An alleged attempt to blow up a transatlantic flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas would be all-consuming for the administrator of the Transportation Security Administration — if there were one.
Instead, the post remains vacant because Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) has held up President Obama’s nominee in an effort to prevent TSA workers from joining a labor union.
[….]DeMint’s objection creates a procedural hurdle that will probably take at least three days of debate and test votes to overcome.
It would be nice if a few Villagers here and there could take a break from bashing Harry Reid for not being Mike Mansfield and focus on crap like this.
Update. Ben Smith had a very good piece on this yesterday too (when he’s not quoting Bill Cosby and trolling for Drudge links, his blog is really pretty decent).
Update update. My link at the top is to a McClatchy article. Here’s a somewhat extended version.
Comrade Jake
I’m just shocked, shocked I tell you, that this issue didn’t make Ambinder’s list of ten questions for Obama and the TSA.
Zoogz
‘Tis the season for Jim DeMint to organize a terrific holiday dinner for all the TSA workers, as long as it’s on the second floor…
IndieTarheel
How did I know this was coming?
__
Of course, the Village Idiots won’t say a word, or worse, canonize DeMented as a thoughtful voice of “loyal” opposition.
SGEW
Once again, one wonders if there is merit to the conspiracy theory that certain members of the Republican party are literally working for Al-Qaeda. The evidence is kind of piling up.
Legalize
The successes of Al Q and the Republican Party are inextricably linked. Draw your own conclusions.
K. Grant
Matt Taibbi would have dragged the little fuck deMint to the Senate floor and forced him to lift the hold just by barking at him with several well placed vulgarities – backed, of course, by Ariana Huffington, and receiving a Very Special Comment from Keith Olbermann after the deed praising him and once again expressing shock and dismay that Obama had sold everyone out by not shooting deMint when he had the chance.
donovong
No, Doug, you have it all wrong! It is all Napolitano’s fault and she should be fired immediately. Because if having nobody in charge of the department at fault is a good thing, then having nobody in charge of the office in charge of the department will be ever so much more special.
Once again, I apologize for the fact that the idiotic douchebag named DeMint is from my state.
cat48
I have already written the idiot about this. I’m unfortunate to live in the same state for a few more years. I miss the North so much. All citizens receive here is continual embarrassment from their suppossed leaders.
The Grand Panjandrum
Ben Smith wrote about this yesterday. But the hold on the new adminstrator isn’t the only problem.
Why oh why
Everybody knows unions are the #1 threat to America, and far more dangerous than terrorists; Jesus Reagan proved it!
John Cole
And while we are at it, could we ask Dick Cheney why he kept releasing dangerous folks from Gitmo. Wouldn’t trying them have been a better idea than playing catch and release?
MattF
It makes you kinda wonder whether the Repubs don’t want the Obama administration to have a functional security apparatus. But, no, no, no… wingers are incapable of that level of cynicism, by definition, and thinking that kind of thought makes me a bad, bad, bad person. I must now go punish myself.
jeffreyw
Serious people understand that it wouldn’t be serious to complain about a republican senator doing serious work for serious people.
K. Grant
@John Cole: Dick Cheney is like a low-rent, meaner, and dumber version of Richard Dawson’s character in Running Man.
Tomlinson
Government is the problem. As in, the members of it who are unwilling and unable to govern.
jenniebee
Saw this on Maddow last night. The bastard doubled down on blocking the appointment:
Jason
New NYT thought-leadership: “the system worked” = “heckuva job, Brownie”
Because the two cases are almost incredibly precisely similar, in that both statements made people angry. Y’know, for whatever reason, people get riled up! It’s newsworthy!
Demo Woman
@John Cole: Silly blogger, if Clinton had addressed the Osama Bin Laden problem, Cheney would not of released the loons from gitmo.
Seanly
I liked this editorial at CNN – it articulated a lot of what many of us (including our hosts) have been saying the last few days. Hell, it’s what many level-headed people have been saying for years.
Shorter Schneier – security theater is a waste of money and resources & terrorists will do something different.
EDIT: I read Napitolano’s actual statement last night. Republicans & the idiots at the Corner have some balls for asking for her resignation based on their own willful misreading of her words.
jenniebee
@Seanly: link?
