Please click the icon to follow us on Facebook.on this day Andrew Beane wrote ~ the gloves are off .. and the rubber gloves are on at the nation's airports and bus stops. Starting today, the Transportation Security Administration of America began implementing full body cavity searches for all passengers on both domestic and international flights. Random body cavity searches are also being conducted at various bus stations around the country. The reaction of the traveling population has not been pretty.

"With the rhetoric we hear, one would think this is what they were doing now.... " - reader's commentsIn Tampa, Florida, the father of a thirteen-year-old child was arrested for assaulting a TSA agent who insisted on performing a cavity search on the child. In Augusta, Maine, every bus at the Greyhound station sat empty as passengers protested the searches. In Los Angeles, a Delta Airlines flight took off with only one passenger. Upon landing, the passenger said that after twenty years in prison, the search did not bother him in the least.

The heightened security measures came after the November 23rd attempted bombing of Lufthansa flight 912 by Yemeni terror suspect Hakim al-Assad. Assad, known as the "butt bomber" in the blogosphere, attempted to detonate an egg-sized capsule filled with plastic explosives that was inserted in his rectum. He was restrained by fellow passengers when he failed to detonate the device by cell phone while flight attendance repeatedly instructed him to put the phone away.

President Obama told the nation that though the new security measure seem extreme, they are necessary in making sure America?s skies are safe and secure. Conservative radio personality Glenn Beck was quoted as saying "President Obama should not make such positive comments about this new procedure until he, too, goes through such a search".

Anger over the new security measures has caused an immediate drop in ticket sales, as the Christmas traveling season looms just over the horizon. Some analysts fear that commercial transportation could grind to a halt, with courts doing the same as lawsuits against TSA and other security agencies tie up the legal system.