Balta1701

QUOTE(Milkman delivers @ Aug 3, 2006 -> 08:24 AM) This is for looking at the camera and laughing in every sketch you've ever been in! "Now where's the guy who slept with my daughter"?

QUOTE(Milkman delivers @ Aug 3, 2006 -> 07:35 AM) We've been told repeatedly that we can't complain about winning a series...even when we can't sweep a team that is quite possibly the worst in baseball in years. With Jim Thome and Paul Konerko both out hurt. Thome played what, 1 game in the last 2 series, and Konerko played like 2-3 depending on how you count innings? And we come out of that 4-2?

By the way, the ideal thing for this team to add during the offseason? Some Marbles.

QUOTE(RockRaines @ Aug 2, 2006 -> 09:53 PM) What was wrong with his performance? I think he battled pretty good. He sure didn't impress me. 10 hits, home run on a stupid stupid pitch, seemed to me to be falling behind everyone, and so on.

QUOTE(fathom @ Aug 2, 2006 -> 09:51 PM) Correct me if I'm wrong, but 79-319 is .248? Ok, so his numbers have gone up a little bit since I last looked at his player card. Make it a D+.

QUOTE(fathom @ Aug 2, 2006 -> 09:50 PM) http://chicagosports.chicagotribune.com/sp...-home-headlines Interesting comments by Ozzie at the bottom of this article. If he's being honest, maybe Mackowiak will start to get more playing time in LF. And of course, you know what that means...PODSEDNIK IN CF!!! ANDERSON CANNOT FACE RIGHTIES!!!

QUOTE(greg775 @ Aug 2, 2006 -> 09:49 PM) Maybe Oz should yell at Uribe every day. He may be a good defender, but I'd give him a C for his performance so far this year. Wouldn't you agree C is all he gets? D. His defense has to be better than this if he's going to hit .220.

QUOTE(greg775 @ Aug 2, 2006 -> 09:44 PM) Let's face it. We ain't good enough this year. The magic ain't there. Our pen is spotty. Our D is spotty. Even when are healthy our lineup is all convaluted (sp). It ain't our year. Can we eke out a wild card bid? Let's face one other thing, yeah we were playing the Royals, but we just had Thome out for 5 days in a row, and Konerko out for what, 3 altogther, and in that last stretch we've won both series, gone 4/6, and managed to give our biggest guns some rest.

QUOTE(chimpy2121 @ Aug 2, 2006 -> 09:41 PM) Well, I'm glad I stayed up for that. I can't wait for our next game against the Doc Hopefully 25 and 14 will be back to stare him in the face.

QUOTE(Harry&JimmyRocked @ Aug 2, 2006 -> 09:31 PM) Ozzie should have pulled him IMMEDIATELY! For who? Mackowiak? Thome? Konerko? Alomar? Cintron was at DH, he couldn't be put into the field without sending Freddy Garcia to the plate.

QUOTE(samclemens @ Aug 2, 2006 -> 06:29 PM) that picture is despicable. hey, if lieberman runs independant, that alone could seal democrats fate. like a ross perot type thing. does anyone see that happening? Somehow, I doubt that 1 post at a random blog is going to "seal the Democrats' fate". As always, if you want to , you can find an ungodly amount of stupid bile fired out about anything if you go to the right spot. Sort of disappointing that it showed up at Huffpo, but there's a reason I barely ever visit that site.

QUOTE(Pale Hose Jon @ Aug 2, 2006 -> 06:48 PM) Maybe i was daydreaming through two years of Middle East politics classes, but when did Israel hand over any land? Actually they did, they handed back Southern Lebanon to Lebanese control in 2000, and they pulled their forces out of Gaza, along with many of their settlements, last year.

QUOTE(SoxAce @ Aug 2, 2006 -> 08:51 PM) I'm just saying don't assume he just sucked it up though. The same can be said about the D behind him. Pods cost him a run alone and he barely bailed out Uribe's ass from not catching a foulball and Gload wasn't much better. That pitch was not terrible to Teahen eigher. Inside up Teahan just did a good job pulling those hands in and rotating his hips (if you didn't know Teahen has been on a serious tear) If your surprised, I've said it many times I will back anyone in that sox uni.. (except Pollite who is now gone) That wasn't a terrible pitch, except for the fact that it was the exact same pitch Teahan hit to the warning track the last time he was up.

