Patterico's Pontifications

4/13/2011

Breitbart’s Book Arrives on My Doorstep

Filed under: Books,General — Patterico @ 9:42 pm



I just got home after being out of town and was pleased to see that a shipment had arrived with:

Although we got in late, and I have work tomorrow, I had to read the first chapter of Andrew’s book. It’s hard to know how I would react to it if I didn’t know him. That’s because, as someone who has talked to Andrew for literally hours and hours, it’s impossible for me to read the book without hearing every sentence as spoken in his voice. My initial reactions: 1) it’s very well written; 2) Andrew rather throws the “New [Faux] Civility” overboard as he describes being a soldier in a war against Big Media’s plot to control the narrative in this country; and . . .

3) I have already determined my favorite page in the book — even though I haven’t gotten there yet. It’s page 155. I won’t give it away, other than to say there is a mention of some guy named Patrick Frey and his “indispensable” (!) website.

And there appears to be a rather elliptical reference there to a guy I will call only Frad Briedman.

I again encourage every Patterico reader to order Andrew’s book:

And if you haven’t done this already, please change your Amazon bookmark to this link:

Amazon Through Patterico

Ordering anything through that link benefits this site at no cost to you. So change your bookmark now!

Budget Deal a Pack of Lies That Saves Nothing

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 8:47 pm



National Review no longer supports the budget deal:

The $38.5 billion includes real cuts, but also a dog’s breakfast of budgetary legerdemain. According to the Associated Press, the deal purports to save $2.5 billion “from the most recent renewal of highway programs that can’t be spent because of restrictions set by other legislation.” It gets another $4.9 billion by capping a reserve fund for the victims of crime that also wasn’t going to be spent this year — a long-standing trick of appropriators. The Washington Post reports that a notional $3.5 billion cut from the Children’s Health Insurance Program “would affect only rewards for states that make an extra effort to enroll children. But officials with knowledge of the budget deal said that most states were unlikely to qualify for the bonuses and that sufficient money would be available for those that did.” And so on.

In other words, they’re lying to us. Again.

Per Hot Air, a CBO analysis says the budget saves something like $352 million. With an “m.”

You know how, when the cell phone company “miscalculates” your bill, it always benefits them? How there’s never an error in your favor?

It seems the same is true of budgets. The surprises are never good ones. They never harm Democrats, either. You never hear: “Oh, we said we were funding NPR and Planned Parenthood, but it turns out that, when you read the fine print, we’re only giving them five bucks.”

The issue isn’t even really the money, which was always paltry anyway. It’s the dishonesty. Those of us who were willing to conserve political capital for a real fight over the Ryan budget are now supposed to trust these lying bastards to fight that fight.

I don’t see how we can. But then, I don’t see what choice we have.

In other words, it’s politics as usual. The kind that makes you suppress wild screams of rage, lest the people in your household roll their eyes and say, “There goes Patrick screaming about politics again.”

As Allahpundit says, this should make for a fun vote tomorrow.

The response to Pres. Obama’s debt speech

Filed under: General — Karl @ 7:18 am



[Posted by Karl]

A speech is not a budget.

Pres. Obama’s speech on our exploding national debt, though scheduled for today, was much discussed yesterday. Much of the discussion missed both the immediate point and the larger picture. Ed Morrissey and many others on the right echoed the subtext of the WaPo piece regarding Obama’s general failure to lead. Progressives like Jonathan Cohn and Paul Krugman worried that a presidential embrace of the Bowles-Simpson commission’s work would define the center of the debt debate too far to the right. A few libs, like Greg Sargent, hoped the ambiguous statements coming out of the White House meant that Obama would propose something more progressive than Bowles-Simpson, to push the debate leftward. And Andrew Sullivan thinks Obama’s speech will prove that his decision not to back Bowles-Simpson in his State of the Union or budget “was tactical, not strategic.”

But the first key to understanding the nature of Obama’s speech was right there in the lede: (more…)

Climate Predictions Come Up Short, Example #2,453

Filed under: General — Aaron Worthing @ 7:17 am



[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.  Or by Twitter @AaronWorthing.]

It feels like it’s been a while since I have done one of these posts, so it is worth taking a moment to start with first principles.  The subject of the environment is one of those areas where I respectfully disagree with Patrick.  As I wrote in December:

My default is that the government cannot take away our freedom until and unless they prove that it is justified.  Environmental laws inevitably take away our freedom.  So the government as a matter of practice should not impose such regulations unless it can prove that the dangers it is guarding against are real.

And when it comes to “climate change,” the scientific process is so broken we cannot trust the doom-mongers.  And the proof of that is how they continually and spectacularly get their predictions wrong:

I wouldn’t fault them from staying out of the prediction game.  But they make that prediction and turn out to be wrong, time and again.  They claim to know what the future will be, and are proven wrong, again and again.  They can’t predict two weeks from now.  They can’t predict the climate one year from now.  But we are supposed to trust their predictions into the next century?

Further, the fact that no other scientist contradicts them is damning, too.  For instance, the other day NASA unveiled a claim that they discovered a new form of bacteria that uses arsenic in its DNA.  This was a tremendous deal, if true.  And now we are seeing that assertion questioned, as scientists come out questioning the science behind the claims.  Now I won’t pretend to know who is right in that food fight, but this is what you expect to see when science is operating properly—that when scientists hold a press conference and start getting things wrong, that other scientists speak up and tell us this.  The fact that these climate scientists very publicly make a string of clearly erroneous predictions, and no one contradicts them (except the so-called deniers) says to me that the scientific process has been corrupted.

So this is familiar ground and the only question is what prediction is proven wrong today.  And it’s a doozy:

In 2005, the United Nations Environment Programme predicted that climate change would create 50 million climate refugees by 2010. These people, it was said, would flee a range of disasters including sea level rise, increases in the numbers and severity of hurricanes, and disruption to food production.

The UNEP even provided a handy map. The map shows us the places most at risk including the very sensitive low lying islands of the Pacific and Caribbean.

It so happens that just a few of these islands and other places most at risk have since had censuses, so it should be possible for us now to get some idea of the devastating impact climate change is having on their populations.

Read the whole thing, but the short version is this: the reports of an impending wave of climate refugees was greatly exaggerated.  I mean there was New Orleans and…  that’s pretty much it.  Everywhere else people were supposed to flee from as the ocean would come crashing into their cities…  well, the ocean didn’t come in and thus there was no need to flee.

Which brings up another point.  Al “Crazed Sex Poodle” Gore and the IPCC both won a Nobel Prize in 2007 “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.”  The theory went something like this.  Global warming will cause things like refugee crises, which will somehow lead to war.  So given that these crises have never materialized…  shouldn’t they give their awards back?

[Posted and authored by Aaron Worthing.]


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