The original Messiah selflessly died for his disciples’ sins, so it’s truly touching to see how eager today’s disciples are to return the favor. The new meme seems to be to ignore whatever outlandish claim the Obamessiah may make, and pretend he said something far more sensible instead. The virtual ink had barely dried on Powerline’s fact-checking of Time’s lame defense of the Gaffemaster when Mark Silva of the Chicago Tribune chimed in with an even more outlandish defense of the same:

After all the grief that Obama has taken from the RNC and from rival John McCain this week over the Democrat’s comment that motorists could save some more oil if only they put some more air in their tires, it turns out a search of the clips — conducted by a motivated party — has found that the administraiton [sic, three layers of editors notwithstanding] of President Bush — George H.W. Bush — was telling Americans the same thing back in 1990.

Note how easily and effortlessly this alleged journalist managed to convert Barack Obama’s howler about proper tire inflation supposedly saving “all the oil that they’re talking about getting off drilling” into a common-sense observation that it could save “some more oil.” No, duh. Of course it can save “some more oil.” If all Obama had said last week was that proper tire inflation could save “some more oil,” or that good maintenance is generally a good idea, there would be no controversy now. Math may not be Mr. Silva’s forte, but here’s a free clue: “some oil” does not equal “all the oil that they’re talking about getting off,” nor does it come close.

This sleight of hand is reminiscent of the Gorons who defended their Messiah’s outlandish claim to have “[taken] the initiative in creating the Internet” by pointing out that he had sponsored some legislation to promote it, decades after others had taken the intiative in creating it. Gore was never the media darling that Obama is, so he took his share of ridicule over that infamous quote, tempered by the fact that it was frequently misquoted and for some, the fact that he was widely misquoted was bigger news than the goofy quote he had actually made. As for Obama, one has to wonder if there is any claim so outlandish that he could not make it and expect his disciples in the media to try. If anyone working for the Obama campaign is reading this, here’s how to test my theory: feed some line into Obama’s teleprompter stating that all experts agree that an apple a day will increase your life expectancy by 230 years. We’ll have our laughs for a few days, buttressed by even more laughs when Barack tries to turn it around by claiming Republicans are opposed to healthy diets. Within a week, some “journalist” from Time, Newsweek or the Chicago Tribune will come back claiming Obama was right after all, because some obscure bureaucrat from the Eisenhower Administration made a vague pronouncement that apples really are good for you.

But did some some obscure bureaucrat from the Bush-41 Administration actually say “the same thing” as Obama is saying now? Per this alleged journalist’s article, the answer would be … mmmmmm … no. We didn’t have YouTube in 1990, so the PSA itself is not on the web, but according to the N.Y. Times article:

The new public service announcements give drivers tips on how they can save gasoline. One television ad, which will be broadcast later this year, shows a gigantic oil gusher that is not coming from a well, but bursting forth from the valve on a tire. The announcer tells viewers that by slightly increasing the air pressure slightly in their tires, they can save 50,000 barrels of oil each day.

Well, hey! There’s your smoking gun right there, as 50,000 barrels of oil a day constitutes “some” oil, and so does “all the oil that they’re talking about getting off.” Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to quantify that “some” by determining how many years it would take us, at a rate of 50,000 barrels a day, to save as much oil through proper tire inflation as we would hope to obtain from the shale and the Outer Continental Shelf combined. [I deliberately left out ANWR since Obama's "they" presumably includes McCain, who is scared to death of that place.]

UPDATE: Dave Price has more.

Recently the NRA challenged Philadelphia’s five illegal gun ordinances in court. The court struck down two, while dismissing challenges to the other three for lack of standing. There appear to be three schools of thought on standing:

1. Uncle view: “Standing” is legalese for “I would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for you damn meddling kids.”
2. Xrlq view: Standing is legalese for “Don’t you think we have enough friggin’ lawsuits in this country as it is?! Just imagine what screwy decisions we’d get if courts were open to people who had no stake in the issue being decided, or perhaps even hoped they’d ‘lose!’”
3. Philadelphia Metro view: Standing is legalese for “Court gives city right to enforce some gun laws.”

   H/t: David Hardy.

… how much Dan Besse’s campaign had to pay the Whizz Urinal not only to endorse him themselves, but also to run five letters praising him and zero letters opposing him on a single day.

