I'd have everyone named 'Brach' set upon by wild dogs.  They make those little candy hearts with 'Be my Valentine' on them and they taste like untamed a$$.  'But...but Darth, that isn't reason enough to have them harmed.' you might say.  Well, they make Candy Corn too.

keeps me informed about the important saints' days:

http://www.gotmedieval.com/2010/02/february-feast-calendar-part-2.html

February 22 marks the Feast of the Cathedra of St. Peter. Before you go proofreading me in the comments thread, I spelled that correctly.  It’s not the feast of the cathedral of St. Peter, but rather of his cathedra, or in English, his chair.  That’s right, the medieval Catholics had a feast to honor the chair that Peter sat on.  In fact, February 22 is the second feast on the liturgical calendar dedicated to a piece of furniture that Peter sat on–January 18 celebrates the chair of St. Peter kept in Rome, while the later feast is devoted to his chair in Antioch.

This exists, and so I'm going to have to acknowledge that we do live in the best of all possible worlds.

The Heartland Institute — a self-described "think tank" that actually serves in part as a way for climate change denialism to get funded — has a potentially embarrassing situation on their hands. Someone going by the handle "Heartland Insider" has anonymously released quite a few of what are claimed to be internal documents from Heartland, revealing the Institute’s strategies, funds, and much more.

Here's the Heartland Institute on the release of those Climategate emails a couple of years back:

The release of these documents creates an opportunity for reporters, academics, politicians, and others who relied on the IPCC to form their opinions about global warming to stop and reconsider their position. The experts they trusted and quoted in the past have been caught red-handed plotting to conceal data, hide temperature trends that contradict their predictions, and keep critics from appearing in peer-reviewed journals. This is new and real evidence that they should examine and then comment on publicly.

It's wrong to keep opposing views out of influential publications, did you say?

Here's a bit from an HI memo regarding media strategy:

Efforts at places such as Forbes are especially important now that they have begun to allow high-profile climate scientists (such as [Peter] Gleick) to post warmist science essays that counter our own. This influential audience has usually been reliably anti-climate and it is important to keep opposing voices out.

Also included in the haul are donor lists, details about a skeptical-about-climate-science school curriculum HI is developing, and lists of recipients of HI funds.

Oh, also too: Warmist?

Are the memoes real or not? I'm leaning toward "not" as the opposite is just too good to be true.

"Present your papers--er, lunch for inspection, please."

It should go without saying that people should be fired for this.

[url=http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2012/02/santorum-sells]He's supports Rick's run for POTUS[/url]

Dave Mustaine isn't exactly the 1st in line of 80's/90's rockers that I'd think of as a Santorum man. Peace sells, but Santurum ain't buyin'. But Dave likes him nonetheless.

Floyd Mayweather has been asking for a beatdown for years now--I suspect that he didn't expect it to come from this particular source.

. . .I'm always up for a bit of Sean Penn bashing in the morning.

It appears that first-time unemployment claims have hit their lowest level since May of 2008.  The four-week moving average is just a smidgen over 350k, at which point we'll be well and truly into a labor market recovery.  Oh, and housing starts are also up year over year (thought still at a low level).

And, just for Catchy:

Obama promises not to demonize Wall Street.

Jim Messina, President Barack Obama's campaign manager, assured a group of Democratic donors from the financial services industry that Obama won’t demonize Wall Street as he stresses populist appeals in his re-election campaign, according to two people at the meeting.

So...

Unemployment is falling and all the indices are starting to look healthy.  Europe will continue to bleed slowly and go into something of a recession, but not a pant-sh*ting financial apocalypse.  Provided there's no China surprise, it looks like the burning issue of the 2012 campgaign may wind up being...

Non-generative sex.

http://reason.com/blog/2012/02/16/rick-santorum-against-contraception-agai?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+reason%2FHitandRun+%28Reason+Online+-+Hit+%26+Run+Blog%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher

Face-palm. For what little I pay attention to horse-race news, articles like this one make me regret what attention I actually give. Is this how you win votes? Pathetic.

...for *somebody,* *anybody,* here to notice the Obama adminstration's blatant anti-Catholic *putsch* - forcing all of the church's wonderful & honorable health-care instititutions not only to tolerate, but even to subsidize, things that they cannot, by their nature, accept...

What's up with that?

[url=http://gawker.com/5885630/politico-mistakes-state-flag-for-union-flag-idiocy-ensues]"Politico Mistakes State Flag for Union Flag"[/url]

[url=http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/02/16/10421869-commemorative-bob-mcdonnell-vaginal-ultrasound-probes]Vriginia might pass a bill requiring a women to have a foreign object probed inside their vagina at least 10 days* before they have an induced abortion[/url]

[url=http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/virginia-ultrasound-bill-6655944]* 10 days[/url]

on the Greek crisis. That guy can really be out of control brilliant. http://crookedtimber.org/2012/02/16/so-what-would-your-plan-for-greece-be/

Those whores have it coming sez the small government GOP.

http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/article/2012/02/15/government-sanctioned-r...

It's a freedom probe!

[IMG]http://i.imgur.com/ComiA.png[/IMG]

Small government! Small government! Small government! Small government!

SCOTUS will be facing the question this year of whether the individual mandate should be struck down and whether it is severable from the rest of the healthcare bill.

