StrangeSox

The greatest trick Donald Trump ever pulled was convincing liberals "maybe W wasn't the worst after all"

QUOTE (Quinarvy @ Sep 22, 2016 -> 02:43 PM) I really wanted Bush to throw his hat in for MLB Commissioner. While I disagree with him as a politician, I've never thought of him as any but an honorable man. Wasn't the story that he was angling for that, lost to Selig and then launched his political career as Texas governor?

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Sep 22, 2016 -> 02:04 PM) I have gained a ton of respect for W since he left the White House. By and large he has stayed out of the way of the President, respected the office, and let him run the country, not involving politics in things. The times where he has made himself known in public it has been in an effort to support Obama as a person, and/or to do something positive for the country. Also paint pictures of himself

Yeah, it depends on how much you're working. You're never guaranteed steady work. One of my friends is working 60-70 hours a week right now as a pipefitter, but once this job is over in a month he might be laid off for 2-3 months until the next big project comes through. Depending on the specific trade, you might get laid off for 2-3 months a year every year due to weather so you better make tons of overtime during the "good months"

Conversely I know two people with poli sci degrees who have been gainfully employed for about a decade since they graduated. You're also largely SOL if you don't have a college degree at all for many jobs these days, even relatively low skilled office jobs want a degree in something. What I do these days is only tangentially related to my original engineering degree. Getting into the unions themselves isn't easy. There are only so many slots and like everything else in life, it helps if you know someone already.

Full-blown white nativism from Trump today: He also proposed nation-wide stop-and-frisk policing.

AP as my RB1 and Jeffery as my WR1, season not looking too hot right now.

(Harry R also blasted Trump on the floor of the Senate Monday) The NYT editorial board also put out a pretty scathing article today on Trump's "Stupid Excuses" for not releasing his taxes.

One that doesn't upset a single member of the military for any reason.

Nate's messed with his model a whole bunch this year and it seems to be much more in favor of wide uncertainty than any of the other aggregators. check out how 538 compares to the rest of them about half way down this page. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/up...s-forecast.html For example, if you give Clinton Minnesota (only state that didn't go for Reagan; currently polling very strongly Dem), Virginia (bluer and bluer each year thanks to NoVA; polling strongly Dem; Clinton pulled out ads a month ago to focus on more contested states), and Pennsylvania (polling fairly strongly Dem; has gone Dem since 1988), Trump needs to run the table in every other remotely close state to win. That includes states that are still pretty favorable to Clinton such as Wisconsin, Colorado and New Hampshire. Trump is in better shape than he was a month ago, and I don't like his better-than-Russian-roulette odds of becoming President, but he's still got a very tough hill to climb and after a really bad week of polling, Clinton already seems to be rebounding a little bit.

This is the rhetorical origin of the "Skittles" nonsense that Donald Trump Jr. and the KKK are pedaling and the campaign isn't disavowing with respect to refugees: The man who wrote that was hanged at Nuremberg.

They found the Donald Trump painting that Donald Trump paid $20k for through the Donald J. Trump Foundation https://twitter.com/Fahrenthold/status/7783...src=twsrc%5Etfw Allegedly it's at his Doral golf club in Florida, which probably means the purchase of it through his charitable foundation to be used in a for-profit enterprise is not okay.

There are thousands if not tens of thousands of law enforcement departments across the country

QUOTE (raBBit @ Sep 20, 2016 -> 01:11 PM) Not sure why you're saying Jesus. You did a google search to find out the breakdown of the oversight committee and then stated the obvious. I think everyone here understands the the way bipartisanship works in practice. That's not what bipartisanship means, and that's not how Congress functions.

QUOTE (raBBit @ Sep 20, 2016 -> 01:03 PM) Do you even read the bulls*** links you post? Hanna, the guy who gave the quotes your article was written about, is not on the committee as you suggest. Seems like you have already edited that out of your post. You must have actually read the article after posting your headline it as the article reads, "Hanna, who is not a member of the committee." He was also the first GOP Congressman to support HRC. No wonder why CNN goes to him for a quote. I didn't edit anything out of my post, I changed some messed up line spacing. That whole ordeal started with Kevin McCarthy who did say explicitly that they wanted to hurt her poll numbers, as was mentioned in the article.

