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Your statements are totally false.

I'm with everyone who's not going back to MTS. it's only a matter of time before it blows up again.

I've done that once....a minor league player (may or may not have been a service academy graduate) laid some shit bare when it came to treatment of soldiers in Iraq and the leadership they were receiving. It was all part of a discussion about why he left baseball to deploy to Iraq....I was factual, quoted him honestly, but also knew he had the potential to get in a bunch of trouble from the article. I asked him to review the article and give me his blessing because it was his ass on the line. He made one minor tweak to the article, actually making a two sentence sequence more critical of the situation and was adamant I publish the piece immediately.

OK, I’ll start with some proactive advice. Don’t you just love going to a dealer to buy a new car, seeing one you want, and then spending hours or even days wrestling with any number of salespeople and their managers for the adversarial purpose of trying to wring every last dollar out of each other? Yeah, me neither. Last time I did that was over, of all things, a Honda Accord. I remember it taking over an hour at the end trying to get the guy under $19,000, they’re trying to keep me well above that, managers are shuttling in and out of the room to combat me, and we settle on $19,050. I walked away with my stomach in knots. One of my worst purchase experiences ever. The next time I bought a car, I decided that rather than going through that nonsense again, instead of working in person with a dealer on a car I see on the lot, I decided to determine the exact car I want first, then bid that car out to multiple dealers. First step: “build” the car you want, down to each individual option, then determine the MSRP and Invoice cost on the car. You can do that fairly easily online at a few different websites. Next, develop a list of dealers to bid the car out to. You should probably plan to contact at least ten to start; more depending on how ambitious you are. Make an initial phone call (not email) to the new car sales manager and tell them, I am definitely buying a car in the next few weeks, I’m contacting several dealers and will go with the one that gives me the best price, and do you want to participate? At least 80% of them will say yes, many of them eagerly. Then ask for their email address. After you have the list of participants in hand, email an identical letter to each one: I am ready to buy a car, I’m asking for proposals from a number of dealers, and I will buy from the dealer who gives me the best price. Here’s the car I want, and list out every option, all with their Invoice and MSRP, along with the totals for the whole car, so they know that you know what their costs are. Also tell them you’re aware of whatever buyer incentives there are, and to NOT factor those into the final price. Also, if you can afford to, tell them you are NOT offering them a trade-in, since they can manipulate their bid based on that. Try to keep the trade-in part separate from the purchase part. Then tell them that after you get all the first bids from everyone, you will report the best bid to all participants and give them just one shot at beating that price. Tell them that second-round bid will be final, and that you will contact the winner at that point to finalize the deal, discuss financing, and arrange to sign paperwork. You don't want to go back to the well more than twice, because that's unseemly and leaves a bad taste with them. (When you do move into the second round, start with the highest bid dealer and work backwards to the best bid dealer, so that the best bid gets better as you move toward the initial first round best bid.) Then, and this is important: be sure to follow through exactly on this plan. Do this only if you are 100% certain you are buying car. Otherwise, they’ll remember you next time you try this and it might not work so well. I’ve bought my last four cars using this method and not only have I saved thousands of dollars each time, but as importantly, I’ve avoided the knots in my stomach from the angst of going back and forth with an adversary much better trained and more experienced to do so than I could ever be. After all, you negotiate with a dealer only once every few years—they do it as their job every single day. Try this next time you buy a car. You won't regret it.

Terrible call aside I always thought it was asinine to expect somebody standing over a 100ft away to accurate gauge the stopping point of something being swung 60+ mph, the fact that the umps get that right as often as they do is amazing to me.

You know the rule from gaming theory: Absorb the 1st blow with equanimity. After that respond with overwhelming ruthlessness.... 😇

I didnt like being in a crowded bar before this happened, so things are peachy for me.

The ones I work with. On the days I go into the office I have to wear a mask all day, and not a cloth one, a surgical one. They are itchy, they are annoying, they make things a lot warmer than a cloth mask, but hey, that's the rule, I work for a hospital (in the office building, not directly in contact with patients), so I don't think they are just throwing it out there willy nilly. And we no longer have unvaccinated employees, the 400 or so that refused are no longer employed. Their choice, tough luck, good luck in future endeavors. We have over 40,000 employees, I think it was less than 10 doctors that refused to get vaccinated (who weren't disqualified for health reasons). I'll trust the thousands of doctors who did. They're the experts. I don't like wearing masks, but when I got to a place that has a lot of people, I will wear one. When I go to a store I'm not required to wear a mask, but I wear one. I'm not worried about getting sick, but I don't want to get someone else sick because I can still carry the virus, even though I've already had my booster at this point. I went about a week without wearing a mask in that situation but after talking to a friend who survived cancer, I decided to do it again. I've been to a few concerts, but I haven't been to any sporting events. I haven't missed that much, it's so damned expensive just to show up to a game anymore. Watching the crowd at the Wings game made me miss it a bit, but not going probably saved me $300, so I am fine. I don't know about these lockdowns you seem to be referencing, where are they? We don't seem to be headed for more of them. It's just now we have to make some adjustments between that and what life was like before that. I'm willing. My life is mostly back to normal and because someone at my second job decided not to get the shot (not a right-winger, just silly hippie mentality), I am actually picking up more work and benefiting financially. I wish them good luck burning sage or whatever the f*ck they think will fend this shi* off.

I opened the account with sofi. I'll see how the $500 does before I dump more money on it. On the individual stock, I invested a lot in weed. Weed has never let me done before.

