Balta1701

QUOTE(Milkman delivers @ Dec 7, 2005 -> 01:25 PM) Teams like helping the Red Sox out. Wakefield will be considerably worse without Mirabelli catching him, most likely, but come on. This is really all the Padres will get? I know where you're coming from, and I'd expect the Padres to at least have gotten an additional prospect from Boston in the deal for it to be fair...but at least they're gaining salary flexibility. That's something. If not much.

QUOTE(greasywheels121 @ Dec 7, 2005 -> 01:22 PM) I guess that's the one good thing about living in a place where winters are s***ty. For the most part, people know how to drive in it. Yeah, out here it starts raining and people wind up dead just because they're going too fast for the conditions. If it ever snows out here again (and we as a nation are doing our best to make sure it wont) there will be a lot of dead people out here.

QUOTE(kapkomet @ Dec 7, 2005 -> 01:11 PM) Well, here goes my 3-4 hour trip to go 20 miles. So you're going to try to drive around Los Angeles?

According to Congressman Murtha, who was giving the Democratic Response to the President's speech yesterday at CFR, the Administration is going to need another $100 billion supplemental next year to continue funding the Iraq war. Congressman Murtha is the Ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Subcommittee. If I've done the math right...that will bring the total spend to about $15,000 per Iraqi.

Plus, they need a catcher to replace Hernandez, who it seems they won't be spending the money to resign.

I fully understand why the Padres are making this move, but I have to make the smartass remark anyway: Good to see the Padres are really trying to build on that Division Title they won last year.

Looks like Redman's name will be off the market this year come trading deadline time.

QUOTE(kapkomet @ Dec 7, 2005 -> 12:01 PM) Damn, Nuke. You really stepped on the landmine with that one. When even I pass on one...that's saying something...

QUOTE(Chisoxfn @ Dec 7, 2005 -> 11:40 AM) Good move by the Dbacks. I'm not a big fan of either of those pitchers and when Estrada is healthy he's a pretty good hitting catcher. How many times in the last 10 years have the Braves traded for a pitcher who you thought was finished up, washed up, or just not worth a dime, and turned them into key guys on their staff? The most recent example I can think of is Jorge Sosa, who they picked up from Tampa Bay for almost nothing and who turned into a key starter for them down the stretch last year. Last year they had Mazzone to do it. Watch these 2 guys to see if that same magic still works without him.

QUOTE(NUKE_CLEVELAND @ Dec 7, 2005 -> 11:49 AM) How does the President allow himself to be taken out of the loop on untainted intelligence from an aggressive nation with whom war was imminent? I'm just going to sit and smile at that one.

QUOTE(NUKE_CLEVELAND @ Dec 7, 2005 -> 11:46 AM) Actually, Copies of "Magic" were always promptly delivered in locked pouches to President Roosevelt, and the secretaries of State, War, and Navy. They also went to Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall and to the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Harold Stark. Hell, we even gave Britain 3 of the machines we engineered to gather intercepts but still none of this intel made it to Hawaii. For a significant period of time, FDR had his name removed from the list of those who were allowed to see the Magic intercepts, as one of the intercepts was found in one of his trash cans. He got back on the list only shortly before teh 7th.

ESPN:

QUOTE(NUKE_CLEVELAND @ Dec 7, 2005 -> 11:27 AM) I expected a less than intelligent response from you. Now while you're laughing at your silly picture of tinfoil hats explain to me why, having cracked the Japanese diplomatic codes and having intercepted dispatches instructing operatives in Honolulu to do a reconnisance of Pearl Harbor and report on the locations of American ships, that we did nothing about it. We knew they were scoping the place out for a possible attack and we did nothing about it. Hell, we didn't even tell the commanders in Hawaii about it. There could be lots of reasons why we didn't do anything about it. We were scoping out the locations of Japanese ships for months before the attack...we lost track of 1 fleet in late November. Hell, Amelia Earhart's flight may very well have involved taking photos of Japanese positions in the south Pacific, since she was flying over there anyway. Recon of a potential enemy's ships is certainly nothing out of the ordinary, especially since our fleet was based there...that way you have an estimate of their strength if they sail out to meet the fleet. Simply pointing out stupid things which were done before the attack doesn't prove by any stretch of the imagination that FDR let it happen. What you would actually need is to not only show that these stupid things happened, but that FDR knew of every single detail of them and deliberately chose the things which happened. Do we know for a fact that FDR knew every detail that was coming from those intercepts? Hell, for a time he wasn't even permitted to see them. The military was sending out warnings to its pacific bases, but none of them were specific at all. There were even rumors of potential attacks on the weekends before the 7th, attacks which turned out to not happen...which could have very well made the leadership feel less inclined to send out war messages before the final Japanese declaration was given.

