Mickey

Actually, the prosecution of those responsible was a very proud moment but then again, I'm not one of those who has difficulty loving my country on the one hand and looking at its mistakes honestly on the other. Many members of my family have served their entire professional lives in the military and so I don't take it lightly when a handful of moronic freaks trash its reputation as happened at Abu Ghraib. Nor do I typically, when I am in a heated argument resort to calling into question the patriotism of those with whom I disagree. Or their faith for that matter.

What is this obsession you have with Bill O'Reilly and David Lettermen? What in the world does that have to do with minimizing the Abu Ghraib mess and what it cost us in terms of our credibility among the very people whose "hearts and minds" we are trying to win? If I laugh at Lettermen calling Bill O'Reilly's schtick "60% crap", does that mean I also have to find stripping detainees naked and slapping their balls funny as well or risk being seen as a hypocrite? The military's own reports and subsequent courts martial found that real abuse, assaults and the like have occurred. You'll just have to pardon me if I don't see Abu Ghraib as either America's finest hour or as funny as Lettermen calling one of the countless screeching pundits out there, a load of crap.

Certainly, but # of wins is largely a result of the talent your GM has been able to put on the roster using, more or less, the same cash resources as all the other teams. Put lousy talent on the team and you should have a pretty low payroll but, of course, your team will stink up the field. There will almost always be a number of teams willing to spend tommorow's cap space today to put together a top notch roster and make a championship run. In theory, if all you are going to do is play it safe and take the fiscally responsible approach, aren't you going to lose out just about every year to the teams that borrowed to enhance performance? Yeah, they will have to pay for the party eventually but at least they had a party. The fiscally responsible team will just keep losing out to whatever teams that year went for broke. Those are just theories and we have all seen teams with high priced FA's stink up the field and teams with low payrolls play well. I just think that there are two sides to being a good GM. Job one is getting enough talent on the roster to win games and championships. Job two is to do job one as cheap as possible by managing the cap. TD didn't do job one and given the product on the field, it wasn't really all that cheap.

I guess he is planning to exclude from the definition of "christian" any who don't share his belief as to the nature of the Holy Spirit. I don't really understand the point of his demand that I define "christian" for him made in counterpoint to what I thought was a fairly self evident and general observation that not all christians agree on all theological points such as the nature of the Spirit. This brings to mind an interesting feature of the role faith plays for some people when it comes to politics. To some, their christian faith drives their political beliefs so much so that when they meet another christian whose politics differ significantly from their own, it presents a vexing dilemma for them. They either have to re-think their certainty that christian faith requires certain political views or they must conclude that the christians who disagree with them politically aren't christian enough or worse, that they are lesser, "mistaken" christians. From political to theological arrogance. It really isn't such a stretch to go from imposing your religious views on others of differing faiths to imposing your religious views on others of the same faith.

Are you asking because you think those who don't share that particuar view of the Holy Spirit and Jesus do not qualify as christians?

Yeah, our cap number for this past season was pretty good. We were 16th in the NFL in terms of having the most cap space available as of Sept. of 2005 (NFL Salary Cap 2005) However, I think I speak for most fans when I say that the cap is not that important, winning is. To the extent a healthy cap is related to winning, it is important but it is not an end in of itself. The more talent you have, the higher your cap but the reward is more wins, at least in theory. The less talent you have, the more cap space you should have unless you "overpaid" for players. The best judges of talent will have lots of wins and a low cap number and the worst would have few wins and a high cap number. One way to measure this, by no means scientific, is to simply divide each team's payroll by the number of wins. The result is how much each win cost the team in terms of paychecks. Those teams with the lowest cost per win (CPW) figure are the ones whose management presumably made the best decisions in terms of payroll, cap management and talent. Just for fun, I did just that: Using CPW as our measure of GM performance, TD doesn't rate very highly. The Bills, at 16. 4 million bucks per win, rank 24th in the league. Only Houston (38.8), New Orleans (26.6), Titans (21.1), SF (20.5), Green Bay (20.4) and Detroit (16.7) rank worse in terms of what they paid to get the few wins they were able to eke out in 2005. The teams with the best CPW are Indy (5.7), Seattle (6.3), Denver (6.4) and Cinn, tied with Denver (7.2). Miami spent 9.1 million dollars per win, which is 7.3 million dollars less per win than we spent. TD did a good job keeping us under the cap if you elimenate actually winning games as part of the criteria of judging whether a GM has done a good job managing the cap. Anyone can create cap space by dropping good players and signing lousy ones at a discount.

