Balta1701

QUOTE(NorthSideSox72 @ Feb 9, 2006 -> 02:25 PM) I guess my impression was that his impeachment was more about the banking scandals (Balta refers to it) than that firing, and that the firing was more like the tax evasion that got Capone in jail. I guess its stupidity and lack of forethought (Buchanan) versus mild paranoid insanity and hatred (Johnson). I still think Johnson takes the cake. Plus, Johnson's legacy still lives today in a lot of the policy still effecting Indians (the Dawes Act, while outside his presidency, has its roots in Johnsons policies). Is there anything of Buchanan still roaming about? You're confusing the 2 Andrew's of the 1800's. Andrew Jackson was 1828-1836. Johnson was Right after Lincoln. Jackson was the one who went after the National Bank and sent the country into a large recession, Jackson was the one who used force to evict and march a large number of native americans across the country, killing many, etc. Johnson was the one who was impeached.

QUOTE(southsideirish71 @ Feb 9, 2006 -> 02:13 PM) And its nice to see Mr Oil for Food pipe up and scold the media instead of scolding the fools who are running around killing people over f***ing cartoons. Maybe he should scold Hezbolla, Iran, and Syria over this. Syria has had surprisingly little to do with this in terms of the government thus far. Egypt (which btw gets a couple billion from us a year) has been VASTLY more important, along with our good friends in Saudi Arabia who we can't criticize because we like 4 wheel drive.

QUOTE(Rex Kickass @ Feb 9, 2006 -> 02:05 PM) I'd agree. I think that Buchanan was indeed the worst president in US history. Andrew Jackson has his bad parts too...the destruction of the National Bank which led to a "Panic" as he was leaving office, the "Trail of Tears", etc.

QUOTE(greasywheels121 @ Feb 9, 2006 -> 02:02 PM) Just caught it. It's on at 4 here. Buehrle sounded like the nervous one, voice shaking a bit. Pods sounded like he was reading a cue card. "Oh damn, I wonder what'll happen when the wife sees this" (scott's thoughts)

Link So this doesn't show up at all in the AP piece. They spend a long time talking about how Abramoff's partners had arranged for repeated contacts between Reid's folks and Abramoff's clients, in particular on the Marianas minimum wage/slave labor issue, in an attempt to make Reid look bad. The kicker? Reid never actually supported Abramoff's position that the minimum wage bill was bad. He supported the bill, while Abramoff's clients, the people supposedly doing nasty things by Lobbying Reid...wanted the minimum wage opposed (so they coud keep paying workers $2 an hour or so on U.S. territory). The AP casually leaves that detail out. Oops. Damn liberal media.

Hmph, the current Mayor of L.A., and former city councilman, seems to have first heard about the "terror plot" during Bush's speech this morning. That's troublesome.

QUOTE(LowerCaseRepublican @ Feb 9, 2006 -> 01:46 PM) Best President -- William Henry Harrison. He didn't do a damn thing to hurt the United States at all. /case.closed. Yes he did. There was a funeral to pay for!

Linky

QUOTE(ZoomSlowik @ Feb 9, 2006 -> 01:05 PM) Wow, Draft express really seems to be gushing over Aldridge. I don't think they said one negative thing. I don't know how you could say that he is that polished offensively watching him at Texas. I've watched them a couple of times, and I think he took maybe two hook shots and two jumpers. They make him sound like a cross between Kareem and Olajuwon on offense. He's got more talent than most big men that enter the draft, but he isn't THAT good yet. Even if he isn't "That" good...I think the best team in the NBA right now has managed to assemble itself out of parts that are all very good, but none of them amazingly spectacular.

QUOTE(Cknolls @ Feb 9, 2006 -> 01:04 PM) This commission was a f***ing joke. I love how the commission finds that there are flaws up and down the system, including both Democratic and Republican administrations, and since they don't judge the Republicans to be perfect, the commission is judged to be a joke. It's probably the most bi-partisan investigation of anything we've had in the last 10 years.

QUOTE(SSH2005 @ Feb 9, 2006 -> 01:01 PM) Bush bashers seem to forget that 9/11 might never have happened if Clinton had a set of balls. Apparently, the only time he used his balls was with White House interns. And it might never have happened had Bush not ignored the attack on the Cole or Richard Clarke's requests for a principals-level meeting on Al Qaeda in 2001 either. There's plenty o' blame to go around. Should Clinton have done more? In hindsight, absolutely. Should Bush? In hindsight, absolutely.

CNN starts off by showing images of the King Funeral speeches (the stuff mentionning the WMD), but cuts out the applause from the segment. Fox News does exactly the same thing. Then Morton Kondracke comments on the fact that the response of the audience "wasn't exactly uproarious"

