Arlington

Washington Subway Terrorist Bomb Plot Leads to Arrest

by Hans Bader on October 28, 2010

in Labor, Mobility, Regulation

Federal authorities arrested Farooque Ahmed for plotting to bomb the Washington Metro subway system.  Ahmed, who immigrated from Pakistan, “conspired with people he thought to be al-Qaeda operatives to bomb the Arlington Cemetery, Pentagon City, Crystal City and Court House stations, according to a federal indictment.”

Don’t count on the subway system itself to guard against terrorism, though.  Many of the Washington, D.C. Metro’s unionized employees are incompetent or grossly overpaid, and some simply disregard threats to public safety, as a letter writer recently chronicled in The Washington Post.  Members of its governing board, like Arlington County politician Chris Zimmerman, have turned a blind eye to incompetence, waste, and safety hazards at Metro, even while jacking up subway fares by massive amounts. Federal investigators rebuked the subway system for a “systemic breakdown of safety management at all levels” that led to the deadly Red Line crash last summer and other fatal accidents.

The Obama administration is undermining airline and railroad security against terrorist attacks by pushing policies that benefit public employee unions at the expense of competence and public safety.

Election Season Gives Me Imaginary Relatives

by Hans Bader on October 5, 2008 · 39 comments

in Legal, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual

The upcoming election has given me new relatives, all of them imaginary.  The Obama campaign’s get-out-the-vote operation calls my house on an almost daily basis, trying to reach people who don’t live there, like Cyrus and Hassan Bader.  But I’ve never heard of either of them, even though I share their last name.  The Obama people have also tried repeatedly to reach my 18-month old daughter Sarah.

I live in a liberal bastion, Arlington, Virginia, where high voter turnout favors the Democratic Party.  The Party hopes to achieve its “80-80 strategy” – getting Arlington voter turnout up to a record 80 percent, and getting 80 percent of those voters to vote Democratic.  Cyrus and Hassan may be imaginary, but votes cast in their name may enable the Party to reach its goal.  Imaginary voters have sometimes ended up on voting rolls as part of voter registration drives by the left-wing activist group ACORN, which has a long history of voter fraud.  (ACORN also hires felons, registers voters using the names of minors, and registers the same voters under many different names). 

Protections against voter fraud have been weakened in Virginia as officials appointed by the state’s liberal governor, Tim Kaine, have ordered local elections boards not to check voter qualifications, such as proof of domicile, drawing protests even from liberal election officials.  People have boasted of voting in Virginia elections despite living out-of-state and being registered in other states.