Balta1701

QUOTE (kapkomet @ May 13, 2008 -> 01:07 PM) That's fair. And regarding everyone's comments about CA, that's also fair. I still think, though, that there's a lot of people in this country ignorant to vote against Obama PURELY because of race to where he ends up losing. We'll see. Here's my counterpoint...same thing I think it was David Axelrod saying....While there is certainly a chunk of America who will refuse to vote for Obama based on his race...how many of them would have voted for the party favoring things like legalized abortion, affirmative action, welfare, and so on anyway? Who did the people who wouldn't vote for Obama based on his race vote for in 1996, 2000, 2004? I doubt your answer is going to be Clinton, Gore, Kerry.

QUOTE (kapkomet @ May 13, 2008 -> 01:51 PM) I think you greatly underestimate the ignorance of America in general... and that will trump the "awful GWB". Remember, people the news media generally think McCain is a "maverick". Fixed that for you.l

QUOTE (kapkomet @ May 13, 2008 -> 01:51 PM) And if Obama loses the south, he's done for. In addition, if you look at California, it's in play, which speaks VOLUMES about the volitility of this election. The fact that it's even in play is news in and of itself. I don't think McCain wins CA, but if it's in play, it spells trouble for Obama in the greater part of the country. I think you're simply wrong on pretty much ALL of that. California isn't going to be even close to in play. Obama's currently outpolling Clinton out here. And the Dems have come within a few votes of winning the election each of the last 2 presidential races basically without winning a single southern state at all. John McCain couldn't rise over 45-48 % against either of his opponents when they spent 3 months thrashing each other and he was able to do whatever he wanted. Now that this thing is wrapping up, you're probably going to see a rise in Obama's numbers simply because he won't have Hillary going after him and he'll actually have a chance to get the whole party behind him and use his money for good rather than evil, and I think we'll rapidly see him building a lead in every national poll that he won't even come close to giving back.

QUOTE (Cknolls @ May 13, 2008 -> 12:21 PM) About 25 million bls. should top it off. BTW, according to the WSJ, avg price per barrel in the SPR, a little over $28. There's a number of factors that go in to that though, including the quality of oil that gets put in (It's often the high sulfur stuff).

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ May 13, 2008 -> 10:24 AM) Speaking of shortsighted moves that have no economic benefit... Its seems we are going to suspend putting crude into the strategic reserves because prices are too high. Net benefit to you? MAYBE 25 cents a gallon. We got a fuss about a few pennies on suspending the gas tax, but when we are talking about the exact same cost savings in our national energy emergency plan, they all vote for it? Its such pandering bulls***, it is pathetic. The entire Senate, minus the one person who didn't vote for it, should be ashamed. http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/05/13/con....oil/index.html How close is that thing to full anyway?

QUOTE (The Ginger Kid @ May 13, 2008 -> 11:22 AM) i think Buehrle is fine. I think Wasserman has no business in the bigs. Any word on MacDougal? Down in Charlotte. Made 4 appearances so far, 2 runs, 3 hits, 8 strikeouts but 4 walks in 4.2 innings so far.

Quentin's bat flip is already approaching legendary status. Konerko's grand slam fist pump.

The Republicans have adopted a slogan for their electioneering this year. The fun part? That slogan is already taken. By an anti-depressant.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ May 12, 2008 -> 07:41 AM) McCain outlines his main points on the environment in a speech. Overall, I like his approach - set the bar, and create an economic environment that encourages new technology. But where he sets the bar, how he does the encouraging, and how serious he really is, remain to be seen. Right now, I like it. One particular issue with the cap and trade program of the variety Sen. McCain has outlined so far...if I'm understanding things right it is set up in the same way as the much maligned European system, where instead of starting off the program with an auction that would raise funds from the people who are the biggest emitters, his proposal would hand out the credits to the current polluters, thus allowing them to be the ones who auction them off, determine the price, and earn money from selling them. This is actually a pretty key issue, as one could argue that this difference is largely responsible for the ineffectiveness of the current systems in the world. Policy summary of the issue here.

Figured I'd post this here instead of the Enviro thread since it's more Dem than anything. Last week, Al Gore answered an interview question related to Pastor Hagee, hurricanes, and some of the other events around the world, saying that the increased number and intensity of hurricanes was a predicted consequence of Global warming, the right way to say it. After that, some of the good folks out there on the right, out of the goodness of their heart, took the transcript of Mr. Gore's remarks, changed the order of a couple things, inserted a few ellipses, and were totally shocked to find out that Al Gore had blamed the recent Burmese Cyclone disaster on global warming. The article got a Drudge feature, got on Fox News and CNN, and so on. This is of course the wrong way to say it, as you can never blame any single event on climate change, but you do expect various trends to show up. Like increasing strength of cyclones which travel over anomalously warm waters.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ May 12, 2008 -> 08:41 AM) McCain outlines his main points on the environment in a speech. Overall, I like his approach - set the bar, and create an economic environment that encourages new technology. But where he sets the bar, how he does the encouraging, and how serious he really is, remain to be seen. Right now, I like it. Tying together this subject with another recent subject... (Biased lefty blog source alert). In 2003, the same Danish company who's plant McCain spoke at today canceled a plan to build a wind turbine manufacturing plant in Portland, OR and laid off 500 or so workers (the plant would have employed another 1000) because of uncertainty over that tax credit.

