“California,United States” on The Daily Caller

In 2008, teacher assistant Johanna Munoz helped her Orlando-area fourth-graders on the state achievement test. (more)

Some would say California is overrated, shallow, and made up of neurotic, entitled people, but any state that pop sensation Katy Perry calls home can’t be all that terrible. In fact, the many talents of “California Gurls” singer Katy Perry are so noteworthy that we previously recognized them in one of last summer’s slideshows, back when D.C. was toasty and warm. Those days seem so far away now. (more)

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps star Shia LaBeouf was briefly handcuffed and released in the wee hours of Saturday morning after an alleged bar fight, UsMagazine.com has confirmed. (more)

There’s more to “Baywatch” bombshell Pamela Anderson than her Playboy centerfolds. The Canadian actress is also an activist for respecting the legal immigration process, Fox News reported Monday. (more)

Activist group Judicial Watch is appealing a decision by the Air Force to withhold documents related to former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s use of military airplanes. (more)

1.) Joe Biden refuses to criticize totalitarian Egyptian president, admits liking The Onion — Muhammad Hosni Sayyid Mubarak has not truly “won” an election in the 30 years that he has been president of Egypt. Instead, he’s used secret police and state-controlled media to intimidate and incarcerate his critics and political opponents, including the runner-up in the first presidential election where someone other than Mubarak was allowed on the ballot. On January 25, Egyptians rose up against Mubarak, and the Egyptian president responded by shutting down the country’s Internet and sending armed thugs into the streets to do violence against his own people. By definition, Mubarak is a dictator. Unless, of course, your dictionary was penned by Vice Pres. Joe Biden, in which case geopolitical interests supersede honesty and/or human rights. “Mubarak has been an ally of ours in a number of things,” Biden told PBS’ Jim Lehrer last night. “I would not refer to him as a dictator.” In other Biden news, the vice president likes the Onion’s made-up coverage of him. “I think it’s hilarious, the stuff they do on me,” Biden told Yahoo! News Thursday. “I saw the one of me washing a Trans-Am automobile in the driveway shirtless with tattoos all over myself and out there,” he added. “By the way, I have a Corvette– a ’67 Corvette– not a Trans-Am.” (more)

1.) FCIC dissenters defend bailing out Wall Street — Two reports will come out of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission today. The one written by the panel’s liberal majority will blame lax regulation and the banking industry for the collapse of the housing industry. The other, written by commissioners Bill Thomas, a former Republican congressman from California, Keith Hennessey, former chairman of the White House National Economic Council under President George W. Bush, and Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, spreads the blame more broadly among “investors, creditors, regulators, homebuyers, and politicians,” all of whom must take “personal responsibility.” The dissenters also defended bailing out Wall Street: “For a policymaker, the calculus is simple: if you bail out AIG and you’re wrong, you will have wasted taxpayer money and provoked public outrage,” the paper reads. “If you don’t bail out AIG and you’re wrong, the global financial system collapses. It should be easy to see why policymakers favored action–there was a chance of being wrong either way, and the costs of being wrong without action were far greater than the costs of being wrong with action.” Thank goodness we didn’t destabilize the global financial system, which might have led to really scary stuff, like high unemployment. (more)

1.) Deficit commission gets no respect during SOTU address — “Wait for the deficit commission.” That’s what the White House told Reuters’ James Pethokoukis whenever he asked about Pres. Obama’s strategy for dealing with America’s debt problem. “Obama’s panel has come and gone,” Pethokoukis wrote after the SOTU address. “And in his speech last night, he failed to explicitly endorse any of its budget-cutting recommendations.” After 10 months of deliberation and town halls across the country to the tune of $500,000, and a contentious fight over which commission faction’s proposal was the best proposal, Obama has essentially scrapped the whole thing. “I don’t agree with all their proposals, but they made important progress,” Obama said last night. “To put us on solid ground, we should also find a bipartisan solution to strengthen Social Security for future generations.” Never mind that Obama has endorsed exactly zero of the commission’s ideas, but as Pethokoukis points out: “Did Obama not check his in-box? His bipartisan commission gave him a Social Security fix.” (more)

