Damn Can, +1 :)

Well, one thing is now for certain...Cambrey is a terrorist! Who else could have seen that message?! :)

Honestly the rule of GET SOME COMMON FUCKING SENSE applies more to this man than to the attendants. Why would he write such a note and hand it to a female flight attendant? He is very much asking for trouble and he should know it.
Still, it'd be a much better solution to decide to just strap him down and let the flight commence as normal or something. If he really had a bomb with him and he sensed the plane was turning back, he'd set it off anyway if he were free to do so.

The crew members, obviously. ;)

Oh god, this made national news?
I live in Portland and I can't stop hearing about this damn thing.

Reps!

Honestly, I think that cogadh's commentary may have obscured what actually happened.
Guy (who had already complained over not being able to store his bag under his seat) gives flight attendant the comment card.
Flight attendant reads comment card (not sure if that is policy, but whatever).
Flight attendant sees what card says. The card talks about the plane crashing and the like. At the very least, it depicts him as potentially mentally unstable (because, really, who the hell would write that on a plane?). So she does what she is legally obligated to do, to cover her own butt. She passes it up the food chain.
Head flight attendant reads the card and listens to how the man complained earlier about his bag. She does the same thing: Pass it up the food chain.
Pilot then follows procedure when dealing with a potential threat.
End result: The guy interfered with the performance and duties of the flight crew (he forced them to turn around).
The guy is NOT being brought up on terrorism charges. He is being brought up being a jerk and inconveniencing everyone.
Was it obviously a joke? Yeah. Very obviously. But what if it wasn't? That is why we have the protocols and the like. Because what if he didn't have the Gilligan's Island references, but kept talking about the plane exploding and crashing? Maybe he is still joking. So should we put a specific clause in the procedures stating "If they mention Gilligan's Island, I Dream of Jeannie, or Charles in Charge, they aren't a threat. If they mention The Brady Bunch, sterilize them."?
It is funny, it sucks for the guy, but you have to actually look at what happened. If the flight attendants and flight crew hadn't done what they did, they would have caught hell, been at the center of a media circus, and probably would have lost their jobs (and been fined).
As for this being the terrorists winning: Honestly, I never found people who joke about planes crashing or being ripped apart during a flight to be all that funny. A lot of people are afraid of flying (especially in the modern climate), and if some jerk thinks its funny to cause those people further anxiety, I am not going to mind if he gets a full body cavity search. Do you walk into banks and joking scream "This is a stick-up!"? Do you walk into police stations and jokingly turn yourself in for the rape and murder of a four-year old? Hell, do you make dead baby jokes around a woman who just miscarried? Humor is great and is a wonderful way of dealing with things, but you still need to consider others.
And as for his actual message; It wasn't even all that funny. If anything, it sounded like the guy was a bit loopy in the first place. It is funny in the context of what it caused, but the card itself is just weird.

Oh come on, it obviously WAS a joke and whoever would take it seriously ... Let's just say I would never listen to that person ever again :D Actually, if you ask 'who' would write something like that on a plane, I'm pretty sure I would do so since I tend to make fun of stuff causing public panic (when I was writing a certain speech, it contained quite a few references to swine flu people were completely obsessive about at the time - they got removed, sadly but understandably).
And yes, you know they're winning when people will stop making fun of them. Seriously, if everyone is so afraid of plane crashing that he can't even take a stupid joke, he probly should not step onto a plane in the first place. It's not like the guy stood up and started screaming: "WE WILL ALL DIE!"

Again, think about it from the point of view of the crew of the plane: You might think it is a joke, but will your boss? Will EVERYONE in the news media, if it gets out? Because all it takes are a few angry people and you lose your job, all because somebody got bored.
It sucks, but until official rules on what counts as funny and what counts as a joke are devised, all the crew can do is follow protocol.
As for your self-proclaimed desire to mock public panic (admittedly, I do the same :p); I sincerely doubt that your speech was being given at a hospital or the designated "I think I have Swine Flu, so I am going to go here, wait in line, and definitely have piggy flu by the time I get checked out" location. It isn't that there is a time and a place for humor, but there ARE times and places where certain flavors of humor should not be used.

Graduation ball of nursery school - yes, those nurses were very likely to catch swine flu, actually that was the point of most of those jokes

You've only just realised this?

Yes, but they understand this and are "okay" with it. Let me rephrase this:
You weren't giving the speech in an emergency room full of sick people.

The only thing that interfered with the flight crew performing their duties was that the flight crew themselves were more concerned about practicing CYA security than actually performing their duties. Unfortunately, until we see people start losing their jobs for such stupid overreactions we're going to keep seeing things like this happening because for the people involved there's never any penalty for escalating a situation that should have been dropped.
It's truly unfortunate that we've become such a nation of pussies that everyone is always so concerned with the absolutely minuscule "what-if" movie plot scenarios instead of actually looking at such situations and recognizing that there is no credible threat there.

The problem with penalizing people for "escalating": It causes the exact same problems that plague the corporate world. You get penalized for actually enforcing the rules (paperwork, at the least, and unofficial punishment if it gives bad PR to the company).
And here is the thing: Imagine if the guy actually WAS insane. I mean, it wouldn't be too far of a stretch that someone who clearly made enough of a fuss about his bag that it made an impression on the flight attendant(s) and then provides a comment card filled with a fanciful story (about a plane crashing... while on a plane...) to be somewhat unbalanced (admittedly, EVERYONE is unbalanced these days :p). So what if he did something (ANYTHING). Then it is found that he wrote that card and nobody did anything. I can tell you right now, the contents of the card wouldn't be publicized, and all the people involved would be buggered.
Are the current procedures and regulations good? Hell, are they even enforced properly? Nope. Not at all. Mike Yon got handcuffed for not being willing to state how much he makes in a year...
But this? This is pathetic, but there is no way to get around it. If we go back to not giving a crap, what little security we have actually gotten goes down the crapper. And if we actually use common sense, we run into the problem of what happens when something (ANYTHING) falls through the cracks.

Hmmm...that sounds like something the terrorists would WANT us to believe...:)