Balta1701

QUOTE(SSH2005 @ Feb 9, 2006 -> 01:01 PM) Bush bashers seem to forget that 9/11 might never have happened if Clinton had a set of balls. Apparently, the only time he used his balls was with White House interns. And it might never have happened had Bush not ignored the attack on the Cole or Richard Clarke's requests for a principals-level meeting on Al Qaeda in 2001 either. There's plenty o' blame to go around. Should Clinton have done more? In hindsight, absolutely. Should Bush? In hindsight, absolutely.

CNN starts off by showing images of the King Funeral speeches (the stuff mentionning the WMD), but cuts out the applause from the segment. Fox News does exactly the same thing. Then Morton Kondracke comments on the fact that the response of the audience "wasn't exactly uproarious"

This continues to be the biggest distortion in the Abramoff case...there are a lot of Indian Tribes in this country, and a lot of them are in different states. Many of them wind up having business before the government. Before Abramoff started working with any indian tribes, they gave the majority of their money to Democrats. When a tribe started working with Abramoff, that tribe always saw its contributions to Republicans go through the roof, while it's contributions to Demcrats on average declined roughly 9%. The crime overall is not taking money from people associated with Abramoff (and you can't find a single Dem who actually received money directly from Abramoff). The crime is in the quid pro quo. The crimes are in the lavish gifts which barely border on the edges of the law. If every single person who received money from one of the indian tribes Abramoff dealt with was actually linked to the Crimes, well, let's put it this way, I'd be happy to sacrifice Harry Reid in exchange for knocking out that many Republicans. Hastert got a lot more money from those tribes than Reid, for example, and he hasnt' been seriously implicated. There may well be evidence that Reid has done something inappropriate. I haven't seen it yet. The evidence that is out there thus far is about things done by guys like Rep. Ney, Delay, etc., where they're getting gifts from Abramoff that they don't report, where abramoff is demanding extra money from people to meet with those Congresspeople, etc. Here remains the best summary I've seen to date about who got what in the Abramoff case, including donations just from the indian tribes not necessarily tied exactly to Abramoff. As far as I can tell, it already mentions basically the same facts presented in the AP article ($5000 from 1 tribe, writing a letter to help it, etc.), yet it was made a month ago, and somehow the AP just decided to run that story today. Very odd indeed.

"Well I know Hell, damn, ass..." Interestingly, I have this odd habit of randomly switching between normal letters and script while taking notes in class or writing various handwritten things. I havne't a clue why I do it, but sometimes I'll look back at a page of notes, the first half will be normal, suddenly I'll use a half page of script, then a 1/4 page of normal, then like a 1/3 page of script, and I'll even switch back & forth in the middle of words. Y et somehow I can still read it.

QUOTE(YASNY @ Feb 9, 2006 -> 11:33 AM) I wonder if Widger realizes how knowledgable Sox fans appreciate how much he contributed in '05. AJ's been getting a lot of the kudos, but Widger was a very important part of the team. Nobody beats him.

Molina's not too happy with the Angels it seems. Link.

QUOTE(YASNY @ Feb 9, 2006 -> 10:34 AM) Common sense will tell you that the number not in the labor force will continue to rise, and probably at a faster rate as the baby boomers grow older, have more health problems and reach retirement age. As for the unemployement percentage being irrelevent, if it was 9% would that still be considered irrelevent? It would depend on how it got to 9%. If it got there because it was at 15% but then the labor market had "Shrunk" due to the survey excluding people, it'd be pretty darn irrelevant. Here's the thing to put this in perspective. Due to population growth, immigration, etc., this nation adds roughly 100,000-150,000 people to its work force every month. About a million or two a year depending on the year. Yet the size of the work force has declined dramatically over the past 10 years. These 2 metrics simply do not match.

John McCain, December 2002: This was discussed yesterday: And Mr. McCain's response? Urge to throw flip-flops at him...rising...

QUOTE(southsider2k5 @ Feb 9, 2006 -> 10:11 AM) Not sure what you were linking, but I got this message Sorry, survey does not exist. If you need to contact someone about the program or its data, please send a message to the data questions e-mail address below or call the phone number below. Ok, i must not be able to link directly to that data table...Try here, check the top left box, and retrieve data.

In the first full post-SOTU speech poll i've seen...Pew is saying that the speech produced virtually no bounce at all for the President (1-2 points since December, well within the margin of error of the poll). Still stuck at 40%.

QUOTE(southsider2k5 @ Feb 9, 2006 -> 09:43 AM) It will be interesting to see which Pharoh it was, and why he was buried so hastily. I also can't wait for the Tut exhibit to come back to Chicago this summer. If it was even a Pharaoh.

QUOTE(southsider2k5 @ Feb 9, 2006 -> 09:55 AM) What exactly does that number include???? Every month when the BLS puts out its labor numbers, it includes 1 item in the table for "Not in the labor force", including all sorts of things, like long-term unemployed, people who have stopped looking for work, people who have gone to school, people placed on disability, people who have gone in for other job training, etc. There's lots of ways to fall out. Here's their raw numbers. I don't care as much about the overall number...whether it's 70 million or 10 million isn't the important part...the important part is the fact that in the last 10 years, as the "Unemployment percentage" numbers have dropped...a very significant portion of that drop is due to the dramatic increase in that number.