I was referring to the Virginia Gubernatorial race…

There are less goons in the league, specifically less guys who are only there to be goons. Often linesmen will jump in between guys if they can but if a rare fight does break out they won't usually stop it. Just happens less frequently now. Also: https://twitter.com/NHLPlayerSafety/status/1449008799189291009?s=20

Purrrrty much.

I think I'm gonna stick around here.

I'm glad you brought up the key person in all of this, Bill Clinton. Lots of people like to pontificate why we ended up in the mess we did, how we ended up with Trump, etc. Bill Clinton and his Republican-lite and his anti-poor, race-baiting politics of the 1990s are really to blame for a big portion of this. For everyone that wants to blame the left for not having a bigger majority or losing seats in the house, these structural problems started long before AOC or Rashida Tlaib or Bernie Sanders came on the scene. Policies and initiatives that Bubba supported like NAFTA, supporting GATT as apart of the WTO, normalized trade relations with China, Gramm-Leach-Bliley, repealing Glass-Steegal, welfare reform moving from AFDC to TANF, Commodity Futures Modernization Act, Riegel-Neal Interstate Banking Act, Telecommunications Act of 1996, 1994 Crime Bill, 3 strikes laws, all helped to give rise to the political climate we were in. Each had a devastating effect in a different way. One-way trade agreements like NAFTA and other trade-related initiatives like GATT standards being absorbed into the WTO, PNTR with China gutted blue collar communities that depended on manufacturing jobs to support their middle class base. With it, the power of unions to collectively bargain and organize further eroded as its membership numbers dwindled. Deregulating Wall Street and speculative trading by repealing Glass-Steegal and enacting Gramm-Leach-Bliley and the CFMA led to the wild-west style lending and trading practices that we saw in a post-90's world. The out of control derivatives market, the speculative trading, credit default swaps, CDO's, synthetic CDO's, naked short selling, etc. all gave rise to the 2008 financial collapse and really picked up steam after the Clinton-era deregulation. Right wing talk radio exploded after the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was passed. All the while, the social safety net that had been there for decades through FDR's Aid For Families With Dependent Children to protect working-class people and the very poor were gutted in the name of "work to welfare". With it, the social safety net was taken away and the extreme rate of poverty doubled in this country, leaving people helpless, jobless, and now permanently trapped in extreme poverty. And to top it all off, Clinton-era criminal justice policies were predicated on incarceration and not rehabilitation. Instead of second chances at life people were given mandatory minimum sentences and 3 strikes. The prison population continued to explode and black and brown communities were disproportionately effected. And long before Donald Trump was out there race baiting from the White House, Clinton himself was doing it by literally using state-sanctioned murder and having his Sista Soulja moments. Clinton allowed the State of Arkansas to execute a self lobotomized black man, Ricky-Ray Rector, all so he could appear tough on crime to white people during a campaign. Then he picked a fight with Sista Soulja to again show white people what a tough guy he was. And yet, through all of this, you have people like Josh Gottheimer, Kyrsten Sinema, and Joe Manchin holding up the Biden agenda and pining for this era of the Democratic Party and its third way politics. It isn't Bernie, AOC, Rashida, Primila Jayapal, and the progressive holding up the Biden agenda. Rather, they have been some of the most stalwart supporters of the President's agenda, most especially Sanders in his role as Budget Committee Chairman. The center-right of this party has hijacked it and stalled all progress. Moderates and center-right Democrats have a stranglehold on the Democratic party and they are going to cost us the election in 2022 by not allowing Democrats to have an agenda to run on.

When did the Giants sign Brandon Inge?

Bunker’s not “falling for” anything. He’s an infantryman in the disinformation war. The “I’m not a fan of Trump” thing was his first line of disinformation, and everything proceeds from that. It’s the exact same thing as when anyone says, “I don’t have a racist bone in my body”, and then try to convince you of that by telling you they don’t discriminate against green or purple people.

Not to nitpick, but his side DID argue that exact thing for decades.

Considering the Admin account last visited the site on August 2nd, it appears the site issues may have worked themselves out...

who dat?

Fool me once…

Well, they are referring Bannon for criminal contempt. Let the wheels of justice grind him down.

I think it's awesome that someone can remember enough of their acid trip to put it down on film. I just remember the stucco ceiling looking like it was boiling and my hallway stretching back and forth. Colors stood out a bit too. So many colors. Beautiful colors.

There needs to be accountability. If you are called to testify before Congress, and you don’t even show up, charge them with contempt of Congress. You can’t just throw up your hands and let it go. They can come when subpoenaed, and refuse to answer. That’s their right. That’s reasonably in the realm of normalcy. Complete disregard and refusal to appear just should not be tolerated. Period. from what I’ve been reading, it doesn’t look like even past the charge of contempt of Congress, and a conviction, that they can be sent to imprisonment. There isn’t , after all , a specific “congressional” jail, and they wouldn’t be sent to a federal jail… because this is congressional, not federal. I suppose they can sequester them in a room in Congress until they come to their senses, but who needs that circus. But it needs to be on the record somewhere that they were held in contempt of Congress. You cannot just disregard this. I find this more infuriating every damn day.

Why would they vote in favor of something that Nutty Nancy was going to control. The Impeachment hearings were a joke with Shift and Nadler running it. Why would they give her another chance to do this?

So your litmus test on whether something is credible or not is dependent upon feelings towards Trump. That’s interesting because my litmus test on intelligence is their feelings towards Trump.

He's not a republican because they won't go far enough. So, the current GOP defends the sedition...but the GOP doesn't go far enough. Ok, so.... at what point does the Rule of Law matter? Why are any of you engaging with this Putin lover?