Balta1701

God forgive us.

QUOTE (bighurt574 @ Sep 27, 2010 -> 02:35 PM) Is Teahen even movable if the Sox offer to pick up half his contract? I bet someone would be willing to simply take that on, but I wouldn't expect anything of value back in return. Really though...if we're paying for his salary...he's very useful as a utility guy. That's a good use of a roster spot.

QUOTE (J.Reedfan8 @ Sep 27, 2010 -> 02:42 PM) Like I said before.. I can care less (as of right now) who the sox pick (and quite frankly.. their draft philosophy recently has been very good) it's the matter of getting an unprotected pick to at least "have an option" to help on Type A free agents this off-season. And it sure seems unlikely that's going to happen. We're not nearly that bad of a team, frankly.

QUOTE (BigSqwert @ Sep 27, 2010 -> 12:18 PM) "Quietly so no one sees..." is a strange way to title the thread. Really did slow the start down though.

QUOTE (The Critic @ Sep 27, 2010 -> 12:09 PM) Oh, this thread is starting off awkwardly. Positively.

QUOTE (Milkman delivers @ Sep 27, 2010 -> 11:43 AM) Just like this team to get hot at the end when they're already out, screwing up their draft standing. Is the difference between draft spot 15 and 18 really that big of a deal?

QUOTE (JoeCoolMan24 @ Sep 27, 2010 -> 11:36 AM) I don't know what's going on. Maybe you need to read the words more closely, and use your memory of large threads from last year.

QUOTE (BigSqwert @ Sep 27, 2010 -> 11:29 AM) Knightni might do that but it's not my cup of tea. Let's try sleeping on it then. Figure it out afterwards

QUOTE (BigSqwert @ Sep 27, 2010 -> 11:23 AM) I am lost. Just do what your dog did. It'll help.

QUOTE (PlaySumFnJurny @ Sep 27, 2010 -> 11:12 AM) Golly, such language. Heaven save us.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Sep 27, 2010 -> 11:01 AM) That's just it, no one gets caught. No one goes to jail. The left wing explains it away like it doesn't matter, and that we shouldn't worry about it... mostly because they are at the center of it. Either that...or because it rarely happens. I enjoyed this Brennan Center bit for the actual numbers.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Sep 27, 2010 -> 11:02 AM) Garcia won't be back in 2011 unless something sets back Peavy pretty early on. The Sox don't need him. I could see one of these options being exercised if the Sox decide to do a major overhaul and send out D1 or G in order to bring in a major bat somewhere.

QUOTE (Athomeboy_2000 @ Sep 27, 2010 -> 10:18 AM) Dont know them? Eventually someone will tell me what the Hell is going on.

Honestly, I'd really rather have neither of them on the 2011 Sox. Pena has been acceptable enough that he's got one more year here, but this is his first arb-eligible offseason, so here goes his price. I can put up with 1 more year of him for a couple million, but he's no where near worth 2 years of arbitration. Peavy, Danks, Floyd, Buehrle, Jackson is a mighty Starting 5. Sale makes that a mighty Starting 6. If someone is traded...it better be one Hell of a deal...then I'd consider either of them...but I'd still probably rather go with Sale. Makes zero sense to sign Garcia expecting him to only have that role for 2 months while you work sale out.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Sep 27, 2010 -> 10:21 AM) After viewing all of the if you elect a Republican, all of these bad things will happen that pretty much negates the "no benefit" point, at least as it applies to the left wing, who coincidentally is leading the charge in most of these illegal registrations. It would be pretty easy to convince people that they could lose their jobs, programs, or any other perks they get if they don't do this. Viewing the commercials on Social Security running in my area targeting seniors, and then thinking how easily many seniors are taken in for scams, it isn't hard to envision multiple scenarios of people being willing to commit voter fraud to "protect themselves." Then of course there's the real key...you also need to convince these hundreds of people to do it and then have no one talk about it. Because the moment a couple of those seniors tell their kids about the person who threatened to take away their Social Security if they didn't vote a certain way...the jig is up. Your example should make it just as obvious how hard it is to make any of these schemes actually happen. In an intimidation scheme like that...you need hundreds of people doing it to even make a small difference in a local race, and on top of that, you need no one to talk. because people go to jail.

