Month: December 2005

Day 2 of the strike. P is riding into the city now with a coworker who is driving in at 3:30 am to avoid the HOV-4 rule. It took her 3.5 hours to get home yesterday: upper East Side to Penn Station, LIRR to Jamaica, then Flatbush, then a walk downtown. P’s brother-in-law is a subway conductor who is going on the picket line today not for the money, not for the pensions, but against “sharecropper managers” (his term) that don’t know how to treat their workers well. He’s going without the support of the union’s parent organization, the International.

I like to think that I’m a pretty sympathic guy, and I don’t like people enduring unnecessary hardships. I also understand how people in the public view tend to suffer the slings and arrows of their critics (and how every president since Reagan ends up picking up an independent counsel or two in their second term whatever they do). However, I have not seen so many instances of skirting responsibility in the last 24 hours:

• One co-worker: “All my friends that could give me a ride moved to New Jersey, so I can’t get to work.” Just about everybody else at work came up with a plan.
• Another co-worker: “I can’t find a taxi that will drive me over the bridge.” My boss walked all the way from Grand Central over the Brooklyn Bridge – 6 miles.
• TWU Union Leader: “we won’t sell out our unborn”, meaning snatching defeat from the hands of victory after the MTA started caving from their “final offer”. Could have kept on pressing….
• governor: “the professionals at the table will resolve this”. What professionals? What table? He’s kidding, right?
• president: to paraphrase — yes we wiretapped without warrants, even though previously we stated a warrant was always necessary. We didn’t break the law, and even if we did, we told a handful of Congresspeople, so that made it all good and legal, right? Do they have a problem with it? They can’t tell you, and you can’t find out.

This is ridiculous.

We’re T+1 hour and still no call for a strike from the transit union leadership. From what I can gather, the union doesn’t really want more salary — they just want to be treated better by the middle management. The MTA doesn’t want to cut any benefits for current employees, just for future employees. NY1 reports that the MTA sweetened the final offer of 3% each year for the next three years to 3, 4, 3.5% for the next three years, and moved the retirement age to 60 from 62. There must be some clever negotiator that can come up with a place where they can agree?

The Bush administration is taking it on the chin with the domestic spying scandal by members of his own party. It’s hard to think that members of a party whose core belief is in smaller, non-intrusive government can go along with unlimited warrantless clandestine wiretaps. The legal reasoning behind the wiretaps, as described in the PBS Newshour, is basically the Constitution gives inherent authority to the President as commander-in-chief, and that Congress ratified that in the Afganistan resolution, and that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is outdated and not responsive to modern needs. The opposing side is that the Fourth Amendment is still applicable in wartime, and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, by its own terms (50 USC sec 1822) is the exclusive statutory authority for this type of search. The fact that one searching “under color of law for the purpose of obtaining foreign intelligence information, executes a physical search within the United States except as authorized by statute”, commits a felony (50 USC 1827) raises the stakes even more in this political battle.

Now that I have heard the Attorney General’s articulation of the legal reasoning, I don’t believe that it survives the “laugh test”. The ultimate judgment will be when Congress holds its hearings on the matter — I seem to recall in one commercial Con Law outline that the power of the President is strongest when Congress is acting in concert, and weakest when he is acting in opposition to Congress.

Time’s People of the Year goes to the Global Givers: Bill & Melinda Gates and Bono for their work for the poorest countries (the Time website has it “Bono, Melinda and Bill Gates”, which kind of looks like Bono was adopted into the Microsoft family), and “Partners of the Year” to Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush for their tsunami and hurricane relief efforts.

Saw the Brooklyn Youth Chorus in their annual holiday performance. Someone at work had tickets that were shared with us. They were magnificient. Pictures on the flickr strip above.

Excellent Turkish food on Montegue Street: Kapadokya Turkish Cuisine, 142 Montague Street. Our old sushi favorite Nanatori on 162 Montague Street was great as usual. I guess I’ve officially became a regular there because I get recognized by the manager, and we always get seated in the window (business always picks up for her after we sit there).

Off to the boss’ holiday party tonight…