Monday, April 27, 2015

You can come fisking too


A 30% increase in hurricane damage over the rest of the century. Via Jeff Masters.
BooMan made me look at PowerLine, so you can blame this on him.
There has been quite a bit of news coverage of this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Don’t ask me why.
Just let me get on with giving it some more, huh?
But this year’s event was perhaps notable because it exposed our president’s bitterness, as he approaches the end of his term.
Bitterness? I totally missed that. I've heard "stellar" and "hilarious" (from Fox News!), extremely biting, mentally agile and attentive, and deprecating yet still somehow smug and vicious, but that one is new.
Humor is often revealing. Obama began with a joke that would be considered crude in a junior high school locker room:
After the midterm elections, my advisors asked me, “Mr. President, do you have a bucket list?” And I said, “Well, I have something that rhymes with bucket list.’” (Laughter and applause.) Take executive action on immigration? Bucket. (Laughter.) New climate regulations? Bucket. It’s the right thing to do. (Laughter and applause.)
I guess old Assrocket must spend more time in junior high school locker rooms than I do. Last time I was in one, that line would have been regarded as overly subtle, but perhaps they've become more refined over the decades.
If I had said something like that when I was 12, my father would have whacked me.
If Obama were 12, he probably wouldn't be addressing the White House Correspondents' Dinner. Are you indirectly calling him "boy"?

I'm not going through the whole thing, which climaxes, as Boo notes, with the revelation that Hinderaker totally missed the news story about James Inhofe proving that global warming is a hoax by throwing a snowball on the Senate floor:
And “snowballs in the Senate”? What is that supposed to mean? Just another gratuitous partisan insult, added on top of scientific fantasy. That’s our president!
You'd know what it means if you bothered to read something outside your bubble.

He also alleges that
the Kochs don’t spend anywhere near a billion dollars
though their plans to spend "nearly a billion dollars" in the 2016 presidential election were reported in the Washington Post, in addition to more or less everywhere else, in January.

He affects to think Obama's "nine of the ten hottest years ever" refers to the planet's entire four and a half billion years (and is therefore quite wrong) when everybody knows it refers back to the beginning of systematic records in 1880. He notes blandly that sea levels have been rising for 12,000 years without noting that the rise essentially stopped five or six thousand years ago and covering up the fact that the rise has been catastrophically faster since the mid-19th century due to carbon consumption and the rate is increasing all the time.

He claims without citing a source that
 in recent years there has been less violent storm action than normal 
although it is well known that precipitation intensity and variability have been increasing dangerously, owing to global warming.

And cites as his authority for what "every serious scientist says" on the possibilities of mitigating global warming none other than the fossil fuel stooge Dr. Judith Curry, who has been utterly discredited for the past five years.

So that to me the funniest line in Hinderaker's post is this:
When it comes to climate, Obama has no idea what he is talking about.
So funny I forgot to laugh.


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