{"id":1425,"date":"2009-06-23T06:52:39","date_gmt":"2009-06-23T10:52:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/morningseditionists.com\/msblog\/?p=1425"},"modified":"2009-06-23T07:00:22","modified_gmt":"2009-06-23T11:00:22","slug":"off-the-rails-tuesday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/2009\/06\/23\/off-the-rails-tuesday\/","title":{"rendered":"Off the Rails Tuesday"},"content":{"rendered":"

What with the train crash yesterday, all the shit going on in Iran, the SC governor AWOL<\/a>, and our Governor grounding all the members of the NY State Senate<\/a> (they’re not allowed to go out at all – not on weekends, and not even on the Fourth of July – but my guess is the only legislation they’ll pass is a bill to pay State Senators overtime for being called in to special sessions), the big news this morning is that two people I don’t know and really don’t give a crap about who apparently have eight kids and a “reality” teevee show, are separating. <\/p>\n

The Supreme Court upheld the Voting Rights Act yesterday<\/a>. Sort of. They left a way for “good” cities to bail out, assuming they could show no violations in the past decade. Now, far be it for me to accuse SCOTUS of being “activist judges,” but isn’t that kind of legislating from the bench? I mean, I’m not Nina Totenbag, but it seems to me it’s one thing to say a law is or isn’t constitutional (or even strike down a part of it), but didn’t they just rewrite the law? In fact, isn’t it really up to the legislature to decide whether the law is no longer needed and should be repealed?<\/p>\n

When I was riding back and forth to work in DC, I used to wonder about what would happen if the train slammed into another train or something. Especially a packed train with standing room only (I know I used to “surf,” and only grab hold of a rail when we were approaching a stop. Even holding on with one hand wouldn’t really do much if you slammed into a stopped train doing 58 MPH. <\/p>\n

There are supposed to be switches in place to automatically brake the train if another train is stopped ahead, and there’s an operator that can brake the train manually. Unfortunately there was a failure in both the automatic and human systems yesterday. Since the operator was apparently one of the (so far) nine killed, we may never find out what happened. <\/p>\n

I was probably one of her passengers at some point; I’d probably have recognized her voice – they all have unique personalities, and you kind of get to “know” them after a while. <\/p>\n

I’d have to guess that the switches and signal lights failed, and by the time she saw the train stopped ahead, it was too late; trains don’t exactly stop on a dime. <\/p>\n

Well, time to get ready to get ready.<\/p>\n

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What with the train crash yesterday, all the shit going on in Iran, the SC governor AWOL, and our Governor grounding all the members of the NY State Senate (they’re not allowed to go out at all – not on weekends, and not even on the Fourth of July – but my guess is the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1425","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1425","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1425"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1425\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1425"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1425"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}