Cartman's Evil Plan Proceeds Apace

Nobody wants Ginger kids anymore, except for maybe Ireland.  Thanks, South Park.  Even the daywalkers are screwed.

Object Lesson: Don't Threaten Our Cultural Landmarks

If you threaten South Park, we will put you in jail, and then we'll go after your family.  Sweet, and well-deserved.  Hopefully, we can also go about bankrupting his brother-in-law's tractor dealership.

The Simpsons Did It

God bless my favorite television show of all time for coming through with  an appropriate illustration to support another of my favorite TV shows of all time (hat tip: Andrew Sullivan).

At The Very Least, We Have An Excuse To Mention The Baha Men

I'm not even sure how to write anyting about his, save to note the headline "Gay dog refused entry to Adelaide restuarant."

Actually, three quick thoughts:

1.  Based on the headline, it''s unclear if the dog was actually not allowed to enter, or if it was serving as a bouncer and preventing others from getting in.  Hey, each seems equally plausible.

2.  "Who Let The Dogs Out?" has a whole new meaning.

3.  South Park predicted the whole gay dog thing over a decade ago.  Man, those guys are brilliant.

Don't Even Think About It

Okay, now they've gone too far.  The crazed terrorist bastards are going after Parker and Stone.

Yes, I have to agree that this will get little concern compared to the horribly violent Tea Partiers, whose rhetoric has led to, oh, zero violence.  But let's put my sarcasm aside on that point.  There's a lot of crap we let these cavepissing, Osamabuttlicking, goat-molesting, cameldung eaters get away with over the past many years.  But if they attempt to do anything to the creators of South Park?  I'd support nuking everything in sight.

Yes, I'm exaggerating a tad.  But in solidarity with Parker and Stone, here's the latest thing they made that the crazed whackos found offensive.

Obama, Iran, and the Underpants Gnomes

Wow, this is a great way to start Monday morning...

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has warned in a secret three-page memorandum to top White House officials that the United States does not have an effective long-range policy for dealing with Iran’s steady progress toward nuclear capability, according to government officials familiar with the document.


Several officials said the highly classified analysis, written in January to President Obama’s national security adviser, Gen. James L. Jones, came in the midst of an intensifying effort inside the Pentagon, the White House and the intelligence agencies to develop new options for Mr. Obama. They include a set of military alternatives, still under development, to be considered should diplomacy and sanctions fail to force Iran to change course.


Officials familiar with the memo’s contents would describe only portions dealing with strategy and policy, and not sections that apparently dealt with secret operations against Iran, or how to deal with Persian Gulf allies.


One senior official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the memo, described the document as “a wake-up call.” But White House officials dispute that view, insisting that for 15 months they had been conducting detailed planning for many possible outcomes regarding Iran’s nuclear program.


In an interview on Friday, General Jones declined to speak about the memorandum. But he said: “On Iran, we are doing what we said we were going to do. The fact that we don’t announce publicly our entire strategy for the world to see doesn’t mean we don’t have a strategy that anticipates the full range of contingencies — we do.”


But in his memo, Mr. Gates wrote of a variety of concerns, including the absence of an effective strategy should Iran choose the course that many government and outside analysts consider likely: Iran could assemble all the major parts it needs for a nuclear weapon — fuel, designs and detonators — but stop just short of assembling a fully operational weapon.


In that case, Iran could remain a signatory of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty while becoming what strategists call a “virtual” nuclear weapons state.


According to several officials, the memorandum also calls for new thinking about how the United States might contain Iran’s power if it decided to produce a weapon, and how to deal with the possibility that fuel or weapons could be obtained by one of the terrorist groups Iran has supported, which officials said they considered to be a less-likely possibility.

