There is a reason for the insanity you are complaining about. The vars are effectively hoisted there by the interpreter anyway, by pulling them to the top of the block you remove a possible point of confusion, and more importantly a possible point of bugs.

jshint is great. Putting this in ~/.jshintrc makes it a lot more sane:

    {
      "browser" : true,
      "node"    : true,
      "undef"   : true,
      "eqeqeq"  : true,
      "noarg"   : true
    }