3:37 p.m. | Updated Representative John A. Boehner, soon to be the Speaker of the House, has pledged to fly commercial airlines back to his home district in Ohio. But that does not mean that he will be subjected to the hassles of ordinary passengers, including the controversial security pat-downs.
As he left Washington on Friday, Mr. Boehner headed across the Potomac River to Reagan National Airport, which was bustling with afternoon travelers. But there was no waiting in line for Mr. Boehner, who was escorted around the metal detectors and body scanners, and taken directly to the gate.
Mr. Boehner, who was wearing a casual yellow sweater and tan slacks, carried his own bags and smiled pleasantly at passengers who were leaving the security checkpoint inside the airport terminal. It was unclear whether any passengers waiting in the security line, including Representative Allen Boyd, a Florida Democrat who lost his re-election bid, saw Mr. Boehner.
At a Capitol Hill news conference after Election Day, as Mr. Boehner began laying out the changes he would make when he becomes House Speaker, he announced that he would continue to fly commercial airlines (usually Delta) back to Ohio. It was a not-so-subtle dig at the outgoing Democratic speaker, Nancy Pelosi of California, who had been criticized by Republicans for flying military airplanes when she returned home to San Francisco.
“Over the last 20 years, I have flown back and forth to my district on a commercial aircraft,” Mr. Boehner said at the time, “and I am going to continue to do that.”
And so on Friday, he did. But not without the perquisites of office, including avoiding those security pat-downs that many travelers are bracing for as holiday travel season approaches.
Michael Steel, a spokesman for the Republican leader, said in a statement that Mr. Boehner was not receiving special treatment. And a law enforcement official said that any member of Congress or administration official with a security detail is allowed to bypass security.
“The appropriate security procedures for all Congressional leaders, including Speaker Pelosi and Senator Reid, are determined by the Capitol Police working with the Transportation Security Administration,” Mr. Steel said.
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3:37 p.m. | Updated Representative John A. Boehner, soon to be the Speaker of the House, has pledged to fly commercial airlines back to his home district in Ohio. But that does not mean that he will be subjected to the hassles of ordinary passengers, including the controversial security pat-downs.
As he left Washington on Friday, Mr. Boehner headed across the Potomac River to Reagan National Airport, which was bustling with afternoon travelers. But there was no waiting in line for Mr. Boehner, who was escorted around the metal detectors and body scanners, and taken directly to the gate.
Mr. Boehner, who was wearing a casual yellow sweater and tan slacks, carried his own bags and smiled pleasantly at passengers who were leaving the security checkpoint inside the airport terminal. It was unclear whether any passengers waiting in the security line, including Representative Allen Boyd, a Florida Democrat who lost his re-election bid, saw Mr. Boehner.
At a Capitol Hill news conference after Election Day, as Mr. Boehner began laying out the changes he would make when he becomes House Speaker, he announced that he would continue to fly commercial airlines (usually Delta) back to Ohio. It was a not-so-subtle dig at the outgoing Democratic speaker, Nancy Pelosi of California, who had been criticized by Republicans for flying military airplanes when she returned home to San Francisco.
“Over the last 20 years, I have flown back and forth to my district on a commercial aircraft,” Mr. Boehner said at the time, “and I am going to continue to do that.”
And so on Friday, he did. But not without the perquisites of office, including avoiding those security pat-downs that many travelers are bracing for as holiday travel season approaches.
Michael Steel, a spokesman for the Republican leader, said in a statement that Mr. Boehner was not receiving special treatment. And a law enforcement official said that any member of Congress or administration official with a security detail is allowed to bypass security.
“The appropriate security procedures for all Congressional leaders, including Speaker Pelosi and Senator Reid, are determined by the Capitol Police working with the Transportation Security Administration,” Mr. Steel said.
This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.
Real life has a way of intruding on Barack Obama’s presidency.
After a 10-day trip through Asia and a quick, two-day summit in Europe, Mr. Obama and the White House were eager to shift the political focus back to looming fights with Republicans over the economy, tax cuts, spending and the deficit.
Instead, the administration found itself this weekend on the receiving end of squirm-inducing questions about invasive pat-downs of travelers by Transportation Security Agency officers – procedures that appeared to pop up almost overnight.