I'd say this is insurance in case Loogyn or Thornton go down. The only lefty on Charlotte's staff right now is Whisler, and with the way he's going they probably want to keep him in a starting role.

Moveon.org has announced and posted the winner of their "Obama in 30 seconds" ad campaign.

QUOTE (lostfan @ May 12, 2008 -> 01:04 PM) It's only certain types of politicians that can do that though. Obama is one obviously. Paul would've been another and had his campaign caught on he would've been rivaling Obama for the stacks of money they're raising. In order for a campaign to do that they it has to get the candidate's base fired up at the grassroots level, and they have to be organized and highly motivated the way Obama's and Paul's supporters are/were. Only a select few have that ability and there's no guarantee the next election will be like that. Interestingly though...the right has had a similar system for 20+ years, and its held together through the leaders of the system and not through the people running it. They've been pulling in big sums of money bundled through their direct mail system since the 80's, a system that was built around some of their important interest groups (i.e. the religious groups) which has given extreme power to its leaders within the party and kept them on top in fundraising for a long, long time. Obama himself might not be always around to raise that kind of money, but there's an infrastructure that's been growing up for years now focused on the lefty blogosphere and its other outlets that has been able to do some of these things at a smaller scale.

QUOTE (lostfan @ May 12, 2008 -> 12:34 PM) When considering the death toll you also have to factor in the fact that China's state-run media usually isn't into giving liberal estimates of dead. And the fact that, quite frankly...with earthquakes in these sorts of areas where the census count is poor and no one really knows how many people live in any particular building...until you unearth all the bodies you really don't know the death toll. Heck, look how long it took us to get a close to accurate count for 9/11.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ May 12, 2008 -> 12:12 PM) Even that will do nothing. Its over. I wouldn't go that far. Obama could still have a true "Macaca" moment and kill himself. But it would take one heck of a slip up.

QUOTE (lostfan @ May 12, 2008 -> 11:17 AM) I agree. When a politician, either Democrat or Republican, is campaigning he/she tries to promise a certain set of values and says they'll represent certain things while they're in office. Once they get elected they immediately get influenced by the lobbyists that are basically their life's blood as a politician, and more often than not vote in lock step with their parties. This is what makes me wonder about these "special interest groups" McCain and Obama seem to be railing against. It's nice to think about but without some major changes to the way we conduct campaigns, it's just not realistic. The Dems and GOP have basically cemented that in place and aren't going to volunteer to change it anytime soon. One particularly great thing about this campaign...the Obama camp might actually be the first one in a long, long time that has the ability to genuinely change the way major campaigns are being conducted. I certainly can't guarantee he won't fall in to the "Sell out the lincoln bedroom" camp as soon as he gets in office, but the Obama campaign is truly revolutionary so far in its ability to raise absolutely huge amounts of money from small donors online. They've taken the ability that Howard Dean and Ron Paul built up to a lesser extent and refined it so much that its entirely possible that they could run an entire Presidential campaign on small donors without having to worry about reaching out and sucking up to too many big donors or opting in to the bankrupt public financing system. I think it's pretty much at this point acknowledged by everyone who's not a lobbyist for a major corporation or union that the current financing system is broken. Even people who used to be advocates for reform are gaming the system to try to get more power. The rise of the Democratic small donor is, at least on the left, a potentially important way to break this deadlock. Think about all those Hillary big donors who keep threatening that if Pelosi or Dean don't do something to placate them, they'll stop giving. Why hasn't something been done to placate them, like giving Hillrod a bunch of delegates from FL or MI? Quite simply, because those donors aren't the biggest money pool in the party any more. Obama's email list is.

