1.) Tea Partiers jump freshman congressmen into the Best Friends gang — For freshman congresspeople who were victorious in November, it is time to pay the people who got them elected. “In one instance, incoming freshmen just elected to Congress received hundreds of phone calls and e-mails from Tea Party activists demanding they attend a Tea Party event,” reports The Daily Caller’s Alex Pappas. “In another, Republican members thinking of not supporting legislation that places a moratorium on pork-barrel earmarks are being threatened with a more conservative primary challenger in the next election.” There will be no turning of backs on the Tea Party, or else someone is going to get stabbed in the neck. “They will not get a free pass,” said Americans for Prosperity’s Phil Kerpen at a recent event. “So we’ve got to keep all the heat on them.” This is just like French Revolution, when the peasants revolted against Mitch Antoinette because he was wishy-washy on earmarks.
2.) Renegade DOJ employee has history of doing renegade things — The author of a DOJ report detailing NJ Gov. Chris Christie’s habit of overspending government during his U.S. Attorney days is “one of the most belligerent, unprofessional lawyers” her supervisor had ever worked with. “The report’s author, Maura Lee, began her DOJ career in the civil rights division, but now works in the DOJ Office of Inspector General,” reports TheDC’s Amanda Carey. “Hans von Spakovsky, former counsel to the assistant attorney general for civil rights, supervised Lee and told TheDC that he was ‘astonished’ when he found out she was the author of the report.” Was Lee really that horrible? Apparently, yes! She hacked into her conservative colleagues’ email accounts, regularly leaked sensitive information to the press about Bush hires she didn’t like, and encouraged her colleagues to do the same. But that’s not all! According to Spakovsky, Lee was so demented that she “would encourage other DOJ lawyers not to pursue cases so that the Bush administration would not be able to take credit for being progressive on voter and civil rights issues.” As punishment for her blatant politicization of her role at the Justice Department, Lee was promoted to the inspector general’s office.
3.) Anti-smoking labels are sexy, study finds — Obama and his team of vegan enforcers may want to rethink their plans to put explicit warning labels on packs of cigarettes. According to research by scientists, “suggests that, for a certain set of smokers, those allusions to death may actually increase the likelihood they’ll light up,” reports Miller-McCune magazine. A group of researchers from New York University and the University of Basel assert that many smokers view their habit as cool, sexy, and or esteem-boosting. “For those individuals, terror management theory suggests mortality-laced warning labels could be counterproductive. The threat to one’s life would presumably result in an urge to pump up one’s self-esteem — which, for those individuals, could easily mean a renewed commitment to smoking.” So really what Obama should do is ban Mad Men and/or James Dean movies.
4.) Can scarcity defeat the Taliban? — “Taliban fighters in Afghanistan face a double crisis,” reports the UK Sun. “They are suffering a stark shortage of 7.62mm rounds for their AK-47 machine guns. The cost of raw components to make their feared improvised explosive devices has seen a tenfold increase in the past six months.” According to British commanders, cutting off supplies from Pakistan has done wonders for the war effort. For the Taliban, who eventually will want a McDonald’s in every province, this is a lesson: Violence is the enemy of the market. Keep your hands to yourselves, and you can have nice things!
5.) If you thought the groping was bad now, wait until TSA unionizes — The Washington Examiner’s Mark Hemingway points out that the games of grab-ass and the nudie pics aren’t the worst of it: The TSA could very well unionize in the immediate future, meaning the agency will cost more, do less, and be impervious to reform or speedy change. “When the Homeland Security Department was founded under Bush, the TSA was expressly forbidden from unionizing due to security concerns,” Hemingway writes. “TSA effectiveness depends on rapid response to emerging threats. After a British bomb plot was broken up in 2006, TSA overhauled its policies in 12 hours to deal with new concerns about liquid explosives. It’s hard to imagine that kind of flexibility under union rules. Then according to DHS’ website, in 2007 the newly Democratic Congress cleared the way for unionization.” On Friday, the Federal Labor Relations Authority gave TSA the go-ahead to unionize. Consequences will never be the same.
6.) Foreclosure King gets foreclosed on — “For people pushed out of their own homes by the law firm of foreclosure king David J. Stern, consider Monday’s news a piece of sweet irony,” writes lefty mag Mother Jones. “Stern, the South Florida lawyer who built a business empire in the foreclosure industry, has come full circle: In a regulatory filing published today, Stern’s publicly traded company revealed that one of its subsidiaries failed to pay rent in November on its towering office building in Plantation, Florida, and had received a notice of default.” Stern, who owns a lovely waterfront home in Ft. Lauderdale and pays over $4,000 a month just in utilities, made headlines earlier this year for recruiting ex-fry cooks and high-school dropouts to sign off on thousands of complicated foreclosure documents per day.
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