This continues to be the biggest distortion in the Abramoff case...there are a lot of Indian Tribes in this country, and a lot of them are in different states. Many of them wind up having business before the government. Before Abramoff started working with any indian tribes, they gave the majority of their money to Democrats. When a tribe started working with Abramoff, that tribe always saw its contributions to Republicans go through the roof, while it's contributions to Demcrats on average declined roughly 9%. The crime overall is not taking money from people associated with Abramoff (and you can't find a single Dem who actually received money directly from Abramoff). The crime is in the quid pro quo. The crimes are in the lavish gifts which barely border on the edges of the law. If every single person who received money from one of the indian tribes Abramoff dealt with was actually linked to the Crimes, well, let's put it this way, I'd be happy to sacrifice Harry Reid in exchange for knocking out that many Republicans. Hastert got a lot more money from those tribes than Reid, for example, and he hasnt' been seriously implicated. There may well be evidence that Reid has done something inappropriate. I haven't seen it yet. The evidence that is out there thus far is about things done by guys like Rep. Ney, Delay, etc., where they're getting gifts from Abramoff that they don't report, where abramoff is demanding extra money from people to meet with those Congresspeople, etc. Here remains the best summary I've seen to date about who got what in the Abramoff case, including donations just from the indian tribes not necessarily tied exactly to Abramoff. As far as I can tell, it already mentions basically the same facts presented in the AP article ($5000 from 1 tribe, writing a letter to help it, etc.), yet it was made a month ago, and somehow the AP just decided to run that story today. Very odd indeed.

"Well I know Hell, damn, ass..." Interestingly, I have this odd habit of randomly switching between normal letters and script while taking notes in class or writing various handwritten things. I havne't a clue why I do it, but sometimes I'll look back at a page of notes, the first half will be normal, suddenly I'll use a half page of script, then a 1/4 page of normal, then like a 1/3 page of script, and I'll even switch back & forth in the middle of words. Y et somehow I can still read it.

QUOTE(YASNY @ Feb 9, 2006 -> 11:33 AM) I wonder if Widger realizes how knowledgable Sox fans appreciate how much he contributed in '05. AJ's been getting a lot of the kudos, but Widger was a very important part of the team. Nobody beats him.

Molina's not too happy with the Angels it seems. Link.

QUOTE(YASNY @ Feb 9, 2006 -> 10:34 AM) Common sense will tell you that the number not in the labor force will continue to rise, and probably at a faster rate as the baby boomers grow older, have more health problems and reach retirement age. As for the unemployement percentage being irrelevent, if it was 9% would that still be considered irrelevent? It would depend on how it got to 9%. If it got there because it was at 15% but then the labor market had "Shrunk" due to the survey excluding people, it'd be pretty darn irrelevant. Here's the thing to put this in perspective. Due to population growth, immigration, etc., this nation adds roughly 100,000-150,000 people to its work force every month. About a million or two a year depending on the year. Yet the size of the work force has declined dramatically over the past 10 years. These 2 metrics simply do not match.

John McCain, December 2002: This was discussed yesterday: And Mr. McCain's response? Urge to throw flip-flops at him...rising...

QUOTE(southsider2k5 @ Feb 9, 2006 -> 10:11 AM) Not sure what you were linking, but I got this message Sorry, survey does not exist. If you need to contact someone about the program or its data, please send a message to the data questions e-mail address below or call the phone number below. Ok, i must not be able to link directly to that data table...Try here, check the top left box, and retrieve data.

In the first full post-SOTU speech poll i've seen...Pew is saying that the speech produced virtually no bounce at all for the President (1-2 points since December, well within the margin of error of the poll). Still stuck at 40%.

QUOTE(southsider2k5 @ Feb 9, 2006 -> 09:43 AM) It will be interesting to see which Pharoh it was, and why he was buried so hastily. I also can't wait for the Tut exhibit to come back to Chicago this summer. If it was even a Pharaoh.

QUOTE(southsider2k5 @ Feb 9, 2006 -> 09:55 AM) What exactly does that number include???? Every month when the BLS puts out its labor numbers, it includes 1 item in the table for "Not in the labor force", including all sorts of things, like long-term unemployed, people who have stopped looking for work, people who have gone to school, people placed on disability, people who have gone in for other job training, etc. There's lots of ways to fall out. Here's their raw numbers. I don't care as much about the overall number...whether it's 70 million or 10 million isn't the important part...the important part is the fact that in the last 10 years, as the "Unemployment percentage" numbers have dropped...a very significant portion of that drop is due to the dramatic increase in that number.

QUOTE(Rex Kickass @ Feb 9, 2006 -> 09:37 AM) What I don't honestly understand is that it seems the number of jobs in my local paper doesn't grow day to day. Is the labor market really this tight? Or is it because a large number of people have left the workforce? I'm honestly confused. There are so many statistics regarding employment and some seem to be a direct contradiction of the others. In January of 2001, the number of people listed as "Not in the labor force" in the BLS job numbers was 71,060,000. In January of 2006, that same number was 78,463,000. That's nearly 7.5 million people who are not counted as "Unemployed" by the U.S. government but who do not have jobs.

QUOTE(Al Lopez's Ghost @ Feb 8, 2006 -> 09:08 PM) So let's say the Nats decided to have LeCroy catch, with Sammie in right and Soriano at second. That would be one hell of a defensive lineup. "For the Nationals tonight, 5 runs, 10 hits, 70 errors." Dude...catchers usually don't get called for errors except on throwing. 40 errors, 25 passed balls, 5-10 wild pitches should do it.

QUOTE(SoxFan562004 @ Feb 9, 2006 -> 09:05 AM) LOL, this is classic. Easily the best part is the "knothole." This was a huge thing they put forth with the plans, how this was unique and bring the community together, now it just doesn't do what they said. Personally, I think it's even better than that...it's not just like the construction went awry or something like that...but they're in fact going to actively shut the thing so that people can't see in. They're just laughing at those fans.