Policing Subway Photography

Mortimer L. Downey, the authority's executive director from 1986 to

1993, said the value of the ban might lay primarily in giving the police more

leeway in questioning people with criminal motives.

"The likelihood that

you're going to catch a terrorist taking pictures is fairly slim, but

conceivably you might, and it's certainly better to catch him taking a picture

than blowing up a station," he said.

So i guess that whole due process crap is just kind of "over," like slap bracelets and the Geneva conventions?

Not long ago, Mr. Vergara recalled, he was photographing pigeons

that had entered the Broadway Junction station in eastern Brooklyn, where five

subway lines meet. "Somebody just put out the word - and this is one of the

large stations that have police 24 hours," he said. "They went looking for me.

They caught up with me."

Two policemen, Mr. Vergara said, asked him what he

was doing. "I said, 'Well, taking pictures of pigeons here.' That didn't sound

very believable."

While Mr. Vergara tried to convince the policemen that his

photography was legitimate, another passenger began taking snapshots of the

photographer being questioned. That annoyed the officers, in Mr. Vergara's

account: "Right after they were done with me, they told me, 'We're going after

him.' "

Yup, no civil liberties being violated here!

This is not what you had planned

Apologies, first, for the abyssmal posting of late. I've been preoccupied and frustrated and not sure how to write about it in a way which wouldn't just seem ridiculous. I also have been not doing a great job of being honest with myself about what i've been going through. First, I'm worried about my dad, whose heart medication somehow induced "complications" last week wherein he found himself urinating blood. I haven't heard from my brother in a week, so i guess i'm worried about him too. I'm worried about an old friend who may or may not have been in Indonesia during the Tsunami who i have no idea how to get in touch with. I'm selfishly worried about how much my applications sucked and what i'm going to do for the next eight months and what i'm going to do after that, but that seems trivial. And i'm worried that i'm just going to hole myself in my parent's apartment again and hate my life, which still seems pretty trivial compared to what everyone else is going through. (And at the risk of sounding like some Reaganite voluntarist, the very simple answer is that i just don't do this.)



I went to the dentist for a routine cleaning yesterday and it turns out that the acid reflux crap eroded my teeth and i have to give myself a flouride treatment every day for possibly forever and couldn't i just drink tapwater instead?



I don't really feel like writing anything else right now. I'm really apretty mediocre blogger. Go watch the live video of The Advantage's take on the theme music from the Flashman stage of Megaman 2. It will make me feel better.

Hartford Connecticut kicks (Walmart's) ass.

I'm out $220, but my applications are in. If i could keep my fingers crossed for four months, i would.

Vote, Dammit

Elaine's behind by about 60 votes. Go vote for her, and may the schwartz be with you.

"troglodytes"

I'm kind of speechless on this one.

well, fuck

Steve Greenhouse article on the right-wing agenda of bush's NLRB

"All the cases that we've decided have been well reasoned,"

Mr. Battista said. "They're certainly consistent with the act. I wouldn't

characterize them as pro-business or pro-union. I'd like to say they're

pro-employee."

Vin Petrini couldn't have said it better!

The board's defenders say it is merely continuing a long tradition

of swinging back and forth: toward management when a Republican is in the White

House and toward labor during Democratic presidencies.

"After eight years of

a liberal Clinton board and an extremely liberal general counsel, there is of

course going to be some turning back toward a conservative agenda," said Randel

Johnson, vice president for labor, immigration and employee benefits at the

United States Chamber of Commerce. "The board has turned a corner here, but it's

not a wholesale reversal of the case law in favor of the business

community."

Several recent board decisions, Mr. Johnson pointed out, have

reversed Clinton-era rulings that overturned precedents set by Republican

boards. In a case involving I.B.M., the board voted 3 to 2 to overturn a Clinton

board ruling that gave nonunion workers the right to have a colleague accompany

them to investigative or disciplinary meetings with supervisors. The Clinton-era

ruling was a reversal of a 1980's decision.

In a case involving Brown

University, the board reversed a Clinton-era ruling involving New York

University - a reversal of a 1970's decision - that gave graduate student

teaching assistants the right to unionize.

Mr. Battista said, "What we did

restores the precedent that has been time-honored and had never been overturned

by a court or by Congressional action."

The bush administration: slowly turning the clock back on workers' rights to the 1800s, one dceade at a time, and damn proud of it.

But the board's Democratic members vigorously objected. "The

issues raised by the petitioners were settled 40 years ago," they wrote. "To

revisit it serves no purpose but to undermine a principle that has been endorsed

time and again by the board and the courts."

***

Charles Craver, a professor of labor law at George Washington

University, said the board's conservative tilt would hurt unions, but less so

than the conservative tilt of the federal judiciary, which he said was

increasingly unfriendly to labor.

"I think we have a labor board as

conservative as any time since the Reagan board," Professor Craver said. "It

really troubles me because we're revisiting a lot of cases that have been fairly

well settled."

Wait - what happened to the Bush Administration's crusade against an activist judiciary which throws out precedent in favor of politics? Oh wait, "reality based-community." I remember now. How silly of me.