Jason
@Comrade Jake: If we weren’t so concerned about political correctness, nobody would be able to hide stuff in their crothial regions. When will the TSA be able to scan the croth with their millimeter waves?
Bob In Pacifica
We must keep workers flexible.
DougJ
We must keep workers flexible.
Rarely is the questioned asked: is our workers flexible?
The Grand Panjandrum
Senator DeMint is telling us that working class Americans can’t be trusted to keep our nation safe, particularly if they have the right and power to bargain for better wages and working conditions. And the Republican Party wonders why Americans don’t trust them.
El Cid
McClatchy had a front page story on this yesterday and today (“Who’s running the TSA? No one, thanks to Sen. Jim DeMint“), even quoted here on this blog several times.
Punchy
Does Jim have a brother named “Creme”?
PeakVT
DeMint said in a statement that the attempted attack “is a perfect example of why the Obama administration should not unionize the TSA.”
Our discourse is broken. Can we get a new one?
KCinDC
If McCain or Bush were president and the Democrats were blocking his TSA appointee, the cable channels would be filled wall-to-wall with Peter King and other Republicans screaming about this treason. But since a Democrat is president, we get Peter King and other Republicans screaming about the president’s treasonous behavior instead.
JD Rhoades
@jenniebee:
Soooo…If the TSA unionizes, it won’t be able to stop terrorist attacks. We’re so dedicated to this principle, we’re going to render the TSA leaderless. The fact that there was an attempted terrorist attack during this interregnum just proves our point, even though the TSA was not, at the time of the attempt, unionized.
Sheer chutzpah.
A Mom Anon
I wonder how many other positions aren’t being filled because of this game playing. I also wonder how that’s effecting things like how the stimulus money is being distributed to the various places it needs to go. If an agency is missing it’s key management infrastructure,how is anything getting done?
Ed Drone
@MattF:
Ironing your hands is the common method, but closing your ears in the oven is not unknown.
Ed
Shalimar
@A Mom Anon: Agencies have all the rank and file people they need to operate as they have before, they’re only missing the Obama appointees who would initiate changes in policy. DeMint and Coburn will never admit it, but the goal is to allow Bush’s loyalists to continue existing policies at as many agencies as possible for as long as possible, preferably all the way to 2012 when they can get elect another Republican.
The Ghost of Richard Jaeckel
Deep thinker Matt Lauer was
fellatinginterviewing Peter King this morning, and he identified our greatest security problem as not racially/ethnically profiling. Since “100% of the Islamic terrorists are Muslims,” why give the same screening to a “Scaninavian grandmother?” After all, the Awesome Israelis do it. He wouldn’t commit to saying it should be based on having a “funny sounding name,” though.The stupid really does burn.
eemom
I just realized that this Schneier dude y’all talk about went to the same NYC high school as me, graduated one year later. We were in the same chemistry class. He was an impish sort of fellow.
Steve Gilliard was also an alum, graduated the year after Bruce. And Elena Kagan, our new Solicitor General, three years before me. AND Karen Kornbluh, an Obama advisor who was mentioned in Taibbi’s recent hatchet job, was my classmate.
It was a great school. As you can see, I won the title of “least likely to succeed.”
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
Unfortunately, there are not any other senators who are like Mike Mansfield either.
He was one of a kind.
gopher2b
I’m fine with this.
A TSA without a union is better than a TSA with a union. In the first instance you have an agency full of unemployable morons on a power rush. In the second instance you have a agency full of unemployable highly-paid morons on power rush.
Mike in NC
Al Qaeda means “The Base”, so that’s pretty much all you need to know right there. Jim Bob DeMented is a pure sociopath with delusions that the teabaggers are going to sweep him into the Oval Office in 2012.
Mnemosyne
@A Mom Anon:
Of the approximately 200 positions pending, less than half have been filled thanks to Republican obstructionism. (via Steve Benen)
Citizen Alan
Are we allowed to call them traitors yet? I seem to recall that John discouraged that a few months back, but it seems obvious to me that Al-Qaeda has no greater friend in the free world than the Republican Party.
jean
The world’s greatest deliberative body
Hmm…maybe ‘the world’s tenth or eleventh greatest deliberative body’
Fixed.
Cataphract
gopher2b:
There’s plenty of decent, hard-working and intelligent people who work at the TSA. They put up with an ungodly amount of shit from the general cattle-like public, their airline management and know-nothing commentators like you, and still strive to do their job to the best of their ability.
