Well Tom, knowing what you look like doesn't make you a likely candidate to be groped. But when we were flying commercial flights I was picked out to be groped way to often for it to be just coincidence. Like 1 out of 3 times. And I'll be damned if I look like some kind of a terrorist. And don't bother telling me to file a complaint because that was done and you damn well know that nothing became of it.

-Mrs. anon

Mrs Anon, it seems that you are not going to get the guys to understand that it is not their right to grope, harass, or heckle any attractive woman that they come across. Perhaps they think you should be flattered that you were considered attractive enough for the security guards to grope? Trust me, I know exactly what you mean.

It's a sad fact that women are still not taken seriously in this society.

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Reality Internet Personality

That's not fair Es! Not all men are like that and I have yet to grope, harass or heckle any woman but my girlfriends. :/

I'm glad to hear it :-)

I know there are loads of perfectly decent men out there, but there are plenty of men who take advantage where they can. I have never been groped by an airport security man myself, probably because I usually travelled with my partner. But I have been groped in the street, on the tube, in shops, in bars.. I was once groped up by a rather butch airport security woman who had a moustache..not nice :-(

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Reality Internet Personality

That's not fair Es! Not all men are like that and I have yet to grope, harass or heckle any woman but my girlfriends. :/

If I remember correctly Mrs. Anon didn't say if it was a man.
You assumed it was a man, but it could be and probably was a woman.
From my understanding the women get checked by the women TSA workers.

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Red Bull Air Racing

Gas price by zip at Seti

From my understanding the women get checked by the women TSA workers.

Richard, I think that is the case these days although not all over the world. It wasn't always like that.

I replied to Es's post and it kind of generalized all men, not just TSA workers.

CR, I didn't mean to give the impression that I think all men behave like this. But the attitude that of you complain or sue something will be done about it is unrealistic. In my experience complaints like this are treated like a nuisance and the women are not taken seriously. As for reporting gropers to the police..ha! The police won't do anything.

I had my penknife confiscated when I was flying to Belfast last year. The blade was an inch long and I really couldn't see how I could hijack an airplane with it. I'd forgotten it was on my keyring.

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Reality Internet Personality

Snip of a bunch of partisan crap.

Failure to Support our Troops. Unbelievably, the Bush administration failed to provide proper armor to U.S. troops before sending them into harm's way. They also broke their commitments of a limited combat tour to brave men and women who enlisted and found their combat duty extended.

Looks like Martin wants to write about things he knows nothing about. Surprise, surprise.

Martin, it is rare indeed that Presidents decide the MTOE for any unit, let alone such things as are carried by individual soldiers. Should we blame Clinton, or Bush41, or Reagan, or Carter? Ford? Nixon?

Administration Winks at Big Oil Gouging of Motorists. Oil company profits soared as much as 89 percent in one year, while gas prices for motorists skyrocketed to record heights. Bush officials sat in benign silence. Congress held velvet-glove hearings. Some threatened a windfall profits tax – but plowing money back into the U.S. treasury won't help motorists who have already over-paid.

Hmmmm. Odd. Hey Martin, didja notice that the Democrats haven't introduced legislation or filed any charges either? Why is that do you think?

Now this: Americans seem to have finally caught on.

I wish people like you would catch on that irrational partisan politics doesn't further one's cause among those that one needs to convince.

I hate being terrorized by my own government.

Odd. You hate the use of gov't force as it is applied to you, but you seem willing to apply gov't force to others and use it to raise the minimum wage.

Note the irony? Not that you are the only one, of course.

This is the problem with supporting the system as it stands. Sometimes people get the meddling they want, most times they get skrewed by the meddling others wanted.

Katrina barely affected inland Mississippi, but many got aid
U.S. Attorney's Office checking on 1,000 fraud reports

By Eric Lipton
NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE

November 20, 2005

JACKSON, Miss. - When the federal government and the nation's largest disaster relief group reached out a helping hand after Hurricane Katrina blew through Jackson, Miss., tens of thousands of people grabbed it.

But in giving out $62 million in aid, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the American Red Cross overlooked a critical fact: The storm was hardly catastrophic here, 160 miles from the coast. The only damage sustained by most of the nearly 30,000 households receiving aid was spoiled food in the freezer.

The fact that at least some relief money has gone to those perceived as greedy, not needy, has set off recriminations in this poor, historic capital where the payments of up to $2,358 set off spending sprees on jewelry, guns and electronics.

