Balta1701

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Dec 10, 2010 -> 09:42 AM) seeing as that affects 300-325 million people, versus what, a thousand? I agree. And I still don't get that first responder bill and why the federal government needs to be involved. I'm assuming it's mostly NY fireman/police officers/medical responders. If that's the case it's NEW YORK'S problem, since they are NEW YORK employees who are paid by the state of NEW YORK. Edit: I guess the report says survivors too. But I still don't know why the federal government should be involved with this. Really, you don't feel like the rescuers and responders after 9/11 who were exposed to that stuff were acting on behalf of the whole country, not just the state of NY? I certainly feel like they basically became volunteer members of the National Guard, to some extent, responding to a national tragedy that happened to be in a particular state. Anyway, even beyond that I can give a good answer; because the EPA lied to the responders repeatedly and said that the conditions near the collapse site were safe.

QUOTE (LittleHurt05 @ Dec 10, 2010 -> 09:37 AM) Reds lock up Jay Bruce, 6 yrs, $51 million Good deal if he's the guy they got after the AS break.

Best not try to run them over.

QUOTE (SnB @ Dec 10, 2010 -> 09:17 AM) I got accidentally drunk before a final once. Luckily, I was a senior taking Geology 100 for a gened credit. Man, the amount of times I've gotten accidentally drunk while doing geology...

While we're at it... The $7.4 billion price tag is less than 1% the price of the tax cut agreement. By the way, Illinois, when Mark Kirk was running for office, he pledged to vote for this bill. He also voted for it while he was in the House. He is now in the Senate, and he voted to uphold the filibuster to kill the bill, on the grounds that the Senate should do nothing until the tax cut package is extended.

QUOTE (witesoxfan @ Dec 10, 2010 -> 08:57 AM) Eh, I'd say that Beckham's .310/.369/.516/.885 line in his final 238 plate appearances would suggest that it wasn't screwed up all year. Just have to hope that the hand injury doesn't rear its head this year. He finally got stuff figured out after June, but you get my point. It wasn't just the league adapting to him.

QUOTE (lostfan @ Dec 9, 2010 -> 06:29 PM) They tried to take down Amazon and that was an epic fail, Amazon's servers barely noticed. "What? A DDOS attack? It's December, we've basically had a DDOS going on nonstop for a month" Yeah, I read a CNN piece on that yesterday describing the month of December as a DDOS attack on Amazon and laughed.

QUOTE (Tex @ Dec 9, 2010 -> 10:08 PM) Yes sir, since we'll have to take second jobs to pay back all the debt. Tex, I thought we discussed how we were going to stop this type of posting in this forum.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Dec 10, 2010 -> 08:16 AM) A.) Every indication has been that the economy has been in recovery for a year or more, but more importantly, has begun to recover in a mroe meaningful way in the past few months. So it depends on what your friend means. If he really thinks it will be 2 years before it "even starts to turn around for the better", then your friend needs to keep up with the news a little better, because that's been happening for a while. If he/she means it will be 2 years before unemployment is substantially better, then I agree. I'd say the real issue is that the stimulus and the QE1 bailouts brought us to a point where we're essentially hovering; we're sitting right around 9.6% unemployment and have been for basically 9 months, and although there's a more meaningful recovery slowly kicking upwards, we're still in such a deep hole that the pace of improvement right now will give us a full decade before we're back to reasonable employment levels, and that assumes another crisis doesn't happen. So yeah, the question for your friend is "How you define starts to get better?" If he means "Unemployment starts slowly ticking down", probably by the end of 2011 if there's no tax package agreed on, probably earlier if there is one. If your friend means "below 7% unemployment"...well...

Zoo animals pass things all the time.

QUOTE (iamshack @ Dec 10, 2010 -> 12:01 AM) And of course, the Titans score on the final play of the game to cover the spread, after deciding at one point to bring in their kicker for the FG and then calling him back. You don't think the spread played into that decision?

QUOTE (joeynach @ Dec 9, 2010 -> 06:11 PM) I wouldnt overlook the league adjust factor after a players 1st season.......says Gordon Beckham, Zach Duke, Dontrelle Willis, Bobby Crosby, etc Those are an interesting selection of names you've got there, because most of them I can give reasons why they started struggling totally unrelated to the league adapting. Beckham has some weird mental things going on and his swing was screwed up all last year. Bobby Crosby couldn't stay healthy to save his life. DTrain's fastball weakened and his offspeed stuff became less effective.