As a general principle, the more good players you have, the more you have to spend and the less room under the cap you should have. Given the lack of talent on our roster, it shouldn't be a surprise that we have lots of room under the cap. You have to wonder whether all that cap room came at the cost of victories. We have the 8th pick in the draft because we are the 8th worst team in the entire league. That should mean that we rank 8th in available cap space. I wonder where we rank on cap space vs. our draft slot. I would love to divide the money we spent by the number of wins generated and compare that to other teams to see just how efficiently we spent our money.

I think as fans we are way too concerned about the cap and because of it, keep applauding signing "second tier" talent while passing up top free agents like Corey Simon. Let Marv worry about the cap, I want talent, guys who can play. I'd rather pay a guy 2 mil who is worth 1.8 who can play than pay a guy 1 mil who isn't worth the price of a basket of wings. Just because a guy comes cheap doesn't mean you haven't overpaid for him. I can't count the number of times Donahoe was hailed as a genius for "not overpaying" for players. Of course he is an unemployed genius now.

I'm not looking for players who would be good scout troop leaders. I want guys who can play. Thurman, Andre, Jimbo and Bruce could be real jerks but man could they play. Character is important to a point, you can't have guys in the slammer on Sunday or so exhausted from being out all Saturday night that they are useless. If they stay out of jail, pass the drug tests and are ready to play on Sunday, I don't care what else they do.

Unbelievable, you guys are all weeping for poor little Billy O'Reilly because he went on Lettermen and Dave made a joke at his expense. Gee, how shocking, I mean, who could have seen that coming. When Dave and Bill start posting here and come up with a joke/insult that they repeats a few thousand times and then pretend that its just a joke, then I would see the connection between my complaints about that and this situation. You guys do realize that we are not on a television show and what might be funny or amusing on TV, might not be appropriate behaviour among adults who, given the post stats on this board, talk to eachother every day, in real life? I guess not.

Certainly, but that isn't what I'm talking about. Your knowledge of Constitutional Law is limited, even rudimentary. Light years ahead of, say, Richio, but not exactly highly developed. I don't think though that it follows that your opinion on such matters should be dismissed outright based on your lack of expertise. I don't think I have disagreed with you on a constitutional issue by dismissing them as the product of your ignorance on the subject as you so often do when it comes to military or intelligence issues upon which I dare to express an opinion. Well, I guess we differ there. I start with the assumption that you can't or at least shouldn't bug someone unless you have a decent reason for doing so. If someone is going to excuse it or whatever you were doing by citing her "sketchy" contacts, then I think you should have a reason for it. Further, I would also start with the presumption that it is wrong, unless proven otherwise, to bug the phone of a chief policy advisor of a rival political candidate (Amanpour's husband) in a presidential election. In fact, I think that was tried once, wasn't it, Mr. Nixon? It might help if you read my post in response to KRC who pointed out that maybe there was a good reason to bug her: "Maybe so, and without knowing any details or even if it is so, we can only speculate." I then went on to say that whatever the reason, if this is what they did, they are going to be in a lot of hot water because of all the other info they would have recieved from her calls apart from anything legitimately useful. That is when you helpfully pointed out that I was an idiot and that bugging Amanpour would be great. I asked for the basis for that belief and now at long last, you are where I have been from the start, we don't know and can only speculate. As usual, make a general, over the top accusation and when asked for specifics, run off undercover of a well crafted insult. 557590[/snapback]

I take it you are not talking about the High School in New Jersey? They always have a great crew team. Not every Christian faith shares that particuarl view.

