I do not claim to be Sara's better half. She is my better half. Women are always mens better half.. I mean how would I even suggest otherwise???... :P Now, I'm heading off to erase all mention of my address from Google... ;)

Seriously though, great post. And as one of those "crazies" myself, I too get more than a might irked when we all get lumped into one bag because people can't distinguish between an illness, disorder or just plain fucked up psycho...

Oh the power of ignorance and stereotypes....

Awesome, just when I was starting to give up hope :) Custom field support!! :)

I've not heard anything about any new developments in ages and to be honest I've even lost track of who is on the dev team for this. Unfortunately I fear, when it comes to WordPress, development is moving far to rapidly for most offline editors to keep pace.

And with the new image editor shipping in WP 2.9 they days of a solid desktop client may be numbered.

Also, with regard to Live Writer, which I still love BTW, when you insert an image in a post it doesn't end up in the WordPress Media Gallery, which means it's not available for thumbnail generation which is becoming more and more prevalent with magazine based themes.

It's a remarkably narrow view of the world to believe that the actions of a few can't and don't have an affect on everybody in the community.

Cities and towns can get a bad reputation due to the actions of a handful of people, it's not as if the mass populace is doing it.

We as a group are judged by the actions of our peers and it's events like this that stick out in the minds of others... To simply sweep it away and ignore it is to doom history to be repeated. But with a little discussion and openness, maybe some good can come out of this for everybody rather than just ignoring it and hoping it will do away.

You want an example of how this stuff affects us all? For those people who choose to monetize their blogs it's events like this that make them think twice about associating their brand with bloggers... It may not have an immediate impact but in the long term, if the blogosphere doesn't get it's act together it will.

And there is no time like the present for talking :)

LOL.. The jury is no where near out on that one. First off ask yourself why would they doctor it? Nic is a woman with apparent substance abuse problems which in itself would be enough to begin to discredit her story if they wanted to go down the road of bashing her in a PR sense.

The TSA have no need to take the time, or effort, to put out doctored footage. They've dealt with worse accusations before and in all likelihood, if they had done something wrong they would have taken the standard line of "this is our policy blah blah blah.. but we are investigating any possible breach of policy"... and then swept the entire thing under the carpet. It would have been far easier to just ignore it than to risk releasing doctored footage which, if it was, would surely come back to bite them in the ass at some point.

It simply doesn't make sense from a public relations view to doctor the footage. The potential ramifications would be far too damaging. In a case of "put up or shut up" they put up because, for once, they knew they were right.

Also, Nic admits in her rebutal post that it is her in the video but she can't explain how her son is mysteriously beside he in the stroller. She'll have to look into it???

in the video, it looks as though my son is playing happily in his stroller while i am being searched with a wand. obviously this is the big discrepancy with my story, since he was not in my sight at that time, and one that i too am thoroughly looking into.

Nah, I have to cry foul on this one. She wanted attention and she obviously got it.

I never claimed that you know her, nor do I care. The fact of the matter is that whether you want to believe it ot not, actions like this do reflect on all of us especially in term of our credibility as a community.

You don't believe she fabricated it for attention! Hmm.. well then how about all the mentions in her twitter stream about selling her story? Not exactly the thing someone who is traumatized and suffering from anxiety cares about now is it?

And I never claimed that you can't think on your own. I was merely pointing out that if this was, say, a man lying about the actions of a TSA and saying that he was beaten up, and then the video evidence proved that he wasn't, he would be torn to shreds by bloggers.

And lets be truly honest. Watch the video. Now if anxiety is truly affecting her that bad that she has such a sense of distorted of reality, should she even be alone with the child? What if she attacks the next TSA agent she *believes* has run off with her child?

I have and I am calling bullshit on this.

My only response here is that you either didn't watch the video and/or are refusing to accept the reality that it disproves 99% of what she claimed happened... or that you are protecting her because she is part of the mommyblogger community and now is considered "not well".

I am sure that if it were someone form outside the community they would be vilified for such behavior.

I believe I said exactly that in my post Alex!

Sorry Kevin, it's been a ling time since I had that machine and it has been relegated to a recycling bin somewhere.

Sorry I can't be of further help.

Yep Steven and I have history :) LOL And a good one at that :) There's very few people I respect more in the tech blogging world than that cranky git! :)