Jenksismyhero

QUOTE (RockRaines @ Nov 12, 2013 -> 10:16 AM) WE bring in a great recruiting class (#3 class in the country), but freshman have proven to be very hit and miss. If Shannon Scott stays we wont miss much. He will prove to be a better PG than Craft this year, mark it down. With those one and done's its all about can their supporting cast work with them for that year. Sometimes its great and sometimes its the NIT. Which is why there's so much excitement for Cliff and Illinois. He'll have a supporting class of upperclassmen. For the record, I'm not totally buying into the final four or bust prediction other Illinois fans have. I'm not sure how refined Cliff's offensive game will be once he gets into the Big Ten.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Nov 12, 2013 -> 09:23 AM) And that setup is a path to destroying the insurance industry. You can't allow people to not be covered for things and then purchase insurance when they actually have that problem. That's not insurance, that's requiring a private company to pay for treatment, which no private company will do because that's stupid. Most insurance policies cover 90% (made up statistic) or the majority of problems you will ever encounter in life. Most employer-based policies also allow you to add certain coverages at a higher price on an annual basis. Having a kid for example. You shouldn't have to buy a policy to cover that cost every single year. However, if you and your wife decide you're going to have a kid, you can buy up the year before. That's what my wife and I did, and we saved a decent chunk of change by doing so.

QUOTE (Iwritecode @ Nov 12, 2013 -> 09:58 AM) Not if you have full coverage. Because there are about a million other things that you can run into that will wreck your car besides another driver. A tree, a guardrail, a deer, a telephone pole, a ditch... You are basically paying for the insurance company to replace/repair your car if you hit one of those things. Not to mention medical coverage for your injuries. Actually, they might. I had a guy pull out of a parking lot and hit me while I was sitting in the turn-lane to go into the lot. It was totally his fault and he got the ticket, but he made up some BS story and his insurance company refused to pay for my damages. I had to actually pay my deducible and have my insurance company pay for the repairs and then they went after the other driver's insurance to get the money back. If I had to do that on my own, I would've been completely screwed. You buying full coverage is an option though. You're not legally required to have it.

QUOTE (Jake @ Nov 12, 2013 -> 09:58 AM) I agree that the Obama administration has done little to push back against Bush era spying and extrajudicial bombing operations, instead just deploying them as it sees fit. I would like to see a completely reformed NSA/CIA/FBI, as each of these organizations has a past rife with terrible and illegal activity and have done little in the recent past to disprove such claims. At this point, Obama's biggest failure as president is allowing this to go on and perhaps encouraging the growth of it. I hope he does something about all of this while he's a lame duck (or sooner). As far as the "unforeseen national events" I mentioned earlier that could derail his presidency, it seems like a spying or bombing revelation could indeed be such a thing. The right believes it too, because they keep trying to find such a revelation. The most troublesome thing about our Democrat president not dismantling these (probably) unconstitutional programs is that it makes me fearful that no politician will be willing to do so. I think we're well past that point. That was one of Obama's campaign talking points and he's expanded those programs. If a national embarrassment like Snowden doesn't stop the practice, nothing will.

QUOTE (whitesoxfan99 @ Nov 12, 2013 -> 10:06 AM) Hard to say but Illinois will be very deep and talented next year. They will have 3 transfers who have all proven to be at least good college players coming eligible, 5 freshmen at least 3 of whom will see substantial time this year making the freshmen to sophomore leap and Snider and Black are both potential impact freshmen (my guess is Snider more likely then Black). The only players they lose are Bertrand and Ekey. I would be surprised if they aren't at least a Final 4 contender (Top 10-15 type team) next year if they land Cliff. Also remember MSU will drop down without Payne and Harris, OSU probably takes a step back without Craft (though Rock you can better forecast that) Maybe Wisconsin loses Dekker. Indiana supposedly has a lot of talent with a bunch of McDAA's on the roster, but they'll be young.

