Balta1701

QUOTE(sox4lifeinPA @ Jan 5, 2006 -> 09:50 AM) General consensus is that the BEST situation for a child to be raised is in a loving and nurturing heterosexual male/female relationship. Actually, at least based on the info of the APA, I'm not sure that's true...there is some data saying that many homosexual couples are just as fit to be parents as hetersoexual couples, and that their children are just as fit emotionally as children of heterosexual couples.

QUOTE(YASNY @ Jan 5, 2006 -> 09:49 AM) Those numbers are better sign than we've had in any other recent January, unless we didn't have a Christmas season in the years immediately prior to those particular Januarys. Like I said, that doesn't really mean anything yet...it could just mean that companies are holding onto their temporary workers for 1 week longer to handle gift cards, or it could even be an artifact of the fact that Christmas fell on a weekend so temporary worker layoffs didn't register yet. The fact that they're great doesn't tell you that much - i n Jan of 02, our nation's job growth went through the roof for 1 month, but it didn't mean anything aside from the fact that during the Christmas season temporary worker hiring was exceptionally low, so there were fewer temporary workers to lay off than the seasonal adjustments expected, so the numbers came out as job growth when the entire number was due to the lack of layoffs due to the lack of hiring the previous winter. I'm not saying they're a bad sign, but you can't take 1 week's numbers during an exceptionally volatile period with high seasonal adjustments as a sign of really anything.

QUOTE(YASNY @ Jan 5, 2006 -> 09:51 AM) I agree. Thank God the republicans control the purse strings at the federal level. Yeah, thank God the Republicans aren't overrun by cronies in major industries who would want to get a slice of that pie. Also thank God that they clearly learned their lessons in Iraq about how cronyism can dismantle a reconstruction project, so surely they'll do a better job th is time.

QUOTE(Cknolls @ Jan 5, 2006 -> 10:08 AM) I just read that Sharon has been declared clinically dead. Where did you hear that @? The Pope was declared dead by the 24 hour news networks at least 1 or 2 times in the week running up to his death, so could you give us a source?

QUOTE(YASNY @ Jan 5, 2006 -> 08:36 AM) Agreed. I've always enjoyed watching Flutie play, but he wasn't going to take an NFL to the promised land. That "buffoon Jim McMahon" did accomplish that. I don't know about that...that 1st year he played with the Bills he had a real shot, until Wade Phillips started Rob Johnson against the Colts in game 16 of the season, then saw Johnson tear up the Colts backups, and decided to start Johnson in game 1 of the playoffs against Tennessee. You'll remember that game as the music city miracle. But what I remember of that game is that the Bills offense looked totally off kilter with Johnson in there. Something like a dozen false start penalties killing drives. The Bills dominated that game, except for the work of Jevan Kearse. They should have won it easily, but Johnson sabotaged that team through his suckiness, while Flutie sat on the bench. Tennessee went on to be 1 yard from winning the Super Bowl, and the Bills should have won that game with ease even without that b*tch Frank Wycheck.

Indy's offense has shown repeatedly that it is beatable if you're able to both get pressure on the QB and stop the run with your front 4-5 guys. That's what the Chargers did this year, that's been the 1 thing the Patriots did all those times, etc. The Bears have a front 4 which can do exactly that. They can get pressure on manning and at the same time slow Edge down, which allows them to drop 6-7 guys into pass coverage so that Peyton can't just pick them apart. The Bears might not be able to totally shut down the Colts (even the Pats and Chargers didn't do that) but they sure could slow them down. The question then becomes...what can Grossman do against the Colts defense? And Honestly, my answer is: I don't have a clue. With Orton playing I think the Bears would lose, because the Colts have enough defense that they could stack 7-8 guys up front to slow the run, and they don't give up easy scores due to turnovers. But with Grossman? Can Grossman push back a safety or two into deep pass coverage and let Jones and Benson get an extra .5-1 yard per carry? He very well could, and he very well could make some more accurate passes on 3rd down. But I don't know yet, I just haven't seen enough of him.

QUOTE(Soxbadger @ Jan 4, 2006 -> 11:34 PM) I really dont think Young can stay after this game. He just flat out dominated, and he almost always looks to pass first and run second. He will be very good in the NFL, if I was Houston I would trade Carr and draft Young. They have a good RB core, they have Andre Johnson, they in no way can hurt their franchise by drafting Young. He is going to be a Texas hero, if they pass on him and he does well, they will never live it down. Even if Young doesnt pan out, the fan base will understand far more. Bush looks like a smaller S. Alexander. Some of those Texas lineman look real good, I could be real happy with the Bears getting one. Well, after screaming to the Texas fans "We'll be back" while holding a fancy trophy last night in the Rose Bowl, it would sure be one heck of a flip flop.