With Thanksgiving travel just days away, members of Congress were already calling for hearings. The Sunday morning news shows diverted from talk about nuclear treaty negotiations to inquire about probing in sensitive areas of another kind. Even “Saturday Night Live” jumped in with a racy, wickedly funny spoof that cast T.S.A. agents as phone-sex operators.
On Saturday, Mr. Obama weighed in on the controversy from Lisbon. The nation’s top T.S.A. official spent Sunday staunchly defending the new procedures even as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton admitted on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that she would prefer not to have to submit to an invasive pat-down.
“Not if I could avoid it,” Ms. Clinton said. “No. I mean, who would?”
Soon thereafter, John Pistole, the chief of the T.S.A., issued a statement acknowledging that his agency would try to make the pat-downs and other screening methods “as minimally invasive as possible.”
It all felt vaguely familiar. Mr. Obama has repeatedly found himself off message and embroiled in events that quickly capture the imagination of the public, the news media and his adversaries.
Early in his presidency, Mr. Obama was caught up in the whirlwind surrounding the arrest of an African-American professor in Cambridge after he said the officer in the case had “acted stupidly.” The media frenzy didn’t end until the three men shared a beer at the White House.
There was the flap over the mosque to be built near ground zero in New York, which for a time became the primary focus of attention in the White House briefing room. Mr. Obama contributed to the spirited public debate by weighing in on the subject during an iftar dinner at the White House.
The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico strained the physical resources of the federal government as containment efforts failed for months. But the issue became political and strained the communication resources of the White House, which was repeatedly diverted from focusing on the economy to explain the government’s actions.
In July, the odd case of Shirley Sherrod, the agriculture department employee who was fired, again pulled Mr. Obama into a sideshow about race and politics. In September, a Florida pastor threatened to burn a Koran, once again pulling the White House into a national conversation.
Like those incidents, the furor over the pat-downs started outside the White House. In this case, a San Diego man refused to submit to a full-body scanner and then secretly recorded the pat-down that he received instead.
But the federal government – which runs airport security – was quickly drawn into the controversy. Last week, as outrage grew, critics of the administration blasted officials for failing to effectively communicate with the public about what they should expect at airports and why it was necessary.
“It comes back to marketing,” Allen West, a Florida Republican who was elected to Congress this month, told a local television station. “We should have put out some type of feelers to the American people before we go and implement this type of plan.”
Mr. Obama has blamed the “shellacking” his party received in the midterm elections on a failure to communicate effectively the rationale and motives behind the policies he has pursued, like health care and financial reform.
Traveling abroad, Mr. Obama sought to explain the rationale for the invasive pat-downs, saying that his top security officials “have indicated to me that the procedures that they’ve been putting in place are the only ones right now that they consider to be effective against the kind of threat that we saw in the Christmas Day bombing.”
Mr. Obama said he recognized the frustration that people feel – though he admitted that he had not personally been subjected to the procedures. And he promised to press his security advisers to keep reassessing the need for the procedures in the future.
“Have we thought it through?” he told reporters. “Are there other ways of accomplishing it that meet the same objectives?”
But as this week began, there remained little clarity about the future of the pat-downs that have caused so much consternation. Mr. Pistole’s initial comment that the policy was “not going to change” appears to have given way a bit.
“There is a continual process of refinement and adjustment to ensure that best practices are applied,” Mr. Pistole said in a statement to The Associated Press on Sunday afternoon.
Representative John Mica, Republican of Florida, who is set to become chairman of the House Transportation Committee next year, said he agreed with Mr. Pistole that the practice needed to be refined.
But speaking on CNN, Mr. Mica, a longtime critic of the T.S.A., hinted at the criticism that was still headed the government’s way.
“He’s saying it’s the only tool,” Mr. Mica said of Mr. Pistole. “And I believe that’s wrong.”
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Groped by a TSA agent or zapped by harmful radiation? That may well be the real airport screening debate. But in the past weeks, there’s been an uproar in the media only over the new intrusive examinations being used at airport screening by the Transportation Security Administration. And this past weekend, the Obama administration officials [...]
Follow the Trussell cartoonson Twitter at ChaosTheoryPD This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version. View the Original article
Pushing hard for the START treaty, President Obama kept up his full court press on reluctant Republicans Saturday, warning that failure to ratify the nuclear arms deal with Russia “would be a dangerous gamble with America’s national security.” Obama was in Portugal for a NATO summit where he enlisted other world leaders in his campaign [...]
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