Balta1701

QUOTE(Rex Kicka** @ Mar 4, 2007 -> 01:39 PM) And that makes her different from the average politician, how? She hasn't been elected for anything by anyone except the major media groups that support her.

Jerusalem Post.

QUOTE(hitlesswonder @ Mar 4, 2007 -> 11:06 AM) As for poverty in America, I don't believe it's that rates are worse than they used to be. From Wikipedia: "From 1963 when Lyndon Johnson took office until 1970 as the impact of his Great Society programs were felt, the portion of Americans living below the poverty line dropped from 22.2 percent to 12.6 percent, the most dramatic decline over such a brief period in this century". That 12 percent is about where we're at today. Similarly homelessness and poverty among the elderly is much lower now than before social security. No luck finding the actual data on Google yet, and I'm only on a modem today so I'm lazy, but I believe one of, if not the biggest group, which moved from being consistently stuck in poverty to actually being able to move out of poverty in the 1960's was Senior Citizens...because suddenly there was a program dealing with their catastrophic health costs.

QUOTE(Rex Kicka** @ Mar 4, 2007 -> 07:21 AM) In the state of New Jersey, you can not be denied service if you walk into an ER. Seeing a non-walk in clinic doctor can be quite difficult without insurance, IMO, here otherwise. The rules are the same here in California. The uninsured have basically no place to go other than to the ER. Of course, anyone who had half a brain and was designing a system would consider this a terrible idea; ER visits are ungodly expensive, they're designed for emergencies, not to be the sole provider of care for people. But because of the lack of insurance for so many people, we wind up having people with no choice but to go to the ER when they decide they need care for something, which of course helps drive prices through the roof and keeps those people in debt. And on top of that, the huge cost of going to the ER when you have no other insurance is a huge impediment to getting actual care, such as, for example, being able to go to a dentist when you have a cavity before they turn into 6 cavities or a disease that kills you. Preventative medicine would be so much cheaper if it were just employed in an intelligent way, but no, we just toss people to the ER.

It may not happen this year...but it's gonna eventually be really fun watching Charlie in the big leagues.

I'll make this as simple as I can; If Ozzie Guillen keeps his team together and keeps them winning ballgames this year, gets them to the playoffs, and so on; I couldn't care less which players he rips into. If that works, I'll take it. If Ozzie Guillen becomes a distraction that starts costing the White Sox chances at the playoffs, in repeated seasons, then there will be no more reason to tolerate these rants.

QUOTE(Texsox @ Mar 2, 2007 -> 04:42 PM) I'm not one to use that language, and believe it discounts someone's opinion greatly, I would agree. However, here is the question to ask yourself; what does a Conservative political figure like Ann Coulter have to say or do that would actually motivate some major media outlet to remove them from their channel? You've got O'Reilly saying terrorists should hit San Fransisco, you've got Glenn Beck who asks a Congressman to prove he's not working with our enemies because he's a Muslim who gets his own show on Headline News and becomes a Good Morning America Contributor, you've got Ann Coulter who threatens the NY Times and who has called Al Gore a "total f**" in the past, and all of them keep getting more and more time on CNN, Fox, MSNBC, etc. And then, on days like today, I have to deal with posts complaining about the appearance of naughty language on liberal blogs, while no one seems to bat an eyebrow when one of the biggest conservative blogs (run by a tenured professor) says we've been at war with Iran since 1979 and should begin a campaign of assassinations of Iranian scientists, or says a word when Ann Coulter stays on TV, and so on and so on and so on. Sorry, just venting a lil', been a long week, and I've got another f***ing illness. Edit: and then to top it off, I read this kind of idiocy at the end of the day. ARGH!

QUOTE(Rex Kicka** @ Mar 2, 2007 -> 03:01 PM) Mitt Romney's latest supporter. Ann Coulter I think this clearly shows how vulgar these liberal blogs have become and why they should be excluded from all relevant discourse.

QUOTE(witesoxfan @ Mar 2, 2007 -> 03:11 PM) you mean ARod over Crede? Because Crede would have had to have been involved, and ARod's (likely) not nearly good enough defensively anymore to play a good SS. Supposedly ARod has lost a bunch of the weight he put on the last year or two, so he could actually be in good enough shape to play SS again if someone wanted to put him there.