Clown.
Blue Raven
@The Ghost of Richard Jaeckel:
So either “Muslim” is an ethnicity that encompasses Semitic and African genomes or Nigeria’s 100% Islamic. Boy, are a lot of Christian Nigerians due for a big shock.
Stefan
Since “100% of the Islamic terrorists are Muslims,”
Huh. I would have thought only 60-65% of Islamic terrorists would be Muslim, with the rest being a grab-bag of Catholics, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists and Missouri Synod Lutherans….
Makewi
So the fact that there is currently an administrator of the TSA right now means nothing right? It was probably too hard to go to the TSA’s web site and look at the org chart under administrator.
No, that shit gets in the way of what’s truly important. Fostering anger at the right, and ensuring that more hatred exists in the world. You are truly doing Gods work here.
Common Sense
@Makewi:
Are you suggesting that the former top cop at LAX and a midlevel administrator are just as effective at directing counterterrorism efforts at airports?
Jason
@Makewi:
Well, yeah, I didn’t see “org chart” on the site. I did see “Who We Are” and then “Gail Rossides, Acting Administrator.” Wonder what that “Acting” could possibly mean? Maybe it’s a hobby of hers, along with gate-groping. So, yeah, that fact means nothing? Just like you said.
Batocchio
Demint is just crazy, or reckless. What’s remarkable here is he’s got two dogmatic stances (“Whatever it takes to stop all the terrorists!” “Unions are evil!”) that are at odds – and neither will budge. Collective bargaining is primarily for setting wages, benefits and hours, not specific security measures. It’s not as if a TSA union would want crappy security measures, or insist on them, which is what third-rate McCarthyist Demint is charging. Has he offered any reality-based argument for his stance, or is this just the usual fantasy-based, ideological, illogical bullshit? This reminds me of the GOP “purity test” that even Saint Ronnie would fail, was in some places contradictory, and was full of “ideas” proven ineffective if not disastrous.
gopher2b
@Common Sense:
I’m willing to bet both probably possess about the same level of effectiveness when it comes to directing counter terrorism efforts at the airport in Amsterdam.
gopher2b
@Cataphract:
Cry me a river.
In another life most of these “hardworking” people would be Walmart greeters and mall cops. Sorry if I don’t want to give them guaranteed salary raises up to $100,000+ a year and little to no chance of ever being fired regardless of how poorly they perform.
The news routinely reports that weapons are smuggled by these morons; people (including commentators on this site) regularly complain that TSA agents are unprofessional, stupid, and have no regard for anyone’s rights. Anecdotally, I have never had a good experience with them — including when one of them thumped my two year old son on the head with a cane and blamed him for being in the way. I know its hard to walk and look forward at the same time but it should probably be the baseline threshold for a federal job — especially for those at the “front lines” of our fight against terrorism.
So, no, I don’t think they should unionize. But, Republicans are for against it so “We Must Oppose Them.” Who is the cattle here?
Oh, and also, I don’t care how many “top level” administrators weren’t in place, none of them would have prevented an attempted terrorist attack that originated in ANOTHER FUCKING COUNTRY without any TSA presence whatsoever.
Ass clown.
Cataphract
gopher2b:
I’m the cattle because I don’t paint all TSA employees with the same brush? Because you deem them Wal-Mart greeters it must be so.
But you might think twice about the unionization idea if you were working there and there was constant mandatory overtime–including Christmas w/o your kids, cupcake–, constant threats of disciplinary action with no recourse, airline staffers who were hired as management so guess where their sympathies lay? Yeah, fuck those inbred scum. Let them work on Christmas, it’s their position in life. Unionization is the only counter-weight they have to a wholly indifferent and uncaring management who treats them as bodies to be pushed from place to place.
Don’t you belong on some Randian site where you can get all Ludwig von Mises and talk about how these people are scum and undeserving of the drippings their betters offer them from time to time? Selfish filth.
gopher2b
OH NO.!!! nnnooooOOOOOTTTTTT CHRISTMAS.!!!!!! Loser.
Oh, and DougJ called, he wants his lame attempts to appear esoteric back.
By the way, you know what “constant threats of disciplinary action with no recourse” is….it’s called a job. You should probably look into but you’re probably too busy working on you “novel.