southsider2k5

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Jul 23, 2008 -> 08:24 AM) FWIW, the CFTC issued a report says that it finds no evidence of price manipulation. Of course, clueless Congressmen disagree. http://uk.reuters.com/article/businessIndu...036879720080711 Just so things are clear this is the COMMODITY FUTURES TRADING COMMISSION who came to this conclusion. Needless to say they have a little bit more knowledge of the ground situation than the Congress does.

That's right I went there... OK so maybe not an ace, but it took real guts to do what he did last night. How many guys after a death in the family would offer to take the ball early for their team and then procede to shutdown one of the best offenses in baseball for seven innings? Mark Buehrle is one of my all time favorite White Sox, and a night like last night shows exactly why Here's to you Mark

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Jul 22, 2008 -> 02:10 PM) Key difference there, though. NYT's editorial board and content are biased, their news is generally not. Fox News doesn't have an unbiased element anywhere in its content. I don't buy that for a second. The NYT is every bit to the left as Fox News is to the right. As a matter of a fact, its why I pretty much ignore both of them when it comes to anything connected to politics.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jul 22, 2008 -> 02:06 PM) Which is, I think, Tex's point in a nutshell. If the NYT Does anything that might remotely anger the right, it gets accused of bias, regardless of the reasoning behind it. Because I never hear anything about bias at Fox News or anything... Please.

QUOTE (jackie hayes @ Jul 22, 2008 -> 01:37 PM) Well, the NYT disagrees with you. They believe the speech (and the editorial which preceded it) contained new info. Personally, I don't disagree with you. I didn't find anything in the editorial that I didn't expect to hear. But that's a different argument than the one bmags has been making. The only thing I'm saying is that he has a valid point. A newspaper should be allowed to demand the same standards of any candidate editorial. If you want to argue how well it implemented those standards, that's fine, and I don't think I'd say much against you. The only reason I said anything here is that I think most of the replies to bmags were misrepresenting one of his main points. Btw, I think bmags would disagree with me about how new the editorial was, so take this as jmo. I don't think anyone has said the NYT shouldn't be able to do what they are doing. It seems that most of the arguements are that they shouldn't have done it, because it only fuels the bias fires. It makes them look like they are choosing sides.

Those kind of guys usually "get it" on their second team.

The second time around we usually get these guys. They might not hit them the first time, but they seem to learn something and use it.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jul 22, 2008 -> 01:23 PM) By that do you mean energy prices themselves? Because there's an awful lot of ways in which one could find fault with the behavior of the national government in that regard. I don't fault the government for the decesions that I and the general public make. I blame them for a lot, but this isn't one of those things.

QUOTE (kapkomet @ Jul 22, 2008 -> 01:10 PM) They're all awesome at finger pointing to someone else when it's (supposedly) not their fault. Up until this point, it wasn't Congress's fault. It was the American general public's fault.

QUOTE (SoxFan1 @ Jul 22, 2008 -> 12:53 PM) No kidding. Look how terrible Quentin and Ramirez ended up being. Not to mention how Jermaine Dye has fallen apart since coming to Chicago...

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Jul 22, 2008 -> 12:41 PM) I think it will end up pretty much like that, because this is (as one of the energy market experts quoted in the article said) a smokescreen. Congress wants people to think they are doing something. They don't care about the actual result, because that would be down the line anyway. They just want to look like they are acting on it. And by the way, I'd like it to be noted that the test vote was 94-0 in favor. That means this is a bi-partisan debacle. I swear it is worse when the parties work together versus when they don't.

QUOTE (bmags @ Jul 22, 2008 -> 12:53 PM) ay, they didn't say, Make your opinions more like Obama's, they wanted the content to (repeated ad nauseum, they wanted the definitive McCain Foreign Policy piece) be like Obama's (because Obama's in every way was his policy for the middle east. Had little to do with McCain besides clarifying their two positions). In other words, they didn't want to know why Obama was wrong, they wanted to know what McCain tried to do. So we are criticising the times for wanting a higher level of discourse. In Obama's piece, McCain was mentioned 4 times, in the intro and conclusion paragraphs, in McCain's piece, Obama or the pronoun "He"-which refers to Obama in the context, was used 11 times - in every paragraph except one. So they wanted a new draft. Boo hoo. Like I said, they can do whatever they want, but I don't want to hear anyone crying for the NYT either. The McCain camp is just as entitled to their opinions as the NYT is, then again, maybe McCain should have just rejected the NYT's opinion until they gave it to him the correct format.

QUOTE (lostfan @ Jul 22, 2008 -> 12:49 PM) lol, I noticed. I learn more about what's really going on from this forum between you, SS2k5, Balta, etc. than I ever do from reading the news. I've only ever had to pull my "look this is what I do for a living" card once so far. I guess I never say anything controversial enough and it doesn't look like bulls***. I guess you need to find a career on the front page of the Op-Ed pages

QUOTE (jackie hayes @ Jul 22, 2008 -> 12:36 PM) bmags's point is that the NYT did not say, Change your opinion. They said, Give us a new opinion. They gave no guidelines about what that opinion should be. A new opinion requires a change of opinion. If there is no change, it isn't new. Like I said, they can do whatever they want, but then don't cry about it when you get called on it.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Jul 22, 2008 -> 12:22 PM) That's my one thread of hope here. Congress gives the CFTC a bunch of money and manpower (which they do actually need), and says, GO GET THE BAD GUYS! CFTC, understanding the markets, says, "um... OK". And goes and catches bad guys. They leave the "people who don't intend to take delivery", otherwise known as MARKET MAKERS, alone. I hope that's what happens. I hope, but don't expect it. Congress is hellbent on finding someone to blame, and instead of having the testicles to say "This is your own damned fault for not conserving energy at all!", they go looking for an easy target.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Jul 22, 2008 -> 12:17 PM) All the more reason to publish it, as long as it doesn't break any rules or laws. Let McCain state his peace. If he hangs himself with his own words, then so be it. If he looks good, so be it. That's what I don't get. If the piece was that bad, publish it, and let people tear it apart. There is no need to try to change someone's opinion to try to fit it to what you think it should be.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Jul 22, 2008 -> 12:15 PM) I think this would dwarf SarbOx if it goes into law. SOX is costly and accomplishes little, other than creating extra overhead. But this would actually do the exact opposite of what they are trying to accomplish. No doubt about that. Yet another example of why oversight of the finanical markets is best served by people who actually understand financial markets.

