ADAA Presents: Super Tuesday Bowl 2008!

 
The American Dodgeball Association of America, America's finest Dodgeball Assocation, presents...

SUPER TUESDAY BOWL, 2008, the Dodgeball Tournament that pits the two Democratic Presidential front-runners against the two top GOP contenders...

...And now your hosts for this breathtaking event, Cotton McKnight and color man Pepper Brooks!

Thank you! Welcome, folks to Super Tuesday Bowl 2008. I'm Cotton McKnight with Dodgeball legend Pepper Brooks.

Yippy ka-yay, m[bleep]-[bleep]ers! Back to you, Cotton!

That's why Pro Dodgeball is on a five-second tape delay, folks. Pepper, break down this intriguing match-up for us.

No-problemo, cucaracha! The Democratic Purple Cobras have a beguiling combination of youth and experience with up-and-coming superstar Barack "Saddam" Obama and long-time standout Hillary "Saddlebags" Clinton.

And what about the underdogs, the Republican Average Joes?

Fascinating pairing, Cotton! More complex than a Rubik's Cube painted all one color! We've got the up-and-comer Mitt "The Hammer" Romney, representing the new guard of conservative thinking along with John "Two Parties" McCain. Of course, McCain almost joined the Purple Cobras a few years ago and many believe he'll become a spoiler this year!

A spoiler? How so, Pepper?

Remember, in political Dodgeball, there are no f[bleep]g rules, Cotton! During the match, McCain could actually switch sides, join up with the Purple Cobras, and start pounding Romney!

Wow, that's what makes this sport so great! The unpredictability... the action... the body parts scattered on the pitch after a match! Well, folks we're ready... here's Michael Bufffer to announce the start of the match!

Ladies and gentlemen......... welcome to Suuuuuuuuper Tuesday Bowl 2008. And now let's introduce the principals. Wearing the blue and purple of the Democratic Purple Cobras... Hillary "Cattle Futures" Clinton and Barack "Rezko" Obamaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

Wearing the red and yellow of the Republican Average Joes... Mitt "the Comeback Kid" Romney and John "Keating Five" McCaaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiiiiiin!

And now, Dub Lite Beer and Aztlan-brand Dip'n'suck Tequila-Tortilla Chips are proud to present Super Tuesday Bowl 2008! For the thousands in attendance, and the millions watching around the world... let's get ready to Dodgeball!

Purple Cobras - ready? Average Joes - ready? Dodgeball!!!

Whoa, Pepper, they're cobra-quick! Clinton and Obama grab their balls and we're off!

I can't believe this, Cotton, McCain is hiding behind Romney! I've never seen that before!

Hillary, sensing an opportunity, strikes like the proverbial Chinese espionage agent!!

You're goin' down like a sweet muffin, Romney!

Hillary's throw goes low. Romney ignore Clinton's taunt, catches it on the bounce and fires!

Obama is... frozen... unprepared... his inexperience showing... OUCH!!! Wow, did he get tagged!

Cotton, Obama just got lit up like Happy Hour at Ted Kennedy's house!

Oh, look out! Hillary winds up and fires!

McCain, still hiding behind Romney! Hillary's throw narrowly misses Mitt!

McCain retrieves, throws... weak throw, almost a toss... Hillary grabs it! McCain's out!

It's almost like he wanted to lose to Hillary, Cotton! Now it's just Hillary and Romney, mano-y-mano!

And Romney unleashes a rocket!

Hillary dives, trying to catch it!

Whoa!!! She misses it! She's out! She's out! And Romney wins!

What an adrenaline rush! Cotton, I haven't seen anything like this since the Mongolians got upset by South Park in '99! Pepper needs to change his shorts!

I've got to say that Romney was impressive - the teams are congratulating each other now...

It was hard to tell whose team McCain was on out there, Pepper!

True dat, Cotton. Tru dat.

Well that's it for Super Tuesday Bowl 2008. Join us next week when Hillary Clinton and John McCain join forces in an exhibition match against Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson.

