Jake

I think it's fair to wonder what's going to happen to the Blachawks, but it's important to keep things in perspective. The more you focus on how the case affects your hobby, the more you may develop a rooting interest that is unrelated to what the right outcome is. You can follow it from a Blackhawks-centric point of view without letting that happen, but you have to be cognizant of it. As a fan, I hope Patrick didn't rape anybody and that this is somehow a misunderstanding. That's good for the Blackhawks goose and good for the society gander. What I don't want to do is in any way enable a rapist to go unpunished because I want my favorite hockey team to have one of its best players. I have to consciously remind myself that I am biased in favor of Patrick because I want to root for the Blackhawks without experiencing cognitive dissonance. When the Sox traded for Brett Myers, I had to struggle to figure out if I was seeing his domestic violence situation in a very nuanced way because that's how it really was or if it was because I wanted to be able to cheer for him. There's a reason things like the Ray Rice situation developed some level of consensus. Once we saw him punch his fiance, even people who liked Ray Rice couldn't pretend that he didn't punch her. There were obviously a small group of people who don't give a damn whether he punches somebody, but for reasonable people there wasn't any room for interpretation. Well Patrick wasn't on tape as far as we know so I have to battle the fact that my mind will want to imagine him doing no wrong or at least less wrong than what he may be alleged to have done. So if months from now we're looking at a certain rape conviction for Kane, I'll be intensely interested in the contractual and cap implications. For now, I'm not uninterested in those topics but there are more pertinent things, like finding out what actually happened.

Rubio has a quality that is hard to teach: his general manner doesn't reek of a crazy person. This is an important quality, because people are going to forget almost everything that you say, but they'll still have a general impression of you.

Greg is seriously one of the best parts of this website

QUOTE (SouthSideSale @ Aug 10, 2015 -> 12:15 AM) I'm not real familiar with how different each level is so someone will correct me. But I'm guessing there's a bit of a gap with AAA because you have some vets there, guys repeating it and top prospects up there. Just my two cents. The fact that many good prospects struggle in AAA at first despite doing well in AA tells me it's a better brand of ball

QUOTE (LittleHurt05 @ Aug 9, 2015 -> 04:16 PM) Well except for the bar owner The bar owner, if we assume he's being honest (and, I mean, maybe he isn't) just says he saw a girl clinging to Patrick at the bar. Plausible stuff. He even makes a point to say that his viewpoint isn't very useful considering where the crime is alleged to have taken place.

A former Ron Paul campaign staffer who is already facing charges for allegedly buying the support of an Iowa state senator is now under investigation in connection with a rather odd burglary. The man under fire for both the bribery and the robbery is named Dimitri Kesari and he was Deputy Campaign Manager for Ron Paul's 2012 campaign. He's been active elsewhere too, being involved with National Right to Work and for Mitch McConnell's most recent Senate campaign. This is to say that he's not just a Ron Paul guy, more of just a person trying to make a living in conservative politics. He is one of several who worked for Ron Paul's 2012 campaign who seem to have paid the aforementioned Iowa state senator named Kent Sorenson something like $70,000 in exchange for him switching his endorsement. The specifics of that case aren't so interesting beyond the fact that it's clear Sorenson accepted a big payment to cast his delegate vote for Paul after possibly having also taken money from the Bachmann campaign. There's this other fellow named Jared Gamble, who also spent a lot of time at NRTW and worked in a smaller role than Kesari in the Paul 2012 and 2008 campaigns. He also worked for Kent Sorenson (the corrupt now-former Iowa state senator who took a bribe from the Paul campaign) in Sorenson's 2008 campaign and volunteered in some capacity for Rand Paul's campaign in 2010. He died in 2013 of causes that are unclear. His obit doesn't mention it, multiple tributes from Ron and Rand Paul don't say anything about it, and I've seen just a few nuggets about it on the web. I'll get back to that later. Anyway, Jared Gamble's family was taken on vacation at some point in 2014 by unnamed people who are said to be people in the libertarian establishment that knew the kid. While the Gamble family was away, their house was burglarized. Just one item was taken: Jared's (presumably) out-of-use laptop. Well...that's a bit suspicious, ain't it? It sure seems like someone specifically arranged to get the family out of there so they could get rid of (or maybe just learn from?) this laptop. It's unclear what law enforcement has on Kesari to implicate him, but it is more than plausible there could be evidence of Kesari's role in the bribery or even other things on that computer. It could have something to do with what Lee Stranahan, a longtime Breitbart reporter, has been writing about for a while. The gist of it is that via leaked emails, some of which are written by Gamble, Stranahan says there is evidence that NRTW was illegally doing campaign work on behalf of various politicians. When Rand Paul posted a tribute video to Gamble that is introduced by Sorenson who mentions Gamble's work for him at specific times, it was quickly pulled down which caught Stranahan's attention; he thinks it could be because Sorenson inadvertently admitted to employing Gamble at a time where he could not have legally have done so due to Gamble's concurrent work with NRTW, a lobbying group. I don't know about that, but there seems to be something to the NRTW emails. And no surprise, Kesari also worked for both Paul and NRTW so he could potentially have something to lose there. That Gamble's death happened suddenly and was unexpected has been repeated by people close to him. Robert Wenzel, a libertarian columnist/radio host/blogger, said in passing that Gamble died of "unspecified respiratory complications." What appears to be an earlier version of that post shared on a libertarian discussion site says instead that Gamble died from AIDS. That could be why there isn't much talk about it, but it would be strange that it would be so unexpected. Anyway, I'm going to assume that there's no smoking gun in regards to how Gamble died. Also, let's all take a second and think about what a big f***up this Sorenson guy is, who apparently can't open his mouth without also taking a bribe and/or admitting to having done something illegal.