Today’s Winston-Salem Journal suggests there is some kind of competition among papers over who can be the most obnoxiously liberal while pretending to report news. Today’s top front-page story by Sean Mussenden and Bertrand M. Gutierrez carries the following headline and byline:

Minorities Most Affected by Foreclosures

For risky loans, a lesson in black and white

Oh. My. God. Can you believe those evil lenders are actually taking people’s houses away on account of the color of their skin rather than the contents of their character bank accounts? I can’t believe that in 2008, lenders would actually foreclose on houses just because the owner checked “black” (or worse, “I do not wish to furnish this information”) on the original loan application.

Oh wait, that’s not what they’re doing after all, never mind. Apparently, it’s the subprime mortgages that cause foreclosures. Give a man a regular mortgage at a good rate, and he’ll never default. Give the same guy a subprime mortgage, and we will:

Mortgage lenders were more likely to sell subprime loans to Hispanics and blacks than to whites during the recent housing boom. As a result, minorities are at a greater risk than whites of losing their homes as the real-estate downturn accelerates.

Silly me, I always thought that the causal arrow between subprime mortgages and high foreclosure rates pointed the other direction, but what do I know?

No word yet from the evil industry, who must be hiding in the shadows somewhere, so here’s the obligatory sob story instead:

[Current homeowner and non-foreclosee Terri] Martin nearly lost her $71,300 home in the Waughtown area of Winston-Salem two years ago after the interest rate on her subprime mortgage jumped to 11 percent, leaving her with monthly payments of more than $800. A lawyer helped her renegotiate the terms to avoid foreclosure.

I’m sure my California readers are heartbroken to read that a monthly mortgage payment adjusted all the way up to $800 and beyond. I mean, that’s almost as much as I paid for a two-bedroom apartment while living on student loans in law school!

“If I did not have God on my side, I probably would have committed suicide,” said Martin, a school-bus driver and mental-health worker. “I was fighting to keep my house, and all my income that I did have coming in was going to pay my mortgage and to keep my other bills here going, so, yeah, it was rough.”

Rough indeed, for someone living on an income that in many parts of the country won’t qualify you to own a home at all.

So why did Ms. Martin’s non-foreclosure almost happen? You have to go to the bottom of page 16, well after the “jump,” to find out. We’ll get to Ms. Martin’s details in a minute, but first a more general announcement from the don’t-confuse-us-with-factivists:

Fair-lending advocates and civil-rights groups see parallels in the current subprime gap to other racially tinged historical lending patterns.

In past years, blacks and Hispanics have had difficulty getting mortgages, in part because some banks were reluctant to build branches or loan money in minority neighborhoods, especially poorer ones. The practice is known as “redlining.”

Right, ‘cuz everybody knows that if there’s one thing lenders like better than making as much money as they possibly can, it’s deliberately making less money by intentionally withholding services from a discrete segment of otherwise qualified borrowers. That worked great for decades, but eventually, a few lenders lost religion and started making even more money by selling subprime loans to the same people again. Now the whole industry is in the crapper, in no small part because they now own a gazillion crappy houses no one wants to buy in crappy neighborhoods no one wants to live in. All because a few lenders stopped “redlining” and started selling loans to whoever could (barely) qualify for them.

Near the bottom of p. 16, the authors take a quick breather and allow a little tidbit of token reasonableness as a special reward for the highly motivated readers who made it all the way through the lengthy article:

Mortgage-industry officials say that economics - not racism - explains the subprime gap. On average, minorities have lower credit scores, smaller incomes and fewer assets than whites, making them riskier customers in the eyes of the industry.

Wait, let’s see if I understand this. People with lower credit scores, smaller incomes and fewer assets are riskier customers to lend money to than people with high credit scores, higher incomes and more stuff? Really? Apparently so, at least “in the eyes of the industry,” even if the rest of us know better.

“Race is not a factor,” said Jay Brinkmann, the vice president for research and economics of the Mortgage Bankers Association, the leading industry group. “I’ve often wondered how you would ever get an entire industry to collude on a discriminatory practice.”

Oh, that’s easy. Just get Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and a few of the other usual suspects to make the allegation at least three times, and voilà, the lie becomes the truth.