First of all, I'm always wondering why the New York Times finds it worthwhile to print classified information, but I suppose I should be grateful that this time they're not publicizing a way of gathering intelligence on terrorists. Hell, I'm not even sure this qualifies as news; the fact that our government is thoroughly unprepared to deal with the threat of a nuclear Iran -- while saying we won't tolerate a nuclear Iran -- seems to be par for the course, no matter which party is in power. Allahpundit says it well...

Of course they didn’t prepare alternatives. How could they possibly fathom that diplomacy might fail? The core plank of “smart power,” such as it is, has always been the Obama charm offensive. Simply by being the anti-Bush and offering an open hand to Iran, he would convince Tehran to unclench its fist and open a dialogue. Bush was the problem (he always is!) and once the problem was removed, solutions would inevitably follow. So why bother developing a Plan B? The result: Iran’s now enriching uranium to 20 percent purity and rolling out advanced centrifuges, which means nuclear “breakout” capacity, i.e. the ability to build a bomb quickly even if they haven’t yet done so, won’t be long in coming. I can’t believe The One would ever order a strike on Iran — see this Aussie op-ed citing security sources who claim the U.S. has all but given up on stopping them from building a bomb — so Israel’s going to do what it has to do sooner rather than later. In fact, in my darker Machiavellian moments, I wonder if one of the reasons The One has picked a fight with Netanyahu lately is because he knows they’re planning to act and wants to put maximum distance between America and Israel before they do. Iran will blame Washington for ordering the attack anyway, but plausible deniability may limit the extent of the reprisals.


No need to put all the blame on Obama here, though. Bush knew what it would mean to hand this issue off to a Democratic president and he went ahead and did it anyway. Invading Iraq necessarily left him with fewer military options against other threats; now the bill is coming due. As for Europe, Russia, and China, here’s the Times’s almost poignant description of the White House’s naivete: “Administration officials had hoped that the revelation by Mr. Obama in September that Iran was building a new uranium enrichment plant inside a mountain near Qum would galvanize other nations against Iran, but the reaction was muted.” The fact that western powers had been waltzing with Iran over its nuke program for fully seven years at that point might have given them a clue that no action would be taken, but that’s “smart power” for you.

The Bush Administration also took a diplomatic approach, although it's worth noting that the constraints weren't just logistics related to Iraq -- remember the leak of the NIE in 2005 that said Iran was at least ten years away from a nuke?  I don't think that leaked NIE ended up being right, but it did end up leaving us with diplomacy as the sole route by which we could tackle the problem of Iran's nuclear ambitions, although practically we had little choice in the matter.  And the diplomacy we've pursued has led to little in the way of results, unless you think Iranian progress toward a nuke is a good thing.  Of course, the foreign policy establishment seems to be hell-bent on building a road where we can keep saying we won't tolerate a nuclear Iran, right up until we actually actually, you know, tolerate a nuclear Iran.

At the end of the day, I'm not sure there is a good approach here -- one just may not be available.  But the government's approach to dealing with the issue reminds me of the business model used by the Underpants Gnomes on South Park...



Actually, if the Obama Administration hired Robert Reich to run foreign policy... sorry, that's a cheap shot. Anyway, I keep thinking that Phase One is "Diplomacy". And Phase Three is "No Nuclear Iran." But it's Phase Two that looks way too much like the Phase Two from the Gnomes business plan.

Then again, my guess is that I could have used this same videoclip to describe the healthcare plan.  At least we know where Obama is drawing his ideas from -- it's not Saul Alinsky, it's Parker and Stone.

The HealthCare Follies Continue

If I could make sense of the health care mess.... well, maybe I can, but let's start with the storyline.

First, over the weekend, the Democrats announced that they were pretty much giving up on getting everyone in Bart Stupak's coalition to come back into the fold...

Stupak notes that his negotiations with House Democratic leaders in recent days have been revealing. “I really believe that the Democratic leadership is simply unwilling to change its stance,” he says. “Their position says that women, especially those without means available, should have their abortions covered.” The arguments they have made to him in recent deliberations, he adds, “are a pretty sad commentary on the state of the Democratic party.”