QUOTE (Alpha Dog @ Sep 27, 2010 -> 10:08 AM) NO, you only need to do one of those things after the applications were filed. Get people to go vote under someone else's name, OR have the machined rigged to register votes for the people who are registered but dont exist. With a fire conveniently happening just beforehand, not so far fetched. And the rigging doesn't have to be for the Senate races or the biggies, but maybe a governor, or county president. Positions like that matter even more on the local levels. WHile I am taking this to the extreme for a point, I cannot understand your utter willingness to just brush aside all the false registrations, voter intimidations, dead people on voter rolls.etc. Something is goig on, yet you put your head in the sand. The sky may not be falling, but you can't tell from under the ground. I edited because I forgot about the other way this works. Mai-in ballots. No need to have tons of people, justget all these fake 'people' to request an absentee ballot and you can have but one person filling them all out. Not too hard to find one or two people willing to do that crap, as there are stories every election about it being done. Get 25,000 non-people voting, if 10% get thru, it could swing an election. I'm willing to brush aside voter intimidations? I'm willing to brush aside issues with voting machines? I think that my side has had issues with those for decades now. You just happen to not be concerned about the same ones I am. For example...well funded and organized scare tactics trying to convince people not to vote even if they're legally allowed to might be considered to be problematic, since they actually have a habit of convincing people to not actually vote. For example, these are running right now in Wisconsin, run by a Tea Party affiliated group. Rigged voting machines have been a worry of mine for years. But of course...you need to take a moment and think about who has the actual access to do the rigging. The only people with legitimate access to the software are the companies that write the software and produce the machines. This, for example, is why crying about Diebold machines is a cause-celebre in the far, far reaches of the left, to the point that a few people think Diebold stole Ohio for Bush in 2004. The right solution for this is voting machines that provide a printout of your vote that can be double-checked afterwards in the event of a recount. For some reason though, that has never happened. On top of that...you express concern about a few hundred people voting illegally, when it's quite well known that hundreds of thousands of people are prevented from voting yearly because of a lack of accessible machines in poor or minority rich counties. I'm willing to brush aside 1 case of voter intimidation because it's not a coherent plan/conspiracy, there were zero complaints of actual voter intimidation, and the evil conspiracy is nonsesnse when given a bit of thought. I'm willing to brush aside issues of people setting fire to voting machines to bring in their own machines...because I think it's just silly to imagine that could actually happen; you'd need dozens of people to plan and keep silent something like that, because you'd have to control the code and the results the whole way through. And most importantly...I'm willing to ignore these claims of massive potential voter fraud on the grounds that it doesn't happen. There are, as far as I can tell, only a handful of schemes that even get to court, and frankly, they're typically easy to catch these days thanks to the details of electronic records that are kept. But if you wanted to propose getting rid of absentee ballots to avoid your plan...well, you might have a problem on that one because Absentee ballots typically skew Republican, so that's a worry that actually hurts your side. But even as supposedly easy as it might be to do that...it's remarkable that hundreds of millions of votes can be cast every couple years and we wind up talking about legitimate fraud in the numbers of a few hundred votes. There are at best a handful of cases every decade of legitimate fraud, and they're remarkably easy to catch so far. It's clearly against the law, and there's nothing suggesting to me that we need more stringent laws to prevent something that you can't even prove is more than an incredibly rare problem that gets caught most times it gets tried.

Here's the ESPN Ombudsman's version of that article a few weeks back on Lebron partying it up in Vegas that appeared and then was rapidly spiked afterwards.

Visit My Website

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Sep 27, 2010 -> 09:05 AM) So now, I have a debate. I see that they sell replacement screens online - and I found a manual on how to do it. Looks like major surgery. New screen is $80, but a lot of time, and who knows if I'll screw it up. Or, I can buy an external LCD monitor for like $200, and turn my laptop into a desktop. Easy, but I lose portability. Or, since its a 3 year old laptop with s***ty Vista on it, maybe now is the time to just get a new laptop. Anyone every changed out a laptop screen before? My monitor crapped out on its own about 2 months before my defense date. I quickly went out and bought a spare monitor on Craigslist for $20 and used it as a desktop for 2 weeks before that connection died as well (it was really unhappy about having to put out video constantly in that path). You can probably get away with a reasonably priced monitor from Craigslist for quite a bit less than a new one. Basically, comparing the price and effort of buying and installing a new monitor with the price of a new laptop, the new laptop made more sense. Especially when you consider that after 3 years...it's probably not going to be long before something else goes wrong.