So was that Uribe that dropped that easy popup today? I was in the kitchen.

QUOTE(WCSox @ Aug 2, 2006 -> 03:37 PM) You need to look past the sheer numbers. Who's supplying the funding? Who's supplying the weapons? Who's supplying the know-how? Something tells me that Ahmed Average in Iraq who can barely keep his family fed isn't spending hundreds of U.S. dollars on explosive devices. He's not obtaining them from the U.S.-controlled Iraqi military and probably doesn't know how to put them together himself if he could get his hands on the parts. And, hell, there probably isn't a Lowe's down the street from his house, either. There's no doubt that most of the "ground soldiers" in the insurgency are Iraqi-born, but they're not the important ones. The important ones are the ones who supply the money, weapons, and training... and the ones who are inciting the violence. And even though the Suni and Shiia don't like each other, they'd been living on top of each other under Saddam's rule for 30+ years. And now all of the sudden, they're armed to the teeth with machine guns, rocket lauchers, and IEDs. I seriously doubt that they've all just been stashing these weapons in their basements for the past 30 years. And I'll bet that the vast majority of them didn't even know how to use a machine gun until one of Zarqawi's buddies showed them. These people lived right beside each other for 30+ years and are now engaged in a bloody civil war. Why? Because professional (and mostly foreign) terrorists have incited it. It's not because they just felt like starting a bloodbath for the heck of it. OK, so we agree on ONE thing. Do you have any idea of how many munitions there were floating around Iraq, both in the Iraqi army, and outside the Iraqi army, before the war? The amounts are absolutely staggering. I'll give you a couple examples. In the middle of 2003, some NGO's, like HRW, were wandering around screaming to the coalition forces that there were huge ammo dumps that were going unguarded, not just the ones at Al-Qaqaa that we heard about during the 2004 campaign. HRW told the British about a stockpile of about 20 truckloads near where the British were headquartered. The British responded that they didn't have enough men to secure that area as well. Beyond that, the coalition/Iraqi military has been ungodly careless with its armaments. Here's one article about how 200,000 Kalashnikov's somehow managed to disappear as they were entering Iraq headed for the Iraqi army. The Iraqi army was armed to the teeth with weapons. Those weapons are now almost entirely in the hands of whoever got their hands on them during the looting spree. Literally thousands of tons of explosives, enough weapons to equip an entire army for 20 years, and so on. Do you really think that there are convoys with significant quantities of armaments capable of crossing the Iraqi border today? With multiple car bombs per day? That's a pretty remarkable claim on its face, and it really suggests that the people running that war have absolutely no idea what they're doing.

This is an unwinnable debate on all sides. Perot's support probably came in part from people who wouldn't have voted, in part from Republicans, and in part from Democrats. I'd say it's likely more Republicans were in there than Democrats, but aside from that, it's impossible to even really make an educated guess at the real ratios unless someone has exit poll data I don't know about. If someone does, then show it, if not, this debate has absolutely no point.

2-0 kitty cats in the first over Tampa. HR by Dmitri "Punch" Young. Edit: now 2-1, double by Baldelli, 2 groundouts. Zach Miner on the mound for the Cats, some dude named Tim Corcoran on the mound for the Rays. 3-0 Cleveland over Boston in the first. John Lester on the mound for Boston. Sac fly by Hafner, 2 run homer by Martinez. Young Jeremy Sowers on the mound for the tribe.

And Anderson is hitting in front of him.

The problem with your Angels plan is that I count 3 players who still don't have positions in their IF. Casey Kotchman, Dallas McPherson, and Brandon Wood. Yes, Wood is another year away in my opinion also, but Cabrera is also signed for 2 more years.

DeJesus, LF Grudzielanek, 2B Teahen, 3B Sanders, DH Costa, RF Shealy, 1b Buck, C Gathright, CF Berroa, SS Have I mentionned lately how happy I am we're getting out of here while Sweeney is still on a rehab assignment?

QUOTE(fathom @ Aug 2, 2006 -> 02:38 PM) It brought us success last night. Let's see if The Rock can regain his fastball tonight. "Can you smell what Freddy Garcia is Tokin'"!?

