Balta1701

WHEEEEEEEEEEEE! I feel like it's time to go buy some mortgage backed securities!

WHEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

And here we go.

These baserunners are going to come back to hurt us soon.

QUOTE (fathom @ Aug 24, 2009 -> 05:05 PM) BTW, wasn't it nice to see Beckham not bunting Pods over? He did. It was just a really long, high, swinging bunt.

QUOTE (CaliSoxFanViaSWside @ Aug 24, 2009 -> 04:58 PM) Hit one in Pesky's corner Bex ! He's more a Fisk Fan.

A nice round 8 HR for Becksy.

QUOTE (Dick Allen @ Aug 24, 2009 -> 04:57 PM) Its amazing how people take Carney Lansford's statement for gospel. ?

Victor Martinez failing to throw out Scott Podsednik. Now that brings back memories.

Good start Pods, OK Gordon, let's get going again. Show up the Sox a bit.

Come on Jose

Health reform supporter shows up at an event wearing a Yankee Shirt and a revolver.

Early 2-0 lead, lots and lots of pitches thrown by Buchholz this inning.

Rockies sign Jason Giambi, Russ Ortiz.

Not a bad first, although it seems like you guys are suggesting the umps cost Jose a few pitches.

Just out of curiosity, how does that compare to Brees's deal?

QUOTE (Tex @ Aug 24, 2009 -> 03:55 PM) Not certain how many Congressman and Senators you voted for, but for 99.99% of Americans they get one Congressman and one Senator per election. So there are a lot of Americans who do not want Democrats to do that. That would be everyone who voted GOP, where their candidate won or lost. Of cours...there could also be more than a few Democrats who don't want Health care reform. Conversely, there could be more than a few Republicans who have had to deal with an insurance company.

QUOTE (bmags @ Aug 24, 2009 -> 03:41 PM) Well, Obama wouldn't be able to politicize the Bush administration if the Bush Administration wasn't so awful. Obama could spread it out and still have ammo for four more years I'd imagine. Didn't they keep blaming the clintons for stuff all the way through the financial crisis?

QUOTE (kapkomet @ Aug 24, 2009 -> 03:04 PM) Oh, so you love him, right? He supports everything you stand for. (yes, that was sarcasm). He's always done what he thought was best, even questioning when he had to. Until he put all politics in front of everything else last late October. And you're making the conclusion that he did last october something other than what he thought was best based on what? How are you able to read his thoughts that well? I'm not giving him credit for "Doing what he thought was best" when he clearly wound up being wrong. He thought it was best to show loyalty to people who abused that loyalty ruthlessly to sell their war. I'm not judging him based on his good intentions, I'm judging him based on the disastrous results he was a part of.

QUOTE (kapkomet @ Aug 24, 2009 -> 02:50 PM) I had respect for Powell right up until the whole "endorsement" thing for Obama. That was calculated bulls*** for the Washington establishment and his ethnicity (unfortunately). PERIOD. Going before the U.N. and convincing the country to support a war you yourself don't believe in, and refusing to resign or do anything to change the course of events...totally respectable. Endorsing a guy from the other party who happens to be the same race as him...despicable.

Step it up, everyone.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Aug 24, 2009 -> 09:29 AM) Interesting write up from the right wing WSJ. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB2000142405...3109310680.html And a similar article from the Trib. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion...0,2946061.story While I see some logic in those arguments, there is one key issue that always bothers me about it. Why exactly do we think that a solution to our health care issues is "Covering less stuff"? That's usually an implicit or explicit point in those arguments; it would enable insurers to get around the minimum coverage requirements that some states have instituted by offering the same plans as other states. But the issue I have with that is...why exactly do we think that covering less stuff with insurance is a way to fix what ails the industry? It strikes me that a big problem with health insurance as it currently stands is that it tends to not cover enough anyway. Thus you have the common occurence of people fighting their insurer to get them to cover treatments that you'd expect to be covered if you have insurance, and just flat out awful things like different prices for men and women based on whether or not they can have kids or different prices for people whether or not their policies cover those sorts of things, etc. I feel like one of the goals here is to establish some basic level of coverage such that people don't have to worry about getting sick, not to have people have more opportunity to gamble on which disease they might get.

QUOTE (vandy125 @ Aug 24, 2009 -> 09:24 AM) Not sure where you are getting that line from either. Everyone wants the costs to go down. They are skyrocketing at way more than the current rate of inflation. It needs to go down across the board somehow. Isn't that the whole point of this? We are all paying more each and every year. And IMO, a big, big, big part of the reason why is the fact that the insurers, and hell, much of the medical apparatus in this country, has no legitimate cost-control type competition. If an insurer wants to increase its profitability, it can do so by raising rates and it doesn't have to fear losing its high revenue customers because they're all either locked in through their employers or there's no other insurer that they can go to. So they can spend huge amounts of money on administrative things that only slightly increase profitability and just raise rates to pay for it, and you wind up with a ridiculous amount of bureaucracy in the system because of it. The same sort of thing happens in pharmaceuticals. Because people often actually need those drugs but are shielded from much of the cost, if the company wants to increase profitability, it tries to sell more pills, so it spends a fortune on advertising, and raises the price per pill to pay for all those ads.

Alexei needs to grow an enormous mustache before I can make this comparison.

QUOTE (vandy125 @ Aug 24, 2009 -> 09:09 AM) Completely disagree with this. Where do you get this from? Working in the insurance industry, I know that there is a huge move to want changes made because of the unsustainable rise in costs. You are buying into the Obama/Pelosi line of Insurance Companies being evil. Absolute Bull. The only thing they have been vehemently opposed to is the public options being thrown around there. I don't blame them if you look at how Medicaid and Medicare undercut prices that hospitals and doctors need. Because they undercut them the cost of those programs get shifted over to insurance companies. In other words, the insurance companies think that everyone other than them ought to be paying more.