Moe Lane

Does Scott Walker not understand that all that tax money belongs to the State?

The ($531 million) tax decreases — the third round of cuts by Republicans in less than a year — passed 17-15 with GOP Sen. Dale Schultz of Richland Center joining all Democrats in voting against the proposal. The proposal now goes to the Assembly, which passed a different version of the tax cuts last month with two Democrats joining all Republicans in supporting it.

With growing tax collections now expected to give the state a $1billion budget surplus in June 2015, Walker’s bill will cut property and income taxes for families and businesses, and zero out all income taxes for manufacturers in the state.

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Dunno why I keep staying up too late, but I’m getting too old for that.  I’ll say this, though: it made that strange hallucinatory episode in Assassin’s Creed IV Black Flag last night truly freaking surreal.

Well, well, well.

A major Democratic donor pleaded guilty on Monday to funneling millions of dollars in illegal campaign donations to federal and local politicians, including an unnamed 2008 presidential candidate believed to be Hillary Clinton.

District of Columbia businessman Jeffrey Thompson, who federal prosecutors say financed a “shadow campaign” for D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray in 2010, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to violate campaign finance laws.

Thompson claimed some of the candidates, including Gray, were aware of the illegal fundraising.

…”Some?” (more…)

This one goes out to all those Senate Democratic staffers that have to stay up tonight so that their bosses can pretend to being doing something for the biosphere.

All Night Long (All Night), Lionel Richie

Yes, I am mocking their pain: those people are some of the most privileged in the country. A statement that many of them would indignantly deny, by the way.

Moe Lane

The short version is, I like it, but not for the reasons that I thought that I would. I thought that I’d like it for PDFs, but I haven’t gotten the hang of getting them organized yet.  However, the dang thing is incredibly light and I can actually use it to watch movies again.  Although I probably will have to set up a separate Netflix account for it, seeing as I have kids and everything.

So I am well pleased.

John Sexton, noting why he thinks that Ezra Klein’s new Vox… thingy… may not live up to the hype:

Whatever the case, technology is not capable of adding to or subtracting from the list of things that interest human beings.

It’s a relevant quote because, as near as I can tell, the entire concept of Vox orbits around the idea that producing a service (Big Wonkery, essentially) will generate a demand for it. In this particular case, I kind of doubt it …no, not because Jeff Bezos passed on it.  Klein asking for at least ten million guarantees it.  No, the reason that I kind of doubt it is because Bezos didn’t turn around and do the idea himself for about one million.

Because if he did, it’d be honestly more likely to work.

Moe Lane

School kids.

194 Children. 194 Dreams. Closing great schools closes the door on opportunity. #SaveThe194 http://t.co/AUt23JyERV pic.twitter.com/j8wdJVqa1S

— Charter Schools Work (@Fam4ExcSchools) March 6, 2014

But, hey, none of those minority kids refill Democratic coffers the way that the teachers’ unions do.

…but I agree with him on this:

Ed Snowden lecturing on human rights from Russia pic.twitter.com/NniCEnGSDo

— BuzzFeed Benny (@bennyjohnson) March 10, 2014

They kill journalists and whistle-blowers over there. Hell, Russia used to have slave labor camps. Ever notice how nobody ever seemed to prosecute, Nuremberg-style, all those people who ran ‘em? Amazing how the post-Soviets always seem to get a pass on this stuff.

Moe Lane

Three things to take away from this ‘talkathon’ on global warming planned for tonight by Senate Democrats:

• Indeed, do not call it a ‘filibuster.’ Strictly speaking, the last one of those we had was from Rand Paul.  This will be more like Ted Cruz’s Obamacare session, except that there will be more individuals involved (largely because the Democrats do not have a single Senator that can match the rhetorical skills of Ted Cruz, let alone duplicate his stamina).
• I betcha none of these people will take questions. Like the one about why all the climate models have been increasingly at odds with observed data for about the last, oh, twenty years or so*.
• And this says it all, really: “Democrats have 28 senators scheduled to speak through Monday night, but some of the party’s most vulnerable senators facing re-election this year—Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Kay Hagan of North Carolina—are notably missing from the lineup.”

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This was from a RGA panel(?), back in February:

“When you have governors, and we all compete against each other — we are the laboratories of innovation — and for the President of the United States to look Democrat and Republican governors in the eye and say, ‘I do not trust you to make decisions in your state about issues of education, about transportation infrastructure,’ — and that is really troubling,” he said.
Perry expressed his own fears regarding Environmental Protection Agency restrictions choking off America’s energy production and a possible reduction in his state’s national guard.

“As a matter of fact, he [Obama] said at that meeting, he said, ‘If I hear any of you pushing back, making statements about Washington spends too much money, you’ll hear from me,” he said, adding, “I’m highly offended by that.”

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…under the same email address for two separate data plans.  I have no intention of having them share the same data plan, either: the entire point of the Kindle HDX is to still have my own tablet even when one of my children has vultured the iPad.

Ehh.  Just venting.

White Room, Cream

You know, this is almost comprehensible even if you’re not smoking the marijuana.  Not that I would know anything about that sort of thing, of course.