No real surprises here, but the TPM folks have tracked down the last few donations they couldn't get a handle on yesterday. Know how much money has gone to this candidate by anyone other than Republican donors? $30. All from the Candidate himself. The Democrats are also going to challenge the signatures submitted to get that candidate on the ballot. They allege there's a history of fraud on the part of the company that did the collecting, and:

QUOTE(Rex Kickass @ Aug 2, 2006 -> 02:05 PM) GA-04 Dem Primary Runoff (Insider Advantage) Johnson 49 McKinney (Incumbent) 34 I wonder if she'll run as an independent since the party is leaving her. FL Senate (Rasmussen) Nelson (D, Incumbent) 61% Harris ® 33% If she went Green, I'm sure she'd get plenty of Republican support .

But here's the problem with both the examples of Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories; both of them are failed states. Lebanon suffered through decades of civil war and occupation by both Israel and Syria, and had only had its own, functioning government for about a year. The Palestinian territories have never really had a functioning government; Hamas literally does more for the people there than the PA under Arafat ever did. Both of them are failed states, where people are unemployed, hungry, surrounded by corrpution, crime and death, and so on. In other words, those 2 states were in no position to be able to crack down on the terrorists in their midst, because they're in ruins, and they're not being given any chance to pull themselves out of ruins. For an alternate example, we can go right next door to look at a non-failed state, Egypt. Egypt was at war with Israel for roughly 30 years, until the Camp David Accords. Now, a fairly strong terrorist group actually formed in Egypt, with one of its goals being the destruction of Israel; Islamic Jihad. You may have heard of one of it's founders; Ayman Al Zawahiri. Now, what happened when that group started working in Egypt? Egypt cracked down ruthlessly on it. There have been no major attacks in Egypt for many years, now, and it's members have basically moved on, to places like Afghanistan and the Palestinian territories; other failed states. Do the people in Egypt like Israel? Of course not. Do they march against the country? Yes. Are they blowing themselves up to stop Israel? Not so much. The state there has actually contained the cancers growing inside it, and it is cutting off the lifeblood of Islamic Jihad, by giving the people there the alternative option of a better life. And where do their remaining Egyptian recruits come? From the slums in Cairo, the areas where the people still don't have a shot. Despite the far larger population of Egypt, it produces far fewer terrorists than the Gaza Strip does. The real key here is whether or not these people have hopes for better lives. In failed states, like Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, they really don't, which is why Hezbollah and Hamas have thrived there. But in countries which have had time to develop actual strength, institutions, and economies, there are far fewer terrorist recruits, and they are far more effective at confronting them. The only way you're going to put an end to this problem is to put an end to the failed states. You literally have to fight the poverty and suffering that gives rise to these groups. And you can not bomb people out of poverty either. Lebanon was at a very early stage along a path that would hopefully one day take them away from being a terrorist-causing failed state after the Cedar Revolution. They had an army, their economy was growing, and there was starting to be some impetus for disarming Hezbollah. It would have taken years for this movement to actually bear fruit, and I can give you no guarantees that it would, but I can guarantee one thing now; it never will. Lebanon has been raized to the ground again by Israel, and it has another decade of rebuilding to even have a chance to get to the point it was at before this operation began.

QUOTE(Soxbadger @ Aug 2, 2006 -> 12:12 PM) My problem with the idea that the Lebanese were going to do something to Hezbollah, but just didnt get around to it is: Why are they doing nothing now? I havent heard one story that went something like: Lebanese police officers, capture Hezbollah leaders. or Lebanese army captures Hezbollah militants. or Lebanese govt declares war on Hezbollah. Those are the reactions you expect when a govt really condemns something. What I see is tacit condonation. Why are they doing nothing now? Because they're scared to go outside because they will probably be caught in an exploding building. And because Israel's invasion has sparked a massive surge of support for Hezbollah throughout that country, which has taken the conversation in their government from "is there anything we can do to disarm Hezbollah" "what else can we do to support Hezbollah". Just remember this, having Israel bomb the crap out of Lebanon will make the Lebanese hate Israel, not Hezbollah. You can not bomb people enough to make them like you and hate your opponents.