Sometimes they let the kids run the track switchboard, too.

(Via Drudge) I’d find this funny, except that somebody’s going to lose their job over it…

MTA Operator Let Kid Drive Train, Rider Claims

Driving a subway is so easy an 8-year-old could do it – and one straphanger claims that’s who he saw behind the controls of his train.

Jules Cattie, a 41-year-old lawyer who lives on the East Side, was shocked when he saw a young child at the helm, next to the driver, of his Lexington Avenue express train Sunday, according to the Daily News. And the MTA says it’s launched “a vigorous and thorough investigation” into the allegation.

…which is a shame (says the son of a railroad man). Letting your kid take a supervised shot at the greatest train set in the world is in fact a tradition; it’s kind of a working class thing – one that’s kind of linked to the old days, when child followed parent into a particular job – so it’s not really something that you can explain properly. I mean, I know perfectly well why this woman was showing her son how to operate the subway car; but expressing why to somebody who don’t get it seems to be frankly a bit of a chore, seeing that I’m not personally involved.

Unintended consequences in health care rationing.

This Jim Geraghty post about the travails of Rep. Waxman, and this Leon Wolf one about the travails of Senators Dodd and Conrad, reminded me that I wanted to point two things out to our Democratic colleagues.

  1. If you hadn’t ignored the fact that two of your Senators were involved in long-standing real estate shenanigans, you might not be facing a situation where one of them is currently destroying the narrative of health care rationing;
  2. If you hadn’t encouraged the Speaker of the House to encourage putting in charge of the Energy committee somebody who hates seeing more of it produced, the equivocators on that committee might not be so frantic about having to vote for a health care rationing bill.

Karma.  It’s what’s for dinner.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Yet *more* on the Crowley/Gates thing.

If you operate your own website and are following the Crowley/Gates brouhaha, you’ve probably noticed an abrupt switch in your comments section; one side went from being pro-Gates (reasonable enough) to virulently anti-Crowley within the course of several hours. It’s kind of fascinating to watch that happen; presumably the tapes and testimony coming available is acting as an irritant.

Or possibly it was this video:

Continue reading Yet *more* on the Crowley/Gates thing.

Book of Eli trailer.

Well.

On the one hand, the science is… wonky. Environmental damage severe enough to push the population down to barely-sustainable levels and apparently kill all visible plant matter, and yet beeswax is plentiful enough for candles. Or else tallow, which is of course another word for ‘fat,’ which is not exactly something that you literally burn away in poor-nutrition environments. And they’re all dressed incredibly badly for folks able to root through six billion people’s worth of abandoned wealth.

On the other hand, Denzell Washington and Gary Oldman.

On the gripping hand, it’s just a movie.

Moe Lane

‘A primary challenge from the left would be a sad joke.’

I quibble at Megan McArdle’s adjective: ‘funny’ works ever so much better.  After all, the GOP is the one laughing at the way that Specter’s race is shaping up: we have gone from a situation where Specter, Toomey, and a liberal Democrat would conspire together to create a vicious primary fight and a weakened Specter to a situation where… Specter, Toomey, and a liberal Democrat would conspire together to create a vicious primary fight and a weakened Specter.  Only now the vicious primary fight is happening all the way over there, from our point of view; and I suspect that Megan may not be entirely checked out on Pennsylvania politics.  Pat Toomey may not have been a shoo-in; but a Republican who can hold a D+2 district that went for Kerry & Gore should be taken seriously in a general election, especially since Toomey’s going to have a more or less easy primary of it.

And the best part?  The Democrats were so looking forward to having somebody who was one of them in this race.  Alas, the comfort of the Democratic party’s leadership overrides the needs of their base.  Again.

You can donate to Pat Toomey here, by the way.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

The impossible Gitmo deadline: 24 hours?

It wasn’t until I read this AoSHQ post about the delay in the detention report (preliminary details here) that I started counting off the months on my fingers.  Six months from July 21st makes… January 21st, more or less.

The work of a Justice Department-led task force, which had been scheduled to send a report on detention policy to President Obama on Tuesday, will be extended for six months, according to senior administration officials. A second task force examining interrogation policy will get a two-month extension to complete its work, which had also been due Tuesday.

[snip]

The officials said the administration remains committed to closing the prison in Cuba by January 2010…

I fail to see how.  After the fold is the relevant text of the original Executive Order: note that it is dated January 22, 2009. Continue reading The impossible Gitmo deadline: 24 hours?

‘Nation of Cowards.’

According to Mike Hendrix, it’s the people who don’t want to talk about things like this at all, at all:

In The Atlantic Monthly, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead noted that the “relationship [between single-parent families and crime] is so strong that controlling for family configuration erases the relationship between race and crime and between low income and crime. This conclusion shows up time and again in the literature. The nation’s mayors, as well as police officers, social workers, probation officers, and court officials, consistently point to family break up as the most important source of rising rates of crime.”

Let me repeat: Control for single-parent families and there are no differences between the races when it comes to crime.

It’s hard to argue that there isn’t a reluctance in this country to discuss the possibility that some of our cultural choices are maybe not working out so hot. Even alluding to it feels kind of strange, really. Kind of taboo – and not in the kinky way; in the ‘we do not speak of this matter’ way.