TSA Heavy Petting Zoo

According to the Star (TSA checks IndyGo bus passengers), everyone was getting a little feel up from the TSA yesterday downtown. Awesome. I'm glad my homie, MJ, talked me into going to the Art Museum yesterday. My other plan was to get a hip flask of Old Grandad and just ride the bus to the end of the line and back all yesterday afternoon for fun. If that'd happened, I wouldn't be posting this until maybe next week. Or whenever Sis and Cat could make bail.

Political sites such as dailyKOS want to know WTF? Is this some new conspiracy?

While I am the first one to admit that from a few federal predictors that make me uneasy (such as doing away with habeas corpus October 16, 2006, the end of the 4th and 5th amendments over the last two weeks, and the fact W owns a 900,000 acre ranch in Paraguay), this is Indianapolis. What goes on in Indianapolis, stays in your mind like a sore you keep tonguing in your mouth. Then it makes you want to curl up in a ball in a fetal position and cry for everything bad that's ever happened to these people. Seriously, think Norman Rockwell paintings of Thorazined mental patients-without the advantage of Thorazine. But I digress...

There was actually something waaay less sinister going on here:

• God knows that our public transit system is so worthless that there are really only three types of IndyGo riders: People who have never learned to drive a car, the poor, and the mentally ill. With the price of gas gone up, even middle-class folks are starting to ride their bikes but still refuse to ride IndyGo. These folks are used to being bullied around. It's going to take two hours to get anywhere you could walk in a half hour but due to the humidity that's jamming the sweat back into our pores, they'll wait. They aren't in a hurry anyway. I'm sure most of them were like, 'Play along with our national mall security guards and my ride won't be held up any longer than necessary.'
• The gentle and docile (compared to other cities of comparable size and demographics) people of Indy are less likely to start screaming for the ACLU the second agents start digging around behind their testes for C4. With the way things used to run with the IPD, let's just say that the IndyGo demographic is used to that kind of treatment. Go to Chicago or New York or some culturally sensitive place where people will listen to you when you complain. Unless you have the money to destroy some one's career, no one cares.
• This is just another win-win situation in the partnership between local and federal government: if feds find...whatever it is they're looking for..., they get to be heroes for saving us. YAY! Local government gets off the hook for having to fix our crappy public transit by saying, "SEE! This is what the terrorists and evildoers want! To bomb us back to the stone age. Via city bus. So there's no point in fixing the public transit. They're just going to break it anyway. It's just going to be a waste of your tax dollars."
• Training exercise for the TSA. I was watching ABC the other night/morning and happened to catch a clip where the FBI was giving an explosives demonstration here earlier this week. Federal agencies are having their national convention here this week. That's just me putting two and two together. Obviously, they aren't going to advertise this all over the news. Funny thing, the news. You really have to read a lot between the lines anymore to get a real picture of what goes on.

Like I said, not really too freaked out about it. Just another training exercise for the coming totalitarianism. No real or immediate threats to our little burg.

If you are really worried, make sure your passport is up to snuff, do whatever you can to clean up your criminal record, and figure out a way to spend Novemberish-2008 through Marchish-2009 in a foreign country. Be prepared to stay in other foreign countries for longer if necessary. Good luck!