Jake

In 2007, few people were thinking about Barack Obama as a presidential candidate. People with political savvy saw him as a 2012 nom if Hillary lost or, more likely, a 2016 guy. Obviously, things didn't turn out that way. What are the up-and-comers you see, on either side of the aisle, that might make a surprise run to candidacy and/or presidency? I saw an article on Politico about Elizabeth Warren considering a run for president. Apparently she isn't considered a serious contender, but this is Politico we're talking about - it was all horse race stuff. As an anti-BigBank person with major intellectual credibility and a good deal of charisma, it really wouldn't shock me if she became more popular and made a run. I think 2016 is probably too soon, but look out for Cory Booker. That dude is seriously charismatic. While he has fairly liberal positions across the board, he is able to frame things in a centrist way, especially in regard to finance. He talks about the economy in a way that might appeal to people. A bit like Bill Clinton in that regard. On the Republican side, there seems to have been a lot more speculation already and thus fewer surprises. However, I think Paul Ryan has been forgotten in all of this. I am no fan, but I think we haven't seen the best of him yet. It wouldn't shock me if he comes out ready for primetime in 2016. At his best, I think he can appeal to people. Christie remains the favorite, it seems, for the Republicans but I feel like all this hype is bound to doom him somehow.

He'll be okay.

Wisconsin v Yoder is a good one to think about the establishment clause, free speech, right to education and how all this stuff is balanced. There is also an element here where you can teach how a court case is used to justify slightly different things: in this case, this has been used to argue for supporting all homeschooling

Does it provide for all but the "few" that can make adequate provision? The idea here is that markets work when the actors within it can act rationally. Nobody acts rationally in practice, and this is especially true in regard to health. People are bad at preserving their health, because we are biologically programmed to put short term gains (hamburger) over long-term ills (type 2 diabetes) - being fat simply wasn't an evolutionary problem. On the other hand, behavioral economics (and experience) tells us that we are generally over-optimistic. About everything. 90% of drivers say they are better than the average driver. You do the math on that one. Imagine if car insurance was optional. Even better, get in a car crash and see if both of you have adequate insurance to deal with it. The same holds true with our personal health. People don't believe they will get sick and thus don't feel the need to buy insurance/adequate insurance. This is why we don't understand/like insurance in general; I don't need all that coverage! I'm healthy! People that smoke, of all things, believe they personally are less likely to get lung cancer than non-smokers. People are imperfect. If we want to make this capitalism thing work, we have to give people a chance to make rational choices. Providing social insurance to make sure people have the resources to choose means a strong welfare system as well as not having the looming prospect of bankruptcy and life-changing debt over an unexpected hospital stay.

Yep, that's a district alright

Hahn has always been our designated Boras whisperer. Dayan is represented by Boras, FWIW

Again, Juan would be a fine addition if Keppinger wasn't here and/or he could play SS

Nothing more certain than Peppers not being on the team next year. Price is too high. We won't be able to afford anyone

QUOTE (caulfield12 @ Nov 11, 2013 -> 09:00 PM) And that statistic only includes offensive statistics? Because valuing him as a 1B but still using old defensive metrics which boost his value due to his defensive abilities as a catcher in his prime aren't very relevant. Yes, this counts offensive contributions only. This is how many runs he creates in a park and team neutral environment. 134 wRC+ means he is 34% more productive than the average MLB player. The White Sox finished with just two players above that average 100 wRC+ mark this year, FWIW (Dunn at 105 and Avisail at 109)

