Ouch. No spiffy gift DVD sets for you this year Glenn.

...It's also worth noting how completely antithetical claims are advanced to defend and excuse Obama. We've long heard -- from the most blindly loyal cheerleaders and from Emanuel himself -- that progressives should place their trust in the Obama White House to get this done the right way, that he's playing 11-dimensional chess when everyone else is playing checkers, that Obama is the Long Game Master who will always win. Then, when a bad bill is produced, the exact opposite claim is hauled out: it's not his fault because he's totally powerless, has nothing to do with this, and couldn't possibly have altered the outcome. From his defenders, he's instantaneously transformed from 11-dimensional chess Master to impotent, victimized bystander.

The supreme goal is to shield him from all blame. What gets said to accomplish that goal can -- and does -- radically change from day to day...

The behavior Greenwald describes in those last two sentences is very characteristic of a narcissist's groupies. Their idol simply can do no wrong. Failures are ALWAYS someone else's fault.

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 03:29 PM | Comments (91)
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Drew just asked why the Senate had adjourned until 1 a.m. One a.m.

Here's the explanation, offered by Rosley:

They are meeting at midnight to start the clock on cloture for the defense spending bill. That has to be passed before they adjourn, too. They want it out of the way before they get to Obamacare.

Also have to pass the bill raising the US debt limit (which we've exceeded, anyway).

So they're clearing that stuff out so they can vote on this later in the week.

At Hot Air, discussing the very-much expedited schedule we're on...

Because Republicans like McConnell and DeMint are promising to delay by every possible means (even Olympia Snowe wants to slow down, believe it or not), the only way to get the bill to the floor by Christmas Eve is to schedule votes at the first possible moment under Senate rules — which means they could be voting on amendments at 3 a.m. this week. That’s how desperate the most transparent administration ever is to get this done before the next round of polls freaks out even more centrists.

I'm guessing that's in response to this...

Republicans may force Senate clerks to read the entire managerÂ’s amendment but that will not disrupt the schedule. ThatÂ’s because reading the amendment, which will be shorter than the 2,074-page healthcare bill, is not expected to take more than eight hours.

Reid could offer the managerÂ’s amendment on Saturday morning and keep to his schedule as long as he files cloture sometime before midnight.

Cloture motions need one day to ripen, so the earliest the Senate could vote to end debate on ReidÂ’s managerÂ’s amendment would be 1 a.m. Monday.

These bastards are determined to get this done by...Christmas Eve.

This bill, again, is not even written yet.

Earlier I linked Sen. McConnell raging against this bill. JackM. pointed out he was citing one of the Maine sisters as a reason for delay:

“This isn’t an energy bill. This is an attempt by a majority to take over one sixth of the U.S. economy — to vastly expand the reach and the role of government into the health care decisions of every single American — and they want to be done after one substantive amendment. This is absolutely inexcusable.

“I think Senator Snowe put it best on Tuesday:

‘Given the enormity and complexity,’ she said, ‘I don’t see anything magical about the Christmas deadline if this bill is going to become law in 2014.’

“And I think Senator Snowe’s comments on a lack of bipartisanship at the outset of this debate are also right on point.

“Here’s what she said in late November:

‘I am truly disappointed we are commencing our historic debate on one of the most significant and pressing domestic issues of our time with a process that has forestalled our ability to arrive at broader agreement on some of the most crucial elements of health care reform. The bottom line is, the most consequential health care legislation in the history of our country and the reordering of $33 trillion in health care spending over the coming decade shouldn’t be determined by one vote-margin strategies – surely we can and must do better.’

“The only conceivable justification for rushing this bill is the overwhelming opposition of the American people. Democrats know that the longer Americans see this bill the less they like it. Here’s the latest from Pew. It came out just yesterday.

“A majority (58 percent) of those who have heard a lot about the bills oppose them while only 32 percent favor them.”

“There is no justification for this blind rush — except a political one, and that’s not good enough for the American people.

“And there’s no justification for forcing the Senate to vote on a bill none of us has seen.

“Americans already oppose this bill. The process is just as bad.

“It’s completely reckless, completely irresponsible.”

Catch that? We must rush, rush, rush to pass a bill, without even reading it, so that the bill can take effect in 2014.

Yeah that makes sense.

