From the 10th Amendment Center comes a pretty depressing story. It seems Susie Castillo, a former Miss USA, got a nice taste of TSA friendly-fingers at the Dallas airport last week – enough of a taste that it left her in tears.

Castillo was smart enough to put the thing on her camera phone, though, and at least record her reaction…

“I’m sure this woman was just doing her job. But she…I mean she actually…felt…touched my vagina,” she said. “And so I think that’s why I’m crying; that’s what I’m so emotional, because I’m already so upset that they’re making me go – making me do this. Making me choose to either get molested, because that’s what I feel like and, or, or, go through this machine that’s completely unhealthy and dangerous. I don’t want to go through it, and here I am crying.”

Charming. Welcome to air travel, courtesy of Frank Luntz Janet Napolitano.

Don’t forget – TSA is going to be unionized soon.

Last week there was an election to decide that fact, and out of the 43,000 TSA employees a grand total of 19,587 bothered to vote. Of that number, there was a virtual dead heat between the American Federation of Government Employees (which is AFL-CIO, which is Richard Trumka), which got 8,369 votes, and the National Treasury Employees’ Union, which picked up 8,095. There were 3,111 votes for “no union” – naturally, the 23,000 employees who didn’t show up to vote don’t count as votes against the unions.

So AFGE and NTEU will get to go at it in a runoff. Nobody knows when that will take place. A couple of months, maybe.

After that, TSA employees will be able to play Uncle Ernie with Ms. Castillo – or your wife, or your kids, or you – and if anyone tries to do anything about it there will be a union to step in and keep those employees on the job.

One of the pretexts set forth in Atlas Shrugged, Part 1 was that oil price shocks made air travel almost impossible and that’s why trains re-emerged as the dominant medium for passenger conveyance. Maybe they should have used unionized TSA employees as the airline-killers instead; by this fall that’d be more believable at the rate this is going.