A slight change of pace.

Infomercials fascinate me. Gone are the days of Billy Mays, but in his absence we've seen the rise of Vince from ShamWow and the two-minute commercial featuring some housewife usually dramatizing her plight with household cleaners or cooking utensils; or beaming a smile about a great new product she just has to share with you. I guess this odd ad fits in the latter category. more...

Posted by: CAC at 12:20 PM | Comments (198)
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Extremely Extreme Extremists and Why Government Budgeting is So Fucked Up

So why are we lurching from continuing resolution to continuing resolution with the occasional temporary government shutdown in between?

Well Stacy McCain explains that it's pretty much all the fault of Harry Reid and President Obama and their decision to abdicate one of their primary constitutional duties for short-term political gain:

The answer is that the budgeting process has completely broken down in recent years, and the two men most responsible for that breakdown are President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. For three consecutive years - 2010, 2011, and 2012 - the Democrat-controlled Senate did not pass a budget bill because Reid knew that it would be a political liability to do so. Passing a budget that detailed the Democrats' plans for spending and revenue as official policy would have exposed the "something for nothing" swindle that Reid and his colleagues are perpetrating on the American people. Republican challengers campaigning against Democrat senators could have cited their votes for the budget bill, saying that the incumbent voted for this, that, or the other unpopular component of the measure.

Reid and the Democrats knew this. They knew very well that the federal deficit was spiraling out of control, that there was not enough tax revenue to pay the mushrooming cost of entitlement programs (Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, unemployment, et cetera), and certainly there wasn't enough revenue to pay for all the boondoggles and giveaways the Democrats voted for in the name of "stimulus." Adding to this, there was not enough revenue to pay the cost of Obamacare, which Democrats rammed through Congress in March 2010 on a party-line vote. Passing an actual budget would have made clear the unsustainable fiscal nightmare into which Democrat policies have plunged the nation during the Obama Age, and so Harry Reid simply didn't pass a budget for three years.

Inevitably, there will be serious fiscal and economic consequences for what has been done in Washington since 2009. Democrats, however, cared less about such real-world matters than they did about the short-term political gain to be had by promoting the pleasant fiction that liberal "generosity" with taxpayer money (including trillions of dollars in deficit spending) had no real cost.

To actually pass a budget would be to admit and own what they've done. So they finance the beast through crisis instead.

And count on Ezra Klein to boil the budgeting crisis down to a single sentence of stupidity and utter un-self-awareness:

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics - it is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

Yet somehow as a political 'outlier' the GOP still manages to control the House, hold a 46% minority in the Senate, and got 47% of the national vote in the 2012 presidential election. So yeah they're like totally freaky-deaky crazy-time political outliers.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:10 PM | Comments (1171)
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Saints, Dolphins.

Protected elbows.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 04:45 PM | Comments (226)
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Indeed. Bear in mind, the IPCC is claiming that they are more sure than ever that warming is driven by carbon... despite the fact that there's a 17 year pause in warming and yet ever-increasing carbon.

And despite the fact all their models called for continued straight-line (mostly) warming.

So, having failed to predict anything, they claim they're more confident of their predictions than ever.

MIT Climate Scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen told Climate Depot on September 27, 2013:

I think that the latest IPCC report has truly sunk to level of hilarious incoherence. They are proclaiming increased confidence in their models as the discrepancies between their models and observations increase.

Their excuse for the absence of warming over the past 17 years is that the heat is hiding in the deep ocean. However, this is simply an admission that the models fail to simulate the exchanges of heat between the surface layers and the deeper oceans. However, it is this heat transport that plays a major role in natural internal variability of climate, and the IPCC assertions that observed warming can be attributed to man depend crucially on their assertion that these models accurately simulate natural internal variability. Thus, they now, somewhat obscurely, admit that their crucial assumption was totally unjustified.

Bear in mind this business about the deep oceans sequestering all that Global Warming!!! where we conveniently can't measure it is what we call a Pure Speculation.

There's no evidence for this. It's in the category of "Things Which Possibly Could Be True But We Have No Real Reason to Think Are True."

Thus, the Science Is Settled this-is-a-fact-not-a-hypothesis theory now relies, crucially, on Something They Just Made Up a Year Ago.

@comradearthur asks, "If the ocean sequesters heat (through processes we don't understand), could it be that at other times, it releases heat (through processes we also don't understand), thus accounting for 1975-1998's warming?"

