Noooooooooooooooooooooo!*

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:48 AM | Comments (175)
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Evenin' all.

Ken Layne of Wonkette: Dishonest Fucktard

I don't know if it was covered here or not but there's been Outrage! on the left over Michele Bachmann asking "Who likes white people?" at a recent appearance - except of course she didn't actually say that:

Bachmann made a campaign stop at the Midwest Spirit Christian Music Festival on Aug. 5 in West Des Moines to give a speech about her Christian faith. It was raining during her the appearance, so when Bachmann took the stage, she asked, “Who likes wet people?” referring to the still-damp masses who stuck around for her talk.

“Yeah, that’s right. Because we have the God of the winds and the rain don’t we?” she said immediately after — a key phrasing that was edited out of the shorter clip. “We serve a mighty God.”

Even though it wasn't what she said and made no sense in context, Ken Layne of Wonkette ran with it proclaiming Bachmann to be a crazy racist. But when it was shown to be a blatant hoax (with the original poster apologizing) he refused to make any corrections and has doubled down on the snark.

This is the same Wonkette that attacked Trig Palin just a few months ago. Apparently they're in a race to the bottom of the sinesphere and are willing to knowingly spew falsehoods to get there. Even the most hacktastic lefty blogs tend to follow certain (very) minimal standards - if only to keep getting invites to the right parties. But not Wonkette. more...

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:28 PM | Comments (844)
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Dick Cheney's on Hannity.

He gave an interview to the WSJ earlier.

...

On ABC now (9pm) is "Take the Money & Run," which Jonah Goldberg (I think) recommended.

Two contestants hide a suitcase full of money. Cops have 48 hours to find it, and can interrogate them and hold them in a jail.

If the cops don't find the money, the contestants keep it.

Posted by: Ace at 05:00 PM | Comments (101)
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Good piece on CERN's CLOUD experiment, which proved that the sun is primarily responsible for cloud formation. Cosmic rays cause the upper atmosphere to be seeded with cloud-forming molecules.

And the strength of cosmic rays fluctuates. And clouds influence temperature (by reflecting away sunlight that would otherwise warm the earth).

This has been in the news lately, and it's been linked here. I'm linking this article to note... those who so love science tried to get the experiment killed, because they didn't want AGW theory to even have a challenge.

But Mr. Kirkby made the same tactical error that the Danes [who had earlier proposed the theory, and had been punished] had — not realizing how politicized the global warming issue was, he candidly shared his views with the scientific community.

“The theory will probably be able to account for somewhere between a half and the whole of the increase in the Earth’s temperature that we have seen in the last century,” Mr. Kirkby told the scientific press in 1998, explaining that global warming may be part of a natural cycle in the Earth’s temperature.

The global warming establishment sprang into action, pressured the Western governments that control CERN, and almost immediately succeeded in suspending CLOUD. It took Mr. Kirkby almost a decade of negotiation with his superiors, and who knows how many compromises and unspoken commitments, to convince the CERN bureaucracy to allow the project to proceed. And years more to create the cloud chamber and convincingly validate the DanesÂ’ groundbreaking theory.

Yet this spectacular success will be largely unrecognized by the general public for years — this column will be the first that most readers have heard of it — because CERN remains too afraid of offending its government masters to admit its success. Weeks ago, CERN [formally] decided to muzzle Mr. Kirby and other members of his team to avoid “the highly political arena of the climate change debate,” telling them “to present the results clearly but not interpret them” and to downplay the results by “mak[ing] clear that cosmic radiation is only one of many parameters.” The CERN study and press release is written in bureaucratese and the version of Mr. Kirkby’s study that appears in the print edition of Nature censored the most eye-popping graph — only those who know where to look in an online supplement will see the striking potency of cosmic rays in creating the conditions for seeding clouds.

"Science" -- blocking experiments which could undermine a politically-popular, money-making theory.

Thanks to DanF.

Posted by: Ace at 04:51 PM | Comments (93)
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It's not Allah's fault -- the prognostication he's forced to link are just stupid.

