DC Metro System Shut Down

How bad is DC’s Metro?

They are shutting down for 24 hrs, over a workday…to “inspect the system”.

That leaves approximately 800,000 daily workday passengers SOL.

I don’t even want to think about what the impact of putting 500,000 more cars on the road tomorrow (3/16/16) will be. The impact to traffic will be worse than the blizzard dumping 3 ft of snow on the area just two short months ago. Since 53% of the riders on Metro are government workers, it may well wind up that there is a Federal Government shutdown as well.

Photo taken inside a DC Metro car during the incident at L’Enfant Station when an electrical feed to the train shorted out

The system has been plagued with numerous problems, both self inflicted, and by the fact that much of the infrastructure is 30-40 years old. Due to the self-inflicted problems the company is not able to keep pace with the repair work necessary to renovate the system. In particular, the electrical system is ancient on the older lines is beyond it’s projected lifecycle causing about a half dozen major incidents in the last year, with a passenger fatality on a stuck train due to smoke inhalation. Just Monday this week, another electrical failure stopped traffic on the system’s busiest tunnel system, shared by 3 lines. One of the lines is still not fully operational.

BTx3 is working from home tomorrow.

This is the section of tunnel which arced and caught fire last year resulting in a passenger fatality, just outside the L’Enfant Metro Station.

Sources: Metrorail Will Shut Down All Day Wednesday for Emergency Investigation of Equipment

The entire D.C. Metro system will shut down for 24 hours starting at midnight and lasting for the entire day Wednesday for an emergency investigation, two sources tell News4.

Metro officials are expected to announce at 4 p.m. Tuesday that they need to inspect as many as 1,200 pieces of equipment, as News4’s Tom Sherwood was first to report.

A cable fire early Monday caused delays on the Blue, Orange and Silver lines throughout the day.

This is an abandoned trolley tunnel under DC, built back in the 1949

This is a current Metro tunnel on the Red Line – the oldest operating line.

 

Trump Finds Racist Rhetoric Don’t Play Outside the South

Spurred on by racist rhetoric, and calls for vicious attacks on lone protesters at Trump campaign rallies – the folks in Chicago decided to push back in what may well be the first of a series of major counter protests.

This ain’t America of the 1920’s. or 1950’s anymore where going after Minorities was a safe bet because they as a group were less than 20% of the population. Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Muslims, and other minority groups now make up 40% of the population. And I have tried to explain to some of my recalcitrant friends and associates – there is no shortage of “brass cajones” on the side of folks who oppose Trump’s racism.

Donald Trump Rally In Chicago Canceled After Protesters Turn Out In Droves

Chaos broke out after the event was called off.

• Thousands of protesters show up with tickets to rally
• At least two officers, two attendees injured
• Several fights, heated arguments, Nazi salutes, five arrests
• Trump still insists: ‘I’m a unifier’

A Donald Trump rally that attracted thousands to the University of Illinois at Chicago was abruptly canceled Friday night amid his campaign’s security fears, sparking shouting and scuffling between the candidate’s fans and anti-Trump protesters.

Chicago police said two officers were hurt, including one who was struck on the head with a bottle. At least two other people were taken to a hospital with minor injuries, according to news reports. Five people were arrested.

The rally was called off about a half-hour after the scheduled 6 p.m. start time, after thousands of Trump fans and anti-Trump protesters packed into the free event, which required online registration. Thousands more gathered outside, surrounded by a police perimeter, and people became more vocal as the starting time approached.

Chaos broke out when the cancelation was announced, according to media reports from inside the pavilion. CBS News said reporter Sopan Deb, who covers the Trump campaign, was detained by authorities.

“I have never seen anything like it. It’s amazing,” CNN’s Jim Acosta said. The network said approximately 8,500 people were at the rally.

Violence has become a recurring theme at Trump events, with protesters beingbeaten, shoved, kicked and verbally abused. Trump has encouraged supporters to attack protesters, saying they should “hit back” more often, and has offered to pay legal fees if they do.

Clashes between protesters and Trump supporters at a St. Louis rally earlier on Friday led to at least one injury and 32 arrests. On Wednesday, a Trump supporter at a North Carolina rally sucker-punched a protester and was charged with assault and battery.

Trump said later Friday on CNN he had “no regrets” about his tough talk, including a remark that protesters, in the old days, would be “carried out on stretchers.”

“You can’t even have a rally anymore in this country,” Trump complained on MSNBC shortly after the Chicago cancelation. He added: “There’s a lot of anger in the country, and it’s very sad to see.” 