Sure could be the case. When you're down to mere speculation, many things could be true.

But the Warmists insist that of all the out-of-your-ass speculations that you could make, only their preferred out-of-your-ass speculations -- the ones that don't directly rubbish their claims -- are "Science."

Um, no. This is all pure speculation. This is step one of the scientific process -- these are guesses.

Talk to me when you've gotten some evidence for your speculation. Let's at least get to Step 2 here.

More: ICYMI, Ga. Tech's Judith Curry has a great post on how the IPCC gets to "95%". [Andy]

And, Open Thread.

Posted by: Ace at 04:07 PM | Comments (144)
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Posted by: CAC at 03:22 PM | Comments (85)
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The FBI defines serial homicides which have a heavy ritualistic/fetishistic component -- arranging bodies, playing with organs, torture, etc. -- as "Sexual Homicides," whether or not there's a normal sexual element to them.

We do have to acknowledge we have a culture that's pumping out Sexual Homicide Serial Killers, and then worshipping them.

Not all of Islam, mind you. Recall the protesters in Turkey who just wanted to have a beer at night and not be harassed by the Morality Police. Recall the protesters in Egypt, who chafed under Rule by Sharia.

But there is a psychopathic, misdirected-sexual-impulse Death Cult cadre of Islam.

And it's really time we stopped pretending about it. I don't know if talking about this fact "helps" or not. I have no idea if it helps -- or how it would help.

But whether it helps or not, speaking the Truth about things should not be impermissible in society. The truth should not be deemed polite.

And the truth should not be required to produce tangible secondary benefits.

Many PC idiots will say things like, "Well, how does it actually help matters to speak the truth about things?"

What?

It's the truth. By its nature it "helps matters." One shouldn't have to be required to prove a bonanza of indirect benefits of speaking the truth to speak it.

Islamic terrorism is not, at its core, political, no more than Jeffrey Dahmer's homosexual yearnings channeled into cannibalism were political.

It is a subculture that praises, and deliberately breeds, serial killers.

Posted by: Ace at 02:35 PM | Comments (185)
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Republicans are trying to stop "guaranteed affordable birth control" and such things as screening for diabetes in pregnant women.

She didn't mentioned taxpayer-paid abortions, oddly enough.

Must've slipped her mind.

Meanwhile, one of the only three objective reporters I can name off the top of my head, Jonathan Karl, asks Carney a tough question, so Carney just makes a scoffing noise.

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Posted by: Ace at 02:02 PM | Comments (107)
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He's got a press conference scheduled for 4:40 PM, or, as Obama calls it, "Five-ish."

Live Feed here, at Fox. But I think it might be the White House's feed.

Posted by: Ace at 12:39 PM | Comments (375)
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But wait! Doesn't that same poll show that only 34% approve of the Democrats? A mere 8% difference in the approval ratings for both parties?

Don't worry; Chris Cilizza, Objective News Reporter for the Washington Post, has an answer for that. For while the public is sick of Republicans because of Republicans, the public is sick of Democrats... because of generalized annoyance with "Government" (which means: More Republicans).

Now don't think the means something like "people are increasingly dissatisfied with the Super Size US Government." No, he means like this:

People hate the Republicans because of what Republicans do;

but people dislike the Democrats Because of Society In General.

His attack on Republicans is quite specific as to their faults which supposedly drive public disapproval; but when it comes to the Democrats' own horrific numbers, he just sort of says "that's the state of play, man."

And when he says people don't like "government," he means squabbling in government, which itself is all due to the GOP.

But note that the Wily Reid, The Rock, isn't squabbling. No, he's taking a manly stand on principle.

I really can't tell which side the media favors with all the nuance of a rabid fanboi.

Posted by: Ace at 12:14 PM | Comments (141)
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From Instapundit, how to pick the correct length of a nap for best brain rebooting.

Which is entirely useless to most people, who have zero opportunity to nap.

Personally, I cannot nap (even when I'm tired), but I'm interested in learning how. It's an interesting skill. People who nap don't realize it's a useful skill until they meet people like me who can't nap, and who have to remain awake for almost the entire duration of a six hour plane ride.

Anyway, I searched for "How to Nap" and found this from the Boston Globe. Kind of seems obvious. Maybe I'll try it sometime.

Posted by: Ace at 11:38 AM | Comments (197)
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