Happy weekending, 'rons & 'ettes.

Posted by: andy at 03:42 AM | Comments (430)
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Greetings fellow morons and moronettes! Welcome to your weekend yard and garden thread. Your co-hosts are Y-not and WeirdDave. Feel free to use this thread to share ideas, thoughts, questions, product reviews, jokes, and whatnot about gardening.

January seemed like a good time to start this thread, which we hope to do every week. Football season is basically over, no one watches hockey (I keed, I keed!), and many of us started the New Year with aspirations of turning over a new “leaf,” tackling projects that save money and make our lives happier. So without further ado, here’s some thread-fodder.

Just to help orient folks, Y-not is in Zone 7a (at roughly 4,600 feet in Utah) and WeirdDave is on the East Coast in Zone 6b. For those who donÂ’t know, USDA plant hardiness zones are based on the average annual extreme minimum temperatures over a 30 year window. They are updated periodically. The current USDA map is based on data from 1976-2005. Find out your zone by entering in your zip code at this website.

Contributions from WeirdDave and Y-not below the jump.
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Posted by: Open Blogger at 06:40 AM | Comments (297)
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In gigantic, margin-shredding map style. more...

Posted by: CAC at 03:52 PM | Comments (307)
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In the words of Instapundit: That which can't go on forever, won't.

U.S. stocks fell sharply and Treasuries rallied on Friday, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average tumbling triple-digits for a second session and posting its worst week since November 2011, as investors pulled money from emerging markets and other assets viewed as risky.

As Wall Street's faith in some of the world's largest developed countries unraveled, currencies of those nations were hit, with Turkey's lira falling to a record low against the dollar, and Argentina's peso down sharply against the U.S. currency.

"We've touched off by what's going on around the world, so to speak, and are reallocating assets from some of the emerging markets into what is thought of as more reliable," said JJ Kinahan, chief strategist at TD Ameritrade. "It's a safe parking spot," Kinahan added of fixed income.

Rick Santelli says that markets are beginning to wake up to the fact that central banks' straining efforts to levitate a deadweight market cannot continue. His nontechnical point is that central banks have been trying to artificially juice up the market, in hopes that positive psychology would then turn fake growth into real growth, and feigned confidence into genuine confidence.

But he says the frantic efforts to get sodden wood to catch fire have failed, and people are now catching on.

Video at the link.

Posted by: Ace at 03:01 PM | Comments (343)
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Just a quick mention here that several lefty blogs are sharing this post from UC-Irvine law professor Rick Hasen suggesting that "what looks like a victory against having to do a symbolic act may really be a defeat in having to do the nearly identical symbolic act."

First, here's the order:

Hasen writes:

So they win by not having to fill out the form. But they have now to send a letter containing essentially the same disavowal in order to not be covered. Presumably this triggers the very same thing: the insurance companies providing the contraceptive coverage directly.

Everything Hasen writes in the sentence beginning "Presumably" is incorrect, which is what happens when someone who apparently hasn't been following an issue starts a sentence with the word "presumably."

First, the coverage the Little Sisters object to is not triggered by giving HHS notification, as contemplated by the Supreme Court order. Rather, it is triggered "[i]f a third party administrator receives a copy of the self-certification," i.e., the accommodation form that organizations objecting to the contraception mandate have to fill out. You can check me on this, if you like (PDF). The Supreme Court order specifically says that the Little Sisters notification to HHS does not have to use the accommodation form or provide it to their third-party administrator. Thus, providing an alternative notification to HHS does not trigger the objectionable contraceptive coverage.

Also, contrary to Hasen, the insurance companies aren't even in this. The Little Sisters use a self-insured health plan, which has a third-party administrator, again as specifically stated in the Supreme Court order, not an insured group health plan. The different types of plans have different requirements.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:24 PM | Comments (113)
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Via Danger Girl, a funnier blow-off post. more...

Posted by: Ace at 01:25 PM | Comments (294)
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Breaking:

Little Sisters of the Poor is a Catholic charity that was fighting Obama's birth control/abortion mandate. They sought an injunction against enforcement of the mandate while they were litigating the case. Obama's HHS, of course, refused, and claimed that they could not possibly be so cavalier about enforcing every single mandate in the law (despite not enforcing twenty mandates they found to be politically problematic).

Gabe writes:

Little Sisters get their stay during pendency of appeal. Will not have to fill out the mandate accommodation form which facilitates a third party to provide contraceptives coverage to employees.

The "accommodation" Obama offered them was that they could sign this form which says that a third party should provide the contraception coverage to their employees. As you know, this is fiction -- it's their insurance company providing it, and yes, just right out of their premiums -- but Obama said "free birth control" and people are supposed to pretend it really is free.