They may get some of stupak's coalition, but not all.  Stupak's more electrifying charge (that Democrats actually argued that the amendment created more costs due to more babies being born) is apparently an argument he's heard from individual Democrats, but not the House leadership. It's still pretty appalling, and sure as hell sounds like a death panel, as Allahpundit noted. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, who previously backed the House bill, have now jumped ship. Perhaps they don't believe the Senate simply made a typo in another provision that could lead to publicly-funded abortions...

Liberals wanted to expand the reach of community health centers, which have provided low-cost health care to people in underserved areas since the 1960s. And they wanted the health care bill to commit $7 billion for these health centers. The moderates agreed, and new language was hurriedly added to the Senate bill.


"This is all stuff that was inserted late at night and they were trying to reach a final agreement" on the bill, says Timothy Jost, a professor and health law expert at the Washington and Lee University School of Law. Unfortunately, no one remembered to write in an explicit provision explaining that this $7 billion in spending for the health care centers would be subject to all the usual restrictions on how federal money is spent. One of those restrictions, the so-called Hyde Amendment, prohibits most federal funding for abortions.


..."It seems that this is something that slipped by," Jost says, "because elsewhere in the bill they made [funding] subject to [the Hyde amendment]."


And that's how a silly slip-up allowed the anti-abortion forces to issue the dubious claim that this bill will unleash a flood of federally-funded abortions. But though the Democrats' omission makes it easier for anti-abortion rights groups to claim the community health care ceneters funding could pay for abortions, it doesn't make it true.


Community health centers don't perform abortions. They never have—not even in the 1960s and 1970s before the Hyde Amendment was introduced. And they don't plan to in the future. In a statement issued last week, the clinics' umbrella organization, the National Association of Community Health Centers (NACHC), said that "health centers do not plan to, nor are they seeking to, become providers of abortion." And Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius has pledged that none of the money from the health care bill will be used to fund abortions at community health centers.

The problem is that leaving a loophole like that is an invitation for someone to abuse in the future.  None of the points mentioned above prevent someone from using the loophole to fund abortions in the future. Even if you agree that it's a typo, then it brings to mind the question of why we should trust Congress enough to believe there aren't additional "typos" that will come to light later, when they're rushing to try and pass a bill before the President heads overseas (and before their members go home for an Easter recess that might not be so restful). Maybe they can use Nancy Pelosi's latest stupid argument in favor of the bill -- unemployed artists will no longer have to find jobs to finance their health care, since the government will subsidize it, allowing them to not work and pursue their life's dream!  Hey, I can finally puruse my dream of being an "artist" who watches TV all day!  But that's all backdrop for the real remaining issue -- the vote count.

The White House is confident it will have passage of the week -- so confident that two major advisors essentially guaranteed it on the Sunday talk shows.  Of course, the House Majority Whip (you know, the guy who actually has to count the votes for the Democrats) says they don't have the votes yet.  Which means the White House is still looking for votes, which might be why they're suddenly backtracking on the President's pledge not to have any more special deals in the legislation...

Still seeking votes for his proposed health care overhaul, President Barack Obama appears ready to reverse his position and allow unpopular deal-sweetening measures in the hopes of finding Democratic support for legislation whose future will be decided in coming days.


...Clinching support, though, might require Obama to back away from his insistence that senators purge the legislation of a number of lawmakers' special deals.


Taking a new position, Axelrod said the White House only objects to state-specific arrangements, such as an increase in Medicaid funding for Nebraska, ridiculed as the "Cornhusker Kickback." That's being cut, but provisions that could affect more than one state are OK, Axelrod said.


That means deals sought by senators from Montana and Connecticut would be fine — even though Gibbs last week singled them out as items Obama wanted removed. There was resistance, however, from two committee chairman, Democratic Sens. Max Baucus of Montana and Chris Dodd of Connecticut, and the White House has apparently backed down.