Linked by: Instapundit and Jules Crittenden. Thanks!

Crushing Al Gore and his UN global warming profiteers

 
Christopher Monckton shreds the UN's IPCC, the body behind "global warming" hysteria. Read it all.

As a contributor to the IPCC’s 2007 report, I share the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. Yet I and many of my peers in the British House of Lords - through our hereditary element the most independent-minded of lawmakers - profoundly disagree on fundamental scientific grounds with both the IPCC and my co-laureate’s alarmist movie An Inconvenient Truth, which won this year’s Oscar for Best Sci-Fi Comedy Horror.

Two detailed investigations by Committees of the House confirm that the IPCC has deliberately, persistently and prodigiously exaggerated not only the effect of greenhouse gases on temperature but also the environmental consequences of warmer weather.

My contribution to the 2007 report illustrates the scientific problem. The report’s first table of figures - inserted by the IPCC’s bureaucrats after the scientists had finalized the draft, and without their consent - listed four contributions to sea-level rise. The bureaucrats had multiplied the effect of melting ice from the Greenland and West Antarctic Ice Sheets by 10.

The result of this dishonest political tampering with the science was that the sum of the four items in the offending table was more than twice the IPCC’s published total. Until I wrote to point out the error, no one had noticed. The IPCC, on receiving my letter, quietly corrected, moved and relabeled the erroneous table, posting the new version on the internet and earning me my Nobel prize.

The shore-dwellers of Bali need not fear for their homes. The IPCC now says the combined contribution of the two great ice-sheets to sea-level rise will be less than seven centimeters after 100 years, not seven meters imminently, and that the Greenland ice sheet (which thickened by 50 cm between 1995 and 2005) might only melt after several millennia, probably by natural causes, just as it last did 850,000 years ago. Gore, mendaciously assisted by the IPCC bureaucracy, had exaggerated a hundredfold.

Recently a High Court judge in the UK listed nine of the 35 major scientific errors in Gore’s movie, saying they must be corrected before innocent schoolchildren can be exposed to the movie. Gore’s exaggeration of sea-level rise was one.

Others being peddled at the Bali conference are that man-made “global warming” threatens polar bears and coral reefs, caused Hurricane Katrina, shrank Lake Chad, expanded the actually-shrinking Sahara, etc.

At the very heart of the IPCC’s calculations lurks an error more serious than any of these. The IPCC says: “The CO2 radiative forcing increased by 20 percent during the last 10 years (1995-2005).” Radiative forcing quantifies increases in radiant energy in the atmosphere, and hence in temperature. The atmospheric concentration of CO2 in 1995 was 360 parts per million. In 2005 it was just 5percent higher, at 378 ppm. But each additional molecule of CO2 in the air causes a smaller radiant-energy increase than its predecessor. So the true increase in radiative forcing was 1 percent, not 20 percent. The IPCC has exaggerated the CO2 effect 20-fold.

Why so large and crucial an exaggeration? Answer: the IPCC has repealed the fundamental physicalthe Stefan-Boltzmann equation - that converts radiant energy to temperature. Without this equation, no meaningful calculation of the effect of radiance on temperature can be done. Yet the 1,600 pages of the IPCC’s 2007 report do not mention it once.

The IPCC knows of the equation, of course. But it is inconvenient. It imposes a strict (and very low) limit on how much greenhouse gases can increase temperature. At the Earth’s surface, you can add as much greenhouse gas as you like (the “surface forcing”), and the temperature will scarcely respond.

That is why all of the IPCC’s computer models predict that 10km above Bali, in the tropical upper troposphere, temperature should be rising two or three times as fast as it does at the surface. Without that tropical upper-troposphere “hot-spot”, the Stefan-Boltzmann law ensures that surface temperature cannot change much.

