Moe Lane

Well, I wanted to do “Vacation,” but it wouldn’t embed.  What the hell: Eighties videos all blur at this point anyway.

Manic Monday, The Bangles

I just got sent this.  I… think it’s real.  Michael Winslow is That Guy from Police Academy, after all.

And if it is: you know, I just may have wasted my life by not learning how to do that.

Starting tomorrow afternoon, I’m going to be taking a few days off for vacation – as in, don’t expect any posts; I very well be totally offline.  But I am taking the Kindle, so any suggestions?

First, let’s refresh people’s memory of what happened.

For those without video: basically, what happened was that after Joe Biden Opened His Mouth and announced that voting against the President’s job bill would result in more rapes in Flint, Michigan, Jason Mattera of Human Events confronted the Vice President on Biden’s statement.  If you watch the video, you’ll see that Mattera ‘ambushed’ VP Biden by cruelly saying the magic word ‘picture:’ this of course caused Biden to go into full Pavlovian politician mode… thus freezing him for just long enough for Mattera to ask Biden on the record whether that language was appropriate for a sitting Vice President.  Biden then attempted to push out a cloud of link by standing by his statement that rapes were up three times in Flint – which, by the way, Factcheck.org calls a ‘whopper;’ i.e., a lie – and then made a hasty retreat.

So.  Point to Human Events.  But now it gets better. (more…)

(H/T: Verum Serum) Or should that be ‘tear gas, tears?’  More cause-and-effect that way:

Early Tuesday, the city began ousting protesters who have camped out for two weeks at the Occupy Oakland tent city on Frank H. Ogawa Plaza. Police started assembling around the tent city at 14th Street and Broadway at about 3 a.m.

I am afraid that I have perhaps not the greatest sympathy in the world for these people, which might have been made clear by my visible surprise that the Oakland city fathers did not follow the example of then-Mayor Moonbeam and use wooden bullets to disperse the protesters.

And… that’s all that pretty much has to be said about Occupy Oakland, huh?  – Unless they come back, that is.

Shock.
Surprise.
Inconceivable!

Last week’s release of FBI documents finally put in writing what nobody had ever said on the record: The FBI suspected that former Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.) and lobbyists close to him were running a scheme to funnel earmarks to sham companies and nonprofits to benefit the lawmaker’s friends and former staffers.

Bits and pieces of this story were kicked around for years before Murtha died in February 2010. The Los Angeles Times, Roll Call, the Washington Post and others had documented the odd appearance of earmarks for tiny defense contractors that just happened to open an office in western Pennsylvania and just happened to hire one of the lobbying firms close to Murtha and just happened to begin making campaign donations to Murtha and other Members of Congress close to him.

Yes, that was sarcasm. (more…)

Plan here.

[UPDATE]: Speech done; copy can be found here.  Lots of good stuff in it: to quote @DrewMTips…

Shorter Rick Perry: “What’s my plan? Just about every popular conservative idea that’s been floating around for 30 years”.

Pretty much, pretty much.  I like ending baseline spending, myself.  A lot.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

So… the Maryland redistricting map was revealed and signed into law recently, and – shock!  Surprise! – the Democratic-controlled legislature managed to hack into one of the two Republican seats.  The short version: they went into Roscoe Bartlett’s MD-06, switched out a bunch of districts to make it more competitive, and then put central Maryland into the redistricting blender and hit ‘puree.’  Because, well, central Maryland is dominated by the Baltimore and Washington DC metro areas, which is another way of saying that it’s prime Democrat country.  The redistricting is likewise allegedly designed to give current Congressman John Sarbanes an easy, carefree life until such time as there’s a vacancy for MD-SEN; all in all, if you were hoping to see a Maryland redistricting map that didn’t look like a four-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, well, be disappointed yet again.

There’s just one small problem for the Maryland Democratic party, and it’s called the Voter Rights Act of 1965.  Or, perhaps, ‘karma.’ (more…)

Screw it, I’m recycling this one.  You know why.

Bang The Drum All Day, Todd Rundgren

[UPDATE]: Welcome, Hot Air readers.  I ain’t proud: Paypal’s on the side over there.  I promise to frivolously spend it on roleplaying and video games, if that helps.

Via @MelissaTweets / @chuckdizzle comes this heartwarming story about how an internal dispute at Occupy Wall Street is threatening to bring the whole, somewhat fetid, thing down.  Reportedly, the actual community – you know, the ones who pay taxes and actually live/work there – is SICK AND TIRED OF THE DAMNED DRUMMING GOING ON ALL THE TIME WHEN DECENT PEOPLE ARE TRYING TO GET THEIR KIDS TO SLEEP, and they’re on the verge of sending in the cops with the mops.  Meanwhile, the Occupiers are a little slow on this entire ‘recapitulating civilization’ thing, so they’ve not yet culturally evolved to the point where they can force the DAMNED DRUMMERS TO STOP THE DRUMMING AT ALL HOURS OF THE DAY AND NIGHT.  Because drummers WON’T STOP DRUMMING.  EVER*.  All of which means (supposedly) that unless the Occupiers can get their shit together – or more accurately, gone – shit will go down tomorrow at the real community board meeting.

And if you’ve never been to a community board meeting when it goes bad, well.  It’s not pretty.

Mind you, @allahpundit refuses to believe that this isn’t a parody, which is fair: it’s hard to believe that such people as this… (more…)

OK, let’s set the scene: you have these two guys named Steven Preckwinkle, and David Piccioli.  Preckwinkle is the Director of Political Activity for the Illinois Federation of Teachers; Piccioli is one of its Legislative Directors.  Neither is an actual teacher.  Both of these men are getting to that age (Preckwinkle is 59; Piccioli, 61) where they’d like to retire, but… they’re lobbyists – which means that they’re union officials, not teachers.  However, the Illinois legislature in 2007 passed legislation that allowed teachers union officials to be grandfathered into the state teachers pension system, with their union employment counting for the purposes of determining a pension – just so long as those officials had been plugged into the system by the time that the law had been signed.  So Preckwinkle and Piccioli went out, got their teaching certificates, each subbed for a day – and thus became eligible to participate in a generous pension system originally designed to benefit teachers, which are generally held in higher esteem than are either union officials or lobbyists, and for excellent reasons.

The only entertaining thing about this is that Preckwinkle at least may not actually be able to take advantage of this loophole after all; the union lobbyists are ‘only’ being permitted to buy into the aforementioned generous pension system, and the recent economic woes are making it difficult for the poor lobbyist to make all the back payments.  We are still talking about almost four to six million dollars being paid out to these individuals over the next two decades, which is still one heck of a bargain if either can scrape up the cash.  And, again: this was a pension designed to be generous to teachers.  Real teachers, not people who substitute taught for a day. (more…)

You can see it here*: I’ll be damned if I have that filthy Jew-hating bastard’s video on my own site.  But I will say this… I’m betting that Team Perry (and Team Gingrich) appreciates how much you hate them, schmuck:

But to be fair, David Duke also hates Teams Romney & Santorum.  Well, actually, David Duke just hates everybody in the GOP, OK?

Moe Lane

*Obviously, it has to be up somewhere, so that you can see it for yourself.  But still, I’m glad for the ability to hyperlink.