Can Jesse Ventura force a TSA submission?

Things have come to a pretty pass if our best hope is a former pro wrestler’s lawsuit against the TSA’s violations of privacy

Jennifer Abel
Guardian

Desperation is when once-proud and free Americans like me are reduced to pleading, “Save us, Jesse Ventura, you’re our only hope.”

It’s over three months now since the unelected political appointees heading the TSA made their sexually abusive Hobson’s choice mandatory for American airline customers: either step through a scanner whose potentially cancerous radiation lets TSA agents view your nude body, or adopt guilty-criminal, hands-in-the-air poses, while agents grope you head to toe, genitalia included.

Two months since Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano suggested expanding this to all forms of mass transit. Eight weeks since the House of Representatives voted 417 to 3 in favour of House Resolution 28, supporting exactly that TSA expansion. And mere days since Barack Obama joked about the patdowns in his state of the union address. (Easy for him to laugh, as one of the privileged few exempt from the humiliations TSA imposes on his countrymen.)