Posted by: Ace at 02:49 PM | Comments (75)
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As you probably know, I do not believe in God (nor disbelieve, particularly), as His existence cannot be proven.

Well...

World leaders flying into Copenhagen today to discuss a solution to global warming will first face freezing weather as a blizzard dumped 10 centimeters (4 inches) of snow on the Danish capital overnight.

“Temperatures will stay low at least the next three days,” Henning Gisseloe, an official at Denmark’s Meteorological Institute, said today by telephone, forecasting more snow in coming days. “There’s a good chance of a white Christmas.”

...

Denmark has a maritime climate and milder winters than its Scandinavian neighbors. It hasnÂ’t had a white Christmas for 14 years, under the DMIÂ’s definition, and only had seven last century. Temperatures today fell as low as minus 4 Celsius (25 Fahrenheit).

Are you kidding me?

This is something like an argument about the existence of God in the Hitchhiker's Guide -- proving God doesn't exist.

With some alterations...

The pratical upshot of all this is that is that wherever Albert Arnold Gore, Junior, chief evangelist for the Cult of the Virgin Gaia, goes, spreading his Gospel of a rapidly-warming earth, the weather suddenly takes an intense turn to the frigid and starts dumping snow on every SUV and private jet in his carbon-throbbing vehicular entourage.

Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindboggingly ironic could happen, and continue happening, and happen and happen and happen and then happen again some more, purely by chance, and without some Divine Hand manipulating the cosmic weather machine, that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.

The arguement goes something like this: 'I refuse to prove I exist,' says God, 'for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.'

'But,' says Man, 'the Gore Effect is a dead giveaway isn't it? It could not possibly be a coincidence that this continues happening. It could not possibly happen so many times that meteorologists now forecast the weather half by Doppler radar and half by Gore's travel secretary. It cannot be that everywhere this man moves, the clouds start pouring snow over the landscape like OJ pouring out DNA all over Rockingham. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguements, you don't. QED.'

'Oh dear,' says God, 'I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

'Oh, that was easy,' says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.

Most leading theologians claim that this arguement is a load of dingo's kidneys, but that didn't stop Oolan Colluphid making a small fortune when he used it as the central theme of his best-selling book Well That About Wraps It Up For God.

Or, as Depeche Mode said:

I don't want to start any blasphemous rumours
But I think that God's got a sick sense of humor
And when I die I expect to find Him laughing ...

Well they're liberals. They would find it sick. I think it's pretty awesome (in a sick, but deservedly so, sort of way).

The Lord works in hilarious ways.

Pascal's Wager: Rand Simberg, in an article last night, was talking up how the left's favorite new argument is a variation of Pascal's Wager.

Pascal said: Look, there is such low cost to believing in God, and the costs of not believing in Him, if He in fact exists, are so high (eternal damnation), that any rational person should just believe as a hedge against eternal calamity.

Simberg noted that this is flawed, because, for example, it could be that some other religion's God is the real God, and by believing in the wrong god, you are condemning yourself.

In other words, Pascal's Wager is wrong because it posits that if there's any chance of calamity, you must take effort to avert it, without considering the possibility that your actions invite a different calamity.

Anyway, this is the left's new argument with global warming; Oh dear, the world could end, so given this possible calamity, even if we don't know it will happen and even if we cannot even calculate the odds of it happening, we must believe, believe in Global Warming for only by the grace of the Virgin Gaia will we be saved.

Note that this is wrong, again, for it doesn't take into account the non-zero possibility we're actually scheduled for a naturally-occurring Ice Age, and that what we really need to do is start pumping out carbon like there's no tomorrow, or else there might not be.

You can't just take some possible thing and say because it's possible we need to take action against it without having some sensible idea of what the odds are -- or what the odds are of inadvertently causing a different calamity by your attempts to avoid the first one.

At any rate, bringing this around to Gore:

If I were him, I really would start thinking about the flaw in Pascal's Wager.

Because it seems to me there is some evidence of a non-zero sort of chance that the Earth sorta hates his puking guts.

Maybe he should stop worrying about what we're doing to the Earth and start worrying what the Earth might do to him if he doesn't stop this nonsense at once.

Timeline: The Gore Effect. It really is -- I mean -- it's uncanny.