QUOTE (RockRaines @ Nov 12, 2013 -> 09:59 AM) For his one year at Illinois, do they have the players in place to make a title run? We'll see how everyone develops, but I would think they would be in the conference title discussion yes. Cliff/Egwu would be the best front court in the conference and you hope to get some good production out of Starks/Crosby who get a year of practicing in the system. Add in the development of the new guys and they should be pretty good.

QUOTE (KyYlE23 @ Nov 12, 2013 -> 09:55 AM) Yep. Emery can literally do whatever he wants after this season, take the team in whatever direction he sees fit schematically and personnel wise. He told Mully and Hanley early this season that he intended to keep the 4-3. His reasoning was that the 3-4 requires that big nose tackle/space eater in the middle and those types are just too hard to find.

QUOTE (RockRaines @ Nov 12, 2013 -> 09:51 AM) Nope. Everyone knows Alexander is going to DePaul... Possible. If his stated goals of (1) playing time (2) being "the" guy and (3) winning, Illinois is his best choice.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Nov 12, 2013 -> 09:34 AM) Eh, I think he would have made that list. Even with the no-fly zone he had a military strong enough to cause a lot of harm to his own people, that's something. Right, tyrant in the sense of a somewhat modern country with the means to do something significant and the balls to do it. You could say someone like Kim Jong had equally sophisticated weapons (if not more advanced), but I don't think they would ever actually do something. Saddam had a track record. African war lords don't really count because as disgusting as they are, they can't create world wide problems.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Nov 12, 2013 -> 09:29 AM) You are probably remembering Curveball. Read the book on him, it is worth your time. The Germans thought at first they may have had something, but quickly determined he was full of it. The US bullied Germany into handing him over, he made yet more inconsistent statements... but the CIA was so hell-bent on finding a reason to go into Iraq (so totally backwards by the way), they ignored Germany AND their own lower level analysts in favor of talking him up as knowing things he didn't. By the time the information made it to frat boy at the top, it was a "slam dunk". I thought English and French intelligence also thought he had WMD's and/or were contacting terrorists. But yes, the problem was they were using old intelligence and/or relying on questionable intelligence to make a case when they shouldn't have.

QUOTE (Jake @ Nov 12, 2013 -> 09:11 AM) How many people get cancer? Should you not get covered for that? I don't understand the argument that unless you will definitely get something, it shouldn't be part of the risk pool. Again, it was bad for society when people were getting completely hammered for pre-existing conditions. Likewise, it was bad for society when women had to pay 50% more than men of equal health and age. They did nothing wrong except for be women and be more likely to see a doctor when they are sick. You're paying for pregnancy services so that babies can be healthy, mothers can be healthy, and so women all over the USA are not getting f***ed by the insurance system. You should have the option of buying insurance that may or may not cover those issues. Look, here's my issue: a 27 year old should not have to buy a policy that covers those things. He should be able to buy a catastrophic policy that protects himself against a sudden accident in the ER so he's not financially ruined. He shouldn't have to pay higher premiums for care he will never, ever use at his age. I fail to see why we should be making these types of coverages mandatory in every policy that is offered. Make it so you can't DENY people that coverage. Regulate it so that insurance companies can't make it unaffordable for everyone and thus not really an option. I have no qualms with that. Do NOT restrict someone's right to buy coverage the think best fits their situation in life, both financially and medically.

