Bus Fumes

Here's another dandy example of what's wrong with union work rules:

Robert Kelly, president of Amalgamated Transit Workers Union Local 308 representing motormen, said what Claypool calls “coffee time” is a 15-minute window to give motormen time to park sometimes a block away and get in the cab of a train before it’s scheduled to leave the station.

“If he wants to eliminate that, I’ve got no problem with that. But, that also means that train won’t go out at 8 a.m. It’s gonna mean huge service delays,” he said.

That's right -- Chicago transit workers get paid to park their vehicles and get to work on time.

More of the crazy?

• Twenty-minute paid bathroom breaks for customer assistants with easy access to washrooms.
  
• [L]imits on discipline built into union contracts that make it difficult to punish no-shows. For example, an employee can only be discharged for excessive absenteeism after seven occurrences while consecutive absent days are considered one occurrence.
  
• Paying workers convicted of drunk driving to do nothing for 180 days while they appeal and attempt to get their driving privileges back.
  
• Starting the clock on emergency overtime when employees get the phone call at home instead of when they arrive at work.
  
• Paid holidays for birthdays and work anniversaries that guarantee bus drivers and motorman who chose to work on those days 2.5 times their normal hourly wage.
  
• Forcing the CTA to run a normal schedule of buses and trains, even on slow days like the Friday after Thanksgiving and the week between Christmas and New Years, instead of “right-sizing” service to meet demand.
  
• A “spread premium” that pays operators — who pick their shifts based on seniority — time-and-a-half for working more than 10.5 hours a day. They receive the extra pay even if they deliberately pick runs at the beginning and end of a day and take a 5.5-hour break in between.
  
• A guaranteed, three hours’ pay for any work done outside a janitor’s normal hours, whether or not that janitor works more than eight hours in a given day.
  

It's amazing to me that union workers don't see any of this as a slap in the face of the rest of us working stiffs.

Drive-Bys

All of a sudden Illinois Dems are acting like Republicans -- and they're leaving my head spinning. Behold:

Mayor Rahm Emanuel is proposing another round of ethics legislation — this time to try to “reign in the influence” of City Hall lobbyists and lift the veil on their influence-peddling activities.

During his first few hours in office, Emanuel signed a series of executive orders that, among other things, aimed to slam shut the “revolving door” that has allowed city employees and mayoral appointees to lobby City Hall. They are now banned from doing so for at least two years after leaving their jobs.

Emanuel also swore off campaign contributions from city lobbyists and insulated city employees from pressure they had felt to give gifts or make political contributions to the mayor, department heads or city supervisors.

More recently, the mayor also posted an unprecedented amount of information about city lobbyists on the internet.Now, he is prepared to go further. At Wednesday’s City Council meeting, the mayor will introduce an ordinance limiting — to $50 per gift and $100 per calendar year — the value of gifts lobbyists can give to city employees.

And good ol' Governor Giveaway is finally reining it in, too:

Gov. Pat Quinn said Tuesday he was prepared to go to court against the unions to defend his decision to cancel pay raises for nearly 30,000 state workers and he repeatedly blamed lawmakers for leaving him no choice by not setting aside the money.

“It’s very clear that the money wasn’t available for the raises and therefore there’s really nothing I could do to clear it up,” Quinn said after a Chicago press conference where he touted a $10 million program to give teens and young people internships and jobs in state parks, park districts and nature centers.

Quinn made the surprise announcement Friday that workers wouldn’t be getting the 2 percent increase they were expecting that day. The state’s largest employee union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, said it had no idea Quinn was considering such action.

The raises will save the state about $75 million as it copes with a budget crisis.

And finally Governor Giveaway shocked me with this stunner:

The names of licensed gun owners in Illinois will remain private under a measure Gov. Pat Quinn signed into law today.

The governor approved legislation to prevent Illinois State Police from releasing the names of those who hold or have applied for a Firearm Owner’s Identification card.

Apparently they're listening to the tax paying public here in Illinois. Who knew?
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Quote of the Day #1:

"President Sparklefarts is seriously deranged." -- Second City Cop

(Yes, it made me giggle, although the subject matter did not.)
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Is buying organic produce really better? Apparently that's a yes and a no. Go here to check out which fruits and veggies contain higher levels of pesticides and which ones don't.
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Is it rude to text in at the movies, during a live concert or during a live theater performance?

Those little LED screens can break the spell in a darkened theater, and it doesn't matter that you're not making a sound. "Anything intrusive is a noise, and the light is intrusive," said Charles Coleman, who is the programmer at Facets Multimedia. "Using a phone in a darkened... theater is like lighting a road flare."

