You are a terrorist, until proven otherwise

Well, isn't that precious. A clueless TSA goon has apologized for humiliating a passenger who did nothing wrong. The woman was prohibited from boarding her plane with her breast pump because her milk bottles were empty. She dumped the milk before going through security to avoid security hassles -- after all, we're all familiar with the TSA's ridiculous rules on liquids, right? Well, the idiot at security told her she couldn't take her ice pack on the plane without milk in the bottles.

"It really confuses me as to how an empty breast pump and cooler pack are a threat to national security and 20 minutes later, with milk, they no longer pose a threat to national security," the woman said.

With no private place to pump, the woman had to go to a public restroom.

"I'm in a dress, in heels, and I find myself in front of a sink and mirrors with travelers coming in and out of the bathroom," she said. "I'm standing at the sink with my breast hanging out, pumping. I wanted to cry. I was humiliated."

Your federal government: Keeping you safe from breastfeeding moms.

Of course, this isn't the first bit of lunacy from the TSA. Not long ago, Ron Paul's son, Sen. Rand Paul, made the news when he refused to consent to a TSA body grope. For defending his right to privacy, the TSA detained him. A United States senator. Detained. For refusing to be molested at an airport.

It all started when the senator walked through the scanner and an alarm errantly went off. He offered to go through again, and that's when the TSA told him that wasn't an option. He'd have to be groped instead, like a criminal under arrest. After two hours, the fools finally backed down and let him go through the scanner again, and naturally, there was no issue the second time.

As Papa Paul put it after the ordeal:

The police state in this country is growing out of control. One of the ultimate embodiments of this is the TSA that gropes and grabs our children, our seniors, and our loved ones and neighbors with disabilities. The TSA does all of this while doing nothing to keep us safe.

Making lemonade out of lemons, Ron Paul parlayed the debacle into a campaign fundraiser.

At least Rand Paul didn't have to suffer the humiliation of a twentysomething pair from Ireland and the U.K., who were photographed, fingerprinted, and thrown in jail because of a couple of joke Twitter posts. A 26-year-old white guy was handcuffed and kept in a cell with a group of Mexican drug dealers because he'd tweeted about how he wanted to get together with some friends before he took off to "destroy America," as in "go off and have a great time while I'm there." His female companion was interrogated to see whether she planned to be his lookout while he dug up Marilyn Monroe's grave -- since the guy also quoted Family Guy in a tweet about how he was going to be having a ball on Hollywood Boulevard and "diggin' Marilyn Monroe up."

"It got even more ridiculous because the officials searched our suitcases and said they were looking for spades and shovels," the woman said. "They did a full body search on me, too."

You couldn't make this stuff up.

They were ultimately refused entry into the United States and told they would have to reapply for entry visas back home.

You know what the solution is to all of this nonsense? Freaking common sense. As Rand Paul put it:

We’ve been 10 years and we have no frequent flier program, we have no ability for people to go back through the screener, [and] one-size-fits-all, everybody-is-a-potential-terrorist rules waste a lot of time on people who are not terrorists.
So, resources, I think, could be better devoted to looking at who’s flying and where they've been flying and knowing more about the passenger list rather than spending all this time doing these random screenings of elderly people, young people, and frequent fliers.

[...]

There are a lot of people who are insulted and their dignity is compromised by what the TSA does to them. ... Instead of targeting people who meet a risk profile for terrorism, what they’re doing is they’re just doing these random things. But I think it’s a waste of time, and it's insulting to put people through a body pat down when they have not shown any risk.

In short, as the senator puts it, "The TSA has got a lot of problems."

That's putting it mildly.