dc – Page 8 – Moe Lane

#rsrh QotD, Oh, Dear God That’s Embarrassing Edition.

So in 2010 the Washington, DC school board challenged hackers to get into their absentee voting system…

Yeah, you, I, and Glenn Reynolds know where this is going.

Anyway, a team from the University of Michigan broke in, replaced all the votes with write-ins for “Bender Bending Rodríguez” (yes, the robot), accessed critical files that would have permitted social engineering and/or wholesale voting fraud, got into the general network to use the security cameras, fended off several other hacking attacks both foreign and domestic, tagged the site with an “Owned!” gif, and programmed the site to play the UofM fight song. In case you were wondering, this was not a particularly subtle finishing move:

And yet…

Despite all this, the system administrators did not notice anything strange until two days later.

Ah, Dizzy City. I’d recommend that the portions of it not on the Federal Mall be given back to Maryland and Virginia, except that neither state would take them except at gunpoint.

#rsrh An Occupier video unsuitable for RedState. (NSFW)

At least, not for the front page: it’s a long range video of a DC [Seattle*] Occupier literally defecating on a sidewalk as the cars whiz by. Note when you watch it that the Occupier uses a garbage can to give himself(?) some privacy from the other Occupiers, while clearly being indifferent to the reaction of the folks in the cars: I’m no psychologist, but I suspect that this probably gives you an idea of just who said Occupier truly recognizes as being important.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Wl1ObUGAoHE

Anyway, the question that eventually comes to mind here is Was this faked? After all, the idea that the Occupiers have degenerated to the point where they’re defecating on public sidewalks is kind of alarming. Alas, the idea that it’d might have been faked is really just false comfort; it only means that the Occupiers have degenerated to the point where they’re indifferent to defecation on public sidewalks.

Which is some pretty hardcore degeneration, right there.

Moe Lane

PS: Can’t remember where I saw this first, sorry. Drudge?

[*The Blaze reported that this video is actually from Seattle. My bad.]

Reimagining the Justice League.

Good stuff as usual from Aaron Diaz; I liked especially re-imaging Lex Luthor as a benevolent, friendly geek in his public/corporate persona. It’s a step up from the usual knee-jerk ‘visibly evil mega-corporation villain.’ The rest is visually interesting, in the retro-Futurist way that Diaz likes to draw technology.

Now if he’d just update Dresden Codak more often…

Picture of the Day, THIS… IS… DC! edition.

Via Instapundit, this picture of Tuesday’s local earthquake damage tells you everything that you would ever need to know about Dizzy City’s conception of itself, its place in the universe, and how to allocate media priorities accordingly.

Although, to be fair, the Steve Jobs thing seems to have knocked that off of the front page.

Moe Lane

PS: Of course I freaked out (mildly) when the earthquake hit: I have two kids, it was a 5.8, and we don’t get earthquakes around here (I don’t think that I’ve actually ever been in one before).

Reason’s DC Taxi Sharecropping video. #tcot #p2

My friend and colleague Caleb Howe already has this up at RedState, but stuff like this irritates the living life out of me:

Short version: (Democratic) DC Council members are putting together a taxi medallion law that will force out independent owner-operator cabbies in DC, in favor of connected cab companies… who will, of course, eagerly rent medallions (at a high markup) to the former independents. Hence, sharecropping: which, as anyone who has read history can tell you, is feudalism without the charm*.

(pause)

Ever get the feeling that the Democratic party leadership kind of misses that entire patron/client thing? – Because they keep coming up with stuff that would bring those days back. Old times, they are not forgotten, indeed.

Moe Lane

*Actually, no, feudalism does have its charms. If you happen to live in a system where its understood that loyalty and responsibility flow both up and down the chain.

Car snowboarding in DC. #rsrh

(Via @seanhackbarth) I am conflicted about this:

On the one hand, it does seem tailor-made for a future edition of The Darwin Awards. Nobody got hurt there, but, well, it’s snowboarding from the back of a car at speed in DC at night. One step away from death or trauma at all times.

On the other hand… well, it’s snowboarding from the back of a car at speed in DC at night. I haven’t do anything that stupid-cool lately.