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Nov 11, 2013 -> 09:05 AM) I don't agree on Roberts being purely aligned with big business. What he is, is aligned against certain extensions of regulation. By nature that is often pro-business, however, his PPACA decision was certainly the opposite of that. Presidents want, and try for, lots of things. You can get into what plans Presidents have, but I am dealing with what was actually accomplished. I would consider the ACA a quite pro-business law. Upholding the part that makes you purchase things from private insurance companies seems pretty pro-business to me QUOTE (raBBit @ Nov 11, 2013 -> 11:47 AM) I get tired of everyone pegging Bush a far-right, conservative. Looking at how he expanded government and tossed money all over the place you cannot really classify him as a conservative. Bush was quite representative of the neoconservativism alive and well at the time. Interestingly, he pretty much killed it. It was all about supply-side economics, big defense spending and war mongering, tax cuts, phasing out federal aid programs, and high federal involvement in polarizing social issues (stem cell research, gay marriage, abortion). These tendencies all still exist, but they are being framed rather differently. GWB seemed less interested in proving his conservative-ness than doing and saying the stuff he thought people and his party wanted. QUOTE (Tex @ Nov 11, 2013 -> 01:02 PM) And most president have terms like Bush, Bush, Carter, Ford, and Obama. Nothing extraordinary, either bad or good. This nation is like a huge freight train lumbering down the tracks. A single president usually can't detour it too much. Obama is trying with health overhaul. We'll see. I'd say the state of the country when GWB took office and the state of it when he got out are quite different. Obama is going to be heavily criticized for the worst case scenario that it is only marginally better. QUOTE (iamshack @ Nov 11, 2013 -> 01:46 PM) I don't follow politics like you guys do, but my thoughts are just that you can't compare Obama's Presidency to any in recent history...has anyone ever had to deal with this level of idiotic stubbornness from the opposition party before? Or since Lincoln anyways? Seems to me like the game has entirely changed. Clinton did to some extent, this is where people learned these tactics can have some effect. That group lacked anything like a Tea Party though and came to power after Clinton was wildly popular. There are also weren't any historically big issues in the Clinton presidency and Clinton often took somewhat centrist stances on issues like welfare reform and crime policy QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Nov 11, 2013 -> 02:39 PM) Saddam didn't have the means and groups like aq were not his friend. But they were all Muslims! QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Nov 11, 2013 -> 02:45 PM) That 9/11 commission was horses***. Go watch the HBO documentary on the team that was hunting Bin Laden for decades and all of them were SHOCKED that he was able to plan a domestic attack like that. They suspected he might be planning something, somewhere, but no one in any intelligence community thought he would crash 2 planes into the WTC. The 9/11 commission and all those hindsight conclusions are no different from a corporate injury report that lists a "cause" of an accident. 99.9% of the time it's not proof of any negligence, it's just trying to attribute blame so that people feel better about safety. The Katrina claim is a joke. The state and local governments are to blame. They had all sorts of money for public improvements over the last how many decades and they never fixed the levees. They lined their own pockets. Seriously, if all you have is "the government cut taxes and didn't spend more money!" is all you have, that's a really weak claim. A war based on an obvious lie that wasn't believed by the international community at the time and is believed by nobody now is a weak claim? A record surplus and thriving economy upon entry to the second worst economic crisis in the country's history is a weak claim? A trend toward the loss of privacy, habeas corpus, and personal freedoms is weak? QUOTE (TaylorStSox @ Nov 11, 2013 -> 07:08 PM) First, Obamacare is neither a failure nor a success at this point. People don't understand it and the website has been a disaster. The policy itself needs to play out. With that said, comparing a social initiative meant to provide healthcare to millions of uninsured Americans to a war built on a lie is absurd. The only victims of Obamacare are Americans who will see their insurance premiums rise, yet receive a better policy. The victims of the Iraq war are the thousands of American and Iraqi citizens that needlessly died so that Bush could distract Americans while lining the pockets of his buddies as he financed the war machine. This is a strange thread. Indeed. Obamacare can go really badly and be nowhere near as bad a policy decision as the Iraq war. Along with the many lives lost and permanent damage done to relations in that region, which could eventually lead to world war, the cost at home has been significant. Recent estimates say the current costs are over $2 trillion and may add up to $6 trillion by the end of our lives due to financing costs and the extended care of soldiers who wouldn't otherwise have needed it. Obamacare will not pose those costs and is based on a good faith premise to stop people's suffering. The very worst case scenarios at this point are still better than the status quo. I'm not thrilled with how this presidency has gone but it is nothing like Bush's. Of course, much can change in three years! Who knows what can happen. Another recession, war, or other major national event and you never know what will happen.