It's a little creepy, man. It's like one of those super-dumb premises that Steven King comes up with, almost as if it's a bar bet, something so utterly dumb that you almost giggle at and say Oh that can't possibly be made scary, and then, just to prove that he can, he makes it scary.

Like-- Steven King's The Man in the All-Weather Parka.

Or, I don't know: The Devil's Mittens.

Thanks to Chainsaw Chimp for that.

Why Do They Keep Tempting Fate and Scheduling These Confabs Around Christmas? I hope no one will be offended if I note the early Christian calender scheduled observances around the time of pagan observances, to make conversion an easier transition.

So why do these conferences always seem to happen during Yuletide?

When it makes so much more sense -- and there is less a chance of blizzardry embarrassment -- to schedule them in the summer?

See what I'm getting at here?

Do I believe this?

Nahhhh... Well. Who knows. I'm an agnostic. Who knows what the hell I believe.

I know Steven King's got a new book coming out about a snowman magically animated to life who then goes on a torso-killing spree.

Or he should, at least.

Posted by: Ace at 01:24 PM | Comments (424)
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(A series of daily-ish roundups of the day's Climate news and commentary.)

This is by no means a comprehensive recap. The stories come from a variety of sources, and I highly recommend exploring the linked sites for more breaking news.

(after the break...) more...

Posted by: Open Blog at 01:00 PM | Comments (25)
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This is what's going on with the Russia temperature data, too.

Turns out -- how could this be? I don't blame the warmmongers for it but how did this happen? -- the world has been losing, not gaining, temperature stations for the past 50 years, and most of the lost stations came from higher-latitude and higher-altitude, no-heat-island rural areas, in other words, the best, most pristine gauges of actual temperature, unchanged by the hot sprawl of Man.

And most of the ones that didn't get eliminated were in... cities. Or built up towns and suburbs. And mostly at lower altitudes, too (by sea level -- where most of the human population clusters).

And so what happens when the bulk of your old weather stations get discontinued?

Well, if you're a genius climate researcher, you just fill in these unmeasured expanses with homogenized (I think) type data from the city stations still in use.

Voila! You had no idea of what the temperature was in rural Russia so you guessed it was probably pretty close to the temperature in Moscow, and you filled it thus!

And look! Look at all this global warming and tremble.

You Know What's Going On Here? A dialogue.

CLIMATE SCIENTIST: You know, there is some tentative evidence to suggest a link between carbon fraction and temperature.

POLITICIAN: Really? I'd sure like to be able to talk about that. You know I'm concerned about the environment!

CLIMATE SCIENTIST: Here's my data.

POLITICIAN: I see a lot of fudge words and caveats in this "Summary for Policy-Makers."

CLIMATE SCIENTIST: Well, you know, the fact is: There are huge areas of uncertainty. For one thing, we really don't have a very strong understanding of how the sun and clouds interact to shape climate.

POLITICIAN: I can't go to the public with all this hedging.

CLIMATE SCIENTIST: Okay, I changed that, I have now taken out the caveats about cloud formation and the sun. We have now, um, determined that they are not factors. How's it look?

POLITICIAN: You still have this caveat about "not having continuous temperature records for 80% of the earth's surface, making positive correlation very difficult to establish."

CLIMATE SCIENTIST: Well, that's true, see, the world's been losing weather stations, and so there always were HUGE gaps in our data, and now they're even bigger...

POLITICIAN: I can't do anything with this. And damn, I was so close to getting you a big grant.

CLIMATE SCIENTIST: Hang on, I can fix that. Okay, here you go -- I just took the city temperatures and extrapolated them out into the hinterlands.

POLITICIAN: Is that, like, a valid assumption?

CLIMATE SCIENTIST: Do you care?

POLITICIAN: Humor me.

CLIMATE SCIENTIST: Well... kinda-sorta.

POLITICIAN: And in scientific terms, "kinda-sorta" translates as...

CLIMATE SCIENTIST: No.

POLITICIAN: No?

CLIMATE SCIENTIST: No. Is it important?

POLITICIAN: Not really. Just seemed like the sort of thing I should pretend to be interested about. Okay, but what about this Medieval Warm Period? In the IPCC first report on this in 1990, you guys said it was warmer from 1000-1350 than it is now, and obviously that's not driven by human industry or agriculture. The world had no machines and only like one tenth of the current population.