Finally, finally, at the very end of the screed they explain what got Martin in trouble in the first place. Hint: it’s not race (unless, of course, you think “clueless” is a race):

Martin bought her house in the Waughtown area eight years ago. She didn’t know back then the difference between a fixed rate and an adjustable rate. She just liked the brick house on a corner lot.

In other words, it’s that evil, racist lender’s fault that for eight long years, Martin couldn’t or wouldn’t figure out on her own that fixed-rate mortgages have rates that are fixed, while adjustable rate mortgages have rates that can be … oh, I dunno …. adjusted?! Suddenly I’m having no trouble at all understanding why polls show this country on the brink of electing a President who doesn’t know that Al Qaeda In Iraq is either (1) part of al Qaeda, or (2) in Iraq. It is still “we, the people,” right?

[Full disclosure: I have never worked in the lending industry, but have worked for two companies affiliated with major lenders. No, I won't tell you who they are, and no, I sure as hell don't speak for them or any other employer, past or present.]

Allah catches Jerry Rivers in a whopper, in which Jerry falsely promised that Zina Linnik’s family would speak out on why Terapon Adhahn’s “immigrant” label should be replaced by “monster,” followed by a segment with her uncle in which Adhahn’s immigrant status didn’t come up at all (and in which the uncle would have taken the opposite view if it had). At the end of the segment, Rivers doubles down, demanding that Michelle Maglalang apologize for being an anti-immigrant (not anti-illegal immigrant, just plain anti-immigrant) extremist who thinks Adhahn’s detention by ICE has anything to do with whether he is in the country legally or should have been deported after his earlier crimes. It’s way past time for FoxNews to give Jerry the boot.

As an aside, I’m sure some will object to my use of the name “Jerry Rivers” to describe the guy who calls himself Geraldo Rivera, noting that “Jerry Rivers” never really was his real name. On the one hand, it might be worthwhile to point out that Bill Clinton’s legal name also was never really “Bubba” or “Slick,” Hillary’s was never really “Hildebeest,” John Edwards’s was never really “The Breck Girl”, and Vladimir Putin’s was certainly never “Pooty-Poot.” On the other, a careful, thorough and appropriately defensive reading of Snopes’s purported debunking shows that the Jerry Rivers story, much like Al Gore’s Internet, is mostly correct, and wrong only on a relatively minor detail. In the case of Al Gore, that minor detail is the fact that he technically didn’t claim to have “invented” the Internet, but did make an equally preposterous claim to have “created” it. In the case of Jerry Rivers, it is true that his last name was never “Rivers,” but it is also true that it wasn’t Rivera, either, and that he did indeed change both it and his first name to play up his Puerto Rican heritage when it suited him. It’s also worth noting, however, that Jerry Riviera’s father really did have the surname “Rivera,” which would have become Jerry’s original surname if not for his mother’s equally lame effort to downplay his Puerto Rican heritage earlier in his life. So when it comes to playing cheap identity politics, I guess you can see this particular apple didn’t fall too far from the tree.

Others will object to the fact that I referred to Michelle Malkin as Michelle Maglalang, on the grounds that Maglalang really was once her last name, and arguably still is (see, e.g., the copyright notice in In Defense of Internment). I guess there’s just no pleasing some people.

Last and least, it’s worth noting that unlike both the perp and the victim in this horrible case, neither Jerry Riviera/Rivera nor Michelle Maglalang/Malkin technically qualifies as an immigrant. Based on their original surnames, however, I’ll give you three guesses as to which of them is closer to being an immigrant, and the first two guesses don’t count.

UPDATE: Michelle responds.

UPDATE x2: Apparently, Jerry Riviera has minions in the blogosphere. This one, who cares so much about poor Zina that he can’t even spell her last name, finds it “darned inconvenient” for some straw version of Malkin that Adhahn “is NOT an illegal Mexican, but rather a legal resident from Thailand, and 8-year member of the elite Army Rangers.” These factoids should come in really handy if the guy ever encounters anyone who seriously believes that (1) only Mexican immigrants should be deported, (2) no legal immigrants should ever be deported, even upon conviction of serious crimes, and (3) none of these rules apply to Army Rangers anyway.