More than one-fifth of House freshman have taken the “bring your work home with you” concept to another level by opting to sleep in their D.C. offices. (more)

Piers Morgan wants to know why former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, an accomplished, successful woman, has yet to tie the knot. (more)

While British students took to the streets last month to protest tuition hikes in the UK, one man at the University of Colorado-Boulder opted for a more subtle approach. (more)

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. (AP) — Host Ricky Gervas humorously insulted nearly every A-lister in the room at the Golden Globes, while the big winner was “The Social Network” — a movie about a guy who riles up everyone on campus with his new and invasive website. (more)

VERSAILLES, Ky. — Zenyatta has had her nails done and been visited by Capone, a teaser stallion with a not very romantic name. He will never have her, though. She is destined for a more pedigreed mate and, as in all arranged weddings, the days before will be fraught with the anxiety and stomach-turning expectations usually directed at the union of British royals. (more)

The nation’s first gay museum opening in San Francisco’s Castro district showcases a variety of items ranging from Harvey Milk’s pink-framed sunglasses to manuscripts and sex toys. (more)

1.) Two Democrats announce plans to overreact to Tucson massacre — A little more than 24 hours after a lone gunman attempted to assassinate Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, killing and wounding more than a dozen others in the process, two Democratic representatives announced their plans to further restrict Americans’ freedom. Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, whose husband was killed and her son injured in a subway car shooting, wants to renew a Clinton-era ban on large ammunition magazines, as well as investigate the type of ammunition used by deranged (and possibly schizophrenic) shooter Jared L. Loughner. “Looking at the number of clips that he was able to fire, from 15 to 20 rounds, we need to look at those and say, ‘Why should an average citizen be able to have that?’” McCarthy told Newsday. “If you have a semiautomatic and can’t take someone down with a standard clip, you shouldn’t have one.” Meanwhile, Democratic Rep. Robert Brady would like to make it “a federal crime for a person to use language or symbols that could be perceived as threatening or inciting violence against a Member of Congress or federal official.” When asked by CNN if he honestly expected his colleagues to join him in defecating on the First Amendment, Brady replied, “Why would you be against it?” (more)

While many Pennsylvanians celebrated the arrival of 2011 on New Year’s Eve, home builders in the state likely did not blow their bugles and pop their poppers with quite as much exuberance. That is because this year marks the beginning of a new government mandate in Pennsylvania requiring that all new one- and two-family homes have an automatic fire sprinkler system — a feature that costs thousands of dollars. (more)

Customs officials say they intercepted one of the world’s most destructive grain and seed pests during an inspection at Los Angeles International Airport. (more)

In true celebrity justice, the former governor’s Mercedes G-Wagon was hit with a citation after the actor-turned-politician overstayed his welcome in a five-minute passenger loading zone. (more)

1.) Every player in the higher education subsidy debate is a parasite — “When you inject government into an industry, you get some pretty unsavory results.” That’s the conclusion that the Examiner’s Tim Carney arrived at when he dived into the murky debate over federal subsidies for for-profit colleges. Institutions like University of Phoenix and Kaplan have been horning in on the market traditionally held by community colleges. But while claiming to offer a private alternative, for-profits aren’t offering a market-based alternative: They get most of their money from federally provided (or backed) student loans, which they are allowed to keep even if their students drop out. Short-sellers have set their sites on these companies, with one sending out employees to collect signatures from homeless shelter directors complaining about for-profits enrolling homeless people in order to swipe their federal aide money. “In effect,” writes Carney, “the for-profit colleges created a clash between two evils, with one side exploiting the homeless and the other side exploiting the homeless shelters.” (more)

Reese Witherspoon is ready to walk down the aisle again! (more)