Axelrod said the principles the White House wants to apply include "Are these applicable to all states? Even if they do not qualify now, would they qualify under certain sets of circumstances?"

Somewhere, Jim Geraghty is updating his line that all of Barack Obama's promises have an expiration date. However, the real issue is why Gibbs and Axelrod would issue such blanket guarantees.  I think there's a combination of two things going on here.  First, they have some degree of confidence (hopeful confidence? desperate confidence?) that Nancy Pelosi will get the votes somehow, despite the loss of at least a few Stupak bloc voters.  The second issue is that they're trying to create a sense of inevitability and momentum for the bill -- it can't be stopped, so people (or at least, wavering House Democrats) should get on board.  I think it's a mix of both, really, but the question House Democrats have to be asking is whether they can really trust this Administration to get the pulse of America right.

Axelrod seems to saying that he wants the GOP to make the fall elections about the health care bill.  I think what House members realize is that the GOP does not have to do it -- the Tea Parties, the independants, and the core GOP base are already making it about the bill, without much in the way of urging from the GOP leadership.  The rebellion against the health care reform bills and process wasn't coordinated from above, much as the Obama Administration fervently wishes it were.  The fact that it comes from the grass roots means that the arguments Axelrod is making will be arguments that Democratic candidates will be having with constituents as much as with opponents.  And when you're arguing with people, it's tough to get their vote.

And this is before we get to the optics of the situation -- and here's new Senator Scott Brown,who is the walking, talking symbol of what this debate has cost Democrats, delivering Saturday's GOP response to the President's weekly radio address...

Maybe you remember what President Obama promised in his State of the Union address. He said he was going to finally focus on jobs and the economy for the remainder of this year. I applauded him for that. Well, here it is, it’s almost spring. And what is he out there talking about again? That same 2,700-page, multi-trillion dollar healthcare legislation.


So, an entire year has gone to waste. Millions of Americans have lost their jobs, and many more jobs are in danger. Even now, the president still hasn’t gotten the message.


Somehow, the greater the public opposition to the healthcare bill, the more determined they seem to force it on us anyway. Their attitude shows Washington at its very worst – the presumption that they know best, and they’re going to get their way whether the American people like it or not.


And, when politicians start thinking like that, they don’t let anything get in their way – not public opinion, not the rules of fair play, not even their own promises.


They pledged transparency. Instead, we have a healthcare bill tainted by secrecy, concealed cost, and full of backroom deals – and that’s just not right. They should do better. The American people expect more.

Let the vote-counting continue. Firedoglake's estimate is here. Jay Cost is here. The Hill is here. I have no count, but a prediction that the bill with either pass by a small majority, or go down in flames as moderate Dems bail and are followed by liberals seeking to make a statement on the bill not going far enough.

At the end of the day, I doubt the bill dies, even if it doesn't pass this week. The Obama Administration needs a win, no matter how many votes this costs them in the fall. I think the longer this carries on, the worse things get for them, and I don't just mean this fall. The chicanery being used to push this bill through... well, let's just say a declaration of Shenanigans is coming.



Get your brooms.

This Is Why You Watch Old Episodes of Your Favorite Shows

So I'm watching an old episode of South Park last night from 2004. It's their classic parody of the 2004 Presidential campaign, entitled Douche and Turd. By way of background, here's the Wikipedia summary...

During a pep rally at the South Park Elementary School, a group of local PETA eco-terrorists protests the use of a cow as a mascot (for "the 47th time"). The school agrees to pick a new mascot, and the students are told to vote for said new mascot. Embarrassed by the bland choices, the kids decide to fill in a joke candidate but disagree as to whether it should be a "giant douche" or a "turd sandwich." Kyle rallies his friends to fill in the giant douche, and Cartman gathers support for the turd sandwich. Cartman wins Butters' support (by slanting the question when asking Butters which of the two choices was funnier). The result is the two joke candidates get the most votes and the students must choose between the two in an election.