I have to link it too. It's really dumb.

A guy called Lichtman is calling the race, and he says Obama wins.

There are 13 keys to victory, he says, and whoever grabs six wins.

Now this guy claims Obama has nine in his pocket:

1. No contested primary

2. Incumbency

3. No third-party candidate

4. Major domestic-policy changes in his first term

5. No social unrest

6. No major scandals

7. No major foreign-policy failures

8. Major foreign-policy achievements in his first term (killing Bin Laden)

9. Little charisma by his likely opponent

Um, "no social unrest"? Does he mean rioting? Well, the public's in a riotous mood.

"Major domestic policy changes?" Let me explain something, that's because such changes are usually popular. ObamaCare has been unpopular since it was snuck through the Senate in the dead of night and has only become more so.

Shouldn't this indicator actually flip the other way when the domestic policy changes in question are extremely unpopular?

"No major scandals" -- We'll see. He's probably right because the one thing the media can definitely do is refuse to report a scandal.

"No major foreign-policy failures" -- This one's debatable.

"Little charisma by his likely opponent" -- Going to take that one to the bank? I assume he means Mitt Romney, but the problem there is 1, Mitt Romney is sorta growing on me, personality wise, 2, Romney appears to be a stronger-than-usual challenger, and 3, it's not even super-likely to be Romney, given Perry is leading him and not by a little bit.

Lichtman claims he doesn't know what the short-term economic situation will look like in 2012, so he can't assign that one either way. Oddly, he is a precognitive psychic on seeing the future and knowing that Obama will not see Gunwalker blossom into a major scandal, and that Obama's opponent will have low charisma.

He also knows that, say, Libya won't blow up in Obama's face. Or Iraq. Or Afghanistan. Or... Iran.

But on the economy? Gee, who could guess on that one, huh?

Allah writes:

All of which assumes, of course, that this will be an ordinary election like the past seven were. Maybe it will; maybe there’s no such thing as an extraordinary election. But the state of the economy is surely extraordinary, poised as it is for a double-dip, and unemployment is extraordinary compared to any other era over the past 75 years. That is to say, we’re assuming that these “Keys” are equally weighted in election after election, no matter the circumstances, when basic awareness of the current political climate suggests the two economic Keys will be weighted way more heavily than any of the others.

There are keys Licthman could have never anticipated -- like a $16 trillion dollar debt, which we're adding to at the rate of $1.5 trillion per year.

How about the US credit downgrade? Unprecedented, so you can't even include it as a predictive variable.

Just forget about those, huh?

Posted by: Ace at 01:32 PM | Comments (680)
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Bill McInturff of the Republican polling firm Public Opinion Strategies is publicly releasing a report on the current mood of the country.

Lots of interesting stuff in it. But the most interesting stuff is about the Michigan Index on Consumer Sentiment.

No president has been reelected when the Index stood at 75 or below (date of snapshot unspecified; I assume they mean "on the day of the election").

The average read of the Index for successful reelection bids is 95.9.

The average read for unsuccessful reelection bids is 74.8.

The current read on the index? 76.2, just above the average for unsuccessful bids.

Nah, I'm totally lying, just to get your attention focused on the real read: The Index currently stands at 55.7, much, much lower than even the average for reelection losers.

Liberals are fond of saying "Well Reagan slipped below 40% before he got reelected."

Well, yes, but as is often noted, in this quarter of his term, GDP was growing by something like 9%. And the Index reflected that -- consumer sentiment was at 90+, and would improve even further by election day.

The proper comparison isn't to Reagan, but to Carter, and... well I'll wait for that stuff.

The Index... has been running at least since 1961. lu asked how long it's been running.

I haven't got a firm answer, but I know the basic metrics of it were devised in the 40s, but the national telephone polling to get the index as we know it today started sometime later. Maybe in 1961, maybe before then.

