticism to her honesty and sanity.

Lillian McEwan has never publicly spoken about her sexual relationship with Justice Thomas even though she’s been approached by reporters over the last two decades since the hearings in 1991. She and Thomas dated when both were single. Vice President Joe Biden, leading the 1991 Senate investigation into the Hill accusations at the time, never asked her to testify as he was focusing only on women with whom Thomas had a professional relationship.

McEwen has maintained  good relations with Thomas over the years.  Now retired from being an administrative judge and law professor, she’s shopping her memoir. When Virgina Thomas made her monstrous gaffe of asking for an apology, it got McEwen to thinking and she decided to come out about Thomas in hopes it will help her land a publisher. And, we know said publisher is going to want her to totally rewrite that memoir.  The manuscript does, however, talk in detail about her Katie-bar-the-door sex life with Thomas.

In a Washington Post story, McEwen states that when watching the Anita Hill testimony that the scenarios she talked about to all too familiar to her.  “He was always actively watching the women he worked with to see if they could be potential partners,” McEwen said matter-of-factly. “It was a hobby of his.” She adds, “He was obsessed with porn. He would talk about what he had seen in magazines and films, if there was something worth noting.” She states that he was also obsessed with large breasts and that Thomas even told her about an incident in which he asked one of his females colleagues what size her breasts were.

At the time of the hearings, Clarence Thomas called the investigation a “high-class lynching.”  The fact that he was confirmed to the Supreme Court is what I call another result of blinded political correctness of lawmakers too gun-shy to be the ones too vote down a black nominee for Thurgood Marshall’s seat on the bench.

So one day after the Juan Williams firing debacle from NPR, another one of our sad results of political correctness rears its ugly head again. Political correctness has got us by the throat and as Juan Williams says “distorts reality.” 

 Anita Hill surely knew that eventually the truth would set her free.  Welcome to freedom Ms. Hill.

The Lesser of Two Evils

 Rick Scott was either a thief and a liar or he was an unconscious leader asleep at the wheel. Those are the only two choices.

Rick Scott was at the helm of a healthcare company that perpetrated the largest Medicare fraud this nation has ever seen.  He stole our tax dollars, and used some of that money he bilked from us to buy, er finance, his run for Florida governor.  He spent $50 million of “his own” money to finance his campaign. He told CNN the day he won the primary that there was no limit to what he would spend to become governor of Florida. It’s mind-boggling to me that my fellow Republicans would support him to win the primary.

Scott continues to say how he took full responsibility for the Medicaid fraud at his corporation. Okay, so what exactly does that mean? He’s admitting he was asleep at the wheel? So he admits it and it absolves him?  Is that the personal responsibility he’s talking about?  Maybe if I admit to him that I ate the donut and it made me fat, then he’ll not inflate my medical insurance because I “took responsibility.” 

Scott pillaged hospitals and allegedly put patients at risk with his bare bones staffing and cheapness to an extent that at one of his hospitals, a nurse was put in charge of 72 infants all by herself.  One administrator told the New York Times, “I never witnessed such an extent of demeaning, debasing and devaluing behavior as I personally experienced at Columbia.” 

Journalist Maggie Mahar, who interviewed Scott years ago for Barrons when he took over HCA, said that most up and comer CEOs such as Scott usually had larger than life personalities. But not Scott. He was rather hang-dog and boring she said.   She later wrote on her blog:   “But that’s not why Rick Scott made me uneasy. It was the fact that, when I looked directly in his eyes (which is how I usually made contact with people I interviewed) there was no one there.”

When we’re talking the lesser of two evils, a Democratic governor is surely the lesser.

BLOOD SPORT

Politics is a blood sport. There comes a point, however, when political bashing as a blood sport reaches its limit and does nothing to contribute to the collective consciousness. It serves only to gnaw at everyone’s spirit, even the basher.

Caribou Barbie

I’ve found myself  unfollowing otherwise entertaining people on Twitter because of incessant negative comments about Sarah Palin and George Bush that merely serve to complain.  Or the mayor happened and to on TV and they found it necessary to express their disgust at simply seeing him. I’ve asked my Facebook followers to  please not load up their negative political arguments on my wall, and most especially to something positive I say.

Am I too Pollyanna to believe it’s possible? No. I know of one friend up north who actually curtailed her bashing for sport of Sarah Palin on Twitter after some respectful private exchanges. Bashing serves absolutely no purpose, but does leave a lasting effect whether it be about politicians, celebrities or your relatives.

Everyone has some good in them that can be recognized. Even Rick Scott.  And I’ll remember that, after the election.