QUOTE (Jordan4life @ Dec 9, 2010 -> 06:15 PM) Then you need to retire from the sport as a fan if you think JP is better than Carl Crawford. All we're saying is that if you're going to hate on Juan Pierre, make sure your hate makes sense. Don't complain about his OBP and then 30 seconds later suggest having people with worse OBP leading off. Don't tell us how terrible his sabermetric stats are when he was worth $8 million in the fangraphs player value world last year.

QUOTE (joeynach @ Dec 9, 2010 -> 05:59 PM) Im not advocating that we make a trade, Im advocating that we need more, period. And personally, I like Santos, but I think part of his success was that no one had ever seen him before. I dont expect him to be as dominant the second time around. I was disappointed to see the sox let Putz go for 4 and 4.5M. There are not that many relievers, epecially via FA that you know are "shut down" guys that you can get for $4M. Look at what Benoit got, hell look at what we gave Linebrink and Dotel. Im concerned with where the bullpen depth is going to come from. Really? I've got to disagree on Santos. He was doing what a whole lot of really good bullpen guys do; pairing a really good slider with a low-mid 90's fastball with some movement on it. That's usually a formula for success out of the bullpen.

QUOTE (Steve9347 @ Dec 9, 2010 -> 05:48 PM) Ozzieball. Fixed typo. Meant 2008.

QUOTE (Steve9347 @ Dec 9, 2010 -> 05:45 PM) In 106 at bats leading off in his career, he has a .351 OBP with a .672 OPS. His next worst is batting 6th, where he puts up a .780 OPS. Your memory serves you well. 105 of those at bats came with the Sox in 2008.

QUOTE (KipWellsFan @ Dec 9, 2010 -> 04:38 PM) You mean they'll want even more spending and larger deficits and debt? Yes, they'll want more jobs. Don't you?

QUOTE (Steve9347 @ Dec 9, 2010 -> 04:28 PM) Country borken. Somehow, that's an apt typo, with the adopted meaning of the word "To Bork".

An attempt was made just now to bring the Defense funding bill up for debate in the Senate. The motion to bring the bill to the floor failed to overcome a Republican filibuster, with 57 votes in favor and 40 votes against. Susan Collins was the lone Republican voting in favor of the bill, while 1 Democrat (Manchin, WV) voted to support the filibuster.

QUOTE (RockRaines @ Dec 9, 2010 -> 04:11 PM) Man I wish we had enough in the stable to get Justin Upton. Nobody does.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Dec 9, 2010 -> 04:02 PM) People in the Sox org also read here, though I don't believe anyone currently working for the team will actually be posting. Although the Ranger is kinda close.

QUOTE (Kenny Hates Prospects @ Dec 9, 2010 -> 04:04 PM) We'll have to see what the Red Sox do now because there HAS to be someone available. They've just got too many players making money and even though their the Red Sox they still don't want to spend 5X what is necessary to have a good 4th OF. I dunno about this...when you look at what their guys did last year, they got barely 210 games played out of Ellsbury, Cameron, and Drew, and most of those were from Drew (who hasn't been the paragon of health in his career). They basically got 1 1/3 of a season from their starting 3 OF's. They're fully justified in holding all 4 guys if they can afford to, based on how they performed last year.

QUOTE (Rex Kicka** @ Dec 9, 2010 -> 03:54 PM) This will pass, but the House Dems need their fingerprints on some of this too. The problem is, they're rapidly running into recess deadlines. They need to bring along a large portion of their caucus within a week, without losing the Senate Republicans.

QUOTE (sircaffey @ Dec 9, 2010 -> 03:40 PM) That's a good question indeed. Though I wouldn't rule out it being better than last season. Morneau missed 81 games, and Mauer, Kubel, Span, and Cuddyer all had .100+ drops in OPS. Should be interesting to see how they perform after a year in the new stadium. Could be scary good. I still expect to see some serious movement from them at some point this offseason. They've lost so many bullpen pieces that they're going to really need to make a move there; even they can't possibly have that many bullpen callups ready. If I were in their spot, I'd be looking to re-sign Thome, and then looking to find a RH hitter who can play the OF sometimes and perhaps platoon with Thome on other days (Andruw Jones would be perfect and he actually hits balls far enough to leave that ballpark)...then look to move Kubel to fill in my pitching staff.

QUOTE (Kenny Hates Prospects @ Dec 9, 2010 -> 03:32 PM) Oh come on, who WOULDN'T tolerate a penis??? I think you're exaggerating just a tad... Especially if they're ferociously cute.