I have taken 6 flights the past week and every fucking one was delayed. 10 hours was the longest i was held up but i sat in the Laguardia airport for 5 hours bored out of my mind at the airport bar and heard quite a bit of talk about how much trump was ruining everyone's day.

Oddly enough all the tsa lines were incredibly short.

---

who's smarter than you're? i'm!

How the hell are ANY federal employees unionized then per 4?

That's just flying through LGA had nothing to do with the shutdown. Also flying this time of year is asking to be delayed

Flew through PHL and BOS last Monday/Tuesday and the TSA lines were the shortest I've ever seen them (nobody in line ahead of me at PHL, and a couple people at BOS). No flight delays either, thankfully.

Or, maybe a discreet conference call was made to some union chiefs from Chuck and Mitch on the subject of excusing absences.

I took this while waiting to take off

---

who's smarter than you're? i'm!

Yeah one of my delays was due to weather but the others were a shit shows. Even the weather delay was apparently compounded because of short staffing due to the shutdown. At least that was the explanation given.

---

who's smarter than you're? i'm!

b/c non of the fed unions advocate for striking?

That just makes them impotent and useless

it's not the only way fed unions get de-clawed and de-fanged, but unless someone repeals Taft Hartley or if it gets declared unconstitutional, it's a non-starter and a moot point

what most don't realize is that the fed unions still do perform quite a bit of other duties that are important.

while on the topic of Taft Hartley, it was written during another time and under a different political climate. Red Scare was just getting started, and labor unions (in general) had quite a bit of power. Very different from today's situation for labor.

Wait times in DTW were less than 10 minutes on the busiest of days. Nothing unusual, in other words. But I know for a fact that the regional director for TSA (we were managers together at Northwest Airlines and he got smart and jumped ship for TSA a year or so after it was stood up) moved about 250 uniformed TSA screeners from much less trafficked airports and placed them as backstops at the bigger and heavier facilities. Plus, he had the plainclothes security inspectors (they're not sworn law enforcement officers) staffing the security checkpoints and screening bags, too.

That ground stop thing in New York goes on plenty of times in a year, by the way, whenever flight traffic in that corridor gets too thick. No doubt today's was due to blue flu on the part of ATC folks, however, and the optics of it looked pretty bad, especially after their union and the airline pilots union, ALPA, issued a letter saying that flight safety was going to become more compromised as the shutdown wore on.

---

"Politics is just show business for ugly people."