Could you explain the rules again?

QUOTE (Tex @ Sep 26, 2010 -> 08:24 PM) If any do, they will dive to the center like everyone else. Then they'll face a 2012 primary and be thrown out in favor of those who won't go to the center. Really Tex...honestly...do you look at the makeup of the current Congress and think "These people have been driven towards the center"? 2k5 and I were randomly taking shots at the California budget situation in the Republican thread, but there's an actual lesson there. In California, there are a group of (republican in this case but affiliation isn't key to the argument) legislators who have gotten by for years by being unwilling to vote for or negotiate anything on the budget. They get themselves reelected every year because they're pushing hard for their small government values and they're in districts that really like that. Occasionally one of the block from one of these districts decides they're willing to negotiate on the budget to extract a concession they really want, and they wind up thrown out of office next election for having voted in favor of the budget. These legislators get rewarded for being totally unwilling to negotiate on anything. California though has this particular mess where you need a 2/3 majority to pass a budget...so if you happen to get 34% of the legislature that decides there is zero benefit for them in negotiating because the voters throw out anyone who is willing to compromise, it becomes 100% impossible to pass a budget. Do you know of any governing body at the National level where a supermajority requirement is becoming engrained, and where anyone who crosses the aisle is facing a primary defeat?

QUOTE (Alpha Dog @ Sep 27, 2010 -> 12:31 AM) gee, massive voter registration of questionable people, vote machines destroyed, what could happen? A new batch of machines rushed in with 'bugs' in them to record some extra votes for all these extra registered people? A manual system of checking people since you have no ID requirement there? Sounds a little crazy, but desperate people (and stupid people) do desperate things. Yes, it sounds a little crazy. Frankly, more than a little. If nothing else...you just illustrated the extent at which one would have to go to actually successfully commit voter fraud. You'd have to not only file those applications, make an organized group of people show up knowing that they're putting themselves at risk to go to jail for no obvious benefit to themselves, somehow guarantee that those people actually vote for the right person once they're in the voting booth, and then make sure that they're not caught at any of the redundant steps. You not only need to bypass the voting machines, you need to convince hundreds of people to commit a crime that they could go to jail for without having them benefit at all. Do you see how difficult "vote fraud" actually is based solely on your own example?

QUOTE (Tex @ Sep 26, 2010 -> 08:32 PM) Maybe cut the wildcard to 3 How much of a mess do you get into with that though? Between home field advantage being huge because it's only 2 games to teams getting tossed from the playoffs for basically a single bad game. It's like taking all the bad things of a play-in game and all the bad things of the 5 game first round and combining them without keeping any of the good things like the added drama/excitement.

QUOTE (Tex @ Sep 26, 2010 -> 08:03 PM) Of the Sox managers over the past 30 years, we're discussing the two best. Do you want old and experienced, or still rough around the edges? I don't believe Ozzie is built for the long haul. No way he's still managing in 25 years. I'd have to see who else is mentioned, but I'd like to see Tony on the short list. In terms of "Built for the Long Haul"...I'd say there's more of a chance that Ozzie is managing in 25 years than LaRussa.

QUOTE (greg775 @ Sep 26, 2010 -> 09:52 PM) I'd rather have Teahen than Kotsay but Kotsay has a better approach at the plate. He's just too old and has lost whatever talent he once had to do anything with his approach. Teahen continues to be a guy who thinks he is a power hitter (big swing, tons of strikeouts) when he should be a line drive hitter. Kotsay has given you the impression that he has a better approach at the plate? Kotsay has been much more of a fly ball hitter when he makes contact than Teahen this year. 40% of Kotsay's batted balls are fly balls, 30% of Teahen's are. Teahen hits more ground balls than Kotsay and more line drives. Their career numbers bear out the same trend. Beyond that, Teahen's approach takes a lot more walks than Kotsay's, which is a good thing.