lostfan

I think you guys are underestimating how much money airlines have been losing lately due to fuel costs.

If there's no draft, then there is no other war, and people have to stop talking about that, too.

There is nothing like watching a good old-fashioned ass pounding to make you feel better about your team.

If we were to have another war, we absolutely would need to re-institute the draft. There really is no way around it.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Aug 20, 2008 -> 07:22 PM) Nothing. Obama opted out of the public financing system, so he's not bound by those spending limits. He just has to raise an additional $80 million beyond what the McCain campaign raises to make up for the money McCain gets from the government. Ah, I see. So Obama's spending advantage hasn't even kicked in yet.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Aug 20, 2008 -> 07:19 PM) That's because he can't be. In the next 2 weeks, he has to spend every dollar he's raised that is not general election money, and after that he's totally blocked in by the state by state spending limits. What does that mean for Obama?

McCain doesn't seem to be all that cash-strapped, at least not yet.

QUOTE (Pants Rowland @ Aug 20, 2008 -> 07:59 PM) Seriously? Where did you hear this? Uhh... I don't know, he's probably just messing with us. Hall said he was fine last night. http://mlb.mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20...rtnerId=rss_cws /shrug

QUOTE (mr_genius @ Aug 20, 2008 -> 06:47 PM) wow, the TV Media isn't covering his talking points? if you guys think the MSM is pro-McCain and parroting his talking points for free; you really are going to piss this election away. oh well. so much whining even though he is getting great coverage. kind of like the rich kid on MTV who is crying because she got a red Lamborghini for her 16th birthday but wanted 2 of them; one read and one blue. I don't know if you've been watching the Keith Olbermann channel or something but not all of McCain's press is bad press, he gets good press, a lot of it actually, and he is getting his message out there. What the Obama camp does not seem to have learned is that they still do control the media narrative to some extent, and that by them responding or overreacting to everything, like you were saying earlier, they are prolonging the life of that story, and getting themselves more negative exposure. If they just let it die off, McCain's strategy here loses effectiveness. They don't need to go into an all-out blitz here, they can just play a soft zone for now. But they're blitzing and giving up big plays.

That "going goiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing GONE!" with whatever he tries to blurt out before he has to say it? Yeah I hate that. I would rather hump a cheese grater than be forced to listen to a DJ home run call.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Aug 20, 2008 -> 06:15 PM) Part of the problem though was that against Hillary, the campaign put together a strategy where they didn't need to go negative at all. They won it by winning Iowa, outworking Hillary for every delegate they could steal on Super Tuesday, and then putting her away with strong showings in the late Feb. states where she hadn't planned to compete at all. He never had to go negative against her that much to win, he just had to endure her barrage and not totally foul anything up before PA and NC hit. So far, they're using the same basic playbook here...outworking McCain while he tries to keep swinging a club. They haven't hit him all that hard yet except on the couple of local issues (Ralph Reed in GA, the DHL thing in Ohio). They may not want to go harder after him than that...up to this point in the Campaign, they've never had to. More or less I agree, Hillary's popular vote argument was so dumb because aside from the blatantly obvious fact that the nomination wasn't decided by popular vote, she simply had a poor strategy designed for a single knockout blow on Super Tuesday which ended up getting blunted, and ran out of steam by Texas and Ohio (I knew it was over then, she simply didn't get enough delegates). Had she been more focused on the delegates like she should've been (among several other things that derailed her like her husband failing to STFU when he needed to), she probably is the nominee right now. Obama basically won with the rulebook and the only thing that mattered was the end result. If he keeps to that and focuses on electoral votes, which I'm sure Axelrod is, he wins. If he allows himself to become distracted, he fails.

QUOTE (mr_genius @ Aug 20, 2008 -> 06:05 PM) Fist off, the MSM is an advantage for Obama. He needs to use every bit of this advantage. Not recognizing this advantage and taking advantage of it would be an epic mistake. If the thought process comes in that the MSM is 'unfair' to Obama, he is pretty much done for and honestly shouldn't be president because it shows that he has no idea what is going on around him. Currently, the coverage of Obama and a positive message about him dwarfs anything that McCain can possibly do with the media. The Clinton's ran a very negative campaign against Obama and he took the high road and stayed on message and won. Not only did he win, but he was winning over mass indipedent voters. A negative campaign can be beat, and he knows this. McCain isn't going to be anywhere near as rough as the Clinton's. The Obama camp is getting way too sensitive, they can't let McCain joke ads throw them off track. Obama did get a little dirty towards the end, but only after Hillary's attack ads started causing him to dip in the polls. He hasn't been negative yet against McCain, but I wish he would stop paying McCain so much attention and whining. Even if his beefs are legitimate, him bringing that up is not seen that way, it's just more political noise.