CLIMATE SCIENTIST: If that.

POLITICIAN: If that. So you see my problem.

CLIMATE SCIENTIST: Okay, hang on.

POLITICIAN: What's this?

CLIMATE SCIENTIST: Hockey stick.

POLITICIAN: Hockey stick?

CLIMATE SCIENTIST: Hockey stick.

POLITICIAN: Can you prove any of this?

CLIMATE SCIENTIST: Again: How much do you care?

POLITICIAN: 'Nuff said. Okay, I think we've got some grant money coming your way!

Look, the problem here is that the data are simply unavailable to prove this one way or the other. The data do not exist.

But the warmongers have decided that that that's not fair, they're not going to let a little missing data stand in their way, because Mother Earth has told them she's in pain. And they are going to bend, fold, and mutilate whatever spotty records they do have until they can claim to have something approaching a temperature record of the whole earth extending back 1000 years.

Posted by: Ace at 12:33 PM | Comments (65)
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Olbermann: I will go to jail before I participate in a mandated-insurance scheme that enriches the corporate fat-cats in the insurance companies.

Axelrod: Anyone on the left wanting to kill this bill is insane.

Incidentally, after Gibbs called Howard Dean pretty much crazy yesterday, a White House hack (forget who-- Rahm?) walked that back and offered a more respectful objection; but I see the respectful objection thing was abandoned again by Captain Wonderful, and we're back to the "lunatic" argument.

(Argument being used in the loosest possible sense.)

Hmm... those who started saying, early, "the left just might kill this bill," well, you may be about to collect on your pool wager, depending on what day you selected.

I gotta tell ya, I did not see this coming. I thought the left was so hopelessly in love with Captain Wonderful they just wanted him to get a "Win," and didn't care what it looked like.

I see now that that was pretty much just Chris Matthews. And David Brooks, I'd imagine.

Posted by: Ace at 12:07 PM | Comments (135)
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I suppose this is a natural evolution of the battlespace if you're broadcasting in the clear with hardware that was rushed into production and service.

Shia fighters are said to have used off-the-shelf software programs such as SkyGrabber to capture the footage.

The hacking was possible because the remotely flown planes have an unprotected communications link.

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 11:17 AM | Comments (114)
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...and therefore I reject the "compromise" abortion language in the Reid monstrosity.

What Makes Ben Run: Polls, polls, polls.

This question is loaded, as the blogger notes, but it's accurately loaded. Asked of his home-state voters...

"In general, do you favor or oppose President ObamaÂ’s plan to expand health care coverage to most Americans even if this plan increases the role of the federal government in health care and increases the cost of the deficit?"

Favor: 26%
Oppose: 67%

A bit of a loaded question, maybe, but look at this follow-up:

"If Senator Ben Nelson votes in favor of this plan, would that make you more likely or less likely to support Senator Nelson when he runs for re-election?"

More likely: 26%
Less Likely: 61%

Posted by: Ace at 09:50 AM | Comments (189)
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Commenters asked "Why not show a picture of the Tricorner Tea Party Babe?"

It's a question I have no good answer to.

Why not indeed.

How do those poll numbers look now, Chrissy?

A bit more "overwhelming love," I guess, and a bit less "mezza-mezza."

You stupid dick.

In exchange for that picture, she had wanted me to mention The Conservative Coalition for American Values at Purdue University, which, not to exaggerate or anything, is humanity's third-most important and benevolent secular organization after 1) the United States Armed Forces and 2) humanity.

The Conservative Coalition for American Values at Purdue University is certainly worthy of noting.

Vid (Not Really): Three pictures of her (just the three) set to Motorhead's Ace of Spades.

From BumperStickerist. more...

Posted by: Ace at 09:22 AM | Comments (145)
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We don't need people peeking through keyholes to see what goes on in taxpayer funded Senate Majority Leader's offices.

Busybodies! Prudes!

Sen. McConnell:

‘And here’s the most outrageous part: at the end of this rush, they want us to vote on a bill that no one outside the Majority Leader’s conference room has even seen. That’s right. The final bill we’ll vote on isn’t even the one we’ve had on the floor. It’s the deal Democrat leaders have been trying to work out in private’

More below the fold. more...

Posted by: Ace at 09:12 AM | Comments (66)
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