Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 05:40 AM | Comments (164)
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64 to 16, here's the status, Gladys.

And here's the leaderboard over at the Moron NCAAB Tournament Pickem place (games picked correctly) points/possible points:

1 HankF Hank Freeman (36 of 4 46/162
1 Seattle Steve Steve W (36 of 4 46/142
1 beedubya's bracket Ida (35 of 4 46/106
4 King Of Farts HQ (INCITEmarsh) Mike (36 of 4 45/153
4 The Poruba Gambit FREAK (35 of 4 45/137
4 jonjo54 jongurr (35 of 4 45/133
4 Nomentum Joel (34 of 4 45/113
4 33°50'35.00N 7°46'44.00E Rd (34 of 4 45/113
4 Rocks Rocks Rocks (35 of 4 45/109
10 AlaskAdkins R Paul (33 of 4 44/164

My bracket is as broken as the health care system Obama and the Democrats just saved. Consistency is not necessarily a virtue.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 04:47 AM | Comments (16)
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Good evening all M&Ms. Remember today is National Puppy Day.
And don't forget about the job bank at the AoSHQ yahoo group.

Why Hockey is Fun
Because fights can break out in the first 5 seconds of the game. Why wait for a play - just jump straight into the brawling.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:30 PM | Comments (1050)
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Senate: Hey House...flip over to the cartoon network. My favorite show is on.

House: Which one?

Senate: The Baracky and Bullwinkle show. You can learn a lot about American history and stuff from Professor Peabody.

House: What's Bullwinkle doing?

Senate: Baracky dared him to pull an executive order out of his hat.

House: But he didn't pull anything out. His hand went through the bottom of the hat, and he ripped his shirt.

Senate: Exactly. LOL. Slays me every time.

House: I don't get it. Does he ever pull an executive order out of his hat?

Senate: No. See, that's the joke.

House: You mean, Bullwinkle always says he will and Baracky always dares him to do it, but it never happens?

Senate: Nope.

House: This is too confusing for me. Can I go back to watching Olbermann?

-End scene-

Posted by: Jack M. at 05:09 PM | Comments (34)
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Earlier this evening, we had a troll who decided to infect a couple of threads with some racist comments. The morons responded admirably with anger, wit and impressive amounts of profanity aimed at the idiot. While there's nothing more beautiful than a moron flash mob tearing into rancid troll meat, it would be really helpful to those of us who clean up the troll's droppings if you guys didn't quote the offensive statements.

As the president and Congress grow more unpopular, I think we're going to see more of these types of Axelturfing crapweasels. The left is going to do whatever it can to paint conservative blogs as hotbeds of racist teabaggin' rage. So please let the co-bloggers know when and where we can find the Moby in question, and we'll zap it.

Oh, and please keep flaming the ever-loving crap out of the trolls. Not only is it the right thing to do, it's extremely fun to watch.

Posted by: Slublog at 04:52 PM | Comments (119)
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But he promises he'll do it "soon."

President Obama signed the Senate health care bill into law Tuesday. He did not sign the executive order on abortion negotiated with Michigan Democratic Congressman Bart Stupak in an 11th-hour arrangement that may well have saved the entire health care reform effort.

A White House official told Fox, Obama will not sign the Executive Order Tuesday and has set no specific date to do so. Stupak predicted Obama would sign the order later this week. The White House said only that Obama would sign the order "soon."

In two celebratory speeches Tuesday - one at the bill's signing, the other at the Interior Department with health care advocates - Obama said nothing about the abortion issue or the executive order.

If you haven't read William McGurn's beautifully brutal takedown of the "pro-life" Democrats, here's the link.

How far has Stupak fallen? This far. more...

Posted by: Slublog at 03:31 PM | Comments (337)
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Levin wants his $2500 cut in premiums per year, as promised dozens of times by Obama. And he wants the $940 billion price tag held to the penny.

That medley of Obama's dozens of promises to cut premiums by $2500 per year is going to appear in a lot of ads.

Megan McArdle also asks for "accountability for the bill," and wants to keep a close eye on which of the many promises made by HCR's proponents actually come to pass, and which do not. Her prediction? None of them will, except for a few in a trivial manner.

