T Minus Zero

I'll see you in a month or so. Remember, the Mrs. and DANEgerus will still be posting when they feel like it.

Quote of the Day

From Britt in the comments to this post.

The Democrats are whores with AIDS and three kinds of clap. The Republicans are whores with three kinds of clap. You can cure the clap with wide spectrum antibiotics. There ain't nothing you can do about AIDS but keep well back.

The question, continuing to riff on the analogy, is whether or not the whore is worth curing.

Ayup.

But why a spoon, Cousin?

Because, it'll HURT more when I use it to cut out Al Gore's heart! All that supposed "data" on global warming? Faked. Fake fake fakeittyfakefakefaked.

Those, dear friends, are the clumsy fingerprints of someone messing with the data Egyptian style … they are indisputable evidence that the “homogenized” data has been changed to fit someone’s preconceptions about whether the earth is warming.

One thing is clear from this. People who say that “Climategate was only about scientists behaving badly, but the data is OK” are wrong. At least one part of the data is bad, too. The Smoking Gun for that statement is at Darwin Zero.

Found at Ace of Spades HQ. Again, anyone who claims that manmade global warming is real needs to be laughed at, long and loud.

Winter is here

Just shoveled a little less than a foot of snow off the walk. It wasn't too bad, light and powdery, until you got to the stuff that the snowplows had tossed from the road onto my property.

Gah.

By the time the Mrs. and I had finished shoveling, there was another half-inch already in place. It's going to be a fun day!

Here come the Death Panels

They won't be named "GOVERNMENT DEATH PANELS" of course, but they'll perform exactly the same function.

The eligibility age for state-subsidized breast cancer screening has been raised from 40 to 50 by the California Health and Human Services Agency, which will also temporarily stop enrollment in the breast cancer screening program.

Hey, how are you enjoying that free government health care, folks? Oh, you want to go home, be taken care of in home and save the government money? Sorry, you can't do that either.

Democrats voted to cut Medicare’s home health care budget by 13 percent over the next 10 years. The next time that I hear a Democrat say that there won’t be a cut in benefits as a result of them cutting Medicare by $467,000,000,000, I’m gonna get in their face and tell them that they’re lying through their teeth. Then I’m gonna read them the riot act. THEN I’m gonna get nasty.

The notion that the Democratic Party is the protector of the elderly, the downtrodden and the people who’ve fallen through the cracks is BS. They’re cutting the most efficient part of Medicare and the part that has the most positive impact on families.

I’ll lay this out as succinctly as I know how. Medicare’s home care programs save money, lots of it. It also helps people live their last days in dignity. And the Democrats just voted to slash their budgets by 14 percent over the next decade.

But don't worry, the government's going to take care of you! No change in benefits! No new taxes! Trust the government, you little upstart minion! You're just there to provide funds to the government anyway!

Shall I go get the tar and feathers now?

CarbonHagen

Just Damn.....

Over 1,200 limos.

So many private jets that they can't all be parked at the airport, they have to be flown to frikkin' SWEDEN, parked at the airport THERE, and then flown back to pick up whoever the high-muckity-schmuck is.

What fucking hypocrites. What fucking liars. You want proof that man-made global warming is utter and complete bullshit? Just look at the actions of those who preach it the loudest.

Hmmmmm....

So Iran wants to build a nuke. They've already said they would use it. Wouldn't it be great if there was some internal group revolting against the Iranian regime that we could support?

Oh, wait....

Of all the things the Teleprompter Jesus has done, ignoring the Iranian protesters is one of the vilest things. We're watching freedom try to live, and Obama wants it to die.

Just like he wanted freedom in Honduras to die.

It used to be that American Presidents did their best to spread freedom and prosperity around the globe. Obama spreads slavery and statism. And I hope he burns in hell for it.

December 7th

1941 - Japanese attack Pearl Harbor.

Back when I was a young'n, my father was stationed on Oahu. I remember being about eight when Dad took us to the USS Arizona memorial. There's still oil coming up from the Arizona, in tiny little drops, blossoming into rainbow circles on the water's surface.

The Arizona is treated as a tomb, which it is. There's a reverence in the way the Memorial staff treat the site, and they expect the same from the visitors.

Pearl Harbor happened because America was not ready to go to war. It wasn't that we weren't aware of what was going on - we as a country knew that by cutting off oil supplies to Imperialistic Japan, we were poking a hornet's nest. We had volunteers fighting against Japan in China. Roosevelt had the Lend/Lease program going with Great Britain. But we were officially not-at-war, while the world went to hell in a handbasket. Jews were being herded into gas chambers while pacifists at home and abroad screamed that we must make peace with our enemies. And so we sat around with our thumbs up our ass. Until December 7th. And then we wept.

Appeasing bullies only makes the bullies stronger. You cannot stop a madman by ignoring him. Hope isn't enough to stop a genocidal dictator. These lessons should have been pounded into everyone's head. And for a while, they were. But not anymore. I thought that September 11th would be stuck in people's heads for a while, but obviously not.

I fear the next September 11th. I fear the next December 7th.

A good primer

Of the Global Warming Hoax coming out of the CRU. The one thing that people understand, and it's something I've used in the past when confronted with a Warmista - if the graphs put out by the global warming crowd are so accurate, where is the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age?