QUOTE(NUKE_CLEVELAND @ Dec 7, 2005 -> 11:02 AM) So it was coincidence then that the far more valuable aircraft carriers left port only a couple of days prior? Yes, it was. They were on a run to deliver aircraft to Wake Island, which had been preparing for a possible invasion for months and was ready to receive the newer aircraft. Those aircraft performed quite well in the defense of Wake, btw. Edit: oh yeah, and 1 more thought...at the time, the U.S. military and most of the folks in the government still imagined sea warfare involving what it had in the years before - large concentrations of battleships slugging it out. It wasn't really until Pearl, when all we had was aircraft carriers left, when the military really started using the potential of the Carrier. The Japanese realized the Carrier's potential before the war started - leading to Pearl and the sinking of Force Z near Singapore. If you asked people on Dec. 6th, 1941, which ships they'd rather lose in an attack, I bet you the large majority of the Navy would have said the carriers. They were really not thought of as more valuable than the battleships until we had no battleships left.

QUOTE(NUKE_CLEVELAND @ Dec 7, 2005 -> 11:05 AM) The Soviets and Chinese spent the whole war shipping arms to their "fraternal Socialist Allies". If a few of their advisors had been killed we could contend that their weapons were killing far more of our people and basically tell them to piss off. That leaves out the answer to the question: what would we do if they didn't just "Piss off"? If they chose to either up their aid or establish an actual military presence inside North Vietnam along the lines of what we had established in the south?

Oh, and furthermore...I'm not sure "Unmolested" is an accurate description of how we treated Cambodia and Laos...first of all, those areas were bombed heavily. In fact, some interesting tactics were used to try to place the bombings - sensors were developed to detect people in quite a few ways so that we could try to find where they were. Furthermore, Laos itself was actually even used as a site from which the U.S. ran operations- the CIA ran an "airline" which set up facilities for radar and covert operations out of Laos.

So would you contend that the death of any of the Soviet advisors, or the widening of the conflict to directly include Cambodia or Laos, would have had no consequences with regards to the actions of the Soviets or the Chinese?

QUOTE(NUKE_CLEVELAND @ Dec 7, 2005 -> 10:59 AM) There is a school of thought that says that Roosevelt allowed Pearl Harbor to happen as justification for getting into WW2. Anyone believe that.........I do. Not a chance in Hell. He very likely did want an excuse to enter the European war, but he never imagined the loss of almost the entire Pacific Fleet.

"Air raid, Pearl Harbor. This is no drill."

QUOTE(NUKE_CLEVELAND @ Dec 7, 2005 -> 10:49 AM) I wont debate you that we dropped a lot of bombs and wasted a lot of gas bombing. We did. Problem was that we dropped bombs on all the wrong targets. I would counter by saying that there weren't enough right targets. Even if we had gone after their defense network before it was up, it wouldn't have broken them. That nation endured terror campaigns just as bad as any bombing campaign we could have launched when the French first attempted to recolonize the country after WWII - people starving, torture, indiscriminate killings, occupation of cities, the whole works. When the "Christmas bombing" happened in 72 (I think it was that year, correct me if I'm off by 1), it basically had almost no effect on North Vietnamese morale, because the people had both been through worse, and they'd been expecting terror bombings of their cities since the U.S. first intervened.

Oh goodie, now we've got a Vietnam tactics debate. This should be fun. The problem with bombing as a tactic is that in North Vietnam, there really wasn't all that much available to bomb. Yes, we lost a ton of airmen because of the rules of engagement there, but think about this...in N.V., there were virtually no Industries during the war. Nothing in the way of factories, munitions plants, or even psychological targets that could be hit with bombing. If we flew planes over Vietnam, we were spending tens of thousands of dollars on fuel, munitions, and lost planes, in order to bomb a few hundred dollars worth of a target. (anecdote from History of Vietnam War class @ Indiana:) At one point during that war, the military claimed it had destroyed something like a billion dollars worth of North Vietnamese equipment through bombing; at the time, the estimated net worth of every piece of industry, equipment, buildings, etc., in all of North Vietnam was something like an order of magnitude less than that. The only solution to that war through bombing was going to be to bomb that entire nation into the ground, killing literally tens of millions. You simply cannot bomb away an opponent when the opponent is fabricating half his munitions from your unexploded bombs.

QUOTE(103 mph screwball @ Dec 7, 2005 -> 10:29 AM) If JG was traded, I still feel the Sox are in good shape to defend the title. I'd rather give big bucks to MB than JG. I don't think it's out of the question that we could afford to keep both of them, if we continue to be smart in the way we make moves, we keep competing (so that our attendence continues to grow), and inflation keeps happening of other revenue sources (Merch, TV, etc.) Also, we are probably going to continue to get younger at several positions (notably the Outfield), which will give us potential trade pieces in Podsednik and possibly Dye that could be used to find other young/cheap fill-ins.

64 years ago today, the newly installed radar station on Oahu picked up a large formation of planes headed for the Island from the North. The military wasn't alarmed, because a flight of B-17's was expected to arrive that morning.

QUOTE(NUKE_CLEVELAND @ Dec 7, 2005 -> 09:32 AM) If torturing terrorists saves one innocent life, prevents 1 suicide bomber from getting where hes going, stops one shooting before it starts, prevents one governmental official from being assassinated then its justified. I wont shed a single tear for people who hate America and want to kill as many of us as they possibly can. But what happens when torturing 1 person prevents 1 suicide bomber from getting where he's going, but it motivates 1000, or 10000 more people to begin to work/fight against America?

QUOTE(aboz56 @ Dec 7, 2005 -> 08:56 AM) Where'd you see this? That's badass if true. CBSSportsline