QUOTE(Beltin @ Mar 2, 2007 -> 02:51 PM) And still worshipped by too many fans. Eventually, Mark Buehrle and Jon Garland will leave in Anger, Ozzie Guillen will be fired, Paul Konerko will leave or retire, Juan Uribe will eh, who knows, Bobby Jenks's arm will fall off...and I'll still have a deep gratitude for that 05 team. That doesn't mean that firing Ozzie won't be the right decision at some point. Ozzie's job is to keep a fire set under this team's ass. In 05, it worked. In 04, eh, so-so. In 06, it failed miserably. We'll see how it works in 07.

QUOTE(jackie hayes @ Mar 2, 2007 -> 02:46 PM) Mind showing me the cf on our roster who didn't "hit horrible last year"? Luis Terrero. Put up a 927 OPS in AAA last year. (You didn't specify what league they were playing in).

QUOTE(Beltin @ Mar 2, 2007 -> 02:47 PM) Tell that to Ditka. It took a while, but he was still fired.

On a different topic. Army Sgt. William "B.J." Beardsley, and his family moved to Indiana a few years ago when he enlisted. While there, it turned out that his wife needed significant hospitalization and surgery. He re-enlisted and went back to Iraq so that his family wouldn't lose health coverage. He was killed the day after she left the hospital.

QUOTE(kapkomet @ Mar 2, 2007 -> 02:08 PM) If we (humanity) all died today, "global warming" would still happen or be occuring. So, yes, humans are "A" problem, but not "THE" problem. Of course, because there's still roughly 1-2 degrees C of warming left in the pipeline due to the Carbon we've already released.

QUOTE(southsider2k5 @ Mar 1, 2007 -> 12:56 PM) Meh, it might well be the beginning of a sell-off by the technical signs aren't there. Yesterday they rallied back, but finished on the lows, which ususally means they are exhausting the "buy the dips" people. The market did open sharply lower, which wasn't a big surprise, but instead of sustaining the selling, the market actually rallied back pretty well, even going green for a while. It looks like we are going to finish in the high end of the range. I would bet tomorrow is a 100 point plus down day, as I doubt anyone will want to carry positions over the weekend, but barring bad news, I would bet on a rally early next week. I'd just like to add...I'm impressed.

QUOTE(ScottyDo @ Mar 2, 2007 -> 01:53 PM) time to get a look at masset for the first time. wish radar gun was an official statistic but for some reason it doesn't show up on the box score Because different parks will have radar guns up to 5 mph apart. And on top of that, the same park can have different radar guns that give numbers that are different by several mph on the same day. And on top of that, the same radar gun in the same park can be different by several mph from day to day.

Why is it that the moment I saw on the forum front page "Guillen responds to..." I swore silently to myself?

QUOTE(Alpha Dog @ Mar 2, 2007 -> 12:02 PM) DemUnderground is the worst. Ever hang around FreeRepublic.com? Anyway, just looking at their data, it's actually quite obvious which ones they were able to count comments and which they weren't. Atrios, for example, has comments, but he runs them through Haloscan, a different company than Blogger, so the profanity in his comments wasn't counted. Huffington post, on the other hand, hosts its own comments on the same screen as posts, so when someone posts some profanity, it gets counted. Therefore, even though Atrios has been around for like 3x as long as Huffpo, huffington Post has almost 1000x as much profanity as Atrios. I could probably go to Atrios's comments and find more profanity in a single thread than this study counted. Just by looking through the list you can see easily who's comments were counted and who doesn't have any or wasn't counted: TPM, no comments, Kos, 1000x as much, counted comments. All I'm saying is that this study's methodology is so completely flawed that you can't even say that one side uses more profanity than the other. And finally, to pretend that either side's chief people don't receive death threats is simply silly. Hell, I got a column listed on AOL once about 5 years ago and I got a couple. The thing you should pay more attention to is not whether or not they're receiving them (I guarantee you every major author out there does), but whether they choose to publish them and what they do with them. Malkin publishes them because she wants to use them to tar her entire opposition as extremists, while she's the more "mainstream" and respectable one, while most of the others are smart enough to just ignore them. And it just so happens that the rest of the media keeps buying it.

QUOTE(southsideirish71 @ Mar 2, 2007 -> 11:46 AM) We dont get draft picks anymore, they changed that. When MB leaves you get nothing. The only reason to keep him is for the value of his pitching for the 2007 season to the whitesox and that is it. That's incorrect. They altered the formula slightly in the last CBA, but for a top-flight free agent like Buehrle, the White Sox would almost certainly still get 2 draft picks unless his arm falls off this season. Here's a summary of the changes, from BA: Link.