I’ve had to to there with “sunshine” laws in general, and their pollyannish names in particular. Society has long outgrown its fetish with real sunshine, too little of which can be problematic but too much of which causes everything from sunburn to melanoma. We (meaning all rational individuals, myself included) know damned well what too much literal sunshine can do; it’s part of the reason our homes and offices have roofs over them, for chrissake. Yet somehow we (and by that I mean the smarmy, non-royal “we,” which means either “you idiots” or “those idiots,” not any group of individuals that includes myself) seem to forget that the same problems exist with the figurative version of sunshine, i.e., the naive notion that disclosing stuff is always good.

News media are, unsurprisingly, among the worst offenders. In the big leagues, papers like the New York Times (and, to a lesser degree, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times) got the brilliant idea to publish every detail they could about the NSA wiretaps and the SWIFT program, both of which had until then been effective tools in the global war on something even more dangerous than Lite-Brites. Here in bush league territory, Christian Tejbal of the Roanoke Times thinks small and goes after ordinary citizens instead. Specifically, his idea of how to celebrate “Sunshine Week” was to liken Virginians with concealed handgun permits to registered sex offenders and publish their names and home addresses as punishment for exercising their Second Amendment rights.

The list stayed up for about a day, inviting comments. Here’s mine (the one they published):

Christian, your snotty article and your gross invasion of law abiding citizens’ privacy requires one of two actions:

1. Explain what the hell kind of good it was supposed to do for anyone other than the violent ex-lovers some CHP holders were trying to get away from (and whose violent exes now know where they live) or
2. Admit that you are an irresponsible jerk who has no business being a journalist.

Here’s the unpublished one that followed:

Christian Tejbal should be fired, as should anyone else who approved his boneheaded decision to invade the privacy of 135,000 law abiding Virginians. Now. That idiot’s idea of “sunshine” is precisely what got actress Rebecca Schaeffer (and Lord only knows how many others) killed. At Schaeffer’s killer had to pay a sleazy detective agency $250 to obtain the information your pathetic excuse for a newspaper provides for free.

Lastly, here’s a little “sunshine” on the creep who started it all. I’m sure he won’t mind, as Sunshine Week isn’t over yet.

Christian Trejbal
675 School Lane
Christiansburg, VA 24073

Punk probably thinks “Christiansburg” is named after him.

UPDATE: The database was removed and replaced with a they-a culpa. My favorite part:

“When we posted the information, we had every reason to believe that the data the State Police had supplied would comply with the statutes. But people have notified us that the list includes names that should not have been released,” said Debbie Meade, president and publisher of The Roanoke Times.

No kidding.

UPDATE x2: Michelle Malkin has more. Don’t know how I missed this at the time.

Yesterday I blogged about a rather difficult exchange with L.A. Times Readers Rep Kent Zelas regarding the Times staff’s New Year’s boner on AB 849, the blatantly unconstitutional gay marriage bill vetoed by Governor Schwarzenegger. I promised to keep you apprised of any changes, even while cautioning against the holding of breath. I received a followup today that gives reason for cautions optimism:

Thanks for your further thoughts. I believe I have a better understanding of your position and have taken it to the editors who oversaw that opinion piece.

Kent Zelas
Asst. Readers’ Rep.

At this point, if the paper doesn’t correct itself, we’ll have it, not the Readers Rep, to blame.

UPDATE: Patterico sez I’m tilting at windmills. Time will tell.

UPDATE x2: I’ve since been contacted by a senior editor, confirming that the message was indeed passed on to the editors. Apparently, their misunderstanding (which, alas they have yet to acknolwedge as such) was based on the Legislature’s self-serving statement that Prop 22 applies only to marriages conducted outside California. Were the courts to accept that hackneyed theory, then AB 845 could indeed have allowed same-sex marriages to be conducted inside California. It still wouldn’t have spared the courts anything, though; to accept that interpreation of the scope of Prop 22, the Supreme Court would have to rule on Prop 22, else the Court of Appeal precedent of Knight v. Superior Court stands, and Prop 22 applies to in-state and out-of-state marriages alike. Seeing as the tired “California Proposition 22 only applies to non-California marriages” meme apparently won’t die, perhaps a reader can explain the rationale behind it. It’s clear why Prop 22 opponents want to construe Prop 22 as narrowly as possible, but does anyone really think California voters intended to vote for a law that prohibits the state from recognizing same-sex marriages performed elsewhere, while recognizing same-sex marriages conducted in-state? If so, why on earth?