Now -- huddle up near your fainting-couch, because this is going to shock you -- those who sold ObamaCare with these promises are now objecting to calling them promises at all, and object to McArdle's push to keep score.

McArdle likes the mortality rate and average lifespan predictions especially, since they are such well-known numbers. It is easily determined if the liberals' claims lies are true. And it's precisely because this is such an easy determination to make that Ezra Klein and fellow travelers object to using their own claims as benchmarks.

ObamaCare Evangelist Ezra Klein, who draws a paycheck from the Washington Post despite the fact his true employer is clearly the progressive caucus of the Democratic Party, is the first to squeal that his claims that ObamaCare would reduce mortality has been taken out of context, or something, and by "taken out of context," he seems to mean merely "noticed by someone else."

Apropos of my earlier post, Ezra Klein writes to complain that I have erroneously grouped him in with Nick Kristof. I should be clear that Kristof's estimates on their own suggest that the death rate should drop by 20% or so over the next ten years; Ezra's estimates are just gravy.

But this triggered a back and forth about what it means to claim that "hundreds of thousands" of people will be saved by this bill, and similar. A lot of my correspondents on the left seem to think that I am trying to set up some sort of a gotcha--to make this into a "contest". Or that making predictions is just "sour grapes".

That seems like a more apt description of people who just induced us to pass a bill that will ultimately cost more than $200 billion a year--the fifth or sixth largest line item in the US budget. During that debate I heard a lot about the 20-45,000 people who were dying from lack of insurance every year. I heard about how US mortality indicators lagged behind the rest of the developed world. I heard about infant mortality. I heard, over and over again, about medical bankruptcies, and how medical bills were bankrupting America. I heard about the CBO score that said this bill would be deficit neutral. Let me know if I've missed anything, but it seems to me that mortality, financial protection, and deficit-improvement were the three major planks upon which this bill was sold. They are certainly the bulk of the anecdotes that fill heart-rending articles and presidential speeches.

Forgive me, but to my admittedly naive ears, this sounds like what you are saying is that you think that if we cover the uninsured, we will have lower mortality rates, fewer medical bankruptcies, and a lower deficit.
...

However "imperfect" this bill is, you got what you wanted: virtually all the uninsured are covered, and those who aren't covered probably aren't particularly unhealthy. So now you should be willing to state that all the marvelous things you claimed would come to pass, will actually come to pass. Over a reasonable time frame.

...

[The American voters] were regaled with eye-popping statistics on deaths from lack of health insurance--I certainly was, by many of the very same commenters who are now suddenly wary of prediction making. If you quoted those statistics, you were committing to a pretty strong position on the benefits of this bill. By my count, since we're now supposed to be covering at least 2/3 of those who are currently uninsured, and the remainder are often immigrants who trend younger than the general population, you believe that we should see a reduction of at least 15,000 deaths a year. You might argue me down to 12,000, but you couldn't get me as low as ten. That is what is implied by citing a figure of 20,000 deaths a year.

If you quoted Himmelstein et al's 45,000, obviously you should be expecting deaths to fall by at least 25,000 a year, very conservatively. If we don't see such improvements, then those studies were wrong. And if you won't commit to saying that you expect such a sizable reduction in our mortality rate, then you were wrong to cite them.

...

If you don't think that any of the effects of this bill will be large enough to measure and hopefully, large enough to justify the price tag of this bill, then I have to ask two questions:

1) Why the hell are we spending $200 billion a year, plus the mandated spending by individuals and employers on premiums, plus the new money the states will have to spend on Medicaid?

2) Why on earth did you bring up all these apparently irrelevant statistics?

The only thing faster than Ezra Klein moving towards a television camera is Ezra Klein moving away from predictions and promises he made previously to those television cameras.

Posted by: Ace at 02:11 PM | Comments (245)
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Trivial?

No, not really. Democrats will either be forced to vote against the measure-- compounding their public-image problem -- or accept it. And if they accept it, then they've changed the House bill, and there will be more voting in both houses of Congress, and more pain.

Democrats will probably attempt to defeat the amendment, though, and then schedule almost immediately a vote on a standalone bill to achieve the same thing.