QUOTE(Texsox @ Mar 2, 2007 -> 09:28 AM) The Gore thread has highlighted something for me, why doesn't the GOP have a position regarding the environment? The only thing I've seen is attacking any Dem lead discussions and policy initiatives, but no proposals of their own besides delaying milestones for energy efficiencies and pollution standards. I assume theirs is a "if it hurts business, we can't afford it economically" position that is tough to articulate and more importantly, harder to defend. To my eyes, the answer is fairly simple: $$$$$$$$$. It costs businesses money to make changes to help the environment. It is a lot cheaper to dump mercury in a pond than it is to actually try to clean it up, and it's a lot cheaper to fund the American Enterprise Institute's Milliion-dollar-campaign saying global warming doesn't exist than it is to spend a few hundred million or a few billion developing an alternate source of energy. It affects the Dems less, but it still does hit them some, when they have people who are particularly in bed with certain business groups. But the reality is...the Republicans get an enormous amount of money from companies who would be hurt by additional environmental regulations, so when the Republicans get in power, they do so because of the support of those industries, and they take the steps those industries would like. Well, that's a complicated question. If we're talking about what can we do to bring the American Enterprise Institute towards an environmental perspective, the answer is probably nothing; their existence in these fields is based on the idea of denying everything. Just say that Global warming is caused by the sun, run ads saying CO2 is good for you, etc. With the people who simply deny that humans can do anything to the environment that will harm humans, or that the environment is always unimportant relative to profits...there probably isn't anything. The hope I see though comes from the religious side. You're not going to get all of them (I believe Falwell just called Global Climate change "Satan's attempt to redirect the church's primary focus"), but I think that there is going to be a sizeable group who may at some point become receptive to the message that humanity does have some responsibility to this earth, or even more so, that changes to the earth that cause suffering by billions of people might be something that should be dealt with. The business community may come around slowly...mainly as businesses start to realize that there is money available in protecting the Earth in ways...but not every company is going to throw their hat in with that group. But there are ways that inroads can be made, and I think that the religious community might be the best chance.

QUOTE(Texsox @ Mar 2, 2007 -> 09:16 AM) I wonder if bottled water without flouride is causing more dental problems for kids. If this family was spending its $$$ on bottled water...

QUOTE(mreye @ Mar 2, 2007 -> 05:20 AM) 6 rotted out teeth by the age of 10? No. The kid who died wasn't the one with 6 rotten teeth.

So wait a second, they're counting appearances at sites like Kos and MyDD, which allow just about anyone to sign up, create an account, and start posting comments and diaries, and comparing them to a bunch of Conservative sites that don't allow comments? If you count comments, there's probably more postings in 1 day @ Kos than there is at all of the non-commenting conservative sites combined since the beginning of their existence. It's no wonder that there's an 18-1 ratio when there's 50 times as much content. If anything, this simply shows how unwilling the conservative blogosphere is to allow people to comment on their posts, which is something that's been noted in the lefty blogosphere for quite some time. Instahack, Malkin, powerline, etc.

QUOTE(Texsox @ Mar 2, 2007 -> 08:02 AM) If you owned either team over a ten or twenty year period, which franchise would offer the best opportunity for the highest profits? Where I am going with this is a bigger question, why do certain owners buy certain teams? I think you were dead on with Pitt as a great possibility because of the home town angle. I think that is a bigger factor than profits for many owners. Others are fans of a sport and want a franchise in that sport regardless of location. There are 2 different ways that an owner can turn a profit, both of which are worth mentionning: 1. Increasing the value of a team. This would be the White Sox after 05; they increased salary to chew up the additional money coming in through ticket sales, however, at the same time winning the W.S. pushed up the value of the team by something like $30 million. 2. Greater revenue than expenditures. The D-Rays are the classic example here; one of the lowest salaries in baseball, with one of the most profitable teams. I think that in terms of guaranteed revenue, the 2nd part, the Cubs are a much better option, because you're almost guaranteed a sell-out every game. It's a stable revenue stream. However, because of the fact that it is a stable revenue stream, and there's not a ton of opportunity for growth other than increasing ticket prices, there's not a lot that can be added to the value of the team beyond inflationary growth. The Pirates, on the other hand, have room for growth in #1, simply because it's a fairly backwards franchise right now, but maybe not as much room in #2, because increasing the revenue is likely going to require spending more money on the FA market.

QUOTE(Kid Gleason @ Mar 1, 2007 -> 04:40 PM) If I was Lovie right now, I would be WAY too drunk to know I was Lovie right now!!! Are you kidding? Free Agency starts in like 3 hours and 20 minutes! He's not signing anyone directly, but he better damn well be sober tonight!