I normally get blank stares at that point. And when I tell them that it used to be warm enough for the Vikings to farm Greenland but now it's too cold to do so, I get more blank stares. When I point out that they used to be able to grow grapes for wine in England, and that hasn't happened in centuries because it's been too cold, people start getting upset. At me. And when I start talking about the Little Ice Age and it's affect on Europe, they get openly hostile.

It's their religion, you see. And I just used some plain, simple facts to knock it down.

Look, I'm not a scientist. I read these reports, and I have to go over them two, three, four times to make sense of the data, simply because I'm not trained in reading straight data and understanding it immediately. It takes me some time. And I'm not the only one in America who's like this, OK? Give me a five paragraph Op-Order and I can pull relevant information out quicker than you can blink, but charts with multiple data sources and equations and formulas take me a while.

But once it's been digested, I can condense it down into simple terms and use it. I'm not the best communicator, but I can get my point across. Talk about tree rings and ice core samples and a lot of people's eyes start to glaze over. They become disinterested. But mention the fact that the Vikings used to have farming communities in Greenland, and that it's been too cold to have those farms for about a thousand years, and people's ears perk up. They can relate to farming, most of them, even if the only farm they've ever been on was a 10X10 garden plot. It's something they can understand. Mention that the Little Ice Age was one of the contributing factors to the Black Plague, and people start listening. It's something they can understand.

I'm willing to bet that most folks still couldn't tell you exactly what the lies are in the CRU data. But at least now they know they've been lied to. That's the first step. Reading the American Thinker piece would be a good second step.

Oh, for Pete's sake....

It just keeps getting worse and worse. I don't know if you've seen this yet, as it's been linked all over the place, but I'm linking to it again just because I can.

In June, McChrystal noted, he had arrived in Afghanistan and set about fulfilling his assignment. His lean face, hovering on the screen at the end of the table, was replaced by a mission statement on a slide: "Defeat the Taliban. Secure the Population."

"Is that really what you think your mission is?" one of those in the Situation Room asked.

On the face of it, it was impossible -- the Taliban were part of the fabric of the Pashtun belt of southern Afghanistan, culturally if not ideologically supported by a significant part of the population. "We don't need to do that," Gates said, according to a participant. "That's an open-ended, forever commitment."

But that was precisely his mission, McChrystal responded, and it was enshrined in the Strategic Implementation Plan -- the execution orders for the March strategy, written by the NSC staff.

"I wouldn't say there was quite a 'whoa' moment," a senior defense official said of the reaction around the table. "It was just sort of a recognition that, 'Duh, that's what, in effect, the commander understands he's been told to do.' Everybody said, 'He's right.' "

"It was clear that Stan took a very literal interpretation of the intent" of the NSC document, said Jones, who had signed the orders himself. "I'm not sure that in his position I wouldn't have done the same thing, as a military commander." But what McChrystal created in his assessment "was obviously something much bigger and more longer-lasting . . . than we had intended."

This is what you get for promoting Amateur Hour in the White House. This is what you get when you put an empty suit in charge of the military. This is what you get when a "community organizer" plays grown-up. As Allahpundit at Hot Air states:

So it goes for our supposedly Spock-like president, who made such a pageant during the the past three months of deliberating over Afghanistan lest he waste time and lives by rashly adopting the wrong strategy. He wanted to show his commitment to the war early on, so he installed McChrystal, handed him 22,000 extra troops, stuck him with orders he either didn’t think carefully about or didn’t believe were feasible (Bush-lite?), and then forgot about it for half a year while he went off to chase his health-care dreams. Even more surreally, the only way McChrystal could have misunderstood the orders is if he’d had so little contact with people at the top — Obama, Gates, and Jones — that the occasion never arose for them to clarify that “defeat the Taliban” actually meant “degrade the Taliban.” Remember in September when he said he’d only had one teleconference with The One since taking over in Afghanistan in June? I guess this is the result. Question: How come closing Gitmo was such an urgent priority that Obama sent down the word literally two days after his inauguration, but appointing McChrystal and getting him started on a full strategic review — which would necessarily take weeks — had to wait until late March?

At this point I want to find all the frikkin' Obama voters and just ask them "Hey, why do you hate the military so much? Did we not live up to your expectations or something? Why would you do this to us?" But that might lead to me beating at least one of them to death with their own limbs, so it might be better for me if I didn't do that. But still..... the incompetence of the Obama administration is on display here yet again. There isn't a damn thing they've gotten right.

Riddle me this: Just what the hell am I supposed to say to a Soldier getting shipped to Afghanistan, when we both know that that the Commander in Chief is nothing more than a brainless idiot who's completely incapable of performing his duties as such?

Bama-Texas

So, the BSC title game is going to be Bama and Texas, unless the BCS voters pull their heads out of their asses and actually VOTE for teams like TCU, Cincy or BSU. And we all know that won't happen.

Remember last year? Utah, winner of the Mountain West division, undefeated all season, and the voters poo-pooed the team. Until they rolled up Alabama like a cheap suit and dunked them into the trash during the Sugar Bowl. Tore Bama a new asshole in that game. And the kicker? The kicker is that after many of the BCS voters watched Utah dismantle Alabama, they admitted that they hadn't even watched any Utah games before they voted to keep Utah out of the title game.

I got ten bucks that says TCU, Cincy and BSU were ignored this year as well. It's going to keep happening until the BCS is finally abolished and thrown away like it should be. Texas could barely beat Nebraska.

Dude. Nebraska. And Texas won by ONE POINT. Are you serious? And you want to call yourself one of the top two teams in the country?

Gah.