Except for all of your hypotheticals, none of that was the case with McCain. They didn't say it was too long or too short. They didn't say that it was plagerized or not spell checked. They said that they wanted the content of the article changed to be like Obama's. They are perfectly within their rights to do so, but in doing so they also open themselves up to people who view this as further proof their biases. And I agree with you that it was about money. They are sucking up to their subscriber base. They know that the people reading the NYT in general want more Obama and less McCain. And they have a specific vision of McCain that fits their vision. They wanted exactly that from McCain's editorial. As for my example being good or bad, that is 100% irrelevant, and a pointless sidetrack. The main issue here is that the New York Times is trying to have the best of both worlds. They want the attention of a John McCain editorial, except they want him to do it exactly how they want him to do it. Its not much of an editorial if you are telling someone what to write.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Jul 22, 2008 -> 11:57 AM) What happens when a bunch of Congressmen, who apparently know nothing about the financial markets, decide they need to lower the price of oil? You get this: the "Stop Excessive Speculation Act". Main points of the bill: Ugh. Now, I am all for more CFTC market surveillance. They are shorthanded. And transparency could be good. But look at the two bolded parts. This is idiotic. Do they know what a futures contract is? Do they know anything about how the markets work? Without speculators, THERE IS NO MARKET. With no market, two very bad things can happen. One, the buyers of oil can't hedge anymore, so they will be subject to even wilder price fluctuations than the already are. Two, the oil producers have much more control over the sale of their product, and now THEY can game the system, which is far worse than the current scenario. Hang on to your wallets, folks. If these laws actually go into effect, and if the CFTC actually tries to do these things, the price of gas and oil will go wild, and mostly wildly up. Idiots. Yup. No speculators=No liquidity, which means the markets get left up to a very few people who are willing to take delivery. This goes into the monumentally stupid pile along with Sarbines Oxley.

QUOTE (bmags @ Jul 22, 2008 -> 11:48 AM) Give me a break. A privately owned newspaper asking for a different draft for an editorial that could have huge impact on how much papers they sell is not akin to censorship in any way, shape, or fashion. And, balta said length, CONTENT. Yet you focused solely on length for some reason. And comparing a message board to a newspaper is just completely out there. It's like comparing cooking shake n bake at home to working as a cook in a Chef's restaurant. You totally missed it, but I focused on content as well when I mentioned them trying to force changes based on what was suggested. Like I said, if they want something specific to print, go ahead and put your own name on it so that it is what it is... the NYTs opinion, or at least their interpretation of McCain's opinion. And accidently you hit on the biggest point of all here, money. The NYT knows that they will sell more newspapers by creating controversy and catering to their audience. Rejecting the content of people that they don't agree with is probably the best publicity that they could create.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jul 22, 2008 -> 11:15 AM) But every op-ed writer faces the same hurdles. Every piece you see on the op-ed page of a major newspaper has gone through that process of being submitted to an editor and probably coming back with comments about length, content, etc. Are you arguing that the editors simply shouldn't exist and that the paper itself should have no control over the material it prints once it decides to hand over column inches to someone? Length is not what the NYT was trying to change. They were trying to get McCain to change what he wrote. There is a big difference there. I don't think you would be happy if all of the sudden I started making it so that I had to approve your posts, based on the changes I suggested, and let other people's fly by. Who knows what the true reasons are, but it doesn't look good when you start forcing changes in people's writing. In some parts of the country they call that censorship.

QUOTE (kapkomet @ Jul 22, 2008 -> 10:41 AM) Well, you should get a bird's eye view of this one, Tex. So start your own... Nothing cooler than the eye of a hurricane. It is just awe-inspiring.

QUOTE (bmags @ Jul 22, 2008 -> 10:43 AM) There's a big difference between rejected and revising. Rejected would be refusing to publish anything from McCain. Revising is what most everyone does. And when you are going to get a big spread in the Sunday edition of the NY TIMES, yeah, you might have a few drafts. Which isn't any better to me. If they are going to publish editorials, the writer of them, not the editor, needs to decide what his message and relative content will be. Forcing changes in that, changes the authors message. If they wanted to have something specific to print, they should have just written it themselves and put their own name on it.

QUOTE (Dick Allen @ Jul 22, 2008 -> 10:42 AM) A CF who is their leadoff guy or #3 hitter and is under control for the next 3 seasons at a very reasonable rate, isn't going to be traded to the White Sox, unless you greatly overpay for him. Considering Fields is the main chip, the Royals have Gordon. Most of the other minor leaguers are either not ready or still questionable as to what they can be projected to become. Its one thing to trade an often injured MacDougal, but to trade a cheap, effective player to a division rival and face him 18 or 19 games a year, its a different story. At the time he was a cheap closer. Those usually don't get traded either, and that happened.

QUOTE (Chisoxfn @ Jul 22, 2008 -> 10:06 AM) Clearly 2k and Kap didn't realize that Pratt and I at SS were doing our best impressions of Jose Valentin. And doing them very well I might add