QUOTE (Jake @ Nov 12, 2013 -> 08:44 AM) Health insurance is to protect against yourself, sure, but in many cases it isn't like you have much say about the illnesses or injuries you get. Much like driving a car, you can be a great, defensive driver...but sometimes you get slammed. You can maintain your car, but sometimes its parts fail. You need to disavow yourself that mental illnesses only can affect certain people. There are environmental factors and genetic factors, certainly. It remains hard to predict and the attitude that "I am of sound mind and shouldn't have to have mental health screenings on my plan" is the very reason that men in particular are highly underdiagnosed across the spectrum of mental health conditions. Also, my understanding is that the only thing in the mandatory coverage is screening for clinical depression, which I'm guessing entails a talk with your primary care physician. If you get in a wreck that isn't your fault, your insurance doesn't pick up the tab. Nor would the insurance pay for the maintenance on your vehicle. Car insurance is not similar in anyway to health insurance. I'm not saying you can't get mental health issues, but it's not like it suddenly happens either. It's not the same as a sudden ER visit as a result of a accident. But more importantly, the vast majority of people will never have those issues. 25% I believe is the statistic I read in the last couple of weeks. So why are we making that a requirement instead of an option?

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Nov 12, 2013 -> 08:37 AM) Because no fine, upstanding young men ever suddenly have mental issues or try drugs/alcohol, and everyone who comes down with depression or starts abusing drugs comes up with a 5 year plan saying "you know what I'm going to do, I'm going to get hooked on crack and become the mayor of Toronto". It's like how everyone who develops cancer comes up with that 5 year plan saying "i'm going to develop cancer and so I should really get insured for it". The vast majority will not suffer from either. And unless it's a 100% certainty, it shouldn't be a mandate, it should still be up to people to decide. Please though, explain the pregnancy care requirement.

QUOTE (Jake @ Nov 11, 2013 -> 08:54 PM) A war based on an obvious lie that wasn't believed by the international community at the time and is believed by nobody now is a weak claim? A record surplus and thriving economy upon entry to the second worst economic crisis in the country's history is a weak claim? A trend toward the loss of privacy, habeas corpus, and personal freedoms is weak? IIRC other European countries had similar intelligence about Saddam, but yes, it was still a weak claim. Frankly Bush should have said we're doing this to set up a base of operations in the region to kill AQ and other similar groups while also getting rid of the world's most dangerous tyrant and he would have had more support. Bush took office during a mini recession. We were not in a "thriving economy" in 2001 and 9/11 certainly didn't help. But yes, he spent way more than he should have. I'll agree with that. And lastly, a trend that has not only been continued by Obama but expanded considerably (see, US drone policy).

QUOTE (Jake @ Nov 12, 2013 -> 07:58 AM) Does it provide for all but the "few" that can make adequate provision? The idea here is that markets work when the actors within it can act rationally. Nobody acts rationally in practice, and this is especially true in regard to health. People are bad at preserving their health, because we are biologically programmed to put short term gains (hamburger) over long-term ills (type 2 diabetes) - being fat simply wasn't an evolutionary problem. On the other hand, behavioral economics (and experience) tells us that we are generally over-optimistic. About everything. 90% of drivers say they are better than the average driver. You do the math on that one. Imagine if car insurance was optional. Even better, get in a car crash and see if both of you have adequate insurance to deal with it. The same holds true with our personal health. People don't believe they will get sick and thus don't feel the need to buy insurance/adequate insurance. This is why we don't understand/like insurance in general; I don't need all that coverage! I'm healthy! People that smoke, of all things, believe they personally are less likely to get lung cancer than non-smokers. People are imperfect. If we want to make this capitalism thing work, we have to give people a chance to make rational choices. Providing social insurance to make sure people have the resources to choose means a strong welfare system as well as not having the looming prospect of bankruptcy and life-changing debt over an unexpected hospital stay. Car insurance isn't to protect you against yourself, it's to protect other people. Health insurance doesn't have that concern. Your health issues are your own. You choose your treatment plans. You choose how much medical attention you want to obtain. You should also be able to choose the type of coverage that you get. And I agree with the second bolded sentence. What doesn't fit with that is telling a young male of sound mind who doesn't use drugs or alcohol that he HAS to get coverage for pregnancy, mental health and substance abuse. He has no choice. He has no option. It's a federal mandate.

That has been retracted btw. Kansas still could get 1, 2 or all 3 of them.