For half a century we have been measuring the temperature in the upper atmosphere - and it has been changing no faster than at the surface. The IPCC knows this, too. So it merely declares that its computer predictions are right and the real-world measurements are wrong. Next time you hear some scientifically-illiterate bureaucrat say, “The science is settled”, remember this vital failure of real-world observations to confirm the IPCC’s computer predictions. The IPCC’s entire case is built on a guess that the absent hot-spot might exist.

Even if the Gore/IPCC exaggerations were true, which they are not, the economic cost of trying to mitigate climate change by trying to cut our emissions through carbon trading and other costly market interferences would far outweigh any possible climatic benefit.

The international community has galloped lemming-like over the cliff twice before. Twenty years ago the UN decided not to regard AIDS as a fatal infection. Carriers of the disease were not identified and isolated. Result: 25 million deaths in poor countries.

Thirty-five years ago the world decided to ban DDT, the only effective agent against malaria. Result: 40 million deaths in poor countries. The World Health Organization lifted the DDT ban on Sept. 15 last year. It now recommends the use of DDT to control malaria. Dr. Arata Kochi of the WHO said that politics could no longer be allowed to stand in the way of the science and the data. Amen to that.

If we take the heroically stupid decisions now on the table at Bali, it will once again be the world’s poorest people who will die unheeded in their tens of millions, this time for lack of the heat and light and power and medical attention which we in the West have long been fortunate enough to take for granted.

If we deny them the fossil-fueled growth we have enjoyed, they will remain poor and, paradoxically, their populations will continue to increase, making the world’s carbon footprint very much larger in the long run.

As they die, and as global temperature continues to fail to rise in accordance with the IPCC’s laughably-exaggerated predictions, the self-congratulatory rhetoric that is the hallmark of the now-useless, costly, corrupt UN will again be near-unanimously parroted by lazy, unthinking politicians and journalists who ought to have done their duty by the poor but are now - for the third time in three decades - failing to speak up for those who are about to die.

My fellow-participants, there is no climate crisis. The correct policy response to a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing. Take courage! Do nothing, and save the world’s poor from yet another careless, UN-driven slaughter.

The Telegraph (2006) has more info.

Even after the "hockey stick" graph was exposed, scientific papers apparently confirming its abolition of the medieval warm period appeared. The US Senate asked independent statisticians to investigate. They found that the graph was meretricious, and that known associates of the scientists who had compiled it had written many of the papers supporting its conclusion.

The UN, echoed by Stern, says the graph isn't important. It is. Scores of scientific papers show that the medieval warm period was real, global and up to 3C warmer than now. Then, there were no glaciers in the tropical Andes: today they're there. There were Viking farms in Greenland: now they're under permafrost. There was little ice at the North Pole: a Chinese naval squadron sailed right round the Arctic in 1421 and found none.

The Antarctic, which holds 90 per cent of the world's ice and nearly all its 160,000 glaciers, has cooled and gained ice-mass in the past 30 years, reversing a 6,000-year melting trend. Data from 6,000 boreholes worldwide show global temperatures were higher in the Middle Ages than now. And the snows of Kilimanjaro are vanishing not because summit temperature is rising (it isn't) but because post-colonial deforestation has dried the air. Al Gore please note.

In some places it was also warmer than now in the Bronze Age and in Roman times. It wasn't CO2 that caused those warm periods. It was the sun. So the UN adjusted the maths and all but extinguished the sun's role in today's warming.

In Monckton's paper, Apocalypse Cancelled, he calmly lays waste to every facet of Al Gore's propaganda.

ALL TEN of the propositions listed below must be proven true if the climate-change “consensus” is to be proven true. The first article considers the first six of the listed propositions and draws the conclusions shown. The second article will consider the remaining four propositions.

Proposition and Conclusion
1. That the debate is over and all credible climate scientists are agreed. False
2. That temperature has risen above millennial variability and is exceptional. Very unlikely
3. That changes in solar irradiance are an insignificant forcing mechanism. False
4. That the last century’s increases in temperature are correctly measured. Unlikely
5. That greenhouse-gas increase is the main forcing agent of temperature. Not proven
6. That temperature will rise far enough to do more harm than good. Very unlikely
7. That continuing greenhouse-gas emissions will be very harmful to life. Unlikely
8. That proposed carbon-emission limits would make a definite difference. Very unlikely
9. That the environmental benefits of remediation will be cost-effective. Very unlikely
10. That taking precautions, just in case, would be the responsible course. False

In short, Monckton painstakingly deconstructs the hype around global warming. An example: concern about rising sea levels.

