Balta1701

QUOTE (fathom @ May 5, 2008 -> 05:14 PM) Good things Fields is in AAA. Yeah, those 2 games Joe has missed this season have just crushed us.

Ryan Dempster's BABIP wasn't staying at .190 forever.

QUOTE (The Ginger Kid @ May 5, 2008 -> 04:11 PM) If ozuna swings at the first pitch this laptop is going bye bye Pablo took a strike and the laptop survived.

Think the dirt could bat leadoff?

QUOTE (fathom @ May 5, 2008 -> 04:48 PM) Uribe must have been too busy fantasizing about the inflatable dolls. How was that Uribe's fault?

Is Gameday screwing up or has McGowan slowed to a crawl?

QUOTE (fathom @ May 5, 2008 -> 04:43 PM) Bad at bat by Quentin, as he was unable to shorten his swing. At least he fouled off a couple pitches.

Come on Jim. This is your job.

QUOTE (sf_soxfan @ May 5, 2008 -> 04:38 PM) once upon a time we were excited about Hall, after all Our top 3 players in batting average are now Toby Hall, Brian Anderson, and CQ.

QUOTE (fathom @ May 5, 2008 -> 03:32 PM) Filthy pitch by Vazquez on the 3-2. Maybe Toby can get us going! Uribe got us started...

Brian Anderson now has the highest batting average on our team.

QUOTE (watchtower41 @ May 5, 2008 -> 01:35 PM) Good point... Can CQ bunt, or better yet will it be asked of him in this slot? The way he's hitting right now...well, put it this way...assume for a moment that Manny Ramirez practices 50 bunts per day and is a great bunter. Under what conditions would you want him bunting? Quentin has an OPS over 1.000 and is leading the AL in home runs. I think he ought to bunt once every season just to steal a hit when no one is expecting him to. Then again I think Thome should do that every now and again to beat the shift also.

It's always hard to correctly count these things, but I'm reading that today's Superdelegate count is something on the order of 6 for Obama, 0.5 for Clinton.

Someone may have pointed to this over the weekend, but here's a good look at what exactly the "Woods fund", the evil organization through which terrorist sympathizer Barack Obama met terrorist Bill Ayers, actually does. Terrorist. Read the whole thing.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ May 5, 2008 -> 12:44 PM) In the discussions in the Buster about the border fence last year, I brought this very thing up. Surprisingly to most people, there are in fact jaguars in SE AZ and SW NM. Only a few right now, but their very small populations are starting to increase a bit. They are still very endangered though. Jaguars are just one of a large number of animals that straddle that region, including a significant number of endangered species. And that is one among many, many reasons why a virtual fence is a much better decision than an actual wall. It would cause serious problems for many of those species. Is it worth noting that the government spent about $20 million on a prototype test of the "Virtual Fence" and it flat out didn't work?

QUOTE (SoxPride56 @ May 5, 2008 -> 01:54 PM) I, for one, don't mind this at all. Who knows, maybe moving Swish down in the order will help him out? More at bats for Quentin can't be a bad thing.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ May 5, 2008 -> 12:34 PM) But this isn't public funding we are talking about. These are PRIVATE donations to a university. Actually...with the endowments, it's not just private donations...it's also large amounts of growth in the endowments due to the quality of the investment people they're able to hire (Which again comes back to their tax-advantaged status). These endowments haven't doubled in the last 5 years because Harvard and Yale have been given an additional $20 billion, they've done so through their investments.