Readers of Patterico, Boi from Troy and others are aware of a recent moronic editorial that ran in last week’s L.A. Times with regard to Ass. Bill 849 and the ongoing court challenges to Proposition 22. In that moronic editorial, the L.A. Times staff argues that Governor Schwarzenegger could have headed off the court challenges to Prop 22 by signing AB 849 rather than vetoing it. These legal eagles write:

IT COULD have been different. If Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger had signed a bill in 2005 legalizing same-sex marriage instead of vetoing it, the California Supreme Court would have been spared the task of deciding, as it probably will this year, whether a voter-approved ban violates the state Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the law.

Apparently, the Times staff’s opinions were too important to be sullied by Article II, Section 10(c) of the California Constitution, which says this:

… or even to read Section 8 of AB 849 itself, which says this:

The Legislature finds and declares that this act does not amend or modify Section 308.5 of the Family Code, as enacted by an initiative measure, to the extent that Section 308.5 addresses only marriages from other jurisdictions. The Legislature further finds that Sections 300 and 308.5 of the Family Code have been declared unconstitutional by a state coordination trial judge appointed by the Judicial Council, and the Legislature declares that the purpose of this act is to correct the constitutional infirmities of Section 300, which was enacted by the Legislature.

Thus, by Leno’s own written admission, passage of AB 849 would have resulted in two dueling statutes in the California Family Code, reading as follows:

300. (a) Marriage is a personal relation arising out of a civil contract between two persons, to which the consent of the parties capable of making that contract is necessary. Consent alone does not constitute marriage. Consent must be followed by the issuance of a license and solemnization as authorized by this division, except as provided by Section 425 and Part 4 (commencing with Section 500).
(b) Where necessary to implement the rights and responsibilities of spouses under the law, gender-specific terms shall be construed to be gender-neutral, except with respect to Section 308.5.

308.5 Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.

Put those two statutes together, and you’re left a California law defining single-sex unions as “marriages” that are neither “valid” nor “recognized” in California, hardly a result any SSM advocate would be proud of. The Dog Trainers make a really, really lame attempt to dodge this problem, noting the alleged constitutional infirmities of Prop 22:

But Schwarzenegger said he had to respect Proposition 22, approved in 2000, which states: “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.” Whether committed same-sex couples will be relieved of second-class status now depends on the state Supreme Court. And as Superior Court Judge Richard A. Kramer’s ruling notes, the state Constitution trumps any ballot question and entitles same-sex couples to what he called “the last step in the equation: the right to marriage itself.”

Kramer’s opinion was reversed on appeal, so I’m not sure why the legal eagles see fit to cite it as authority, but even so, neither his opinion nor any other published or unpublished opinion of which I am aware authorizes the legislature to usurp the role of the courts in determining the constitutionality of any statute, let alone an initiative statute they do not like. Even Ass. Bill 849’s author, Mark Leno, was not that brazen, writing further in Section 8 of the bill that:

The Legislature further finds that the constitutional infirmities of Section 308.5 of the Family Code, which was enacted through the initiative process, cannot be corrected by the Legislature and that the California Supreme Court is the governmental body that has authority to make a final determination regarding the meaning, validity, or invalidity of Section 308.5.

Thus, whatever merit there may be to the view that Governor Schwarzenegger should have signed a blatantly unconstitutional (and therefore meaningless) bill, there is none whatsoever to the notion that doing so would have mooted the court challenge rather than complicating matters further. I alerted “Readers Rep” to the error, which - surprise, surprise - was deemed not correctable. The email exchange appears below the fold.

(more…)

Is here.

Some commenters - thus far, all of them, in fact - think I went to hard on Hot Air in my recent post, and in a subsequent comment thread at Patterico’s blog. Perhaps I was. My intent, however, was not to demonize the site or any of the people who post there, merely to point out that the site does have enough accuracy issues that it should be read defensively, and not relied upon as gospel truth. The discussion began surrounding Ian Schwartz’s hatchet job on Martin O’Malley, followed by a lengthy discussion over a post by Allah that helped give rise to the popular myth that Larry Sabato had either claimed or implied he had heard George Allen say the N-word in a recent interview with Chris Matthews. That myth, in turn, quickly mushroomed into an even bigger, nastier myth that Sabato’s subsequent clarification that he had not personally heard Allen say anything amounted to Sabato being “caught lying.”