I'm not a criminal lawyer so no, I've never achieved an acquittal for someone who is guilty. Certainly, someone can win a criminal trial and still have done something illegal, I don't dispute that. However, the verdict does mean that a fair jury was drawn, at least as fair as the rules allow and I'll bet a lot more fair minded than the poster who pronounced the actions involved to have been illegal. It also means that well paid and well trained advocates presented all the evidence and marshalled all the arguements available to support their contentions. It does mean that a Judge explained the law to the jury that heard all that evidence, all those witnesses and all those arguments in detail before deliberating the case. It does mean that after all that, the jury decided that the defendant did not break the law as charged. And on the other hand...... We have VABills' proclamation that what they did was illegal. Hence my question to him, posed in the hope of forcing him to present some facts, some arguements as to why I should believe him and not the jury who heard the case first hand or to admit that he is talking out of his *.

Maybe so but until the blessed day when that changes we have to make do with the tools we have. I'd be happy with FISA compliance or at least an openly debated and agreed upon change to FISA to address whatever legit problems it might have posed in gathering needed intel. I never claimed to be an expert in intel but I don't have to be a dairy farmer to know when the milk is spoiled. Besides, as Americans we get to vote based on issues ranging from those we know in detail to those we don't. It is clear, for example, that your lack of legal expertise and training in critical thinking makes many of your proclamations on the law, especially Constitutional Law, laughably off the mark. Yet when we disagree on such issues, I engage you on the merits rather than point out that you have never written a brief to the SCOTUS so your opinions mean nothing. I have no problem with bugging journalists if it makes sense to, ie, if there are grounds for doing so, and in fact, FISA allows just that provided its provisions are met. That is why I have asked you for grounds as to why we should be bugging Amanpour specifically. You see, if you have good ones, I'd be all for it myself. But you just keep coming back with a general, one size fits all justification about journalists having contacts worth watching. I think you were just speculating about her with no particular reason at all to suggest that she should be bugged and if so, fine, be honest about it. If you have something specific that justifies bugging her, Amanpour, out with it then. Which is it, do you think there are grounds for bugging her specifically (if so, state them) or are you relying on the general proposition that foreign correspondents occasionally have contacts worth watching thus we are justified in bugging them all, including Amanpour? If you care so much more than me, I don't know why you are so blithe about this wire tapping outside of FISA. "Regulary raped the Constitution" I see you have your "Overheated Rhetoric" buttons set at maximum. This is a whole other issue. If you want to start a new thread off listing all these instances of constitutional rape by the democrats, I'll take a look and join your upset where I agree and explain where I disagree. 557453[/snapback]

If it was illegal, why was the finance guy who did it acquitted? What you are citing is the word of a three time felon according to the link provided. Assuming he is not lying, they agreed to a fine with no finding of illegality. What I don't understand is what does a campaign gain in that situation by underreporting the contributions? Does it effet matching funds or something? Do you have to report it to make sure that the sources were legit? They screwed up if this guy is telling the truth but I can't tell if it was a nefarious foul up or just a stupid one. Knowing what might have motivated it would help. If you think that accepting bribes from Russina oil executives and Pacific Island textile magnates is simply in poor taste and not illegal, you have a strange definition of "illegal". DeLay is going to be dropped permanently from the party leadership and will sooner or later be pleading guilty in exchange for a reduced sentence before this Abramoff thing is over.