Posted by: Ace at 12:37 PM | Comments (287)
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Or scheduled to be, within minutes. Hit "Listen Live" to stream it.

Supported... HillaryCare in 1993? Perry says no, but that's the claim.

In a letter to Clinton, who is now U.S. Secretary of State, Perry wrote: “I think your efforts in trying to reform the nation’s health care system are most commendable.”

“I would like to request that the task force give particular consideration to the needs of the nation’s farmers, ranchers, and agriculture workers, and other members of rural communities,” Perry continued, noting his administration’s focus on economic development for rural Texans. “Rural populations have a high proportion of uninsured people, rising health care costs, and often experience lack of services.”

“Again, your efforts are worthy,” Perry concluded, ”and I hope you will remember this constituency as the task force progresses.”

Perry's response is that this was written early in the process, before the extent of Hillary's proposed "reforms" were made public. He claims that as Commissioner of Agriculture, it was his duty to remind Washington about his constituency (farmers).

Posted by: Ace at 12:00 PM | Comments (226)
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And I think this is standard operating practice. Do what we want, or we will make government trouble for you.

3M claims an investment company conspired with high-powered lobbyist Lanny Davis in a smear campaign to "coerce" it into paying "tens of millions of dollars ... to save them from the consequences of yet another unprofitable investment," a screening test for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus...

Davis, who worked as a special counsel for President Clinton from 1996 to 1998, has lobbied for a string of controversial clients since leaving the White House, including African dictators, military coup supporters in Honduras, and the government of Pakistan.

This report does not specify the interest of the parties here. It is my guess that 3M entered into some agreement with a company Davis lobbied for, to test and then distribute their drug; they decided it wasn't commercially viable, and terminated the agreement, and then Davis went to work to pressure them into reversing that decision.

I assume the termination of the contract wasn't a breach at all, because I don't see any mention of suing over a broken contract.

After attacking them in the press, it is alleged, they got more direct:

"Defendants' illicit campaign has included overt threats of reprisals by holders of large blocks of 3M stock; public demonstrations by paid individuals posing as victims of an altogether fabricated public health 'issue' allegedly created by 3M's decision to discontinue selling a product no one wanted...

And so forth. And then they kicked it up a notch.

3M adds: "When these tactics failed to yield the financial windfall defendants sought, they resorted to making extortionate demands upon 3M." It claims that Boulter and Davis then "acted together" to make a "crude extortion attempt" by "sending to 3M's counsel an unsolicited e-mail in which Boulter claimed that the British Minister of Defence had instructed Boulter to inform 3M that if it did not pay over $30 million, the Minister of Defence would interfere with 3M's ability to do business with the British government. He also threatened that the British government would reconsider the recently announced call to knighthood of Buckley. This crude extortion attempt threatened both to embarrass Buckley and to tarnish 3M's most valuable asset, its corporate brand."

Sounds a lot like a form of privateering. Well-connected individuals, acting with other pals in government, pirate money away from companies and people. And it's kinda-sorta legal, if you have enough friends in government.

Via Ben Smith.

Posted by: Ace at 10:02 AM | Comments (222)
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Lets look at the new meme - Rick Perry is a dummy.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 09:18 AM | Comments (197)
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A million dollar's worth of property seized, and the feds won't say why.

The company guesses that the raid is over a claim of violation of the Lacey Act, which harasses US importers of foreign wood (to protect foreign forests (!)); but Gibson says its imported wood was all certified for export.

And yet that is just a guess. They still haven't been told anything.

It has come out that Juszkiewicz is a Republican donor, while the CEO of one of his principal competitors, C.F. Martin & Company, is a Democratic donor. Martin reportedly uses the same wood, but DOJ hasnÂ’t raided them, leading to speculation that the Obama administration is sending a warning to Republican businessmen that they had better not oppose his re-election, lest they face criminal investigations. Normally such speculation would not be credible, but Eric Holder has politicized the Department of Justice to a point where such questions must be taken seriously.

Posted by: Ace at 09:03 AM | Comments (294)
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