This was especially funny to me because the last time I was in Vegas, for a bachelorette weekend, a married man famously hit on my friend by telling her he had just heard said phrase for the first time, and felt it could justify their having a one-night stand.

Like Proust’s madeleine, hearing this charming defense of Vegas debauchery for the second time in a month sent me back, back, to that earlier plane flight coming home from Vegas. There we were, exhausted, carrying leftovers from Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville (of all things), queuing up for the Parade of Irritating Helplessness which is the TSA security checkpoint.

As often as I have gone through airport security, it never ceases to annoy me. It is like when you’re babysitting for a spoiled child, and you’re forced to play in some inane game the child has concocted to see how far you’re willing to degrade yourself for ten bucks an hour. Take off your shoes, the TSA person says. But why? Because that is what Princess FairyDust demands! Throw away your water bottle. Can’t I just drink it to prove it’s water? Do not speak back to Princess FairyDust! Now you must walk through the metal tunnel of shame and I will rub my wand of punishment all over you!

This particular trip through airport security, I was treated to a new weapon in “War on Terror 2: Shoes, Water, and Other Dangerous Liquids,” the body scanner. The body scanner is a type of “whole body imaging technology”:

Millimeter wave technology produces whole body images that reveal what’s under your clothes, including Metallic or non-metallic devices and objects are displayed, including weapons, explosives and other items that a passenger is carrying on his/her person. The images are viewed by a Transportation Security Officer in a remote location. According to the TSA: To ensure privacy, the setup “has zero storage capability and images will not be printed stored or transmitted. Once the transportation security officer has viewed the image and resolved anomalies, the image is erased from the screen permanently. The officer is unable to print, export, store or transmit the image.”

The body scanner is supposedly being offered as a voluntary alternative to a full-body pat-down, but that was not my experience. After going through the metal detector, I was told to step into a glass booth that looks like one of those money machines, only way less fun. I had to put my arms into multiple zombie-attack-type poses while the machine turned around me, the TSA employee said, “taking pictures.” Is this some kind of X-ray? I asked. Oh, no, just pictures, the man said, it’s completely safe.

Turns out, not only was this machine attacking me with millimeter waves rather than just “taking pictures,” it was also transmitting an image of me, naked-like, to some unknown government employee somewhere. But don’t worry – it’s not like my picture was being stored or anything! Oh, well then – go ahead! I’m sure it’s inconceivable that a TSA employee would, say, take a cell phone picture of your weird, nudie, blurry-faced image. (As the ACLU points out, whatever rules the TSA has in place to protect privacy are nowhere in law or regulation, so they could be changed on a whim. Or ignored.)

And anyway, that’s not the point. You would think getting on a plane was like being admitted to heaven or something. Apparently we are OK with random nutjobs packing heat as a matter of course, but when it comes to plane travel the thought of a plastic gun or a liquid shoe-explosive so terrifies us that we let these turds take weird wave pictures of us as nude globs. Way to go, rational beings.

You’ll be happy to know TSA has just purchased 150 more of these stupid things. I guess what happens in Vegas doesn’t just stay in Vegas after all. Zing!

And now, here’s Susan Hallowell, Director of TSA’s Security Laboratory, in the flesh.

-AS

By this, Treviño meant, I don’t think we should have to show passports where I live in Texas, because it is inconvenient to me, and this is my ill-phrased way of showing my annoyance. (This understanding of his stance took some time in gathering, as I had to get it via a sequence of 140-or-less-word blurbs.)

Although Mr. T (if I may call him that) has since declined to endorse racial profiling (and by calling for open borders, pissed off some, ahem, racists who immediately came to his e-defense), his statement is very telling. Mr. T is half-Mexican, although he doesn’t look it, and he identifies racially only as “Texan.” (Except when he is defending himself against charges of racism, when he then identifies as half-Mexican. But I digress.) The thing that Mr. T gets at so well is that buzz-words like “security” and “border control” and “fighting terrorism” all sound good until they start affecting you personally, when they suddenly become very annoying – or worse.

What a lot of civil liberties and immigrant rights groups have been saying for some time is that even if your “red hair and pale skin” are protecting you now, if you don’t look around at what is happening to the other Texans without your same “passport,” there will be no good law to protect you from that Border Patrol cavity search down the road, if I may be so blunt. Mr. T is lucky that so far his red hair and pale skin have still functioned as a passport outside the Border Patrol checkpoints. Now that local law enforcement actors are being deputized to enforce immigration laws (thanks to the disastrous 287(g) program), anyone with a name like Treviño would be wise not to count on that passport for too long – especially not if he plans to make any road trips to Arizona any time soon.

-AS

An Orange County lawmaker [Mike Duvall] who inadvertently broadcast explicit remarks about his sexual conquests over an open microphone during a lull in a Sacramento hearing abruptly resigned from office this afternoon.

The famously conservative Republican Assemblyman was just having a little pre-hearing banter about his sexual exploits with a couple of much-younger lobbyists , when unbeknownst to him the whole conversation was picked up by a nearby mike. Awkward!

Even more awkward is what it must have been like to be the conversational victim of such a gross overshare (courtesy of the OC Weekly):

“She wears little eye-patch underwear,” said Duvall, who is married with two children. “So, the other day she came here with her underwear, Thursday. And
 so, we had made love Wednesday–a lot! And so she’ll, she’s all, ‘I am going 
up and down the stairs, and you’re dripping out of me!’ So messy!”

So many questions, so little time. First of all, what the hell is “eye-patch underwear”? How come the person Duvall is talking to doesn’t stop him at that point to figure that out? Oh right, because he’s THROWING UP IN HIS MOUTH.

You can check out some of the actual footage courtesy of the hilariously dopey KCAL news report that broke the story here.

-AS

-AR

After Coulter signed off, a caller asked Lars if he considered Coulter a “right-wing wacko.” Lars denied Coulter is a right-wing wacko, saying she’s just blunt and says the things that the rest of us think but don’t say. This may be true, but I don’t think that precludes her being a right-wing wacko. I’ll admit that occasionally I think the things that Ann Coulter says but don’t say them. Somewhere between thought and speech, some faculty intervenes and says “Don’t say that, it’s false/evil/ridiculous/racist/moronic.” I would contend that the lack of such a faculty is precisely what makes Ann Coulter a right-wing wacko.

The caller then challenged Lars to explain who is a right-wing wacko if Ann Coulter is not. Lars stuttered for a while, then named those who claimed Ramos and Compean, the border agents who gunned down a man at the border, should have their sentences commuted because the man they shot, unbeknownst to them, was a drug smuggler.. Personally, I reject any defintion of right-wing wacko that includes Dianne Feinstein but not George Bush. But even if you grant Lars’ standard, he may want to re-examine his opinion of Ann Coulter.

I then came upon Mark Levin. Levin explained that he was about to play Ray Charles’ “America the Beautiful” because, unlike our President, he know it’s America that makes America great. Or something like that. (I wonder whether Levin’s “America” includes the majority of Americans that voted for Obama and currently approve of his job performance). Either way, the playing of the song was the most pleasant four minutes in the history of conservative talk radio, even more so because it reminded me of one of my favorite speeches ever. (skip to 18:30).

-AR