QUOTE (jackie hayes @ May 5, 2008 -> 12:31 PM) But it would be nice to get ex post estimates of the effect. And there are also problems with those projections -- they are loaded with sunset provisions, and none considered the effect of the AMT fix that happens every year. The trouble is of course...a valid estimate after the fact of how much was done by the tax cuts to the budget is essentially impossible, because the system itself is so complex. You can of course calculate how much would have been taken in had there not been tax cuts and had the economy done exactly the same thing, but that number is basically useless because the economy wouldn't do the same thing. The tax cuts in 01 probably did serve to stimulate the economy, but I don't think I trust really anyone's numbers on exactly how much. Conversely, keeping the tax cuts in place and borrowing money from overseas like it's going out of style has played right in to the inflation pressures pushing the dollar down and the price of oil higher like we're seeing now, and so it might well have the effect of weakening the same economy under one set of conditions that it might have strengthened under another.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ May 5, 2008 -> 11:04 AM) And the alternative minimum tax was originally created to tax less than 100 families. The Illinois toll road was supposed to become a freeway after the original bonds financing it were retired. The income tax itself was supposed to only tax the richest of the rich. Taxes do not go away, nor do they ever stay only taxing the people they are intended to tax at the time they are instituted. Sorry, I don't buy it. History tells me different. So then, what is the alternative? Is it simply to allow these endowments to continue growing and locking up funds (in no small part thanks to their tax-advantaged status as it is) that they never spend?

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ May 5, 2008 -> 10:00 AM) This is literally putting a tax on education. Endowments help defray the costs of education. Even if we aren't talking about money for things like scholarhips and the like, endowments pay for things like new buildings, new programs, etc. Putting a tax on that, is literally putting a disincentive to people who want to aid others educations. This is one of the dumbest thing possible to tax. Can you imagine if someone said they wanted to put a tax on dorm fees, tuition, books, or something like that? This economically has the exact same effect. Well, let me give the other side of this issue. There are right now a handful of schools, basically around 10 (including my own school) who's endowments have pretty much gone insane. And on top of it, the schools with the biggest endowments are actually having trouble finding stuff to spend the money on, so it basically is sitting around growing. With the rates of return that the top couple schools have on those investments, they've basically got very little reason to actually come up with things to spend the money on. A couple of these schools have come up with things like free tuition for a large chunk of their students as a way just to spend some of the money, and even then it's probably not enough. For a smaller school, with a tiny endowment (hundred million dollars or so, give or take), putting a tax on that money would be murderous. For these biggest schools, putting a tax on that money is one potential way to force them to start spending that money rather than just hording it.

Give em Jell, Havy.

QUOTE (jackie hayes @ May 4, 2008 -> 07:49 PM) I believe they are approaching that level. When you add in interest on the extra debt (which will be in the tens of billions) and the Medicare drug benefit (modest cost now -- just glanced at some articles earlier, seems estimates for current costs are something like $40 to $60 bil -- projections are much worse), I'm sure it's in the ballpark, though I can't say for sure it's more than that. Without worrying about the other factors and just going to the raw "How much are we expecting to cut taxes by" numbers, the 2001 tax cut was supposed to cut taxes by $1.3 trillion over 10 years, the 2002 tax cut was supposed to be roughly an additional $100 billion, and in 2003 they cut Capital Gains and Dividend taxes on a scale that was supposed to but $300 billion in taxes by 2008.

Jose Canseco walks away from his house in Foreclosure.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ May 2, 2008 -> 10:09 AM) Agree. Seems pretty trollish to me to even ask, even if there is some evidence he may have said it. Its completely inappropriate in a public forum like that, in front of families. If there is some sort of evidence he did, then I think a column or whatever on a website is more appropriate. On that I'd agree. Here's the other part though...name a press source that's actually going to ask it? McCain's not going to give an interview to RawStory (that'd be like Hillary going on Drudge), and whether or not it happened, if the reports are credible enough that there are at least a couple witnesses who don't have reason to be anti-McCain (I don't know their backgrounds well enough to testify on that, it's certainly plausible they all could have invented a story for personal reasons), is there a reason why the claim shouldn't be investigated?

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ May 2, 2008 -> 06:03 AM) But on the subject... why do people feel the need to do s*** like that? As far as I can tell, so far it's been reported by three separate reporters from Arizona that he did call her that at one point in a public setting. The guy putting out the story in a book gave the names of some of the people who were involved as witnesses. I'm actually genuinely curious....why is it inappropriate to ask someone about something that multiple sources confirm they did in the past even if it involves some language less than appropriate for the setting? And how is that question any more unfair than the Ayers one they hit Obama with?