… have a great week folks, and thanks to Kate for letting us post while she was gone.
Cheers!

Update:
Obama rivals PM Harper for singing voice:

They’ve got the best cheese in the world. Quelle fierté nationale! Surely time to make a city of their subdivision.
X-posted.

The old standby that “they’re all the same, so why bother voting” has been made irrelevant:

Kay wondered aloud, who would have believed that within the first seven months of the new administration, 90% of all mortgages in the United States would be backed by the federal government (placing the taxpayer at risk for over $5 trillion dollars, I might add). The U.S. government, she said, would also become a major shareholder in one of the world’s largest banks, Citigroup-who would have believed it? In addition, Kay pointed out the feds hostile takeover of General Motors and Chrysler, the sacking of their respective CEO’s, replacing them with political appointees, and then heartlessly closing hundreds of profitable dealerships across the country, many of whose owners were known to have contributed to Republican politicians and conservative causes.
If Kay had told America this would happen upon electing Barack Obama as president, would the country have listened?
I began working off of Kay’s supposition, presenting the same sort of questions to my listeners on KSFO in San Francisco:
“If I told you that if elected, the budget deficit for Barack Obama’s first fiscal year would total $1.6 trillion dollars, and in ten years the predicted national debt would surge to $16 trillion, would you have believed me? And we conservatives thought George Bush had a spending problem,” I declared.

… keep reading “If I had told you.”

More Mmm … Mmm … Mmm:

… on a related note, at least one snippet of good will have come from all this … The Race Card is Dead:

So why is the faux charge of “racist” so freely bandied about — given that polls suggest it is a losing tactic for liberals?
The most obvious reason is that a popular president believed he could enact an unpopular agenda on the basis of his own magnetic personality. When he discovered that he could not — and in the process revealed a pattern of partisanship and intolerance — some of his diehard supporters were flabbergasted by the turn of events and resorted in desperation to the “racist” charge to regain sympathy for both their cause and their president.
Second, liberals never envisioned that they would so quickly regain the House and Senate, as well as the presidency — partly through tough invective and a demonization of both George W. Bush and a Republican “culture of corruption.” Their noble ends were felt to justify their often over-the-top rhetoric. Now they most surely do not wish the same level of street invective legitimized and used against themselves. “Racist!” then serves as a preemptive firewall against possible conflagrations to come.
… more.

Steve, as you’ve never seen him

If you’re up for some lighter fare. Just toying around with Microsoft Movie Maker.

I will not die, it’s the world that will end!
The most dangerous thing in the world today is the universities!
Today’s conservatives are worse than today’s liberals
… because they do not know how to preach capitalism
… because they do nothing but apologize
… because they are all altruistic!

… the rest of the interview.

The science on Global Warming is now, without a doubt, settled … proving that Anthropogenic Global Warming simply doesn’t exist to the extent we’ve been led to believe … and if it does exist as a phenomenon, there is no definitive proof of it.
Robust examination of the facts has settled the science … that being, that the science is not settled:
The following is taken from the Financial Post; be sure to read the whole thing:

I have been probing the arguments for global warming for well over a decade. In collaboration with a lot of excellent coauthors I have consistently found that when the layers get peeled back, what lies at the core is either flawed, misleading or simply non-existent. The surface temperature data is a contaminated mess with a significant warm bias, and as I have detailed elsewhere the IPCC fabricated evidence in its 2007 report to cover up the problem. Climate models are in gross disagreement with observations, and the discrepancy is growing with each passing year. The often-hyped claim that the modern climate has departed from natural variability depended on flawed statistical methods and low-quality data. The IPCC review process, of which I was a member last time, is nothing at all like what the public has been told: Conflicts of interest are endemic, critical evidence is systematically ignored and there are no effective checks and balances against bias or distortion.

More Reading from Jennifer Marohasy:

This week’s claims by Steve McInyre that scientists associated with the UK Met. Office have been less than diligent are serious and suggest some of the most defended building blocks of the case for anthropogenic global warming are based on the indefensible when the methodology is laid bare.
This sorry saga also raises issues associated with how data is archived at the UK Met. Office with incomplete data sets that spuriously support the case for global warming being promoted while complete data sets are kept hidden from the public – including from scientific sceptics like Steve McIntyre.
It is indeed time leading scientists at the Climate Research Centre associated with the UK Met. Office explain how Mr McIntyre is in error or resign.

Science always wins … always!
A good source for helping the debate stay focused is the Skeptic’s Handbook. (source)