Who I like, remember.  But when she writes something like this:

We should be looking for ways to make teaching more open to part-timers and people in second, third, or eighth career cycles, and to make it easier for teachers to move around between schools and districts, and between teaching and other industries.

It’s just too damned easy to respond with this:

Well, that’ll happen over the union’s dead body.

…and the conversation ends there.  Look, it’s not my fault that public sector unions exist; that they have metastasized throughout federal, state, and local governments; that they are now adjuncts of the Democratic party*; and that we can no longer afford to give them more and more free stuff every year while private sector wages and benefits stagnate, if not retreat.  It’s also not my fault that the well of my sympathy is dry.  And it is certainly not my fault that public sector unions have dug in their heels and refused to admit that you can’t be simultaneously a noble collection of independent secular saints and avowed political partisans.

But all of these things are true, and they are now affecting the political environment, and by ‘affecting’ I mean ‘destroying.’  We can talk about how to maintain the system after we’re done making the most critical repairs to it.  And that involves breaking the Democratic party’s control over government infrastructures.  We have to, if for no other reason that they completely suck at running them.

(H/T: Instapundit)

(more…)

This one goes out to Hot Air Headlines. I believe that the appropriate comment here is “Neener, neener.”

Girls Just Want To Have Fun, Cyndi Lauper

Let me set the scenario: the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) has unfortunately realized that the 2010 election cycle – which would be where the DSCC spent 97.8 million and went into debt for 8.9 million in order to lose six Senate seats and gain zero – demonstrates handily that the DSCC cannot be trusted to come in out of the rain; wipe its own nose; or, indeed, wear its underpants underneath its outer clothing.  Accordingly, the DSCC is now outsourcing to actual functional adults every possible function that it can… which includes finding a slogan for the DSCC.  Seriously: as the Politico puts it, “…DSCC Chairman Patty Murray (Wash.) is looking for a pithy catchphrase to rally the troops…”  The Politico then proceeds to mock the DSCC for this, which is unusual – but, given the truly insipid slogans that the DSCC considering, perhaps the Politico simply could not help itself.

Certainly, I could not, so here’s mine.  I feel that it is pithy, actually conveys the message that the DSCC is attempting to convey, and even uses a historical/pop-culture reference to make it, in its way, a truly honest slogan in a way that most political slogans cannot be. So, here we go:

DSCC 2012

DRINK THE KOOL-AID.

Is there going to be a small prize for the winner?

Moe Lane (crosspost)

“I teach it to hate.
I teach it to win .”

Stone-cold, there.

Moe Lane

PS: I assume, of course, that I should never pick up this game if I ever want to have free time again, or see the Sun.

…At least, that’s how I’m interpreting this letter from the Wisconsin Senate Majority Leader to (hiding) Wisconsin Senate Minority Leader Mark Miller, in response to Miller’s request for a face-to-face meeting to discuss a possible compromise that would allow Wisconsin senators to came back home with something roughly approximating their dignity intact.  Fitzgerald’s letter starts as follows:

Sen. Mark Miller
Parts Unknown, IL

…and pretty much continues in that vein for six paragraphs’ worth of what has to be one of the better official political letters that I have read, and I unfortunately have to read a lot of these.  Read it for yourself: it’s a treat.  Then again, any official document where the words and phrases ‘bizarre,’ “We all deserve better than this,” and “I hope you are enjoying your vacation, and your vacation from reality” usually is.

Couple this with Governor Scott Walker’s response – short version: No; slightly longer version: Heck, no* – and you might be forgiven for thinking that the Wisconsin GOP is not going to back down on this issue…

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*With a dollop of implied “We’re talking to Senate Democrats that aren’t you, you know.”

A story that clearly involves somebody’s pain and loss.

Via email.

…Which they are, of course: just not to HuffPo. Which is why that the “strike” that some of them are invoking because they aren’t getting paid for their freely-provided content is so… well, it’s kind of cute.  Diagnostic of a sad mass delusion of the relative worth of their provided free content, when contrasted against the difficulty in acquiring new free content of equal or greater value, but cute.

More seriously, when you have a site of HuffPo’s size, then you will get people who are happy to trade free content in exchange for free publicity.  Some of those people will be good enough at what they do to be usable.  You cannot compete with those people unless you first accept that they are in fact being compensated for their work, and adjust your pitch accordingly.  Just the way it goes, folks.

Moe Lane

There’s some confusion going on with regard to the intentions and plans of the fourteen AWOL Democratic state senators from Wisconsin who have been hiding from their job responsibilities for the last two weeks. They are or are not or are or are not or are or are not* about to give up and just come back in; what is actually going to happen is still to be determined.  On the other hand, it’s easy enough to see what did happen over the weekend: the fourteen AWOL senators lost whatever unit cohesion that they might have had in the first place.  Two weeks of living on the lam and being politely chased by private citizens with video cameras will do that to a group, after all.

You see, we tend to forget that politicians are not identical, like potatoes: these fourteen men and women are just that – men and women – and it’s easy to believe that they’re getting tired, sore, and fuming about how they’ve somehow become the surrogate whipping boys for a national debate on public sector unions.  Some of them might even be thinking that they didn’t actually sign up for this, that this wasn’t in the job description, and that the people urging them to exile in Illinois might not really give a tinker’s dam about them or their problems.  And that this situation that they’re in is getting old.  Oh, sure, no doubt a few of the AWOL senators are having a ball… but some of them are not, and the loss of message discipline in the last few days shows that.

And it only takes one AWOL senators to end this nonsense. (more…)

I would buy it for my children if it did, though.

So would you, I hope.

Via @MelissaTweets.

Moe Lane

PS: Eerie how that look works for Adama, isn’t it? (more…)

Lucky Man, Emerson, Lake & Palmer

I always thought of this as a World War I song, for some reason.

Specifically, Lovecraft’s ghouls.  I hate to say, but… they just ain’t that scary to me, sorry.  Or mind-blastingly evil.  Mi-Go?  Sure: brains-in-a-can and deep space frightfulness.  Deep Ones?  No problem, especially since Delta Green: Targets of Opportunity did a revamp.  Great Race?  Yeah, those SOBs are pretty freaky-deaky when you realize that they’ve got a real problem with personal head space.  But… ghouls?

OK.  You eat dead people.  Hold on, am I dead?  No?  Well, then, you just keep on with gnawing on that head then, buddy:  he’s obviously past caring and it’s nobody I know. I mean, seriously: read “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” again.  You can recruit those guys as a ally race in that one.

They got real nuanced after “Pickman’s Model,” is all I’m saying.

Moe Lane

…I am exceedingly comfortable with despising you.  Don’t make me change my opinion (no matter how slightly) because of what you told Mayor Bloomberg to his face:

“When I become mayor, you know what I’m going to spend my first year doing? I’m going to have a bunch of ribbon-cuttings tearing out your fucking bike lanes.”

New York City politicians.  Love them or despise them, but at least they generally make things clear.  Aside from Bloomberg, of course.

Via @SonnyBunch.

Moe Lane