So you don't care if people are getting bugged illegally (outside of FISA) and for no reason (could just as easily have been done within FISA)? I'm not surprised. How much more interesting to speculate on whether or not there is any reason at all to bug Christiane Amanpour? I'm still waiting for a concrete reason to do so beyond, "hey, she might get a call from AQ." That "logic" would justify bugging half the country including every immigration lawyer, muslim, and anyone with a third cousin named Muhammed. If that is what passes for knowledge of intel practices, it must be an easy field to get into. It might also explain why 9-11 happened, the Niger yellowcake dipshitathon and the "slam dunk" on Iraqi WMD's. Maybe we need smarter spies, not ones who think following around a network news diva is a worthwhile way to spend intelligence resources. Seriously, based on your logic, foreign journalists=knowledge and contacts with bad guys, shouldn't we be bugging every foreign correspondent of every news organization? If not, tell me which journalists should be bugged and which shouldn't and explain what the criteria is, please. You see, I don't have your obvious expertise on these hard to understand intelligence issues so please, open my eyes. The real issue remains, when we decide to bug the Amanpours of the world, how do we do it, within the law or outside of it? I know you don't care whether the government operates within or without the law here but us mere mortals must wrestle with these mundane questions that are so beneath you. Trying to figure out where to draw the line between civil rights and national security may not be an issue that interests you but for many of us, its an important discussion to have. You know, what with our lives and liberties hanging the balance and all, it just seems, I don't know, important.

See? Now that wasn't so hard was it? I applaud the government having called out both freaks.

Who is pretending that? Maybe you could PM me the positions you imagine for me ahead of time so I can be sure to adopt them so you don't have to make them up for me anymore. It would save time. Its nice to see that you guys don't defend Robertson, you just attack those who are critical of him. Such a big difference.

Not every idiot, just the idiots they campaign with and the idiots whose money they accept. If somewhere there is a set of rules or laws stating what the President or his lackey's can publicly comment on and what they can't, I'd love to see a link to that resource. My belief is that they can speak on whaterver issue of the day they want. They choose to let a prominent supporter of theirs to state publicly that God wants the PM of Israel to die for following a diplomatic course it is our official policy to support. Nothing is stopping them from denouncing Robertson. If they wanted to, they could. They haven't. Why? You think because it isn't their job, I think its because they don't want to alienate the political support they have enjoyed from him and his followers.

You are certainly supporting bugging Amanpour without giving any reason at all beyond an empty reference to the "sketchy circles" she supposedly is close to. The question isn't whether or not she should or should not be bugged. The plain fact is that they can bug her if they want to whether it is justifed, as you seem to think, or, as I think, it is not justified. The question is, how do you go about tapping people like that, within the very, very broad limits of FISA, or do you violate the law by opting to proceed outside the limits of FISA? FISA is not a statute designed to protect civil rights. It is designed to legitimize violating civil rights whenever national security is even remotely an issue. Taking your position, that bugging Amanpour is a wonderful idea and anyone who disagrees is just an ignorant fool lacking your mastery of the issues, explain to me why that bugging had to have occurred outside of the almost limitless, bug anyone you want, paramaters of FISA?

DeLay is the Dyson of Politicians. Its all about suction. Maybe we should create our own voters guide based on different levels of suck ranging from "golf ball through a garden hose" to "broken hoover".

Who said "equal creedence"? The government hasn't said a peep about Robertson's latest gaffe. Besides, I kind of know without being told that my government doesn't support in any way that Iranian lunatic. I don't think we are in any danger of anyone thinking that our government agrees with that guy. Pat Robertson on the other hand has had close ties to the Bushies for many years. Papa Bush was even on the show. Did he ever share a stage with Ahmadinajead or whatever his name is? This administration has courted and accepted the support of religious lunatics like Robertson and at some point, if they really do think he is nuts, what is the harm in saying so, apart from losing the support of the godhatesfags and fire-bombing Jesus folks?