QUOTE (Alpha Dog @ Aug 20, 2008 -> 05:49 PM) I really hope you are right. because if he goes out and blows up a cafe, there is going to be hell to pay for more than one government official. If we are talking Hizballah, and are going to assume this guy is a Hizballah member, that is probably not very likely to happen because: a. They've never actually done anything like that in the United States, and even still, they only attack military and government targets e.g. the Marine barracks in Beiruit because they are seen as legitimate whereas randomly killing civilians does not make them look very good morally, and... b. It's a strategic misplay on their part to do that and there is more to be lost than gained. Now, that all may change... but that's my view of things currently.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Aug 20, 2008 -> 06:01 PM) Well, here's the question we all need to ask. Do we have a high enough tolerance at this point in our lives to play a drinking game with Rudy's speech using 9/11 as one of the phrases? I'm actually worried about casualties from that night. I'm totally in. What's the criteria?

QUOTE (Athomeboy_2000 @ Aug 20, 2008 -> 05:52 PM) The problem is that it's damn near impossible to get heard when your opponent runs almost nothing but negative ads and uses the media like fiddle. Obama WANTS to stay positive and issue oriented, but the MSM has no interest in that. They'd rather say "oh, hey, look at this negative ad. How WRONG! Let's play it again." Obama released 2 VERY good and positive ads during the olympics. Did they get near the same press as the "Celeb" ads? not even close. Until Obama can figure out a way to have the MSM listen to his positive message more than McCain's negative message, he'll have to keep trying to link McCain to , Abramoff, , and their newest line: McCain's a trigger happy a hot head. I thought Obama's Olympic ads were pretty flat and dull, but I'd rather see that than another dumbass attack ad. After a while that makes me just not want to pay attention anymore.

Wow I totally forgot about the game and just checked the score, the Sox are beating the absolute s*** out of the Mariners.

I dunno, on TSN, generally speaking the more you blog, the more people will see it, and if people like it, they will friend you, come back and read what you write and see your titles linked more often. If you write crappy blogs people will start catching on and nobody will read it. As far as regular ones I really don't know.

I guess once you've burned the option for the players it doesn't really matter how many times you call them up or down.

I used to blog on TSN, same screen name, in fact that's the first place I used it. I ended up getting bored with it because the general commenting areas (news articles, TSN staff blogs and so on) are poorly moderated and they don't do anything about trolling unless someone says something blatantly racist or threatening.

QUOTE (JuiceCruz16 @ Aug 20, 2008 -> 02:07 PM) I'm just happy the gymnastic commentators and their whining are cries of we got jobbed by the rules or judges are off the air. They were a bad American syerotype personified. I could do without Lukin and her attitude as well, Johnson and the other one who fouled up were great though. I'm really not liking how Yahoo puts up blogs about things like "the real, unbiased medal count" on the front page, and all of this is getting so much attention. It makes us as Americans look bad, like a bunch of whiny sore losers, and that is usually reflected in the comments section. Was some of the scoring unfair? yeah, probably. We could handle it with a little more class though.

QUOTE (scenario @ Aug 20, 2008 -> 11:45 AM) Yes. I do. Remember... they didn't send down Richard and call up Broadway... They called up Adam Russell when they sent Richard down on August 5th. They added an available arm for our bullpen, which was really struggling at the time. Broadway was called up on the 11th when they sent Logan down (after his implosion). Richard was not available because he started a game in Charlotte a couple of days earlier. Broadway hadn't pitched in a week so bringing him up made more sense. He was immediately able to pitch in relief (which he did his first night up). I still believe that if Richard had been better in his first stint up here, they would have felt no need to replace him and shuffle the roster, and things would've turned out differently. Especially if he was as good as last night. Someone else would've been added for the bullpen later. I kind of find it hard to believe it was planned this way, and banked on to work out the way it did.

QUOTE (YASNY @ Aug 20, 2008 -> 10:45 AM) I really REALLY miss those things. Word! I make it a point to get at least one every time I go home.

QUOTE (Soxbadger @ Aug 20, 2008 -> 02:16 PM) If you dislike that, you are free to move to another country that does not believe in the freedoms America stands for. Stalin is dead.

QUOTE (Pants Rowland @ Aug 20, 2008 -> 11:48 AM) Exactly. I was disappointed the Sox did not end up playing the Yankees (and Cardinals to a lesser extent) in 2005 postseason. It was a little muted but some outlets insinuated the Sox lucked out by the Angels taking care of the Yankees. I wanted the Sox to knock off all the so-called baseball royalty along the way. Which to me is silly because we eliminated the previous year's World Series winner in 3 games in the first round.

QUOTE (Rex Hudler @ Aug 19, 2008 -> 11:52 PM) I think an underrated Olympian (in terms of hotness) is swimmer Natalie Coughlin. They did a piece on her and showed her at home and out of the pool in normal clothes and makeup and she looked good. She's not a knockout, but a nice looking girl. I also think Jessica Mendoza is attractive. I look up her pictures on the net and none of them look good. But she did some announcing on ESPN (Women's CWS maybe?) with John Kruk and I thought she looked good. Again, I am not talking magazine spread hotness, but an attractive girl. If Shawn Johnson was older we could talk about her, but for now, we'll just say she's a really cute kid. Cat Osterman, when she has her hair down and isn't grimacing to throw a pitch, is pretty cute.