In a word -- YES. Turn 'em off, folks.
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Smoke belching from Asia's rapidly growing economies is largely responsible for a halt in global warming in the decade after 1998 because of sulphur's cooling effect, even though greenhouse gas emissions soared, a U.S. study said on Monday.

So we really don't have to go green? All we have to do is encourage Asia to pollute more and that'll stop global warming? Or we could simply burn more coal here in order to save the planet?

Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahahahaha!!!
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Has anyone else out there gotten a bazillion emails of posts to Google+ from friends who are beta testing the site?

Jeepers Creepers! It's like having Facebook invade your email. Ugh.

If anyone knows how to opt out of receiving every brilliant thought that crosses someone's mind out of my gmail, please, please, please let me know.

(No. I will not be signing up for this one.)
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Quote of the Day #2:

"I'm really not a 'What Would Jesus Do?' kind of guy. I'm more of a 'Why Would Jesus Do That?' kind of person." -- My Baby Bro, 7/4/11

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Holy crap. I almost forgot that ADWD lands six days from now... or so they promise. Seems I'm not the only skeptic.

(Fingers crossed.)

Bus Fumes

You know, I really wish they'd stop calling them "pat downs" -- because they're not. From Dictionary.reference.com:

pat-down   
[pat-doun] Show IPA
–noun
an act or instance of passing the hands over the body of a clothed person to detect concealed weapons, drugs, etc.; frisking.

In reality, from recent personal experience, TSA agents don't just pass their hands over your body -- they grope you, and hard in the manner of Dictionary.reference.com's definition #6:

Slang . an act or instance of sexually fondling another person.

I also take issue with TSA's promise of privacy and that no pictures will be taken:

The U.S. Marshals Service recently admitted saving some 35,000 images from a machine at a federal courthouse in Florida. TSA says that will never happen. Human experience says, oh, yes, it will.

Here's all the proof I need that your parts can and may be exposed to the rest of the world: this CNN article photo. This quick Bing image search. Repeated photos from the scanners on Drudge Report banners. This quick google image search. Also, this Fox News report that shows images of not only the scanned image, but also identifiable images of the person scanned:

Sure, the TSA assures us that the image-saving capability "will be turned off" in these scanners, but they don't say when, and they don't say what has been or will be done with the gazillion images already saved.

Then there's this YouTube video describing the "pat down" for an "opt out":

Even if you agree to the scan, you still aren't out of the woods. I didn't opt out, and still got the so-called pat down, thanks to my bra's underwires.* The young lady in the video at least got groped in private. I got my breasts squeezed and twisted in full view of every single person in the security area -- and no, nobody offered to take me off into private to do it.

(Please don't tell me it's okay because I submitted. I had no choice. Neither did anyone else in line that morning, as we were all forced through the scanners or to submit to a pat-down if we wanted to fly that day.)

I'm a mature adult who's seen a lot, and still this was a humiliating experience for me. Imagine, then, if it's your grandmother or wife or teenager or tween or very young child who's always been told never to let a stranger touch them inappropriately. Whether its the public chest mauling or the full body scan or the private full body feel-up, it's wrong on just about every level.

Furthermore, the new procedures really slowed the security line down at O'Hare. Don't be even a little late for a flight, or these new procedures will likely make you miss your flight. And be prepared for gridlock at airport security if you're traveling over the Thanksgiving holiday.

Neither of these forms of screening should be used until or unless there's a suspicion that a passenger may be carrying contraband of some sort. It should not be the primary screening method unless it's used for all airline passengers -- including the Head of Homeland Security, the President, the First Lady and the First Children. The TSA has gone way too far.

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*The least the TSA could do is educate their screeners as to what an underwire looks like and why it's not a threat to national security.

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Update: I've heard a lot of discussion on talk radio about this subject today, and a lot of people who experienced the old "pat down" with the back of the hands that came if you made the metal detector beep more than once or had a medical note due to surgical pins, rods, plates or replacement joints saying that TSA agents were "respectful" and that "it's not that bad" and that they were given a choice for their pat down to happen publicly or privately.

Trust me, things have changed. I can't wait to hear about your next experience with the TSA. That was then. This is now, and it's different.

Also, I just heard a United Airline employee assert that NONE of the airline food service truck personnel or bag handlers have to go through security of any type at O'Hare "because they're TSA employees." But pilots and flight attendants do have to submit to those indignities.

There's no logical reason why this is so.

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Update II:

If this photo from today's (11/15/10) Drudge Report doesn't convince you of the outrageousness of the TSA's procedures, nothing else will:



(And for those people who insist that they do the full feel-ups in private, this disproves it.)

Hey, Big Sis! How's that discreet thing supposed to work again?