According to the RAND Corp., the mandate is clearly severable:

"... the number of Americans predicted to get coverage in 2016 under the Affordable Care Act would drop from 27 million to 15 million if the individual mandate were eliminated.

Despite that drop, the study estimates that eliminating the individual mandate would increase an individual’s cost of buying insurance through the individual exchanges by just 2.4 percent."

http://www.rand.org/news/press/2012/02/16.html

or have reproductive issues been in the news and such a lot over the last few weeks, and from several different angles?

Space Nazis from the moon! Versus Sarah Palin!

"Col. John H. Glenn Jr. has just taken off in his rocket for orbit. Please say a prayer for him."

"We need five more chairs here." Yes, sir--yes we do.

(and the version with a few liberties taken with history)

Much like PETA would have been well advised to sit back and STFU while everyone else was justifiably savaging Michael Vick, this sad event might well have put the Heart Attack Grill on a slow path to oblivion if the Food Police had just sat back and let people draw their own conclusions about what had happened. Since they couldn't, I predict that the Heart Attack Grill will be doing better business than ever in six months. Sometimes it pays to have the right enemies.

Today, we look at a phrase and how to and how not to properly use it:

Using "chink in the armor" to refer to literal damage to armor, or as a metaphor for a defect in a defense that is not the Great Wall of China: Not racist--anyone who says otherwise is a PC-addled moron who can be safely ignored and/or mocked.

Using "chink in the armor" to refer to Jeremy Lin finally having a bad game: Yes, racist--at the very least, some people need to be yelled at, and they might want to consider updating their resumes, given that ESPN is not shy about using the ejector seat on inconvenient fools.

Next time: baseball broadcasting and proper usage of the word "balls."*

*--RIP, George Carlin.

[url=http://news.yahoo.com/santorum-says-obama-agenda-not-based-bible-011457960.html]Santorum says "(Obama) is imposing his values on the Christian church[/url]

"the Christian church" is that a synonym for the RCC?

Or was he going for the Ohio State University kind of feel since he was in Columbus, Ohio?

Why are gas prices going up even though gasoline usage in America is down?  Could it be because there are over a billion Chinese using oil, or a lot of consumers in the emerging markets?

No, it's Wall Street's fiendish plot to bring down Obama.

Call it high Broderism, call it concern trolling, but I'm sick of conspiratorial nonsense from everyone.  I'm sick of people ranting about how Obama is going to start putting people in concentration camps, just as I was sick of hearing about how Bush was going to use Diebold voting machines to bring about a dictatorship.

when someone told Sheriff Babeu to "screw the Mexicans" there was a horrible misunderstanding

Linsanity is fun to follow:  

. . .I can't imagine how trusting those nice Occupy people went wrong.

[closed-captioned for the sarcasm-impaired and those in denial]

Apparently, soft drinks are racist. It's like being back at UCLA in the mid-1980s, where being seen drinking a Coke was enough to spur accusations of being racist against black South Africans (for the younger readers here, Google "divestment" and "South Africa" for all the sordid details).

Cute ones, too.

Forced by a labor shortage and pressure offshore (link).

On contraception and abortion:

To begin with, a lack of contraceptive access simply doesn’t seem to be a significant factor in unplanned pregnancy in the United States. When the Alan Guttmacher Institute surveyed more than 10,000 women who had procured abortions in 2000 and 2001, it found that only 12 percent cited problems obtaining birth control as a reason for their pregnancies. A recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study of teenage mothers found similar results: Only 13 percent of the teens reported having had trouble getting contraception.

At the same time, if liberal social policies really led inexorably to fewer unplanned pregnancies and thus fewer abortions, you would expect “blue” regions of the country to have lower teen pregnancy rates and fewer abortions per capita than demographically similar “red” regions.

But that isn’t what the data show. Instead, abortion rates are frequently higher in more liberal states, where access is often largely unrestricted, than in more conservative states, which are more likely to have parental consent laws, waiting periods, and so on. “Safe, legal and rare” is a nice slogan, but liberal policies don’t always seem to deliver the “rare” part.

What’s more, another Guttmacher Institute study suggests that liberal states don’t necessarily do better than conservative ones at preventing teenagers from getting pregnant in the first place. Instead, the lower teenage birth rates in many blue states are mostly just a consequence of (again) their higher abortion rates. Liberal California, for instance, has a higher teen pregnancy rate than socially conservative Alabama; the Californian teenage birth rate is only lower because the Californian abortion rate is more than twice as high.

No evidence that it contaminates groundwater, but it pollutes in similar ways as other drilling methods (link).

and

[url=http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/20/opinion/krugman-pain-without-gain.html]"Pain Without Gain"[/url]

Gleick's career and credibility shredded.

the U.S. is relatively progressive.

The labor market is dysfunctional. Workers can't bargain for any increased compensation despite increased productivity and exploding profits. Only government policy deliberately designed to offset this dynamic can fix it.[img=440x440]http://www.econbrowser.com/archives/2012/02/erp20121.gif[/img]

New Law Requires Women to Name Baby, Paint Nursery Before Getting an Abortion

http://www.theonion.com/video/new-law-requires-women-to-name-baby-paint-...

[url=http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/21/health/aging-of-eyes-is-blamed-in-circadian-rhythm-disturbances.html?_r=1]link[/url]