The stand around and wait for that one guy to score offense looks like this when the one guy can't score It's like post-NCAA championship Illinois

If Kep wasn't here, I'd think about it

http://www.fangraphs.com/leaders.aspx?pos=...0&sort=17,d Players with a better wRC+ than Mauer since 2009: Cabrera, Trout, Votto, Braun, Pujols, Bautista, Fielder, Holliday. Since 2005, his rookie season, among players with 4500 PA or more: Pujols, Utley, Cabrera, Wright, Holliday

At first, I thought this was going to be "my photog was horrible, here's how to avoid my pain" Then...you said you got the "engagement session" and I thought it was going to be a deal like "so the photog was going to film us...consummate." But then it was just a nice story...

He has a career 134 wRC+. Paul Konerko's is 120. Paul Konerko's best was 158, Mauer's was 170. Depends what you think a prime PK was worth, I suppose

I'm not convinced that Mauer has been a good defensive catcher for a while now. He's being overpaid now, but there is no need to fret about him being at 1B. He's going to hit really well. The trick for the Twins is to find a supporting cast now.

I like how he got an endorsement from his cousin in Iowa, who anyone else would have presumed to be a prominent local ex-politician by the same name

I like how he got an endorsement from his cousin in Iowa, who anyone else would have presumed to be a prominent local ex-politician by the same name

I like how he got an endorsement from his cousin in Iowa, who anyone else would have presumed to be a prominent local ex-politician by the same name

If I wanted leverage, I'd sure say that I had no more money to spend and that I'm happy with all of my players

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Nov 11, 2013 -> 04:54 PM) whoops, forgot the link to the article. http://inthesetimes.com/article/15849/teac...er_the_problem/ I think it's the latter. The original study from the SEF is more helpful. You're basically seeing something that I've seen since moving to the South. When I first got to the South (coming from Illinois) for college, I was shocked at how the vast majority of the people I met from the South went to secular private schools. I literally can't think of one of those in Illinois. Of course, in Illinois, a lot of non-Catholics go to Catholic schools so that they can have a private education, but that is beside the point. In the South, though, everyone just said "the public schools are terrible." Oh, okay. I realized later that "terrible" meant filled with poor black kids. What I have observed, especially in Memphis, is a great deal of hostility toward public schools that is rooted in fear and bias against black folks. You get all kinds of people sending their kids to private schools to get them away from the "bad public schools," and then you have a bunch of people who hate funding their local public schools. No s***! Maybe if you sent your kids there and let them mingle with other kinds of people, the entire community would feel invested rather than just making it a factory to poop out people for those quasi-segregated communities to remain in poverty. There is absolutely no coincidence that the South looks the worst in so many of these metrics, especially that 76% of school districts are majority low income in the South. There is a sense of desperation among people there to invest any amount to get their kids into a private school. I worked with a girl in college whose parents made less than 100k/year, yet were paying 20k/year in tuition to send her to an academy in her rural town.

FWIW, most of my life has been supported financially by a trucking business and the government is not perceived as a challenge to its existence. Conglomeration and vertical integration is a much bigger problem.

The only thing that makes any sense is that perhaps by charging it again, I recalibrated the battery. I just don't know why it would have been at a point where it was completely useless and suddenly, magically, gotten all of its juice back.

I think the team and the team-related press benefits by the Sox having interest in free agents. We may or may not try to sign Salty, but either way you want articles like this so that fans are constantly checking for more news and thinking about the White Sox during free agency.

I think the most progressive thing we saw from Bush was his funding of AIDS-related initiatives in Africa. With little to gain politically within his own party, that seems to be a thing that simply meant a lot to him.