Though a majority of the money appears to have been given out legally, the U.S. Attorney's Office is investigating at least 1,000 reports of fraud, including accusations that people lied about claims of damage or where they lived. State and local officials are criticizing FEMA and the Red Cross for doling out money without safeguards, but they also blame their fellow citizens.

"The donors all across this nation thought they were giving money to put food in the mouths of people who had nothing and clothes on the backs of people who had lost everything," said state Rep. John Raymond Reeves, who represents Jackson. "But that is not what happened here. There was a feeding frenzy."

And friends have turned against friends. When word of the Red Cross and federal money got out in Jackson's neighborhoods, many rushed to apply. Huge lines formed at Western Union outlets and other places that issued or cashed the relief checks.

Erica Thompson, 32, tried unsuccessfully to persuade her friends not to join in.

"People can take a good thing and abuse it," Thompson said while doing her wash at a coin laundry in Jackson this week. "It's not right."

Some of those who accepted the aid, though, feel no embarrassment.

"I needed that money," said Lynn Alexander, 30, whose apartment lost power in the storm, but was not damaged. She collected $900, she said, from the Red Cross. "It helped me put gas in my car, wash my clothes and buy food."

What happened in Jackson and its suburbs – in Hinds, Madison and Rankin counties – might not be unique. Emergency officials elsewhere in Mississippi and in parts of Louisiana have also questioned how so much federal aid could have been authorized, given the limited damage they documented.

"Someone is going to have to look at that," said Bo Boudreaux, deputy director of homeland security in Iberia Parish, west of New Orleans, where perhaps three mobile homes were damaged, he said, but 404 families, according to FEMA, received $2,000 checks in emergency aid.

FEMA, which is leading the $62 billion Katrina relief effort, has been criticized as responding slowly to the disaster and then wasting recovery money. In defending the payments in the Jackson area, the agency and the Red Cross cited the tensions between moving quickly to help the desperate, and moving carefully to avoid aiding the undeserving.

"This is the challenge we perpetually face," said Nicol Andrews, a FEMA spokeswoman. "Do you get assistance into the hands of those who desperately need it as quickly as possible? Or do you slow it down to dot every single 'i' and cross every single 't'? We chose to err on the side of the victim."

Charles Connor, a senior vice president at the Red Cross in Washington, said his group had a similar imperative. People who brought in a form of identification were eligible for aid. Connor acknowledges that apparently resulted in aid being offered to some who did not need it.

By the time Hurricane Katrina reached this far, its power had greatly diminished. The sustained winds, recorded at 47 mph at the airport, were far below hurricane speed. But gusts of up to 74 mph took down trees, knocking out power lines and damaging roofs.

Still, the region was largely spared. In Jackson and three nearby counties, only 50 to 60 homes were declared uninhabitable, directors of local emergency departments said.

Immediately after the hurricane made landfall, the Bush administration declared a disaster area along 15 Mississippi coastal counties, as well as 31 parishes in Louisiana. Residents there were eligible for federal emergency grants, housing assistance and money for repairs, medical bills and other costs.

But by Sept. 7, at Mississippi's request, the disaster zone was expanded as far as 220 miles inland, reaching 32 counties, including several that never experienced sustained hurricane-force winds.

Lea Stokes, a spokeswoman for the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency, said the state urged the Bush administration to include so many counties in the disaster zone after documenting widespread damage. The state encouraged all residents to apply for aid, even if the only cost they incurred was the purchase of a chainsaw or generator.

"Let them tell you whether or not you qualify before you rule yourself out," she said, echoing the advice offered by Mississippi officials.

Andrews said the federal government typically deferred to states on disaster declarations. But when that happens, she acknowledged, the door is opened for federal aid.

"Once we effectively turn on a county, anyone in that county can apply," Andrews said.

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me@rescam.org

I hate being terrorized by my own government.

Odd. You hate the use of gov't force as it is applied to you, but you seem willing to apply gov't force to others and use it to raise the minimum wage.

Note the irony? Not that you are the only one, of course.

This is the problem with supporting the system as it stands. Sometimes people get the meddling they want, most times they get skrewed by the meddling others wanted.

I'm not sure what your point is!