In a subsequent appearance on Fox News, Trump told Greta Van Susteren it was “a good decision” to cancel the rally.

“I am a unifier,” he said, even though thousands had gathered at the event to protest him.

 

Snow Days!

Fun Graphic, considering the blizzard in my area today. Yeah – we have about 30″ right now, and still coming down at my house. The neighborhood snow-bunnies rushed out this AM to shovel the walk and clean their cars…The problem being it has snowed another 12″ since then, and with the 40 MPH wind whipping – erased most of their labor.

Map: ‘How Much Snow It Typically Takes to Cancel School in the U.S.’

The geography of the snow day, courtesy of Reddit user Alexandr Trubetskoy

 

How much snow does it take to close the schools?

Weather-related school closings are a constant source of anxiety this time of year. Sometimes the anxiety is generational: “They never canceled school in my day,” parents and grandparents complain when a new snow day gets announced. Sometimes it’s regional. D.C. isn’t as “flinty” as Chicago, President Obama sighed when schools closed during his first winter in the capital. Northernerswatched in puzzlement as two inches of snow crippled Atlanta earlier this week.

A new map from Reddit user Alexandr Trubetskoy (a.k.a. atrubetskoy) is sure to stoke this regional competition. Using data “taken from hundreds of various points from user responses…interpolated using NOAA’s average annual snowfall days map,” Trubetskoy made a map showing how much snow it typically takes to close schools in the U.S. and Canada. Notice that for much of the southern U.S., all it takes is “any snow” to shut schools down. For the Upper Midwest and Canada, two feet of snow are required for a closure.

Trubetskoy includes the following clarifications:

1. In much of the Midwest and Great Plains, school closing often depends more on wind chill and temperature than on snow accumulation (“cold days”). Thus, this map may be misleading in those areas.
2. Many jurisdictions in California and other western states have significantly varied snowfall, depending on elevation. This makes it difficult to find an “average” number, or often makes it misleading.
3. Urban areas like Chicago and New York have more resources to clear snow and often need more to cause closings.
4. Clarification: The lightest green says “any snow” but also includes merely the prediction of snow.
5. Clarification II: This is snow accumulation over 24 hours/overnight.
6. Hawaii does get snow! Just… not where people live….

 

Hang ‘Em High! Republicans and Sedition

Yeah – I think this would be fitting…Line up all 200 or so Tea Baggers… And treat them as the traitors they are.

MoveOn.org Petition Calls For Arrest Of Republican Leaders For Sedition

The 16-day shutdown of the federal government has finally come to an end, but many Americans are still furious about what they perceive as a GOP-sponsored gambit to defund the Affordable Care Act.

One outlet for that fury is a petition from the progressive MoveOn.org that calls for the U.S. Department of Justice to arrest and try Republican leaders, including House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (Va.) and House Speaker John Boehner (Ohio), for “the crime of seditious conspiracy against the United States of America.”

The petition argues that “the House GOP leadership’s use of the Hastert Rule and H. Res 368 to shut down the government and threaten the US economy with default is an attempt to extort the United States government into altering or abolishing the Affordable Care Act, and thus, is self-evidently a seditious conspiracy.” (The U.S. Codedefines “seditious conspiracy” in part as any conspiracy “to oppose by force the authority [of the U.S. government], or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States.”)

With more than 21,000 signatures to date, the petition reflects a wider revulsion over the government’s costly political meltdown — which, among other consequences, resulted in furloughs for 800,000 federal workers, the shuttering of some Head Start programs, the suspension of federal health and safety inspections, and the loss of $24 billion in economic activity.

At the end of the standoff, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) was among those still angered by the shutdown, although not so angry as to accuse anyone of being an enemy of the state.

“I’m glad that the government shutdown has ended, and I’m relieved that we didn’t default on our debt. But I want to be clear: I am NOT celebrating tonight,” the senator wrote in an email Wednesday night. “So I’m relieved, but I’m also pretty angry.”

 

Nations Oldest Park Ranger Words of Wisdom

This is awesome!

If you are over 55 and grew up in the Southern US – you more than likely remember segregation and Jim Crow having lived through the last parts of it. Ranger Soskin at 92 years of age has seen much of the change in this country starting before WWII. Her insights are fascinating…

Nation’s oldest full-time park ranger, from California, furloughed

The nation’s oldest full-time national park ranger, who works at the  Rosie the Riveter museum in Richmond, Calif., recently joined the ranks of the furloughed because of the ongoing U.S. government shutdown.

Betty Reid Soskin, 92, is a ranger at the Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park in Northern California.

