My Daily Domestic Clips 11/24/2010 (a.m.)

• The TSA Doesn’t Care About Cancer Survivors || Jaunted – Annotated Uh… I’m simply stunned. tags: currentevents obama areyousorryyet?
  • A long-time US
    Airways flight attendant was recently subjected to the increased search, but her security screening soon became a little more invasive than most. The flight attendant—Cathy Bossi—is also a breast cancer survivor who now wears a prosthetic breast. Well the TSA wasn’t too tactful when it came to ensuring this woman’s dignity, as after the security officer put her hand on the woman’s breast, the flight attendant was forced to remove the prosthesis from her bra. We realize terrorists could be hiding things inside prostheses, but a little common sense and compassion would go a long away in a situation like this. Plus, she’s a flight attendant.
    Another traveler had a similar situation when it came to her prosthetic
    breast, and this time—in the passenger’s words—the TSA worker moved the
    prosthesis up, down, left, and right in view of other passengers as part of the pat down procedure. This passenger—Marlene McCarthy—is now determined to toss her prosthesis right into the gray bin along with her electronics and liquids next time, as she feels the embarrassment will be on the TSA for once and not on her.

    We don’t want to claim that one person’s embarrassment is greater than
    someone else’s, but one passenger flying out of Detroit-Metro airport had a particularly awful experience with the TSA screeners. Thomas Sawyer—yes, that’s his name—had successfully survived bladder cancer, but he wasn’t able to survive the TSA pat down.
    After being taken to a private area for the pat down—following some
    hesitation by the agents—he attempted to explain his medical condition and his need to use a urostomy bag. However, the agents clearly weren’t listening and, despite the warnings, the agents broke the seal on the bag causing urine to get all over this passenger just before his flight. We really feel for this guy and can’t imagine how anyone could totally ignore someone attempting to discuss a medical condition.
• Woman Who Confronted Obama on Economy Has Lost Her Job – Annotated tags: currentevents obama areyousorryyet?
  • Velma Hart, a woman who got President Obama’s attention when she said she was “exhausted” from defending him and his policies, has lost her job as chief financial officer with a Maryland-based veterans group.

• More TSA – making the skies free from breast milk!! – Annotated What are they afraid of? Milk bombs? tags: currentevents obama areyousorryyet?

  • There were no pat downs, no high-tech body scanners. There were simply two
    small bags of milk. Just over 15 ounces, gone.
    
    Any woman who has nursed or pumped will tell you the milk is liquid gold. It’s not a cutesy term; it’s an understatement. So you can imagine the way my heart sunk as I had to leave several servings of liquid gold with a security agent tonight at London’s Heathrow airport.
    I had checked ahead: by all accounts, I could carry expressed milk on board internationally just as I often do domestically, even when traveling without a baby. Those accounts were
    wrong.

• TSA: keeping us safe from breastmilk since 2010 – Annotated More of that hopey changey thing – now the fly space over the US will be free from – breast milk? tags: currentevents
  • In this segment, I have already been in the glass cage for
    about 8 minutes. My patience wears thin and I start crying. It is hard to see on this video, but real tears wouldn’t stop streaming down my face. About 10 minutes into all this, a Phoenix PD comes to calm me down. I explain to him that there is no reason I should be treated this way and I have every right to be upset. He then says “they” (aka TSA) saw me coming, have it out for me (from my complaint against TSA the week before when they didn’t know the breast milk rules then either), and I should travel out of a different gate in future weeks.
    He said TSA wants me to play along with their horse and pony show and if I don’t then TSA can have the Phoenix PD arrest me! Well, I wanted to get home to my baby and my flight was 30 minutes from departure so I ‘played along.’ Three Phoenix PD watched in the background…I could tell they all knew this was a waste of their time but I was happy to have them standing by in case TSA continued to act out of line. One police office actually came up to me later during my second screening asking if I was okay and if he could let anyone in my party know I was going to be late. A class act compared to the TSA actions.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.