Why on earth would a sitting federal judge give up a life-tenured post to be a lame duck DOJ functionary?

Billy should have to post his own picture next to all of his posts.

FYI - ATL got a shout-out in this morning's Washington Post Express - top of the Blog Log.

Lat, post the schulte bonus announcement

Someone needs to send it to Lat first.

Billary failed the DC bar.

climate change is the religion of retards. Lat, you're an idiot. Do a little research. Temps have cooled over the last ten years and the warmest year in the last hundred was in the 1930s. Seriously, just because Al Gore (or the internet that he invented) says it, doesn't make it true.

10:30, you're an idiot. Learn how to read a byline. This is a Merck post.

i don't question that i'm an idiot. i question the author's intelligence.

9:38 -- probably b/c he would like a circuit court seat, and he thinks this will give him the opportunity to get one the next time a Republican is sitting in the White House. Also, he might find it more interesting than his current job (the Deputy AG is far from a "functionary"); being a district judge is not always thrilling stuff. Somehow I don't think he has to worry overmuch about getting a job in the future.

Why exactly is law the "catch-all" profession to which everyone with nothing better to do aspires? Do people think it's easy to get a good legal job these days, or do they just think everyone else in the profession is a skank, misfit, miscreant or layabout?

11:16 -- that was meant to go into the Ebbert post.

11:16 -- that was meant to go into the Ebbert post.

How 'bout a link, 10:30? Especially when you are claiming as "facts" things which are almost certainly false?

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/

See also RealClimate.org re: the 1934 claim.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/08/1934-and-all-that/

11:31,

the charts on both show peaks and valleys and trends upward and downward. they don't prove or even suggest anything. what caused the spikes in the 30s? moreover, the earth has been around how long? we've had ice ages, hot periods, and moderate periods. what caused all of that? you're a blooming idiot if you think that we have the ability to change the earth's climate. while we should be good stewards of the earth and not pollute as much as possible, the notion that we've somehow caused the earth's climate is in peril is preposterous. not to mention that all of the evidence is correlative in nature. there is not a shred of evidence proving causation.

Wow, 11:49. It's so impressive how you are so much more learned in the matters than actual climatologists. Really, please share with us more of your learning.

You have to be blind not to see that, although of course there are smaller fluctuations, world temperature charts show a clear and unambiguous warming trend. That is just a fact. If you draw a trendline through those graphs, they have a positive slope.

Now, the significance of this trend, the degree to which it has been caused by anthropogenic carbon emissions, and the appropriate policy responses to it, are all matters of legitimate debate. I haven't ventured opinions on any of those topics. But only a ridiculous jackass, or someone more interested in winning an argument than in making accurate statements, could look at the data and not agree that the overall trend is that the Earth is growing warmer.

You claimed above that the warmest year in the last hundred was in the 30s. Look again at the data -- how can you possibly maintain that???

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A.lrg.gif

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A2.lrg.gif

12:17, i didn't make myself clear. i'm not opposed to the argument that temperatures may be warmer, just that humans are causing it. I still don't see the proof that it's really any warmer now than before though. It's idiotic to look at a slice of time 30 years long out of how many millions of years the earth may have been around and purport to know what's going to happen. There is simply not enough history in terms of temperature to know that this means anything.

At 10:30, you said:

"Temps have cooled over the last ten years and the warmest year in the last hundred was in the 1930s."

Both of these statements are obviously, demonstrably false. It's not an issue of you not having been "clear" -- that sentence is perfectly clear, just wrong.

Calling someone an idiot while making assertions that are demonstrably false after five minutes of internet research does not help your credibility.

And the slice of time isn't 30 years, it is a hundred and thirty or so -- on these particular graphs. I agree that this is not geologic, but it is still significant -- especially if we are trying to predict what will happen over the next hundred years, as opposed to the next five thousand.

And by the by -- longer term evidence is necessarily sketchier (due both to the necessity for proxies for direct measurement, and the difficulty of comparing long term trends with more localized variation), but current longer term temperature estimates do show the current temperatures as anomolous on a thousand-year scale.

Check out:

http://www.answers.com/topic/2000-year-temperature-comparison-png

http://www.answers.com/topic/holocene-temperature-variations-png