Local borderpatrol hired illegal immigrant
For Border Patrol officials, it could scarcely have been more embarrassing. One of their own was an illegal immigrant. And, investigators say, he was using his government-issued truck to smuggle other illegal immigrants into the United States...

I'm not sure what your point is!

You'll figure it out.

I not sure I can make it any more simple, but I'll try: If you understand why you don't like gov't force, maybe you can understand why others don't like it either.

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For the Locals...

CIA myths - Despite the pretense, most operatives are known

By Reuel Marc Gerecht; a former CIA case officer, is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
This essay first appeared in The Wall Street Journal.

November 20, 2005

'And they (CIA employees) have to expect that when they do their jobs, that information about whether or not they are affiliated with the CIA will be protected ... And they run a risk when they work for the CIA that something bad could happen to them, but they have to make sure that they don't run the risk that something bad is going to happen to them from something done by their own fellow government employees."

So spoke Patrick Fitzgerald, special prosecutor in the Valerie Plame investigation, about the need to preserve the cover of CIA case officers. His sincere concern for the woman's lost camouflage can also be heard among commentators on both left and right, even among those who recognize that Plame's publicity-loving husband, Joseph "Yellowcake" Wilson, often doesn't have a firm grip on the truth.

In particular, left-leaning liberals, not well known for their defense of the CIA, have charged forward to equate the maintenance of cover for Langley's operatives (who are, let us be frank, probably overwhelmingly antiwar and anti-Bush) with the country's national security.

In their eyes, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, former chief of staff for the vice president, is thus guilty, at a minimum, of a politically motivated disregard for a clandestine public servant on the front lines of freedom.

Needless to say, Langley, which started this whole affair with its referral of Plame's "outing" to the Justice Department, couldn't agree more about the critical role of its secret operatives in the nation's defense. (If it weren't for the CIA's use of rendition and secret prison facilities, a return of 1950s-era liberal love for the clandestine service might be in the works.)

Truth be told, however, the agency doesn't care much at all about cover. Inside the CIA, serious case officers have often looked with horror and mirth upon the pathetic operational camouflage that is usually given to both "inside" officers (operatives who carry official, usually diplomatic, cover) and nonofficial-cover officers (the "NOC" cadre), who most often masquerade as businessmen.

Yet Langley tenaciously guards the cover myth – that camouflage for case officers is of paramount importance to its operations and the health of its operatives.

Know the truth about cover – that it is the Achilles' heel of the clandestine service – and you will begin to appreciate how deeply dysfunctional the operations directorate has been for years.

Only a profoundly unserious Counter-Proliferation Division would have sent Wilson on an eight-day walkabout in Niger to uncover the truth about uranium sales to Saddam Hussein and then allowed him to give an oral report.

FACT: The vast majority of CIA officers overseas operate with little to no cover and have done so since the foundation of the post-World War II clandestine service in 1947. Most case officers posted abroad carry official cover, which usually means they serve as fake diplomats.

The use of official cover allowed the agency to grow rapidly in the 1940s, when panic about Soviet expansionism was real and America's experience with espionage and global secret services was small.

Developing an agency weighted in favor of nonofficial-cover officers would have been vastly more difficult, time-consuming, and not necessarily useful for a CIA aimed overwhelmingly at massive covert-action programs that did not require officers to be particularly stealthy in their daily routines.

Today, operational camouflage is usually shredded within weeks of a case officer's arrival at his station, since the manner, method and paperwork of operatives is just too different from real foreign-service officers. (Even if the CIA really wanted to fix this inadequate verisimilitude – and it does not – it probably couldn't reconcile the differing demands and bureaucracies of the two institutions.)

Minimally competent foreign security services know a great deal of what occurs inside U.S. embassies and consulates since these institutions are completely dependent upon local employees – the State Department calls them "foreign-service nationals" – who, through patriotism or coercion, often report on the activities of their employers.

The situation is better with nonofficial-cover officers who live overseas, most often in rather civilized places where hunting for these American operatives hasn't been a major pursuit of the local security services and where the "outing" of one wouldn't likely lead to the officer's physical harm or long-term imprisonment.

As a general rule, the more dangerous the country, the less likely that nonofficial-cover officers, who don't benefit from diplomatic immunity, will be stationed or visit there. (Imagining CIA nonofficial operatives penetrating Islamic radical groups even after 9/11 isn't possible.) And the agency often gives nonofficial case officers atrociously bad cover that makes no sense, especially given today's targeting priorities.