I'm a week behind all of the major shows, that's my excuse for not posting more. I did catch Homeland from last week though. I have no idea where this show is going. The entire Dana/Brody family storyline is completely unnecessary and downright boring. And the Saul/Carrie/random Iranian person storyline is too confusing to follow. I'm not sure why i'm supposed to care about him or what role he played in anything. Did he plan the CIA bombing? Did he finance it? So confused.

QUOTE (CrimsonWeltall @ Nov 11, 2013 -> 03:34 PM) Voters wouldn't know the race, or even the political party, of the candidates. Here's what the ballot looked like: District II [ ] Dave Wilson [ ] Bruce A. Austin Right, but (1) you'd expect both candidates to be black if you were voting there (predominantly black area), (2) his ads had nothing but black families on them, (3) and he took action to keep his own face out of the press/off the internet. I don't know that he was actively trying to pretend to be black, but he was certainly hiding the fact that he was white. And something about his campaign clicked with people since he beat a 24 year incumbent.

I looked into tickets for that Champions Classic tomorrow night - cheapest is $150. Craziness.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Nov 11, 2013 -> 03:14 PM) For the record, in my view... Bush deserves only a very small amount of blame for 9/11, if any at all. The wheels were already in motion when he was in office, and yes he (and more importantly his key security advisors) should have taken some signs more seriously. But it was so unprecedented, so unlikely to see something on that scale, that I can't really place much blame on him. As for Katrina, the key thing that resulted in the destruction was stunningly poor civil planning. Most of current New Orleans simply should not be built upon at all. I WILL however put some substantial blame for the RESPONSE to Katrina on Bush, for making the epically stupid decision to put a political hack in charge of FEMA. That was incredibly idiotic. I mean, you need to give a guy a job? Fine, make him the assistant to the head of FEMA in charge of radishes or something. Don't put him in a position where he may have to lead a response to save thousands of lives, and oh by the way do significant damage to your Presidency. I agree, the response wasn't very good to say the least. That's not a "policy" though, that was just a piss poor decision. One of MANY piss poor decisions involving New Orleans, the first of which being that they built portions of the city in a freakin' bowl with the ocean 20 miles away.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Nov 11, 2013 -> 02:53 PM) Well of course no one thought they would "crash 2 planes into the WTC". You've just changed the game though. Everyone in the intelligence community knew "something big was about to happen". Something big happened. The intelligence community had every bit of information they needed to unravel that attack, including people in custody beforehand, but there was no one "shaking the trees" at a top level to try to put together all of the correct details. The Army Corps of Engineers is 100% responsible for the construction of those levees, and the final reports found that the failures were 100% due to design flaws; lack of height and failure to understand sediment conditions. In ~2003, there was a report put out naming the 5 most likely natural disasters to hit the United States and its infrastructure over the next several decades. The earthquake on the southern San Andreas was #1; a storm destroying the Levee system in New Orleans was #2 on that list. The night before that storm hit I got radio reception in the middle of the Beartooth Mountains. Every single person in my group of geologists said "well, that's it for that city". Everyone knew what was going to happen, the levees needed rebuilt to modern standards but the money was spoken for. (Interestingly, another item on that list was a major hurricane striking New York City). And as I said...when one of these disasters strikes...the only organization that is going to be able to provide aid is going to be the federal government. That's the case all the time; states can help but every single state and local agency is going to be completely overwhelmed. That's the rule, not the exception. The only ones who can respond to a disaster like that are the people at the Federal Level, and they spent the day having cake with John McCain. I'm not changing the game, you said Bush is partly at fault because his policies (on terrorism, 7-8 months into his presidency...a poor claim to start) caused 9/11. How someone can be responsible for something that literally no one could have predicted is beyond me. You're grasping here over your hatred of the guy. And ok, so you're blaming Bush for the failures of constructing levees undertaken by the Army Corps of Engineers in what, the 60's? 70's? So for every road accident out there caused by faulty design you're blaming Obama because he didn't spend money to fix it? I mean, I get it, Bush is to blame for everything in the world from 2001 onward, but the 60's? That's a bit much.