Who's the Bigger Criminal: Woman Boarding Plane with Nipple Ring or Bush Admin Official Who Misused Grant Money?

Posted by Steven Reynolds, The All Spin Zone at 5:54 AM on March 31, 2008.

You make the call. First up is the woman airline passenger from Texas whose sole problem was she tried to get on an airplane with jewelry on. On her nipple, sure, but it was merely jewelry. They made Mandi Hamiln remove the mipple ring with pliers. From the AP wire:

A Texas woman who said she was forced to remove a nipple ring with pliers in order to board an airplane called Thursday for an apology by federal security agents and a civil rights investigation.

“I wouldn’t wish this experience upon anyone,” Mandi Hamlin said at a news conference. “My experience with TSA was a nightmare I had to endure. No one deserves to be treated this way.”

Hamlin, 37, said she was trying to board a flight from Lubbock to Dallas on Feb. 24 when she was scanned by a Transportation Security Administration agent after passing through a larger metal detector without problems.

The female TSA agent used a handheld detector that beeped when it passed in front of Hamlin’s chest, the Dallas-area resident said.

Hamlin said she told the woman she was wearing nipple piercings. The women then called over her male colleagues, one of whom said she would have to remove the jewelry, Hamlin said.

Hamlin said she could not remove them and asked whether she could instead display her pierced breasts in private to the female agent. But several other male officers told her she could not board her flight until the jewelry was out, she said.

She was taken behind a curtain and managed to remove one bar-shaped piercing but had trouble with the second, a ring.

“Still crying, she informed the TSA officer that she could not remove it without the help of pliers, and the officer gave a pair to her,” said Hamlin’s attorney, Gloria Allred, reading from a letter she sent Thursday to the director of the TSA’s Office of Civil Rights and Liberties.

The guards, evidently the male ones, ended up snickering as Ms. Hamlin was forced to remove the nipple ring with a pair of pliers in order to board the flight. This is America in the age of Bush — no civil rights, and snickering while you endure pain if you decide to protest that you have rights. We should be surprised that they didn’t try to waterboard the woman.

Now our next example, a Bush aide, Felipe Sixto, who has had to resign in the last day due to some financial improprieties that he’s going to be charged for. No, he didn’t commit these alleged crimes while working for Bush. That isn’t alleged. The Bush people are merely incompetent in screening their workers. Again, this is from the AP story:

An aide to President Bush has resigned because of his alleged misuse of grant money from the U.S. Agency for International Development when he worked for a Cuban democracy organization.

Felipe Sixto was promoted on March 1 as a special assistant to the president for intergovernmental affairs and stepped forward on March 20 to reveal his alleged wrongdoing and to resign, White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said on Friday. He said Sixto took that step after learning that his former employer, the Center for a Free Cuba, was prepared to initiate legal action against him.

The alleged wrongdoing occurred when Sixto was chief of staff at the center, where he worked for more than three years before moving to the White House.

The matter has been turned over to the Justice Department for investigation, Stanzel said. He said Bush was briefed on the case and felt that the appropriate action was being taken.

The Center for a Free Cuba describes itself as an independent, nonpartisan institution receives “a couple million dollars” a year from USAID for rent, travel and equipment such as shortwave radios and laptops. He said the center welcomed the investigation and pledged complete cooperation.

Mr. Sixto will likely not have to subject himself to the painful application of pliers to his private parts in order to board a commercial flight, but it seems obvious that he’s the only criminal mentioned in this article.

Steven Reynolds is a regular blogger for the All Spin Zone