You clearly haven't been reading about the Abramoff scandal very closely, have you? DeLay's Chief of staff funneled a million bucks from some Russian Oil executives to the US Family Network. The fromer staffer, Ed Buckham, said the money was to influence DeLay's position on legislation regarding the IMF which was needed to permit a bail out of the collapsing Russian economy at the time. The rest of the budget for the "US Family Network", came from corporations linked to Abramoff. Abramoff helped set up a visit to Moscow by DeLay to meet those Russians back in 1997. This fake grass roots group never did much of any grass roots work in support of conservative causes. What it did do is collect loads of cash. In addition to the Russians, it received half a million from some textile companies in the Marianas Islands in the Pacific. These same textile companies, with the help of Abramoff, solicited and recieved DeLays committment to block legislation that would have boosted their labor costs (and US textile companies be damed). The Network, which DeLay, in a fundraising letter he wrote for them, called "a powerful nationwide organization dedicated to restoring our government to citizen control", never had more than one full time staff member. They also received a quarter million from the Choctaw Indians, a tribe whose gambling interests were represented by Abramoff. The Network paid hundreds of thousands to Buckham's firm which, surprise, surprise, employed DeLay's wife, or at least it paid her $3,200 per month for three years. Whether or not she ever punched a clock for them is anyone's guess. The Network financed the cash purchase of a luxury townhouse three blocks away from DeLay's office in Washington which his staffers called "the safe house". DeLay himself made his own telephone pitches for cash from the master suite at the townhouse every two weeks. The Russian connection had began with DeLay's trip to Moscow in late 1997. DeLay had dinner with Abramoff and two executives from Naftasib, a Russian energy firm, named Marina Nevskaya and Alexander Koulakovsky. Nine months later, the Network got their million rubles. I could go on but really, I don't have all day to simply restate what is being reported everywhere. I have to wonder what it is you are reading that leads you to think that DeLay is not being implicated in the Abramoff scandal. The people who have pled guilty, Abramoff, Scanlon, etc., are all turning on Ol' Tom. We haven't heard yet a single word, directly, from the prosecutors as to what these people are going to say but clearly, DeLay is in for a world of hurt. He certainly won't be alone and I am willing to bet that there will be a democrat or two in the net when it is all over. Good riddance to the lot of them. As for this Hillary thing you pointed out, it involved the alleged underreporting of contributions. Her campaign finance guy was charged, tried and acquitted over it. Nowhere, using your logic on Delay, was Hillary herself implicated in anything. Franklyk, I'm not sure what advantage one gains from underreporting contributions. I just don't know much about how that stuff works. Certainly, the Hollywood donors knew where their money was going. Tell me how that compares with a web of dummy corporations drumming up funds by claiming they are collecting money for disabled kids and then spending it on yacht cruises for Delay and his cronies while all the while writing it off as a charitable contribution? The point that there are lots of corrupt politicians is universally accepted. You have to recognize though that corruption always thrives best within the party in power. They can frustrate any attempt to hold them accountable. That is why I am a big fan of divided government but we haven't had that for going on 6 years now. Further, every piece of reform legislation that is porposed, is mocked and pissed on by the same people who complain the loudest that everyone, everywhere is corrupt. I am not sure what their solution is and until I hear one that makes sense, I just don't know what the alternative is beyond throwing them in jail when we catch 'em and at least try and enforce the laws that we do have.

What Pat Robertson says doesn't scare me, the fact that he has as many devoted listeners and contributors and has the ear of so many politicians, that scares me. The fact that much of what he says, is echoed often enough right here, that worries me. The lunatic that is President of Iran said that he is praying for Sharon's death and our government rightly denounced him for saying such a thing. Interesting though how our government did not denounce Robertson for saying something just as bad. Worse actually given that it was made by an prominent American, Israel's best ally. As for the Iranian, what he said is not really much of a shock.

Thanks for that entry into the low expectations sweepstakes. You accurately point out why the Abu Ghraib incident made me so proud to be an American. From now on, all our aid shipments to other nations should be stamped with our new motto: "America, we aren't as bad as Saddam"