By 2005, the following islands had exhibited no rise in sea levels at all for the periods shown (Khandekar et al., 2005):

Johnston Island: no sea level rise for 50 years
Tuvalu: no sea level rise for 48 years
Tarawa, Kiribati: no sea level rise for 24 years
Kanton Island: no sea level rise for 28 years
Nauru: no sea level rise for 26 years
Honiara, Solomons: no sea level rise for 26 years
Saipan: no sea level rise for 22 years

Global warming appears to be nothing less than a UN-backed bunko scam that aims to regulate and control the U.S. economy.

Vermont Hooters Loses Liquor License for Holding Bikini Contest

 
I'm not making this up. Business has been slower than usual at this Vermont Hooter's ever since the Department of Liquor Control suspended its liquor license more than a week ago for actions during a bikini contest last May...

"Vanessa Lamar, who was in the contest, and is working this Sunday, one of the busiest days of the year at Hooter's, says so far, the suspension hasn't affected her tips."

Heh.

Microsoft launches bidding war for Yahoo!

 
The London Times:

Microsoft, the software empire founded by Mr Gates, launched a $44 billion (£22 billion) assault on the search engine with a hostile bid for Yahoo!, Google’s rival, the largest hostile takeover offer seen on Wall Street.

Mr Gates has watched for several years in which Microsoft’s dominance of technology has been superceded by the rise of Google. He made his move after 18 months of fruitless behind-the-scenes talks with Yahoo!

At stake is an estimated £40 billion of online advertising by 2010 – double today’s figure – in what is a last-ditch attempt by Mr Gates to stop Google’s runaway success.

That's a bold strategy, Cotton.

Now Microsoft will own two search engines that no one uses.

Super-caffeinated coffee unveiled in Chicago

 
The Suburban Chicago News describes the effects of "hyper-caffeinated" Shock coffee on consumers.

"I can taste the difference," McBride said as he sipped the high-octane fuel on a subzero day. "It's pretty strong. I figured today I'll give it a shot and see what happens..."

"It gets me going in the morning," Joliet Speedway manager Rich Hale said of Shock Wave. "It has a good taste. It's not real strong."

"That will wake you up," she said as she offered a sample to a groggy reporter.

Putting Barack Obama, John McCain or Hillary Clinton -- but I repeat myself -- in the White House would also tend to have this effect.

Iran: the fourth option

 
Ali Kazemi:

...A government that knows it has majority support does not act the way the IRI has been acting from its very inception. IRI treats Iranians as the enemy, not citizens. They have executed over 150,000 political prisoners. They try their opponents in Revolutionary Courts where the accused have no rights. The judge and the prosecutor are often the same and the prisoners are tortured until they confess. They are executed for charges such as "Fighting the Will of God" or "Spreading Corruption on Earth". The regime's assassins have killed hundreds of Iranian dissidents including many exiles in Europe.

The rulers of Iran have closed most information outlets from the citizens. Access to the Internet is limited and thousands of political websites are blocked by the government. Ownership of satellite dishes is illegal. Hundreds of newspapers and magazines have been shut down. Journalists and bloggers are imprisoned, tortured and killed...

...Mansour Ossanlou is a bus driver in Iran. He wants an independent union for the bus drivers. In May he was imprisoned and savagely beaten (They tried to cut his tongue off.). The bus workers had a strike in protest, but over 3000 government-paid thugs attacked the demonstrators and over 500 of the workers were imprisoned. Unlike [Poland's Lech] Walesa's, Ossanlou's detention has received minimal media attention in the West...