These are not isolated cases. Nor are they the result of me going hunting through Hot Air looking for stuff to criticize. Quite the contrary, they are two pieces I decided to document after having stumbled across more than a few others with credibility problems of their own. Without belaboring the point, here are a few other examples, a few of which have been duly corrected, but most of which have not been:

• Last June, Democrat Francine Busby committed the cardinal sin of advising a foreigner, and likely illegal alien, that he didn’t need “papers for voting” to help out with her campaign. Two Hot Air posters, Ian and Michelle, were on it like white on rice. A little clipping here, a little highlighting there, and a little trademark outrage on the side, and voilà! Suddenly Busby wasn’t talking about prerequisites for volunteering on the campaign after all, she was advising the guy to vote illegally! These posts have never been corrected.
• More recently, in early October, Michelle pulled a boner, claiming “I told you so” when Mickey Kaus idly mused that gee whiz, for all we know, maybe President Bush will wake up one day, get bored, and veto the 700-mile fence just for fun. Michelle then proceeded to say she was planning to sit this election out - a great idea if you like liberal Supreme Court Justices, gun control, automatic tax hikes and a defunded war in Iraq, to say nothing of President Bush’s non-amnesty amnesty program which, but for a Republican House of Representatives, would likely be law today. To her credit, she corrected the “I told you so” part of her entry later that day. More recently, she finally got around to correcting her bit about sitting out the election.
• Not corrected, however, was Malkin’s drive-by smear on John Lott. I guess you can’t build street cred if you don’t throw a few fellow cons under the bus, whether they deserve it or not.
• Also uncorrected is Bryan Preston’s uncommonly silly screed on why Christians with no Islamic upbringing are competent to judge Islam but non-Christian secularists with Christian upbringings are not competent to judge Christianity. I’m not sure how one goes about correcting a goof as colossal as that, but Dean Esmay did as good a job as anyone.

None of this means you shouldn’t read Hot Air or Michelle Malkin’s personal blog. That would be a dumb suggestion, and as one who reads both on a daily basis and agrees with both at least 90% of the time myself, I’d be in a lousy position to make it. No, my point is that when you read sites like Hot Air, where speed in “getting the scoop” seems to be at least as big of a priority as getting the story right, read the site defensively. Don’t take anything at face value that you can’t corroborate from at least two other independent sources - and by independent, I mean independent - NOT two other bloggers who rely on that same entry to conclude the same thing. Come to think of it, that’s probably the best way to read every blog, including this one. Especially this one, for chrissakes.

I’ll close with a few thoughts for the Hot Air staff themselves, should any of them care to read this.

• To Allah - my apologies for accusing you of dowdifying a portion of the Sabato interview. That accusation depended on the accuracy of an MSNBC, which Patterico has since given me good reason to doubt.
• No apologies, however, for saying your comment system sucks. It really does suck, due in no small part to the echo chamber effect that inevitably results from requiring comment registration at specific, rare intervals that are unlikely to coincide with the time any particular reader, myself included, might have something (beyond “me too,” that is) to say. Either find a way to bring more diverse views into the mix, or consider getting rid of comments altogether. You don’t have to have comments, but if you do, then for chrissakes do it right.
• Someone needs to deal with Ian. I know, he’s a kid, maybe he doesn’t know better, blah blah blah. No excuses. If the NYT hired a 12-year-old to write their front page story, I wouldn’t blame the 12-year-old for the inevitable result, but I would question the judgment of the senior editors who thought it a good idea to put him in that position in the first place. Get him an editor for a while, or maybe have him edit other people’s posts until he gets better at distinguishing good ledes from wild goose chases - always harder when you commit early on in print to the theory that the story really is a story.
• Better still, get someone to edit everyone. Maybe that person should be from outside the tent. After all, it’s one thing to be a conservative news site, and another to make all the same ideological errors in reverse that make the liberal media (in-)famous. Patterico has made similar suggestions for liberal papers in the past - get at least one guy on board who has different ideological blind spots than you, and more errors will get caught as a result. It was a good idea then, and it’s a good idea now.

Or, if you’d rather just take Hot Air or any other blog as gospel truth, that’s your prerogative. I’ve made the argument why I think you shouldn’t. I shan’t press the issue further.