Thanks to Slublog.

Posted by: Ace at 12:39 PM | Comments (334)
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I don't like this rule -- it's kludgy.

The NFL has changed its overtime rules for playoff games.
Starting next season, if a team wins the coin toss and then kicks a field goal, the other team gets the ball.

If the game is still tied after that, play will continue under the current sudden-death rules. Should the team winning the toss immediately score a touchdown, then the game is over.

Team owners voted 28-4 on Tuesday in favor of the proposal at the NFL meetings. The new rule applies only for postseason games.

If the team scoring second scores a touchdown, then they win. So the rule, effectively, is "Don't bother trying for a field goal on your first possession." Because only if you stop the other team from scoring entirely do you win; if they score a field goal, the game is still tied and proceeds to normal overtime. If they score a touchdown, you actually lose.

I've never really understood what was so bad about losing a game in overtime on a field goal. A field goal isn't a gimme. It's part of the game, isn't it? It's not some debased technicality or something. It's a genuine score.

If two teams are tied with three seconds left in regular time, and one team scores a field goal, the game is over, and the team scoring the field goal wins. We don't say "Oh, the other team should have a possession to try to answer that field goal; put two more minutes on the clock." We say the the game is over.

So if two teams have battled to a standstill after 60 minutes, what is so awful about allowing the next score decide the game? The game is basically a coin flip, right? The two teams have proven themselves each other's equal. They're tied, meaning no one is better. It's a 50/50 proposition for resolving it, then, whatever way you do it. No team really deserves the win, as neither beat the other. So what is the problem in acknowledging that and leaving it up to the first score? And if the first score is flukey one, so what?

Of the various ways of resolving this, this seems among the kludgiest and dumbest and least intuitive. If you want both teams to have possession, then get rid of the Sudden Death rule entirely and see what the score is after another 15 minutes of play. (Or less -- 12 minutes is enough.) If it's still tied after that, then go a sudden death period.

Or make it First Team to Six, which is somewhat like the rule adopted, but less kludgy.

Or "Win by Four," that is, four points or more. Hell, in Overtime, you can give teams a chance at a special two-point conversion from the two if they score a field goal; they have to get the ball into the endzone to pick up the extra two points and win by four (actually by five). That satisfies what the NFL seems to want, which is "You can only win on a touchdown or touchdown-like play."

Or just leave the damn rule alone. Look, if you let the other team pick up 40 yards to get into field goal position, you've failed. You knew what was required to continue playing, and you failed to achieve that. The game wasn't "decided on a coin flip." It was decided when you lost the toss and then allowed the opponent to capitalize on that.

Eh. There will still be shouts of "It's not right!" when one team scores on the opening kickoff on a flukey broken-field return. Maybe we need a rule about that, too.

Unmentioned in the rule change is a safety. I assume this means that if one team scores a safety, the game is over, too. As it should be.

But safeties are far flukier than field goals.

I just get this weird "Field Goals Don't Count" vibe from this rule. Sure, they're not really exciting, and sure, the NFL has implemented rules to discourage them. But they are a "real score" and not some kind of made-up technical fakey-score. It's a genuine score. Teams win games on nothing at all but field goals. Last-second field goals are accepted as genuine scores in regular time. Why shouldn't they count in overtime?

Posted by: Ace at 12:15 PM | Comments (156)
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John McCain said that he was emotionally angry to see the Democrats giggling like schoolgirls over their "victory." Seeing Nancy Pelosi cackle with glee was too much for me; I had to turn her speech off.

This is pretty obvious, I guess, but the video and pictures of Pelosi cackling like a witch must run with virtually every conservative ad in the fall.

Among the best cuts is her asking "How do you like our 220?" I think many people have a two-word answer to that. She followed it up, giggling, saying "No money changed hands." It was an attempt to be lighthearted about betting on the outcome of the vote, but it highlighted the fact that a lot of money ha changed hands here.

That image just gets people where they live. It's not an intellectual thing -- it's just an emotional reaction to someone who just fucked you over and then cavorts joyously about it on television, dancing on your grave.

Posted by: Ace at 11:08 AM | Comments (333)
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