QUOTE (raBBit @ Sep 20, 2016 -> 12:55 PM) Thanks for the government lessons. There are two different Republican House Committees. The one in this discussion is not a Republican house committee. In fact, other than Chaffetz, the individual asking HRC's lackeys the most questions in these hearings is (D) Elijah Cummings. Yes, because he's the ranking Democrat. That's how House panels work. Republicans still control this committee and what it does. If you don't recognize that all House and Senate committees are not actually neutral but are in fact partisan and controlled by the party with the majority, you really do need a rudimentary lesson on how Congress functions. Saying that that committee is "bipartisan" is like saying the House is bipartisan and that the legislative agenda isn't controlled entirely by the current Speaker. That's simply not how these things work, and pointing out that Democrats sit on the committee doesn't some how change my "narrative"/statement of fact that the committee in question is controlled by Republicans. Anyway, that's really all just a divergence from the main point which was that DB believes that Chaffetz "proved" Clinton was guilty of a whole bunch of crimes when he did no such thing, and some of the evidence DB keeps bringing up of Clinton's "crimes" (Huma and the IT guy having access to a server which was not a classified info server) dooesn't even make sense and dooesn't point to any crime having been committed.

QUOTE (raBBit @ Sep 20, 2016 -> 12:38 PM) The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is a bipartisan committee but don't let facts get in the way of your narrative. Yes, and since Republicans currently hold the majority in the House, they control these committees and what they do and what sort of hearings they hold. These committees don't function as impartial bipartisan groups e.g. a dozen Benghazi committees with some of the Republicans on those committees stating explicitly that their goals were to hurt Clinton politically. But hey, don't let how the government actually functions and has for decades (forever?) get in the way of your lame sniping again.

Spent labor day weekend in Breckenridge for a wedding. I had been there before in the winter for a day, but this was my first time being in Colorado in the summer. We got in a few hikes including one up to Mohawk Lakes just south of town. Gorgeous views. The wedding was at the top of Vail, and that may be one of the most spectacular views I've ever seen. Can't find a picture that does it justice.

You from New Lenox? Our new place borders right on the edge of Homer and New Lenox and I think we're actually closer to Rt. 30 than we are to the "main" areas of Homer.

Just requested my vote-by-mail ballot since I might be out of town for work on election day. Early voting starts in Minnesota and South Dakota on Friday, so the election will actually be under way pretty soon.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Sep 20, 2016 -> 10:14 AM) With everything that has gone on, I don't get the meme that Cutler isn't tough. Apparently he needs to put on a floor show of acting like he is pain to convince everyone that he is really in pain. For some reason a couple of months ago I speed-read through the 2010-11 NFC championship thread, oh man the hot takes on how Cutler was such a wuss.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Sep 20, 2016 -> 09:18 AM) I have to say that this seems normal, as I have seen it across many other areas. Most consumption of a particular item is concentrated in a much smaller percentage of its users. I have to say that this seems like typical economic behavior. For example, Health care: 50% use little to none, the top 5% use about 50%. I suppose it's probably close to other "hobby" items as opposed to necessity-type items e.g. toasters and fridges are owned broadly and nobody really stockpiles dozens of them but only a handful of people own 99% of RC aircraft.

Fahrenthold with more on Trump's charity scams. Trump used $258,000 from his charity to settle legal problems

Nate Cohn of the NYT with an interesting and demonstrative experiment on how much influence pollsters' decisions of how to establish their demographics model (will this eleciton's electorate look like 2008? 2004? Something we've never seen before) can have on a poll's results. They took one of their own recent Florida polls and gave the raw data for four respected polling firms. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/09...about.html?_r=0