QUOTE(Rex Kickass @ Feb 9, 2006 -> 09:37 AM) What I don't honestly understand is that it seems the number of jobs in my local paper doesn't grow day to day. Is the labor market really this tight? Or is it because a large number of people have left the workforce? I'm honestly confused. There are so many statistics regarding employment and some seem to be a direct contradiction of the others. In January of 2001, the number of people listed as "Not in the labor force" in the BLS job numbers was 71,060,000. In January of 2006, that same number was 78,463,000. That's nearly 7.5 million people who are not counted as "Unemployed" by the U.S. government but who do not have jobs.

QUOTE(Al Lopez's Ghost @ Feb 8, 2006 -> 09:08 PM) So let's say the Nats decided to have LeCroy catch, with Sammie in right and Soriano at second. That would be one hell of a defensive lineup. "For the Nationals tonight, 5 runs, 10 hits, 70 errors." Dude...catchers usually don't get called for errors except on throwing. 40 errors, 25 passed balls, 5-10 wild pitches should do it.

QUOTE(SoxFan562004 @ Feb 9, 2006 -> 09:05 AM) LOL, this is classic. Easily the best part is the "knothole." This was a huge thing they put forth with the plans, how this was unique and bring the community together, now it just doesn't do what they said. Personally, I think it's even better than that...it's not just like the construction went awry or something like that...but they're in fact going to actively shut the thing so that people can't see in. They're just laughing at those fans.

QUOTE(southsider2k5 @ Feb 9, 2006 -> 07:55 AM) The Cubs will sell out again this year. There might be fewer people going by the end of the year, but all of the tickets will long since be sold, so it won't really matter. But I will say this, if the Sox go to the playoffs again, while the Cubs are playing golf, THEN you might see their attendance fall, to go along with an actual groundswell for change at Wrigley. Didn't you read the article? The Cubs have alread "Sold out". (Not talking about ticket sales)

QUOTE(kyyle23 @ Feb 9, 2006 -> 08:10 AM) I wonder how Lovie feels his defense matches up against his old boss. I'm sure Lovie's terrified. I mean, the Lions have 3 top 10 picks in their wide receiving corps. Their offense is just going to dominate!!!

QUOTE(Jordan4life_2006 @ Feb 9, 2006 -> 09:04 AM) Anybody think it's kinda sad that it takes something like this to get hockey in the news? What, the strike didn't get your attention?

So is this guy related to the late bassist from The Who? If not, well I don't really care.

Since very few people actually are mentionning the awards, I think I will... If U2 was going to win for any of their recent albums, it should have been for "All that you can't leave behind", which was not only a better album than "How to dismantle an atomic bomb", but also had weaker competition (The O Brother where art thou soundtrack won somehow).

QUOTE(G&T @ Feb 9, 2006 -> 09:09 AM) Unfortunately my understanding of economics is essentially nill. My question is what sectors are these jobs in? Are these all manufacturing or government or what? It's great that people have jobs but are incomes generally higher or lower? Both real wages and the median wage have been falling for several years now, the median wage (50% of Americans earn less) has been falling since the last year or two of the Clinton Administration. Real wages...wages after inflation is removed, have been stagnant or declining for at least the last year. According to some estimates, more than 100% of the new jobs created since 2001 have been attributable to the dramatic increases in government spending.

QUOTE(southsider2k5 @ Feb 9, 2006 -> 08:08 AM) Supposedly 10 potential attacks have been stopped since 9/11 http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/02/09/bus...r.ap/index.html A few years ago the FBI or DOJ or one of those organizations said 100 had been stopped since 9/11.

QUOTE(kapkomet @ Feb 9, 2006 -> 07:29 AM) Look, it's no secret that BushCo (thanks Flaxx) had a hard on for Iraq since the "job" didn't get finished in 1991. At the same time, though, my point is that there WERE weapons there - and to say that UNSCOM destroyed them all is lacking in thought at best to downright ignorant. That's all I'm saying. It's like Saddam became righteous, etc. and that is simply not true. That's the only reason I'm even debating this is because it's not as black and white as some folks would make it out to be. No one was suggesting that Saddam had suddenly become Righteous. Rather, that's why had Saddam not complied with the U.N.'s 2002 demand to allow inspectors back in with totally unfettered access, the war would probably have been justified. However, once the inspections regime resumed...and verified that Saddam was not only WMD disarmed but that there was 4 years worth of dust on all of the machines it would have taken for him to restart those programs, the fact that there were no WMD was painfully obvious to anyone willing to listen. I wouldn't have just magically trusted Saddam to not develop them on his own, just like you wouldn't. Which is why the UNMOVIC team needed to be in there to verify they weren't rebuilding any or using that equipment. But it is in no way ignorant to claim that when UNSCOM accounted for over 95% of what was built, and 2 separate teams since then have verified that Iraq was WMD disarmed through UNSCOM and Operation Rommel in '98, Iraq was actually WMD disarmed at the time of the invasion.

WaPo.

Both the CS Monitor and Newsweek are alleging that the Administration has basically continued the so-called "Total Information Awareness" program under different names (they don't agree on the name) despite the fact that it was completely shut down when it was first discussed. The Newsweek one claims that the program is still running but is basically useless because the intelligence agencies are just collecting information taht they can't use, so it winds up being a black hole which is just sucking up money and information without having a clue who it should actually be targeting. And no one seems to really know what's being done with whatever information is collected either.