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Nov 11, 2013 -> 02:39 PM) Saddam didn't have the means and groups like aq were not his friend. Was/is AQ the only terrorist group out there? I agree the claim was exaggerated, but at the time i'm not sure it was out of the realm of possibility. Again, we just had 2 planes crash into a building. Security and threats in 2001 were unknown.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Nov 11, 2013 -> 02:31 PM) On 9/11 his administration absolutely played a role. I'm not hanging this entirely on them, so let me be clear, but the 9/11 commission report could not have been more blunt on that fact. They came into office weeks after the organization responsible for the Cole attack had been understood. The Clinton team said they weren't willing to start a long campaign with only a couple weeks left in their administration and left that to the Bush team. The Bush team came in focused like a laser on national missile defense. By all accounts, the people in the intelligence community were begging them to focus more on Al Qaeda and screaming something was about to happen. I believe the phrases "summer of threat" and "all signs were blinking red" were used in the testimony or something like that, however, there was absolutely no efforts taken in response to those threats. I'm not sure if the quote "all right, you've covered your a**" that Bush supposedly said after receiving the August 6 PDB is factual or not, but it sums up their response during that year. Now to add some of the cautions. They certainly weren't the first president to underestimate that threat. They certainly inherited an intelligence organization that was bloated and unable to process its own information rapidly enough. They inherited an FBI that wasn't thinking about that group. And they were absolutely hamstrung by long delays in the Senate getting people confirmed -a problem the 9/11 commission recommended we fix and a problem that has only gotten worse since. So don't get me wrong here, there's more than enough blame to go around. Pick your fraction, they need a very significant portion. And on Katrina...yes...a whole lot of that failure hangs on them. Again, not all of it...you can blame Nagin for not having a plan to get people out, etc. But the Army Corps of Engineers could have fixed those levees years beforehand had money been available and had it been a priority. It wasn't, tax cuts were. And the only organization in this country who can respond effectively to a multi-state, war zone level disaster is the federal government. That job was left to the former head of the Arabian Horse Trading Association. That 9/11 commission was horses***. Go watch the HBO documentary on the team that was hunting Bin Laden for decades and all of them were SHOCKED that he was able to plan a domestic attack like that. They suspected he might be planning something, somewhere, but no one in any intelligence community thought he would crash 2 planes into the WTC. The 9/11 commission and all those hindsight conclusions are no different from a corporate injury report that lists a "cause" of an accident. 99.9% of the time it's not proof of any negligence, it's just trying to attribute blame so that people feel better about safety. The Katrina claim is a joke. The state and local governments are to blame. They had all sorts of money for public improvements over the last how many decades and they never fixed the levees. They lined their own pockets. Seriously, if all you have is "the government cut taxes and didn't spend more money!" is all you have, that's a really weak claim.

Because so many white guys beat a black incumbent of 24 years in a predominantly black community?

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Nov 11, 2013 -> 02:19 PM) Frankly, I heard everything they said at the time in 2003 and I thought it was a very simple choice. I looked at their case and thought anyone who listened to them was a fool. I even gave them their fair shot, at least through Bush's speech in October 03 to try to sell the thing. Didn't join the anti-war segment until after that. It was 100% abundantly clear that they wanted a war and they were willing to do anything possible to get it. And if "we needed to kill more people in response to 9/11 and Afghanistan wasn't good enough" was in fact the real reason for that war...well then the people who made that call are truly sickening. I know at least NYT columnist Tom Friedman endorsed that perspective and I think that's a fair word for it. I think it was more about preventing an overly exaggerated threat moreso than trying to pile up bodies in revenge. Saddam was the only enemy we had with the means and hatred to smuggle WMD's to terrorists. Faulty or not, I think that was Bush's ultimate goal - preventing that from happening. The gross misjudgment was that it was going to be an easy, short war. Clearly a huge mistake.