Which leads to the following scene. Make note of the campaign theme Cartman uses for the Turd Sandwich (about 1:30 or so into the clip), and keep in mind they did this in 2004, four years prior to Obama's victory in 2008.



Who knew Parker and Stone were inspirations for President Obama's campaign team?

The Health Care Follies Continue

Clive Crook details the Presidential strategery behind the health-care summit while discussing President Obama's new proposal...

It's true that the proposal entrenches Democratic preferences rather than saying, "we are open to new ideas." But Republicans can hardly complain. Who believes they would have brought open minds to the summit in any event? But if Obama has decided on a Democrats-only strategy, one interesting question is what purpose Thursday's "bipartisan summit" is intended to serve.

The idea must be to put pressure on Democrats to fall into line--sweetening the pill of a measure many don't like (for any number of reasons) by making Republicans look ill-prepared and obstructionist for the cameras. Democrats might decide this works for them, but the Republicans will have to screw up quite badly on Thursday for voters at large to buy it. Going in, the whole event now looks too much like an ambush. Obama needed a bipartisan gesture or two for camouflage--some sign of good faith, sure to be rebuffed. The thinking must be that any such gestures would have made Democratic unity impossible. In other words, get the reform passed first; worry about public opinion later.

The proposal itself doesn't add much to the debate. The biggest new idea in the plan isn't tort reform or some other attempt to reach across the aisle -- it's a plan to stop excessive rate increases by health insurers without government approval. Peter Suderman does a nice job of summarizing the problem with price caps...

And given the widespread public frustration with insurers, it's probably politically savvy, too. It's also hard to oppose: Who could be against blocking excessive rate increases? After all, they are, by definition, excessive (or, depending on who's talking, unreasonable).

But the problem, of course, is that what constitutes excessive or unreasonable isn't easy to define. I was at a conference with a number of lawyers this weekend, and one of them joked about how great words like "reasonable" were for the profession. (How many lawyers does it take to define what "unreasonable" means? Well, how many do you have?) The idea is to create some legal wiggle room, but you tend to end up with absurdly circular definitions like Arizona's, which defined excessive insurance rate hikes as those that "are likely to produce an underwriting profit that is unreasonably high." It's excessive if it's unreasonable! Unreasonable if it's excessive! Feel free to ride this definitional merry-go-round until you puke.

Fun as that sounds, let's go ahead and answer some key cable-news questions in advance: Is Obama's proposed rate-review commission a death panel? Nope! But it could result in insurance companies denying coverage more than they would otherwise in order to meet premium requirements. Is it a government takeover of the country's health care system? Not exactly. But it gives the federal government a lot more authority over health insurers. So what is it then? If you guessed "a form of price controls," you're today's lucky winner. And, just like when Bill Clinton proposed them, medical price controls are a deeply problematic idea.

Cato's Michael Cannon points to a great line from the President's own economic advisor, Larry Summers...

Price and exchange controls inevitably create harmful economic distortions. Both the distortions and the economic damage get worse with time.

But I'm sure price controls will solve the problem of rising health care costs! In the believing in the tooth fairy department, Jon Chait is convinced there's a coming health-care "freakout" (annoying song possibility!) among conservatives...

Brian Darling at Red State speculates that the Democrats will fire or overrule the parliamentarian in order to pass their plan through reconciliation. Republicans actually did fire the parliamentarian in 2001, after he complicated their plans to push tax cuts through reconciliation, but this caused virtually no outcry. But Democrats aren't going to need to do so. The paranoia stems in part from a failure to understand the technicalities of what's going on here -- liberal policy wonks have been following this closely for the last month, but hardly anybody else has. There was some discussion last year of using reconciliation to pass the entire health care bill and avoid the filibuster. This ran into technical difficulties -- reconciliation can only be used for measures that principally effect revenues or outlays. So instead the Democrats passed a health care bill through the Senate using regular order.

