Is that the one with the DeLorean?

Overheard in the living room:

Me: "Hey, look what's on that St. Louis channel: Airwolf!"
My Bride: "That a big deal?"
Me: "Airwolf was one of the finest television shows the 1980s had to offer."
My Bride: "I thought it was a movie? With that guy in it?"
Me: "Well . . . . maybe there was a longer pilot, I guess, but it was a series. It had Jan-Michael Vincent flying a futuristic helicopter and Ernest Borgnine as his mechanic."
My Bride: "Ohhhh! I was thinking of Teen Wolf."

This was immediately followed by My Bride leaping out of her seat and across the room to fall into the desk chair at the computer desk. She apparently thought she could prevent the blogging of her pop-culture faux pas . . . . but you can't stop the signal.

Ess You What Huh What?

I'm glad I'm not the only one wondering what on earth the "States United to Prevent Gun Violence" is supposed to be. Their name is only slightly less stupid than the "Freedom States Alliance," which is just about a syntactically null statement (what are the "Freedom States," and why do they advocate cracking down on freedom?)
Seriously, "States United?" You idiots are claiming to be a coalition of state governments or something. You are, at best, a sort of shell corporation consisting of various vestigial state-level gun-banning groups that represent tiny minorities of the voters in your respective states. You are entirely full of crap, and I've never heard of you. My guess is that the SUPGV was created out of whole cloth quite recently as a way to pool that sweet, sweet grant money from the Joyce Foundation people so everyone can keep feeding, even if each goober had to accept less largesse than he's grown accustomed to.

Being a gun-ban astroturf activist is not a fun or respected life, but it beats working for a living, I guess.

I have issues. Issues I got from the internet.

I started a new job a few days ago, and the day after I brought in a box of breakfast granola bars, ate one, and left the rest in the kitchen, people apparently ate the rest and threw the box away.
That's not the issue . . . the issue is that I caught myself thinking of writing a really passive-aggressive note about it, but decided not to bother because my phone won't take a good enough picture to be legible on www.passiveaggressivenotes.com.

Also, the school district that just hired me uses Macs exclusively. My classroom machine is a big white EMac. Everything about it is backwards and wrong.

Just for Tamara: "Dick Durbin on snow"

Yo, dawg, I heard you like it when yankees get all unhinged about snow, so I got you a unhinged yankee Senator babblin' about snow.



Of course, Senator Durbin's not even from Chicago. I believe he's from East St. Louis, and nowadays he lives in Springfield. We get snow here, of course, but it's not like Chicago.

Overheard in a bar . . .

. . . . down the street from the Illinois Capitol in Springfield:

Veteran Politico: "Okay, tell me how you win Mcdonald. How do you lay out the argument that wins Mcdonald for you?"
Chicago City Attorney: "Honestly? I don't see any way."

Hearing a Chicago attorney admit they're likely to lose McDonald v. Chicago in a big way is like hearing your wife say she loves you. Sure, it's nothing new, and maybe she thinks it should go without saying, but it's still nice to hear it out loud.

Zombie gun control never stops coming back to life

Illinois handgun dealer licensing bill is back from the dead . . . again.
Now, no one get too alarmed, but it does seem that zombie gun control bills are beginning to rise from the dead in Springfield. The first lumbering corpse to claw its way out of the cold, mossy ground of the legislative cemetery known as the Rules Committee is House Bill 180, the "Handgun Dealer Licensing Act. This is the same bill gun owners have been stopping for years, over and over and over--but it always comes back. Normally, that process takes time, as a bill that went down to defeat in a floor vote the year before must be re-introduced and go through the committee process again before reaching the floor--which is why the Senate version of this same bill, SB3092, is some time away from a floor vote; it had to be introduced anew just this week. However, there was no floor vote on HB180 during the 2009 session, so it went back to the Rules Committee . . . which sent it back out to the floor late last week. That means that a floor vote could be taken at any time. But what would HB180 do that would lead gun owners to call their legislators in opposition?

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Hey, Scott Cohen--don't sit with your back to any doors.

Days of our Trailers: Dick Durbin "Nullify Voters' Decision"
Fascinating video of Dick Durbin sharpening the long knives at Days of Our Trailers today.

Interesting that Durbin says they have "legal ways" of forcing the outcome they want. I wonder what those would be, given that it's an elected position and Cohen won the election. I suppose the primary elections are run by party rules as much as election law, and maybe they can convene the Super Duper Delegates who were supposed to take the Presidential nomination away from Obama and give it to Hillary Clinton back when he was the upstart who didn't know whose turn it was. More likely, they think they can get someone elected as a write-in or even insert another name on the ballot as Lt. Governor as long as they technically leave Cohen's name on the ballot. They're not treading very lightly, and that may not be smart. Voters get a little rebellious when they see a smear.
A friend theorized that the pawn businesses that made Cohen rich requires various licensing, and someone will let Cohen know that licenses are not always automatically renewed; it's especially difficult to keep up with the licensing process if you spread yourself too thin with hobbies like political campaigning, ifyouknowwhatImeanandIthinkyoudo.

I don't think it was a complete mistake on Democratic voters' parts, to be honest. I realize they didn't know the full extent of Cohen's past problems, but I think their message is the same either way: "We will vote for anyone who can show any evidence at all that he's trying to do something about the economy in Illinois, especially if he's employing people. We don't care about the rest."

The whole point was that once he flooded the market with advertising about his job fairs and touting himself as the only candidate in the race doing anything about jobs in Illinois, it did not matter to most voters what else he stood for or why he was in the race. Which is the real reason they didn't check into his background before they voted for him.

Either way, it's always fun to watch Durbin get all threatening and say gangsta-wannabe stuff like "he should spare himself and his family what he's about to go through." Meaning, of course, "he should knuckle under and spare himself what I'm about to put him through."