One thing that Kane's people have done so far is not start a smear campaign against the accuser, at least not yet. If you're in the right, take the high road and let the facts present themselves

29 US scientists from the fields of nuclear physics and arms control praise Iran agreement, emphasizing its "innovative" and "stringent" nature. Signatories include 5 Nobel Laureates, the head of the AAAS, former director of Los Alamos weapons lab, the designer of the world's first H-bomb, and almost all of whom have had government Q clearances in the past.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Aug 8, 2015 -> 11:39 AM) It's more like a reverse parole system, they can extend the sentence indefinitely Is it basically just reversing the burden of proof? Assume the person is rehabilitated unless the state can prove differently?

I actually wonder if we as a country may end up electing, ever so incrementally, to get rid of the death penalty. A lot more states have been doing away with it or de facto banning it by never using it.

QUOTE (LDF @ Aug 7, 2015 -> 04:16 PM) find it, b/c a lot of time the victims gets really embarrass on this and drops the charges. More often they don't speak up at all because they fear the repercussions, reliving the trauma with the police/courts, and many times feel so ashamed that they spend time believing that it was all their own fault

Also worth noting that the most influential gun advocates dislike most forms of control over who can buy and carry and under what conditions. I have fairly little confidence that a person concealed carrying is competent at anything beyond not accidentally shooting themselves when they holster their weapon before going out in the morning. It's not exactly easy to just sit in a day-long class and walk away with a cool head under pressure and sure aim in a volatile situation.

I think Megyn Kelly and Chris Wallace's are FOX's best talent and they did a pretty good job. Only clunker of a question was the "word from God" bit, which Kelly clearly thought was stupid as well as she laughed her way through it and started tacking on extra topics as she went on.

QUOTE (beautox @ Aug 7, 2015 -> 12:56 AM) grantland did a nice piece a while ago about their core here they've got 57M coming off the books going into next year so it'll be intresting to see where all that money gets alocated. As someone rooting against the Cubs, there's nothing better than giving Theo Epstein money with the expectation that he spends it in large chunks on free agents

QUOTE (RockRaines @ Aug 7, 2015 -> 02:06 PM) Huh? I was talking about the impending legal case. WIth alcohol and little to no physical evidence the cases almost always get thrown out. There are lots of jurisdictions where a drunk victim is itself sufficient evidence. If the victim is past some threshold of drunkenness (some places it is 0.08, others a fuzzier standard, others there is no consideration given), the sexual aggressor whether drunk him or herself or not is held accountable for having sex with someone who cannot provide consent. You would presumably still have to convince a court that victim was not the one initiating the encounter, though. According to this website, it would seem that would not apply in New York as alcohol could facilitate date rape there but apparently only if alcohol was provided w/o consent (unclear how you'd go about doing that).

I always figured Soto was a steroid guy with his strange statistical fluctuations and quick dropoff of productivity

The reason I take interest in some of these guys being bad with their personal finances is because they are the same people who pretend that managing a state/federal budget is exactly like a household one, which is of course used as justification for never accepting a budget deficit. I have no philosophical problem with a presidential candidate having some level of debt, but I do notice and care about doublespeak.

I'm going to wait for the facts to come out to the extent they can, but I'll let it be said right away that I'm not about to contort myself so I can tell myself favorite team's star didn't commit a crime if that's what the record ultimately suggests

For the record, blowing a 5 run lead over the course of 9 innings isn't the same as what usually happens when you blow a 5 run lead

Good job by Avi there. Having good at-bats (regardless of outcome) is not something he does often. With how much he has been struggling, he had to really feel the heat in that AB considering the two IBB in front of him. I figured he'd be ultra-aggressive trying to end the thing but he had a good smart at bat where he laid off a couple of close pitches.

This team has a lot of good pieces that are all relatively young and under team control. Nothing is promised, but you don't need to intentionally lose to get where you need to go. It is worrisome that our front office has had a really hard time giving out free agent contracts that don't look terrible in retrospect because you're going to have to bring in veterans that don't fall on their face to ultimately put things together. 2005, for example, was all about adding a bunch of solid players on market level contracts to a core that was already pretty good (particularly the starting rotation and a couple of hitters). If we can't at least start signing players who just meet expectations, we're in trouble. With that said, we need to fit Alexei and Abreu into the equation of evaluating this front office somewhere. These are either essentially amateur players we've turned into integral assets (eliminating the "Beckham is the last position prospect to pan out" argument) or they are free agent signings that have gone fabulously well. You can choose which way to think about it, but you can't pretend they don't count.

Scott Walker seems to do pretty well with Republicans of various stripes, both the far-right and the more typical ones. With that said, he is not at home in situations like a debate where he has to ad lib responses to things. I could see him blowing up in popularity as time goes on or really flopping and falling by the wayside.

I emphatically support Bernie Sanders. He is an imperfect candidate insofar as one might worry about "electability" and such, but he's clearly not on the same kind of fringe level of support that guys like Ron Paul had IMO. I don't hate Hillary and I would almost certainly vote for her in the general if it shakes out that way, but she's not my ideal candidate to be sure. I would of course be a big fan of Elizabeth Warren, but she won't be running.

The taxation as theft argument is all well and good, but pretty much nullifies any and all functions of the government.

Relievers are notoriously fickle and you aren't paying him that much. Get him out of these situations for now, see if he pitches better, put him back into high leverage spots when/if he pitches better.