Democrats resegregate DC school system.

[UPDATE]: Welcome, Instapundit readers.

Are you surprised? I’m not surprised.

The leaders of D.C.’s school choice movement, Kevin P. Chavous (former D.C. Councilman) and Virginia Walden Ford (executive director of D.C. Parents for School Choice), today issued the following statement:

“House and Senate Appropriators this week ignored the wishes of D.C.’s mayor, D.C.’s public schools chancellor, a majority of D.C.’s city council, and more than 70 percent of D.C. residents and have mandated the slow death of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program. This successful school voucher program—for D.C.’s poorest families—has allowed more than 3,300 children to attend the best schools they have ever known.

Via Big Government. You know, there’s a part of me that would almost prefer that this was evidence of some sort of long term payback – one that would have been in the works for about 150 years at this point – against African-Americans by the Democratic party. At least that would be a reason to wreck school choice. It would be a conscious decision. Instead, though, I’m faced with the tawdry reality that the Democratic Party simply just doesn’t care.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Cop brings gun to snowball fight.

Dizzy City, of course: three flakes on the ground and this town goes bugf*ck nuts.

A plainclothes police detective allegedly pulled his gun out and waved it at a large group of people in a snowball fight at the corner of 14th and U Saturday afternoon.

The incident began when a plain-clothes detective approached the crowd of people throwing snowballs and got into a verbal altercation with members of the crowd, according to police.

A uniformed officer responded to the scene after getting calls about a man with a gun. The uniformed officer pulled out his weapon as he approached the plain-clothes detective. As soon as the detective identified himself the uniformed officer put his gun back in the holster, police said.

(H/T Drudge) Video at the link, and the guy should have kept his mouth shut. Sucks to get hit with an unexpected snowball when you’re not wearing a hat, and it’s not cool to do it to a cop in uniform*, but plainclothes get to take the same chances as the rest of us.

That being said, if they threw an iceball at him…

Moe Lane

*Dunno why. Just is.

Politico: D.C. Doing great during recession.

And by ‘D.C.’ Politico means ‘The trendy parts of D.C.’

I’d just like to make that clear. When Politico is writing things like:

The rest of the country has a new reason to hate the inside-the-Beltway crowd: Our economy is better than yours.

At 6.2 percent, the unemployment rate in the D.C. metro region is lower than in any other major metropolitan area in the country — and far below the 9.5 percent national average.

…they’re more or less obscuring the problems that DC itself has. They do note the 1/3rd illiteracy rate in the District itself, not to mention unemployment (which is either 10.9% or 11.3%, depending on which official harbinger of doom you believe more), but the article writer seems more interested in interviewing Republican politicians about how awful DC is compared to the rest of the country than it is in interviewing Democratic ones about why it is that the non-tourist part of the city of DC is in such bad shape. After all, as Politico itself notes: “[f]ifteen cents of every dollar the federal government doles out throughout the world on goods and services is spent in the D.C. metro area,” which raises the question of why the District itself isn’t benefiting more – particularly since it’s a Democratic-controlled city in a Democratic-controlled area in a Democratic-controlled administration. It should be benefiting more, but it isn’t.

And I can’t possibly imagine why that might be.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

I guess Obama knows about the Tea Parties now.

“First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.” – M. Gandhi

[UPDATE] “Say what you will about George W. Bush, he had a skin whose thickness wasn’t measured in Planck lengths.” I really wish that I had written that.

Because he’s sounding just a little bit self-conscious on the subject:

Obama targets tea bags at town hall

At his 100th-day town hall meeting in St. Louis Wednesday, President Barack Obama took direct aim at the anti-tax “tea party” demonstrations that have cropped up over the last month and took a veiled shot at the Fox News Channel, the cable news network closely associated with the protests.

[snip]

“Those of you who are watching certain news channels on which I’m not very popular, and you see folks waving tea bags around, Obama said, “let me just remind them that I am happy to have a serious conversation about how we are going to cut our health care costs down over the long term, how we are going to stabilize Social Security.”

See also (originally noted via FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog) the video below the fold: Continue reading I guess Obama knows about the Tea Parties *now*.