Now, of course, the problem is that they can't mesh the Senate bill with the House bill using regular order, because Republicans will filibuster it. But most of the points of negotiation between House and Senate concern taxes and spending -- exactly the kinds of things that reconciliation is designed for. So it's fairly easy to just have the House pass the Senate bill, then use reconciliation to eliminate the Nebraska Medicaid subsidy and change the mix of taxes that pay for new coverage. Indeed, this process is probably easier than getting another 60 votes in the Senate would have been even if Martha Coakley had won.

You can imagine how this feels to conservatives. They've already run off the field, sprayed themselves with champagne and taunted the losing team's fans. And now the other team is saying the game is still on and they have a good chance to win. There may be nothing wrong at all with the process, but it's certainly going to feel like some kind of crime to the right-wing. The Democrats may not win, but I'm pretty sure they're going to try. The conservative freakout is going to be something to behold.

I'm starting to believe that the only people who really want the bill to pass are liberal bloggers and the President's team, if only so they have something they can point to as a success on this front. Trust me when I say this -- the freakout won't come from conservatives or even Republicans if this bill somehow passes. It'll come from independants. The conservatives, particularly the Tea Partiers, will see this as irredeemable proof that government is broken beyond belief, and will happily assist the GOP in sweeping away the Democratic House majority and getting close to evening (or even killing) the Democratic Senate majority (watching Joe Lieberamn become more powerful would be vastly entertaining). But independants who turned against health care reform and thought it was dead after Scott Brown's election will see this as evidence of dirty tricks. And conservatives who feel that way (and even others who acknowledge that politics ain't beanbag) will fan those same flames (and I'm starting to picture something akin to the Cow Days episode of South Park, when Kyle reinstates his original declaration of "Shenanigans!").

Mickey Kaus, who's in favor of reform, does a nice job mocking the idea that we're heading for a bill. I hope he's right, although I think Megan McArdle does a good job of explaining why he probably is...

Despite having declared the death of the health care bill before almost anything else, I don't want to say that the thing's impossible. But the House has lost three of the votes it used to pass their bill 220-215 . . . which means that you have to persuade someone (probably a Blue Dog) to vote for it, who already voted against it. Progressives have been making the almost-plausible argument that the public is going to treat a vote for the House or Senate bill as a vote for final passage, so Democrats might as well go ahead and pass the thing. But their best argument totally falls apart for those who originally voted no.

And that's the best case scenario. It assumes that you can keep Bart Stupak's pro-life caucus, even though it's unlikely that they'll be able to "fix" the Senate's more liberal abortion language in reconciliation. This is a pretty heroic assumption. If you lose many of the Stupak folks, then the bill's done; there is not a snowball's chance in hell that you are going to persuade any significant number of the prior "no" votes in the Democratic caucus to throw their careers on the pyre of Democratic health care ambitions.

...Reid says they'll be ready to do reconciliation within 60 days. Really? Democrats are going to pass a mongo, costly new entitlement right around tax day? The caucus might as well pass the hat for the GOP election fund. But if you delay it, you're leaving an unpopular bill very fresh in peoples' minds as they go into the 2010 elections.

I'm not quite ready to say this thing is dead, because some Democrats seem absolutely willing to drink Kool-Aid and enter the political afterlife. But it is telling that fewer and fewer of them seem willing to take big public stands on it. I assume the White House's goal for Thursday's health care summit would be to turn public opinion around enough that it rallies enough Democrats to the cause. But when the Washington Post isn't impressed with the President's proposal, it's hard to see the Democratic center (let alone the GOP) rallying behind it. The AP's reporting is probably prophetic on this one...

Starting over on health care, President Barack Obama knows his chances aren't looking much more promising. A year after he called for a far-reaching overhaul, Obama unveiled his most detailed plan yet on Monday. Realistically, he's just hoping to win a big enough slice to silence the talk of a failing presidency.