QUOTE(Dam8610 @ Jan 5, 2006 -> 06:36 AM) What was the compensation for the Jets? Nothing's been agreed yet.

QUOTE(maggsmaggs @ Jan 5, 2006 -> 04:43 AM) I think Vince may have moved to the top of many draft borads yesterdau ahead of Bush and Leinart. Bush still looked great against a great team, but not amazing. While, Young seemed on another level than anyone against a great team. I think Reggie Bush won the Heisman in that Fresno State game, which happened the same week Vince Young had a bad week. But I also think that if the Heisman voting happened today, Vince Young would get himself a nice trophy - he saved his best game ofr when it counted the most. And yes, Vince Young even said last night that he's comign back.

QUOTE(YASNY @ Jan 5, 2006 -> 09:41 AM) You are talking about New Orleans, which is in the state of Louisiana. The odds of being able to pull this off without the local politicians getting their grubby little hands in the pot are almost nonexistant. Well, compared with the alternatives, a federally managed program with strict rules written by the feds about how it's to be pulled off certainly seems to be both less able to be defrauded and vastly more fair than either simply dumping money into contractors in the area or throwing caution to the wind and just not doing anything.

The one thing I've learned about January and December is that the "Seasonally adjusted" part of that number is the real key. The DOL attempts to "Seasonally adjust" for economic conditions in those 2 months by expecting significant amounts of hiring in October-December, and significant amounts of layoffs in January. So, they factor those numbers out in order to try to get at the "Core job growth" to coin a phrase. The odd part about those seasonal adjustments is that it only takes a slight variance in the Christmas hiring and layoff patterns to produce something that looks really wierd. For example, if your Christmas hiring season doesn't go as well as usual, you wind up with poor job growth numbers before christmas, but in January there wind up being fewer layoffs reported, so the January numbers wind up looking spectacular. There's a reason this is happening in early January...for all we know this is the effect of the growth of gift cards over the past few years - businesses holding onto temporary employees 1 week longer than before so that they have staff to handle those shoppers. Those numbers are probably not a bad sign, but they're not a good sign either, in fact I'm not sure if they tell us anything of value given how volatile the christmas season numbers get. The January monthly job report will probably tell us more simply by filtering out some of the high frequency stuff, but again it suffers from the same seasonal adjustment imperfections, albiet to a smaller degree than the weekly numbers.

That would be an absolutely massive improvement over the "you're on your own" that we've given that area thus far, or the original floated ideas, such as putting either Karl Rove or FEMA in charge of the rebuilding efforts. The rules would have to be pretty darn stringent so as to make sure that the land wasn't being sold on the cheap or bought at incredibly high prices in order to enrich some politician's cronies, but it could work very well if done fairly.

QUOTE(EvilMonkey @ Jan 4, 2006 -> 07:49 PM) While you can quote statistics all day long about hom many people cannot afford insurance, how many of them 'can't afford it' because they are only in their mid 20's, and they would rather have that $600 a month going to a new BMW instead of insurance? 'Can't afford it' is often simply a choice of what do you want more. Yeah, if the choice is food or insurance, I think you take the mac n cheese. But if your choice is a fancier apratment downtown, or vacations, etc, well then, you don't belong in that catagory. As for a 'right to healt care', when the taxpayers start paying for med school, maybe they can get free med care. As bad as the current system is, it is still better than socialized medicine. But you see, for an insurance system to actually work and be affordable for everyone, those are precisely the people that need to be in the insurance pool, because without them, insurance really falls apart. You need the 20 year old healthy person in the insurance pool for it to work properly. Without that, you're left with an inexorable climb in insurance costs, as higher insurance costs push more of those who are at limited risk out of the insurance pool, which pushes the insurance cost higher because the pool is smaller, which pushes even more people out of the insurance pool, and eventually you wind up with the system we're starting to approach...where only the sick have insurance. Unions and health care through work have delayed the approach to that state, but now that those systems are breaking down rapidly, that's what we're really closing in on.

QUOTE(sox4lifeinPA @ Jan 5, 2006 -> 09:28 AM) I think a double cheeseburger tastes different than the single cheeseburger for some reason. I don't know why. The ratio of beef to bread is vastly increased in a double cheeseburger. Ditto the ratio of grease to bread.