A temporary "NOC of convenience," which is what Plame might have at times been while serving at headquarters in the Counter-Proliferation Division, is a much less secure cover, workable on very short-term assignments overseas, but paper-thin when confronted by knowledgeable folks in the cover profession.

Given the low standards the agency often uses with its headquarter-based nonofficial cover, Plame probably could still, if she dyed and shortened her hair, fly overseas and do whatever she might have been doing before she recommended her husband for his Africa sojourn.

FACT: The CIA knows that most of its officers overseas are "blown" to the local security and intelligence services, and not infrequently to the more astute members of the native press in countries where a real press exists, and to knowledgeable members of the foreign diplomatic community who have firsthand contact with the country's foreign and defense ministries (where real diplomats always spend more quality time and have greater access than do spooks).

But our clandestine service chooses not to dwell on the obvious. Compromised officers continue to run agents, and to try to develop foreigners for recruitments, knowing full well that the host security services know who they are.

Now, this may not be an enormous counterintelligence problem if case officers are working "compatible" targets, that is, working on foreigners whom the host country's security and intelligence services don't really care about (for example, the French internal security service probably would not express its displeasure at regular meetings of a Nigerian official with a known CIA officer in the cafes of Paris).

However, it is more of an issue when the local security and intelligence service might object, and since the end of the Cold War, foreign security and intelligence services have become noticeably less generous in viewing CIA activity on their soil as being harmless or complementary to their own actions.

FACT: Probably the vast majority of all sensitive assets – foreign agents whom the agency considers highly valuable and who might be in some trouble if exposed – have been handled by compromised officers. The agency attempts to compensate for the blown state of its officers by having case officers use "surveillance detection runs."

In the Soviet Union, where the agency and the State Department actually tried hard to hide CIA identities, but where CIA officers inevitably became known, American operatives deployed long and challenging surveillance detection runs.

In most other countries, where the internal security has been less daunting, case officers have often been much more lax in scrupulously designing runs, sometimes with very adverse consequences.

"Inside" officers – those who serve inside official U.S. facilities – have too often damned their agents to jail or death because they did not, or could not, insulate themselves sufficiently from the prying eyes of a hostile service.

But the CIA quite happily has lived with this state of affairs since any attempt to get serious about cover would destroy the clandestine service as we have known it for 58 years.

If we were to use the standards suggested by Fitzgerald – "It's a lot more serious than baseball . . . The damage wasn't to one person. It wasn't just Valerie Wilson. It was done to all of us" – we would fire the operations management, which in practice has become a barely clandestine version of the State Department.

The revealing of Plame's true employer has in all probability hurt no one overseas. You can rest assured that if her (most recent) outing had actually hurt an agent from her past, we would've heard about it through a CIA leak.

Langley's systemic sloppiness – the flimsiness of cover is but the tip of the iceberg of incompetence – has repeatedly destroyed agent networks and provoked "flaps" with some of our closest allies.

A serious CIA would never have allowed Wilson to go on such an odd, short "fact finding" mission. It never would have allowed Plame potentially to expose herself by recommending such an overt mission for her mate, not known for his subtlety and discretion. With a CIA where cover really mattered, Libby would not now be indicted.

But that's not what we have in the real world. We have an American left that hates George W. Bush and his vice president so much that they have become willing dupes in a surreal operational stage-play.

You have to give credit to Langley: Overseas it may be incompetent; but in Washington, it can still con many into giving it the respect and consideration it doesn't deserve.

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me@rescam.org

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Red Bull Air Racing

Gas price by zip at Seti

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Red Bull Air Racing

Gas price by zip at Seti

To be fair, Rep. Murtha has been fairly consistent on his opposition to the war in Iraq.

The press tries to make it sound like a long-time hawk has suddenly decided that our position in Iraq is (and never was) justified, but this is not the case.

Rep. Murtha, like many other war-opposed Democrats, saw it as politically expedient to vote in favor of authorizing the war in Iraq... scoring political points during the 2002 campaign was more important than principle.

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No animals were harmed in the making of the above post... much.

So, Murtha and that wing of the Democrats called for an "immediate" withdrawal of our troops from Iraq. Then, the Republicans introduced a resolution to do just what Murtha called for (it failed), but somehow Murtha and other Dems called that resolution a ploy and a political dirty trick. Hmmmm, be careful what you ask for . . .