Little Sisters objected to being forced to participate in the deception, and being forced to provide birth control against their religious conscience.

Oh: One of the prerequisites for the granting of an injunction is a likelihood that the party will prevail on the merits of the actual case.

So it appears, hopefully, that the Court believes Little Sisters will/should prevail at the court level.

Posted by: Ace at 12:29 PM | Comments (475)
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Creepy, isn't it?

Just breaking over the Belieber News Network: Bieber's bail has just been set at a mere $2,500 after his arrest.

Bieber was arrested after police said they saw him speeding down a residential street in Miami Beach in a yellow Lamborghini. Officers say he had an expired license, was initially not cooperative when he was pulled over and smelled of alcohol.

Police say Bieber later admitted that he had been drinking, smoking marijuana and taking prescription medication.

ABCNews asks the important questions: Could Bieber be deported? I'm not linking that because that's stupid celebrity bait. You don't have to read it because it says exactly what you'd guess it says: Well, maybe, possibly, we don't really know, the law isn't clear, but it probably wouldn't happen.

Although, to be fair, I did learn that Bieber is suspected (but not charged) in causing $20,000 in vandalism damage by throwing eggs at neighbor's houses. And that would make deportation more of a possibility.

Because someone asked for a silly post, and this Bieber crap doesn't seem like enough, I thought, "Where can I find stupid shit?" And I of course thought, "Why, the Daily Mail."

But they're just All Bieber All Day too. (Some more Miley/Bieber comparisons there.)

For reasons that aren't clear, Seth Rogan proclaimed: "All jokes aside, Justin Bieber is a piece of sh**."

I don't know if he actually was joking when he says he wasn't, or if this is one of those Celebrity Beefs I don't care about.

Posted by: Ace at 11:57 AM | Comments (226)
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Well, with the State of the Union coming next week and all this talk of income inequality that'll come with it, I found this article to be a good primer. The three types of "Income Inequality" religious extremists.

image h/t more...

Posted by: CDR M at 05:56 PM | Comments (826)
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So asks Althouse with a tilt towards "Yes." It's not that D'Souza is innocent, mind you; she notes his response pretty much confesses the action that he's being charged with.

The problem is Obama's pattern of not prosecuting his buddies-- and then hounding his enemies like a bloodhound on the trail of a bloodhound-chew-toy thief.

Laws need to be enforced neutrally, across the board, or we need to be free of them. When the executive authority spares its friends or, worse, targets its enemies, what is revealed is the insufficient or fake commitment to rules that bind everyone and that deter rule-followers (like me) from engaging in activities we might want to engage in. I want to smoke out this insufficient or fake commitment to campaign finance law by challenging government to prosecute all violators. If that challenge is unmet, we deserve different laws.

AND: It's really quite unfair, when some candidates spent lots of money carefully avoiding violations of the law and forgo contributions that would violate the law, for another candidate to get away with violations. But it doesn't undo the unfairness to prosecute some and not others. It only breeds more disrespect for the law.

Instapundit agrees, approving linking some blogger whose name I didn't catch, who noted Obama's and the Democrats' blatantly partisan use of prosecutorial resources to wage a political war by other means.

Instapundit be on FoxNews sometime today to discuss this.

Pronoun Confusion: Sorry, I said "He'll be on FoxNews," which, referring back to the last noun referenced, would mean Maetenloch.

But I didn't mean that. I screwed it up. I meant Instapundit will be on.

And yes, I also meant "Javert" not "Jalvert," though I've heard it both ways.

And I said "53 minutes from now" to save people the hassle of figuring out time zone shifts.

Any other complaints and criticisms, you f***buckets?

$1,000,000 Fine and Jailtime vs. a Misdemeanor. The feds seek a $1,000,000 fine from D'Souza. Plus up to seven years of jail.

They aren't always quite so tough on straw donors.

Democratic straw donors, I mean.

DÂ’Souza was charged Thursday with one count of making illegal campaign contributions, which carries a maximum sentence of two years in prison. He also is charged with one count of causing false statements to be made to the FEC, which carries a maximum of five years in prison.

Straw-donor cases have been brought against prominnent individuals from time to time. For example, in 2011, a prominent Los Angeles attorney, Pierce OÂ’Donnell, pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges of making $20,000 in donations to the presidential campaign of former Sen. John Edwards and reimbursing straw donors.

More Corrections: Instapundit will not be on at 2:30. He'll be doing a Fox interview at that time, but he doesn't know when it will air.

And I got rid of the Javert reference.

Posted by: Ace at 09:37 AM | Comments (512)
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