Moe Lane

I guess there’s no reason not to nominate him for it, but it’s still sort of weird:

The former CBS News producer jailed for trying to blackmail David Letterman is up for an Emmy award.

Robert “Joe” Halderman was nominated Thursday for a News and Documentary Emmy award for his participation in an April 2009 “48 Hours” story about an American exchange student charged with murder in Italy. He was one of four producers cited for the story.

Halderman began a six-month jail sentence in May for trying to extort money from Letterman in exchange for not revealing the late-night host’s office affairs.

Via Ed Driscoll, who is not precisely filled with the milk of human kindness when it comes to the journalism industry.  Not that I’m saying that he’s wrong, given that a lot of journalists pretty much hate New Media for a variety of reasons, and the ones who do hate us are rarely shy about making that hatred known.

Moe Lane

PS: Oddly, this is one of those businesses where getting an industry award nomination is sometimes a response to having been thrown in jail, rather than being largely irrelevant to it.

People are paying a lot of attention to the House right now, but there’s something interesting going on in the Senate. And in some ways it should worry the Democrats more.

Let’s start by taking a look at Rasmussen’s state of the Senate races right now:

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If you don’t already know, The Daily Caller bought the keitholbermann.com domain name and is now using it to flick Keith Olbermann’s left earlobe on a steady, but not quite regular basis.  Hi-jinks, as they say, ensued.  The quote of the day is not actually:

“Some might step back and allow Mr. Olbermann to drain his bladder on the first amendment – indeed, on the Bill of Rights itself,” said Carlson. “Not us. No, by God, not us.”

It’s:

And in the meantime, Tucker Carlson may be reached at his personal email address, keith@keitholbermann.com.

Honestly, you’d have thought that Olbermann would have bought the darn thing up himself. I guess that they only taught that sort of thing in the other Cornell…

Moe Lane

Another in-joke, in much the same vein as the last one.

Super Freak, Rick James

Also, kids? Don’t do cocaine.

OK, picking Animal House is a bit of a political in-joke: the “All Is Well!” clip is making the rounds, based on the week that our esteemed colleagues on the Other Side have been having. I’d be sympathetic, except that I’m not sure how I’d manage it in their case.

Now, if you could just look at this red light, Men in Black…

[UPDATE]: Ace of AoSHQ makes a point about the Congressional Record that I no longer have to get around to making, and Allahpundit of Hot Air lets us know that this was not the dumbest thing Rep. Jackson-Lee said today.

I was sent this video of Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee’s announcement of the survival of South Vietnam to the present era with a simple “Words escape me.”

Well, that’s why I’m here.
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Doofuses.

I believe that the topical response to this would be “You’re doing it wrong.”

Major Dem donors who wrote checks to the Democratic Governors Association funded a below-the-radar campaign that attacked Pres. Obama and other Dem all-stars, all in hopes of knocking off a strong GOP challenger.

[snip]

Iowans for Responsible Government is a 527 group founded by Rob Tully, the former state Dem Party chairman. Reports filed with the Internal Revenue Service this morning show the group raised $782K and spent $767K in the second quarter. That money came entirely from the DGA, in 3 contributions in May and June.

…And that money was spent trying – and failing – to get rid of Terry Branstad in the primary by claiming that he was a liberal Obama supporter.  If it had worked, it might have revived Chet Culver’s collapsing campaign; as it stands, it’s over three quarters of a million dollars of Democratic money piled on the ground and set on fire.   Branstad can now point to pretty much any criticism that he’s not conservative enough and plausibly claim that it’s just more Democratic smear-mongering.  He’s already started.  I imagine that Reps. Bruce Bailey and Leonard Boswell aren’t too happy about this, either: both need top-ticket support this cycle if they want to survive. (more…)

Cracked.com can expect some pushback on one of their latest (“The 6 Most Misguided Causes Ever Made Famous by Celebrities“): it’s going to be considered not helpful to point out that, truly, almost invariably Lefty celebrities tend to embrace some truly imbecilic Lefty causes, from The War on Domestic Justice (Mumia the Cop-Killer Good!) and The War On Foreign Justice (Castro the Dictator Good!) and The War On Objective Reality (9/11 is all because of US/Joooooooos!) – and, of course, The War On Science* (Immunizations Bad!). Apparently that last one is going to be getting much, much bigger, thanks to Jenny McCarthy getting a show from Oprah.  As Cracked put it:

All of America is about to catch McCarthy Fever! And measles.

Pretty much.

Moe Lane

*For some reason, some of the most tedious Republicans-hate-science types get very defensive when the entire ‘vaccines cause autism’ thing comes up.  It’s almost as if they’re being – ‘zounds! – hypocritical!  But that’s the worse non-violent secular sin in Western civil society possible, so of course they can’t be that…

So, they’re gassing geese in NYC, and both Ann Althouse and Glenn Reynolds wonder why people don’t just eat the geese.

Probably because most people don’t own a truck with a camper shell and a tailgate, a couple loaves of bread, and an air gun. Supposedly – I HAVE NEVER DONE THIS* – someone could theoretically take all of these items to an area infested frequented by Canada geese, park the truck, lower the tailgate, scatter the bread in the back, wait a half an hour or so, rush around back, raise the tailgate, and then drive off to a somewhat less public place for air gun usage.

Or so I may or may not have been told, which may or may not have during the consumption over large amounts of alcohol, which may or may not have been told to me by people whose names elude me, and during a time period that is well out of the statute of limitations regarding hypothetical violations of the Endangered Species Act and other, related federal legislation.

Moe Lane

*Seriously, I don’t own a truck.  Or an air gun.  I think that we may be out of bread, too.

Today’s “Whoops. Somebody was recording that?” moment will be brought to you today by Rep. Steve Rothman (D, NJ-09):

‘Portability’ in this context refers to the ability of people to take their health care plan with them if they lose their jobs – a feature not found in Obamacare, and one of four supposed deal-killers for Rep. Rothman. As you can see from the video, he was unhappy to be called an oathbreaker, and very unhappy to be asked why NJ-09 voters should be expected to still vote for an oathbreaker*. The awkward body language there is astounding, in fact: even if you’re aware of how safe a seat NJ-09 is normally considered for the Democrats it’s slightly startling that somebody so self-evidently constitutionally incapable of being criticized has managed to survive in it for a decade. The answer, of course, is that up until now nobody was getting things on permanent record…

Hey, we have a candidate opposing him! Michael Agosta. Apparently, it was a somewhat vigorous primary, too. That’s always good; shows that people are taking an interest.

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…not one of their best CGI results, but there’s at least one good photoshopped image in there.

Via Buzzfeed: interestingly, the original story about the Taliban supposedly training monkeys to fire guns originates from… the official newspaper for the People’s Republic of China.  Why do I have the feeling that the rest of the world is getting somehow sucked into the lingering aftereffects of the last Chinese civil war?

Ave Maria, Jewel

You know, as near as I can tell Jewel is just a nice person.  Good sense of humor, too.