QUOTE (kapkomet @ May 12, 2008 -> 10:10 AM) I agree, but that's the hardest part - I don't think many Americans would like the idea of their "leader" being elected by 20% of the vote (multiple parties - parliamentary system). It's a weird balance. I hate the fact that both parties veer as hard as they can toward their respective corners. But here's the other issue...a lot of the countries with those multiple party systems wind up hating them even more than you guys do, for a number of reasons. The most important almost always winds up being that you can't run the government without the extreme parties there, because you need a coalition to form a governing majority, and those 5% or so that vote for whatever extreme party winds up wielding an inordinate amount of power for their size for that reason. Could you imagine, for example, if the difference between the vote count for, let's say, Ron Paul and Ralph Nader decided the next leader of the U.S., and McCain/Obama needed to bring in one of those 2 guys to form a governing coalition? Hell, in 2000 we would literally have had that result, Gore or Bush would have needed to deal with either Nader or Buchanan to decide the White House. A lot of countries that start with parliamentary systems and a ton of parties wind up rapidly whittling down the number of parties and sort of establishing a de facto 2 party system just because the system becomes ungovernable otherwise.

QUOTE (kapkomet @ May 12, 2008 -> 11:01 AM) I'm not making that point. That's your point, right? I think if we all dug enough, we could find instances of where things mattered to certain people. It's a tactic they all use, but the tag of "it doesn't matter" doesn't fly with me, because if it was important enough for a vote, it mattered to SOMEONE, regardless of party. Of course it mattered to someone. I'm not saying the vote wasn't important...i'm asking for an example where the specific vote of the candidate was potentially the deciding vote where he chose not to be counted in that case. I really don't care about a politician making a statement by voting present on something or missing a vote to illustrate a specific point if the vote is decided without his or her presence. It's actually sometimes nice in my eyes to be able to not cast a vote on something to illustrate a point. I was on the Union Board at Indiana and I did exactly that a few times, just abstained from a vote for some reason because I wanted to make a point to the other people in the room. But if the vote wound up being decided by 1 vote, there was no way I was abstaining from that.

QUOTE (kapkomet @ May 12, 2008 -> 11:00 AM) I agree, but only to an extent. I think there's a hard Great Wall of China out there somewhere. It's just a matter of when/how it hits. I think that's more what I'm trying to say. That I can believe. But the point I think I'm trying to focus on is...even if China's economic growth slows, it will take much more dramatic energy price increases for their energy demand to stop going up even in that case.

QUOTE (kapkomet @ May 12, 2008 -> 10:58 AM) It only matters if it's against your guy (or gal), right? I'll still note that none of you have stepped up to my challenge of showing me a single vote where it mattered like I did with the opposition, and now both of you have tried to attack by changing the subject.

QUOTE (kapkomet @ May 12, 2008 -> 10:50 AM) Well, I think that's a key part - the enormous factory growth is in large part due to us demanding cheap goods, and the olympics. I think that the urgency to make China an economic powerhouse will lose some of its emphasis post August, and I also think that all things being equal, wage growth will start to curtail the "cheapness" of things - which will lead to a severe downturn in their economy. We'll see. But here's the counterpoint. Wage growth in China is almost certain to drive more consumption of energy, not less. While fewer factories may be shipped over there from the U.S. as the dollar continues its collapse, if the income of the average Chinese citizen goes up by some percentage, then that allows them to demand more automobiles and more energy and better housing. They're in that enviable position where their economy can sustain itself to some extent as it grows, so as the people earn more money, they're able to buy more things, and who's the country manufacturing everything right now? China.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ May 12, 2008 -> 09:33 AM) So the "they all do it" excuse for the candidate for "Change". Do you really wonder why there is a growing group that doesn't believe the hype? "They all do it" was not the message I was trying to get across. "Show me where it mattered" was.

QUOTE (Gregory Pratt @ May 12, 2008 -> 10:37 AM) Ripken's is not unbreakable. All it will take is someone whose name and ability allow him to call some shots and play through, with some health luck. I'm not sure Ryan's Ks will ever be beaten. Here's how I'd think about it...how far removed are we from that Era. The author notes Randy Johnson as a comparison, even though he's 1000 k's behind. If you look at Johnson's stats, he didn't really break in to the big leagues until he was 25. And, it took him from that point 3-4 years or so to really develop the control he needed to become a dominant pitcher, so his k's go up from 130 to 194, 228, 241, 308. In other words, there's several hundred k's there that could have come about by a team being able to develop his control earlier in his career. And he lost probably 3 or so partial seasons to injuries after that point, not even counting the seasons he's lost in recent years. If you could bring up a Randy Johnson 3 years younger, develop him in to a pitcher rather than a thrower a couple years earlier, and then have him have a little better injury luck, you're basically at Ryan's numbers. Likely? No. But possible. Randy Johnson is proof that the era hasn't changed THAT much, like it has with Cy, to make it totally impossible.

I can totally understand the argument for Cy's numbers being on top because of the differing eras. But on some of the others...I think they're still catchable if someone has a little luck and determination. I think DiMaggio's streak has to fall somewhere in there with Ryan and Ripken.