Iran Bulletin has more on the kidnapping of Ossanlou.

If you're an Astronaut's wife, does that qualify you to be an Astronaut?

 
IHT on Hillary's experience:

...during those two terms in the White House, Clinton did not hold a security clearance. She did not attend National Security Council meetings. She was not given a copy of the president's daily intelligence briefing. She did not assert herself on the crises in Somalia, Haiti or Rwanda. And during one of President Bill Clinton's major tests on terrorism, whether to bomb Afghanistan and Sudan in 1998, Clinton was barely speaking to her husband, let alone advising him, as the Lewinsky scandal dragged on...

Hmmm. Impressive experience!

McCain forced to buy life insurance to secure campaign funding

 
The San Francisco Chronicle reports that John McCain was forced to buy a life insurance policy on himself before banks would agree to extend a line of credit to his campaign. This appears to be the first time that financiers required life insurance from a candidate, which raises additional questions vis a vis McCain's health and life expectancy.

In November, John McCain's presidential campaign was broke.

To survive, he offered his fundraising lists as collateral for a $3 million line of credit from a bank. But obtaining the loan required an unusual extra step: He had to take out a special life insurance policy in case he did not survive the campaign.

At the time, the 71-year-old senator's campaign was more than $500,000 in the red, and the line of credit was a pivotal lifeline that allowed him to make a strong showing in New Hampshire and eventually vault into the Republican front-runner's position... Anthony Corrado, a campaign finance expert at Colby College, said he had never heard of a candidate having to secure a loan with a life insurance policy.

...McCain's finance reports provide new details about how desperate his financial situation was after his campaign suffered a seismic shakeup in the middle of the summer.

...According to a week-by-week analysis of contributions and spending, the campaign was $300,000 in debt by early June. Then it slowed its spending and nearly broke even over the summer. But by November, the campaign was in debt again, and it continued to lose money until McCain began drawing on the loan that month.

Further, the loan raises the spectre of ethical questions for McCain:

Cleta Mitchell, a Republican campaign finance lawyer who has been a critic of McCain, said she believes the arrangement raises some serious questions.

"Did they base this loan on the fact that, even if he lost, he would still be a sitting senator and able to raise money?" she asked. "In my mind, that raises questions about whether he complied with Senate ethics rules," which bar members from using their position to negotiate financial terms that an average citizen could not.

Why would the loan officers require life insurance on McCain?

The Astute Bloggers remind us that the 70-year old McCain has been operated on twice for malignant cancer: in 2000 and 2003.

Can you imagine a Hillary riposte to McCain if they're paired up in the general election? "Hey, old-timer, your bank wouldn't even extend a line of credit to you without a life insurance policy. I've got an idea for a life insurance policy for this election: me!"

Update: Commenter jpm100 asks an excellent question: "The fact I dislike McCain aside, what happens if he gets the nomination and dies before November?" Errr, we draw straws?

Stainless Steel Thighs

 
I posted the picture months ago, but it deserves a reprise... especially with the new description in the Home and Beyond catalog.

• A functional, plastic nutcracker with stainless steel teeth secured inside upper legs to grip and crack nuts in their shell.
• The Hillary Nutcracker will stand upright and has internal stainless steel components and spring.
• Stands Nine inches tall
• Feel the Squeeze with Hillary!

I'll answer the question. No, America isn't ready for this particular nutcracker.

Mission Impossible: Save the Republican Party

 
It ain't over, folks.

Email your friends -- all of your friends -- the official candidate comparison chart, below.

Whip it out in the voting booth on Super Tuesday.

Support amnesty or rewards for illegal aliens	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Oppose oil exploration in the US	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Tax gas 50 cents a gallon more for global warming	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Restrict freedom of speech during elections	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Oppose Bush tax cuts	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Close Gitmo, prosecute POWs in U.S. courts	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Surrender Iraq to Iran	Yes	Yes	No	No

Vote accordingly.

Linked by: the irrepressible Don Surber and the prolific Gateway Pundit. Thanks!