The 10-year, $1 trillion plan, like the current Democratic version in the Senate, would bring health insurance to more than 31 million Americans who now lack it. Government insurance wouldn't be included, a problem for Democratic progressives. Republicans are skeptical about where the money would come from — and about Obama's claim that the plan wouldn't raise the federal deficit.

Striking out in one fresh direction that should have wide appeal, Obama would give federal regulators new powers over the insurance industry, a reaction to a rash of double-digit premium hikes that have infuriated policy holders in California and other states.

The plan is supposed to be the starting point for Obama's televised, bipartisan health care summit Thursday — a new beginning after a year of wrangling and letting Congress take the lead. Yet Republicans were quick to dismiss it as a meld of two Democratic bills the public doesn't want. Democrats, while reaffirming their commitment to major changes, reacted cautiously, mindful that Obama is asking them to stake their political fortunes in the fall elections.

In the end, Americans who have listened to a year of talk about big changes in their health care, may see much smaller changes, if any. The president is likely to have to settle for much less than he wants — small-bore legislation that would smooth the rough edges of today's system but stop well short of coverage for nearly everyone.

Jennifer Rubin does a nice job of summarizing the possible (and hopefully likely) endgame. Personally, we thought this comment from James Taranto was particularly apt...

Obama is asking voters to believe that ObamaCare is a good idea and that the reason they think it is a bad idea is that he isn't good at persuasion. But if he can convince them of that, he can convince them of anything--which means that the claim that he is bad at persuasion is wildly false.

Maybe health care reform will be revived this week. I hope not. But you have to give the Left and the President credit for persistence, even if the persistence is politically ill-advised. Then again, that might describe a lot of things from this band of characters.

What Annoying Song Is Stuck In My Head Today?

If I need to suffer with a song stuck in my head, why shouldn't you have to do the same? Sometimes they're good, most times they're bad... but no matter what, they make you suffer. So I like to share the suffering whenever it happens.

I know the last song was also from South Park, but this one's an underrated classic from the movie, which I caught on late-night TV recently. There's nothing like throwing in a tribute to Le Miz that uses the words "When Canada is dead and gone, there'll be no more Celine Dion!" Besides, is there a better example of this entire series of posts than Terrance and Phillip's "Uncle F---er" song? Just hearing it briefly as part of this song stuck it in my head as well...



You're welcome.

What Annoying Song is Stuck in My Head Today?

If I need to suffer with a song stuck in my head, why shouldn't you have to do the same? Sometimes they're good, most times they're bad... but no matter what, they make you suffer. So I like to share the suffering whenever it happens.

This is in contention for most annoying song of all time, mostly because I'm convinced it will stay in my head for a week each time I hear it. Of course, thank God for Parker and Stone for giving me Cartman's version, which makes it liveable -- in fact, if someone can cue up Cartman singing over the Lady Gaga video, I might start liking the song. But this is the best we could do.



You're welcome.

Best.Science.Scandal.Ever

As if Climategate wasn't bad enough... the IPCC predicted that Himalayan glaciars may disappear by 2035, based on a 1996 study. Turns out that the study actually says 2350, so they're off by 215 years. (hat tip: Instapundit) This is only a big deal if you think the world might change a little in 215 years. It probably will -- keep in mind that in 1794, George Washington was stuck using dial-up Internet at Mount Vernon, or so I've heard.

Seriously, I'm guessing that this was an innocent error involving transposed numbers, but the IPCC seems to be losing credibility by the hour. The biggest problem for the climate scientists and researchers who believed in global warming is that their own arrogance makes them less credible when even innocent errors like this crop up. John Tierney, while discussing the scandal as a whole, makes this point generally...