QUOTE(Controlled Chaos @ Jan 5, 2006 -> 08:57 AM) Here's something interesting to toss around. If a gay couple adopts a baby boy. Will he grow up to be gay, because of the acceptance of it? Can two gay guys raise a heterosexual boy? See I think it has to do with genes. When that kid hits 11 or 12 he is gonna see some girl and be like whoa!! It doesn't matter that his dads are gay...I think his body will tell him what he likes to see and what he doesn't. edit: BTW, I was trying to take this away from a s*** starting thread, into a legitimate discussion. I'm not awake enough to do more than a cursory google search for the actual studies, and it's a bit of a bear to wade through all the crap put out by places like AFA, but I think the general consensus about homosexual parenting, as it stands now, is that homosexual parents are in most cases just as likely to give a child a good home as heterosexual ones. Given that in all cases they have to go through the adoption process, which weeds out many of the unfit parents we so often swear at over in SLaP, the ones who wind up with children often actually put them in better conditions than the average couple who just has a child regardless of whether or not they're in a position to take care of one. In terms of whether or not the child will be homosexual, I believe (couldn't find the exact studies on this so I'm just working from memory) that there may be some slight increase in the percentage of children raised by homosexual parents who turn out to be homosexual when compared to the population as a whole, but the difference is not huge, and may very well also be related to the fact that many heterosexual families would be totally intolerant of their children being homosexual, while homosexual families would find such intolerance of homosexuality impossible. One decent summary can be found here.

Piece from my LAT this morning on the type of stroke he suffered...

I find myself agreeing with a lot of the previous post, and I have 1 thing to add to it... If Brandon McCarthy can be as dominating of a pitcher as I think he can be, and as good as he looked at the end of last season...think about this. Out of the Bullpen and working spot-start duty, he might be able to work in 60-90 innings depending on everyone's exact health. If he's in the starting rotatino, he'd probably pitch around 200 innings. By placing him in the bullpen, we're losing a lot of potentially very good innings from the kid. We would get some valuable innings out of him to be sure, but compared with what he could do as a starter, he'd be spending a lot of time on the bench. If BMac could do waht he did at the end of last year, the more innings he pitches the better off we are.

And Jon Garland's people have broken off all negotiations with the White Sox. He wants to play on the West Coast 2 years from now.

The Mets have almost certainly the best team on paper in the NL East. The only problem is...the Marlins probably had the best team on paper in the NL East last year, and that wasn't good enough for them to stop the Braves run. If Bobby Cox can manage a team of mostly rookies, an injured star, and a battered pitching staff to the playoffs, what can he do when he gets a new shortstop and a bunch of 2nd year players? If that Braves pitching staff stays healthy, they'll be right there, the question remains their bullpen (and their pitching staff without Mazzone of course)

QUOTE(SoxFan562004 @ Jan 4, 2006 -> 03:46 PM) one of the best SNL jokes in years was about Madonna's and Spears' kiss on some award show. Fallon said "That was hot, if you find sad desperation for attention hot" Couldn't agree more with that crack! No, the best joke about that was when Halle Berry hosted later that season with Britney Spears as the musical guest...in late October of 03, and Lorne et. al spent the monologue trying to convince Halle and Britney to do another kiss, and Lorne's last desperate attempt was "If not me, then do it for those poor Cub fans." Man, I was on the floor for the first 20 minutes of the show. I still watch when that one is replayed.

QUOTE(Drew @ Jan 4, 2006 -> 12:51 PM) And he'll probably strike out or get caught stealing in the clutch anyway, so who cares? Dude, don't you remember? It's a GIDP in the clutch. I.e. game 5 against the Angels, where ARod single-handedly killed a rally that could have won the game.

QUOTE(Rex Kickass @ Jan 4, 2006 -> 02:13 PM) What I thought was great about this story was that Lorne Michaels told her she had a problem. When the guy that shepherded John Belushi and Chris Farley tells you that you have an issue, get thee to rehab fast! I'm not sure if this was implied by the word "Shepherded" or not, but Michaels actually worked incredibly hard to try to force Farley to clean himself up, suspensions, active interventions, etc. Farley was actually sober and clean coming off of SNL, but he really fell apart after "Beverly Hills Ninja" again.

The real question in Israeli politics, if the worst happens here, is: can Simon Peres hold together that new party?

Here's a question...how does a "Serious stroke" on the part of the Israeli leader change any potential strike?

2 down...Joe to go.