“At 92, I am very sensitive to the passage of time. We learned about the furlough gradually,” Soskin said told the Associated Press last week. “When it came at midnight (on) October 1, it seemed like a major interruption in my life because I don’t have time and these young folks were wasting my time, precious time.”

To make matters worse for Soskin, California officials refused Friday to use state money to open national parks, which means no reprieve for Soskin.

Soskin works three days a week as a tour guide and two days in the administrative office at the park that honors not only the famous Rosie but also tells the story of the home front during WWII.

Soskin became a park ranger seven years ago and leads tours at the park and museum that honors the women who worked in factories during wartime.But that all changed last week when the government shut down.

“It was like hitting a wall to come out from under my hat and back into civvies,” Soskin said.

She said she feels uncertain when she watches the developments between lawmakers in Washington, D.C., unfold on television.

“There are times when I feel like the only grown-up in the room. It’s a little disconcerting to feel like no one’s in charge. That’s the feeling I have when I watch the news,” Soskin said. “There are not enough wiser heads in Washington to determine where we should go. That uncertainty is unnerving.”

The National Park Service confirms that Soskin is the oldest full-time park ranger. At 93, Lyle Ruterbories, who works at Glacier National Park in Kintla Lake, Mont., near the U.S. and Canadian border, is the oldest seasonal ranger the park service is aware of, park service spokesman Jeff Olson told the AP this week.

 

Did Racism Cause the Shutdown?

Great article here with the most detailed history in one place I have seen about racial politics and how the party’s switched positions. Racism has been intertwined with policy at the Federal Level since before the Civil War. This article provides a great background on the what, who, and why…

How Racism Caused The Shutdown

This isn’t an article about how Republicans shut down the government because they hate that the President is black. This is an article about how racism caused the government to shut down and the U.S. to teeter on the brink of an unprecedented and catastrophic default.

I understand if you’re confused. A lot of people think the only way that racism “causes” anything is when one person intentionally discriminates against another because of their color of their skin. But that’s wrong. And understanding the history of the forces that produced the current crisis will lay plain the more subtle, but fundamental, ways in which race and racism formed the scaffolding that structures American politics — even as explicit battles over race receded from our daily politics.

The roots of the current crisis began with the New Deal — but not in the way you might think. They grew gradually, with two big bursts in the 1960s and the 1980s reflecting decades of more graduated change. And the tree that grew out of them, the Tea Party and a radically polarized Republican Party, bore the shutdown as its fruits.

How The New Deal Drove The Racists Out

In 1938, Sen. Josiah W. Bailey (D-NC) filibustered his own party’s bill. Well, part of his party — Northern Democrats, together with Northern Republicans, were pushing an federal anti-lynching bill. Bailey promised that Southern Democrats would teach “a lesson which no political party will ever again forget” to their Northern co-partisans if they “come down to North Carolina and try to impose your will upon us about the Negro:”

Just as when the Republicans in the [1860s] undertook to impose the national will upon us with respect to the Negro, we resented it and hated that party with a hatred that has outlasted generations; we hated it beyond measure; we hated it more than was right for us and more than was just; we hated it because of what it had done to us, because of the wrong it undertook to put upon us; and just as that same policy destroyed the hope of the Republican party in the South, that same policy adopted by the Democratic party will destroy the Democratic party in the South.

Bailey’s rage at the affront to white supremacy was born of surprise. Until 1932, the South had dominated the Democratic Party, which had consistently stood for the South’s key regional regional interest — keeping blacks in literal or figurative fetters — since before the Civil War.

But the Depression-caused backlash against Republican incumbents that swept New Yorker Franklin Roosevelt into the White House and a vast Democratic majority into Congress also made Southerners a minority in the party for the first time in its history. The South still controlled the most influential committee leadership votes in Congress, exercising a “Southern Veto” on race policy. The veto forced FDR to stay out of the anti-lynching fight (“If I come out for the anti-lynching bill, [the southerners] will block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep America from collapsing,” he lamented).

The veto also injected racism into the New Deal. Social Security was “established on a racially invidious, albeit officially race-neutral, basis by excluding from coverage agricultural and domestic workers, the categories that included nearly 90 percent of black workers at the time,” University of Pennsylvania political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. wrote in The Nation. “Others, like the [Civilian Conservation Corps], operated on Jim Crow principles. Roosevelt’s housing policy put the weight of federal support behind creating and reproducing an overtly racially exclusive residential housing industry.”

 

Van Jones Destroys Tea Party Ted Cruz

Oh My!

This is a whuppin’.