This is an interesting thread, although I suspect it may soon be moved to Omni. Recent events seem to bear out a fear that TSA is the camel's nose under the tent, an initial agency that is the forerunner of a totalitarian United States of Amerika. That would be a shame, because our experiment in a representative constitutional republic worked for around 200 years.

What is most aggravating to me, a former assistant prosecuting attorney, is the disregard of constitutional rights of Americans. The national government for decades has failed in performing core duties that the Constitution requires of it. Our borders have essentially been wide open since the early 1980s. Republicans want cheap labor, Democrats want recipients of government largesse and then votes. Our failure to address the 1983 bombing of the Marines barracks in Beirut emboldened the Islamowackos. Allowing the murders of Leon Klinghoffer on the Achille Lauro and USN Robert Stethem in the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 to go unavanged appears to have further emboldened the Islamowackos. Back in the early 1800s, President Thomas Jefferson used military force to roust the Barbary Pirates. How things changed!

In the face of this inaction, TSA's increasingly bold violations of the constitutional rights of Americans, and attemped expansion of its violations from airports to trains and urban mass transit systems, is even more frightening. The national government appears to be using attempted plots by Islamowackos from foreign countries to impose draconian restrictions on Americans. This parallels Nazi Germany and the burning of the Reichstag.

I am glad to see concern on the part of CubsFanJohn, a member of the generation following mine. Hopefully enough Americans will resist this expansion of overbearing security directed at Americans, rather than the perps, and prevent the United States from morphing into Amerika.