As the scientists denigrate their critics in the e-mail messages, they seem oblivious to one of the greatest dangers in the climate-change debate: smug groupthink. These researchers, some of the most prominent climate experts in Britain and America, seem so focused on winning the public-relations war that they exaggerate their certitude — and ultimately undermine their own cause.

Consider, for instance, the phrase that has been turned into a music video by gleeful climate skeptics: “hide the decline,” used in an e-mail message by Phil Jones, the head of the university’s Climatic Research Unit. He was discussing the preparation of a graph for the cover of a 1999 report from the World Meteorological Organization showing that temperatures in the past several decades were the highest of the past millennium.

Most of the graph was based on analyses of tree rings and other “proxy” records like ice cores and lake sediments. These indirect measurements indicated that temperatures declined in the middle of the millennium and then rose in the first half of the 20th century, which jibes with other records. But the tree-ring analyses don’t reveal a sharp warming in the late 20th century — in fact, they show a decline in temperatures, contradicting what has been directly measured with thermometers.

Because they considered that recent decline to be spurious, Dr. Jones and his colleagues removed it from part of the graph and used direct thermometer readings instead. In a statement last week, Dr. Jones said there was nothing nefarious in what they had done, because the problems with the tree-ring data had been openly identified earlier and were known to experts.

But the graph adorned the cover of a report intended for policy makers and journalists. The nonexperts wouldn’t have realized that the scariest part of that graph — the recent temperatures soaring far above anything in the previous millennium — was based on a completely different measurement from the earlier portion. It looked like one smooth, continuous line leading straight upward to certain doom.

The story behind that graph certainly didn’t show that global warming was a hoax or a fraud, as some skeptics proclaimed, but it did illustrate another of their arguments: that the evidence for global warming is not as unequivocal as many scientists claim.
...Contempt for critics is evident over and over again in the hacked e-mail messages, as if the scientists were a priesthood protecting the temple from barbarians. Yes, some of the skeptics have political agendas, but so do some of the scientists. Sure, the skeptics can be cranks and pests, but they have identified genuine problems in the historical reconstructions of climate, as in the debate they inspired about the “hockey stick” graph of temperatures over the past millennium.

Read Tierney's whole piece -- it's measured and well-written by someone who probably believes in manmade global warming, but is at a loss to explain why many of the scientists who made the case for it opted for exaggeration and obfuscation.

Meanwhile, I have to cite my favorite comparison thus far in this scandal -- one reader of Jonah Goldberg's likened the climate researchers to the Underpants Gnomes. In fact, there's something beautiful in referencing that episode, as noted by this point on its Wikipedia page...

The episode satirizes the common complaint of large corporations lacking scruples and driving seemingly wholesome smaller independent companies out of business. Paul Cantor, a literary critic and economic theorist, who has taught college courses revolving around the "Gnomes" episode, has described it as "the most fully developed defense of capitalism" ever produced by the show. Cantor said the episode challenges the stereotype that small businesses are public servants who truly care about their customers by portraying local business owner Mr. Tweek as greedier and having less scruples than that of the corporation he is challenging. At the end of the episode, Kyle and Stan conclude big corporations are good due to the services they provide people, and uphold the notion that the businesses providing the best product deserve to succeed in the marketplace and grow to become larger.
The episode portrays the mainstream media as biased against capitalism during a news report in which the reporter openly speaks in favor of Harbucks' opponents. Cantor said the use of children in the anti-Harbucks commercials demonstrate a liberal tendency to use young people to advance their positions. Economic protectionism, portrayed in the episode as Mr. Tweek seeking a law to ban Harbucks from South Park, is portrayed as a tool used by businessmen to restrict free entry into the marketplace to protect their own profits.

This is a scandal where we can reference both Ghostbusters and one of my favorite episodes of South Park, while criticizing a graph that's been called a hockey stick. If someone could find a way to make a beer or Jessica Alba reference, this might be the Best.Scandal.Ever that didn't involve actors, musicians, or sports stars.