ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Are There More Female Athletes With Great Racks?

ROT: BBC Presenter Jimmy Savile Suspect in 199 Crimes, Including Rape.

#WARONWOMEN: Rep. Jim Moran’s (D-VA) son pleads guilty to assaulting girlfriend. “According to a court document, on Dec. 1, police outside the Getaway at 1400 Meridian Place NW observed Moran ‘grab a white female by the back of her head with his hand and slam her head into the metal trash can cage in front of the nightclub.'”

Plus: “The incident marked the second time in recent months that Patrick Moran found himself in hot water. In October, Moran was forced to resign from his father’s re-election campaign after he was caught on camera coaching a man on how to commit voter fraud.”

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: “U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez employed as an unpaid intern in his Senate office an illegal immigrant who was a registered sex offender, now under arrest by immigration authorities, The Associated Press has learned. The Homeland Security Department instructed federal agents not to arrest him until after Election Day, a U.S. official involved in the case told the AP.” (Emphasis added).

I guess the Obama Administration figured one sex scandal for Menendez at a time was enough.

UPDATE: “Mustn’t embarrass members of the Inner Party.”

JUST DON’T LET ELMO HAVE THE KIDS: Sesame Street tackles divorce.

SHIKHA DALMIA: Unions Begin Long War After Stunning Blow in Michigan. “Labor has two options now that its ability to extract mandatory dues from workers as a condition for employment is gone. It can fight the law or try to persuade workers to voluntarily pay up. Union bosses aren’t accustomed to the second approach, so until the next elections in 2014 they can be expected to try everything to overturn the law and to stop the right-to-work fever from spreading to neighboring states.”

CLOSE, MAYANS, BUT NO CIGAR: Asteroid Barely Misses Earth.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Top Dorm Room Gadgets.

IN THE WASHINGTON POST, a nice story on Roger Simon & Sheryl Longin’s Walter Duranty play, The Party Line.

THE RAINMAKERS: Downstream. I saw them at the 930 Club in DC — a double-bill with Steve Earle for just 5 bucks, a few weeks before both bands got famous — and it was one of the best shows of my life. Amusingly, it turns out Mickey Kaus was at that show too, though I didn’t know him then.

CHANGE: Chips expand beyond potato and corn; a garden awaits. “Lentils, black beans, sweet potatoes — yes, they can be chips too. But different ingredients don’t change the fact they must be eaten in moderation.” D’oh!

REMEMBER, JUST BECAUSE THE APOCALYPSE STRIKES there’s no reason to be without bacon!

A LEGAL FUNDRAISER FOR A CANADIAN BLOGGER ENDORSED BY MARK STEYN. I donated.

Background here.

BT AND KIRSTY HAWKSHAW: Dreaming.

And here’s the Tiesto remix. Personally, I prefer the original.

BYRAN PRESTON: Assault in Lansing: Leftist Blogs Go Into ‘False Flag’ Mode, Mainstream Media Goes Silent. “It’s not tough to figure out how the mainstream media can turn a hot story into a non-story through monolithic silence. Journolist proved beyond any doubt that many mainstream media figures collude with figures in the radical left-wing blogosphere to protect Democrats and their allies. . . . This alternative version the left offered didn’t have to be true. It didn’t even have to appear to be true. There did not have to be a single grain of a fact anywhere near it. It just had to be floated out there and give so-called mainstream journalists enough of an excuse to decide not to cover the real story. Mainstream media journalists know all about editing, for instance, since they go out of their way to edit out the conservative world view in just about every story they write or produce. Many journalists know about false flag operations, because they are living false flag operations.”

SO PEOPLE HAVE BEEN COMMENTING ON THE PURE MICHIGAN FACEBOOK PAGE and expressing their anger at Steve Crowder’s being assaulted by union thugs. But Reader Aaron Chmielewski points out that, hey, the good guys won. And he suggests that anger and boycotts of Michigan miss that important point:

Michigan did the right thing and passed the law. Right now Michigan needs the support of sportsmen as well as businesses to make sure that RTW is successful. The site is for sharing tourist information, pictures, and positive stories.

Union members will do everything possible to make RTW seem a disaster, don’t help them out. The quasi-cover-up and failure to arrest Crowder’s attackers is atrocious. Posting “I won’t visit Michigan” is not helpful and shows little more class than the protestors.

Arresting those responsible is important and people should be expressing this. But how is also important. Posters need to show more support and more class. If someone feels compelled to comment, they should be promising to visit when the men arrested and what they are looking forward to when this happens instead of promising not visit like opponents of RTW are also doing.

He’s right. You might want to drop by and thank them for passing the law.

KATIE PAVLICH: Jimmy Hoffa’s Personal and Hypocritical Class War.

IT’S 12:12:12 ON 12/12/12.

EULOGY FOR OCCUPY: “It was the tiny, brutal, and bitter politics of failed people.”

Yet there are lessons to be learned.

WASHINGTON EXAMINER: Union thugs use punches, not persuasion, in Michigan.

Union bosses hate right-to-work laws the same way they hate every policy that tends to empower workers — including their own members — to make informed decisions about how they are represented in the workplace. This is why they pushed so hard to eliminate secret ballot votes in unionization elections. It is why they have pushed to shorten the time frame for those elections to the vanishing point, and to prevent employers from discussing the possible drawbacks of unionization with their employees. That is why they pushed to change the 70-year-old rules for airline and railroad union elections, so that a minority of workers can now force the majority into a union.

Right-to-work laws do not ban unions. They merely ensure that workers can no longer be coerced to pay them. They also create workplace conditions under which even union members are no longer a captive audience, forced to bow to whatever decisions the union leadership makes.

And that’s what the union leaders fear most.

With reason.

UPDATE: But of course: Gawker Tries To Defend Man Who Punched Steven Crowder.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Thoughts from Patterico on the tactics involved.

Related: The Terror of the Anti-Liberty Movement.

CALIFORNIA’S PAMPERED PUBLIC EMPLOYEES: “How bad is California’s public employee compensation problem? If nurses collecting $1 million in overtime pay and highway patrol officers making $500,000 are any indication, ‘bad’ doesn’t cover the half of it. . . . Public sector unions in states like California have squeezed every fringe benefit out of the state government you can imagine, from ‘arduous-duty’ pay, to bonuses for ‘the complex workload and level and knowledge required to receive and respond to consumer calls.’ These are not the demands of people who have the state’s well-being in mind.”

LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: “Better Off On Benefits.”

NEW MARIJUANA LAWS CAUSE CONFUSION: “Laws legalizing the recreational use of marijuana in Colorado and Washington state have exposed a wide disconnect between Congress, the administration and voters on an increasingly controversial issue. The newly enacted laws put President Obama in a tricky spot, as evidenced by the Justice Department’s (DOJ) monthlong silence on the matter, despite pleas from lawmakers and the states’ governors for a concrete position.”

MASS INCARCERATION: John Tierney: For Lesser Crimes, Rethinking Life Behind Bars.