SoTier

The SCOTUS refused unanimously and out of hand to even consider Trump's case from PA. Point. Set. Match. Time for the Trumplicans to fold their tents and slink away to their bunkers.

Fair enough about the issue of bonds as it's a legitimate concern. I see the housing bubble as a type of Ponzi scheme because it was built on continually finding new "investors" by expanding the pool of borrowers by lowering lending requirements as housing prices soared because of the demand created by the continually lowering of lending standards. These shaky "sub-prime" loans were then packaged into "mortgage backed securities" that were sold to other investors. It just went round and round until the proverbial manure hit the proverbial fan in the form of rising mortgage defaults brought down the entire thing.

Which "bubble" are you referring to? The housing bubble that collapsed and led to the panic that froze the financial markets in 2008? That was fueled by reckless lending practices that developed into what was essentially a Ponzi scheme by several of the largest mortgage lenders. There's a segment of conservative economists and politicians who believe that the dollar and other modern currencies are doomed to collapse because they are "fiat currencies" that are backed by the government that issues them rather than being backed by a commodity like gold. Believers in this idea in the US have been predicting "the collapse" ("burst"?) since the US disconnected its currrency from gold back in 1933, although there's no evidence that the gold backed currency makes an economy more stable than "fiat currency". This idea of an inevitable financial collapse became especially popular among anti-government conservatives like Tea Partyers and survivalists during the Great Recession.

The biggest threat to America and to "democracy and freedom world-wide since World War II" is Donald Trump, and he proves it over and over again. He's the one who tried to use the pandemic to try to get the elections "postponed" (ie, never to be held) and he's one who tried to stop mail-in balloting before the election, and he's the one who's been trying to overturn the election with bogus election fraud claims since the day he lost. He's also attempting to foment sedition by pressuring Republican state officials to break the law and declare him the winner in their states despite the election results and court rulings.

Cartilaginous spines like in sharks at best, but spines nonetheless.

I might consider Rodgers and Wilson, too, myself but they have been in the league 15 and 8 years respectively, so if I were building a team that could win now and into the foreseeable future, I'd go Mahomes first, Allen second. At the beginning of this season, I had Allen ranked second in the 2018 QB class to Lamar Jackson, but he's clearly surpassed Jackson (even if Jackson hadn't faltered recently), and while Baker Mayfield has recovered from his bad sophomore season, he's not proven himself as consistently good or as consistently clutch as Allen. A lot of people -- probably including some Bills fans -- have probably forgotten that the Bills looked to have won that game against the Cards on that beautiful Allen to Diggs TD pass in the closing minute, and Allen's led the Bills to wins by overcoming deficits late in games several times over the last two years. He's the real deal. As someone who spend much of this century ranting at the Buffalo Bills for a) not building a quality OL and b) not providing their numerous QBs with adequate targets, I find this guy Cian's take a lot of bull manure. No QB -- not Brees, not Mahomes, not Rodgers, not Wilson -- can succeed without protection and targets. Good protection and targets -- along with good/great coaching --- allows a QB to demonstrate his true talent level, whether it's modest like Nick Mullins or Ryan Fitzpatrick or great like Patrick Mahomes or Aaron Rodgers -- or Josh Allen.

I don't believe you because you have consistently started threads -- I think this is your third try but I might have missed one or more -- that raises the issue of "election fraud", including presenting supposed "evidence" that's little more than supposition and conjecture. You are simply trying to keep claims of election fraud on the front page of PPP, which suggests that you do, in fact, believe there was widespread election fraud. There's no evidence of any organized or widespread election fraud anywhere in the country as evidenced by nearly every single case being thrown out of court for lack of evidence, but that obviously isn't good enough for you. You'd rather believe some video purporting to show "something shady". The only "fraud" in Trump's "election fraud" campaign is Trump's siphoning off of nearly $200 million that his supporters contributed to help his legal fight into his own pockets.

Rudy's "witnesses" are garbage because they didn't provide any kind of evidence that isn't in the realm of rumor, innuendo, wishful thinking, supposition, and outright lies.

Trump's call to the GA governor yesterday to pressure him into calling a special session of the GA legislature to decertify the election and declare Trump the winner borders on sedition. He's lucky that Kemp resisted him, and that Raffensperger resisted Lindsay Graham's "suggestion" he not certify the election result. Their unwillingness to break the law on Trump's behalf keeps Trump's actions within the realm of sour grapes rather than making them criminal acts.

I think wearing a face mask after the second dose is recommended because we don't know enough about the vaccines yet. We know that they seem to be very safe with only mild side-effects. We know that they effectively prevent the worst/more serious cases of Covid-19 as well as mitigating the symptoms of less severe cases. We don't know if they actually prevent us from becoming infected or if vaccine simply works on the symptoms by making them much less severe (flu vaccines frequently do this). If the vaccine doesn't prevent a person from getting infected, there could very well be a "window" in which he or she can still spread the virus. Therefore, the recommendation to continue wearing a mask after the second dose. Stay tuned, though, because as more people get vaccinated recommendations may very well change.

Obviously Putin does since he's one of the few leaders -- if not the only one -- of a major country who hasn't publicly acknowledged Biden as President-elect. He's still hoping his lackey the Snowflake-in-Chief can somehow overturn the election results. If Putin thought he could manipulate Biden as easily as he's manipulated Trump, he wouldn't care who was POTUS. I don't think the US should attempt "regime change" in other countries even through the electoral process. Almost every time the US has meddled in a country during peace time to force out the current regime and put in another one it thought better, the situation within that country became worse. The US once supported Fidel Castro, albeit tepidly, against Fulgencio Bautista, the Cuban president. The US sponsored a coup d'etat against Chile's democratic socialist president Salvador Allende that plunged that country into more than a decade of terror under the vile, brutal dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. In the 1980s, the US aided the mujahideen against the Russian puppet government supported by the Russian military, and that eventually developed into the Taliban ruling Afghanistan. Can we honestly say that Iraqis are better off today than they were under Saddam Hussein (another dictator the US once supported BTW) before the Iraq invasion in 2003? I'd rather have the US try to encourage better behavior by governments rather than trying to change the governments themselves. We've tried being the world's policeman, and that's exploded in our faces almost every time. I think that a judicious use of trade and aid incentives are more likely to get countries like Cuba to give their people more freedoms than somehow forcing out the current authoritarian leaders and replacing them with other authoritarian leaders. I think that with a country like China there's not much that the US can do unfortunately.

Agreed. The US could do a great deal to motivate the Cuban government to behave better -- grant more freedom to its citizens -- if it actually had some influence there. Unfortunately, US policies towards Cuba over the last 60 years -- especially the boycott --- have made the US the perpetual bogeyman that the Castros can resurrect whenever their regime needs shoring up. Nothing like an easily identifiable villain to rally the country behind a dictator in hard times. IMO, it's more than time for the US to normalize it's relations with Cuba so that it can have some positive impact on the lives of the people living there. We can't do that if we continue to pretend it's 1965 and Cuba is a puppet state of the USSR. The Cold War is thirty years over. Fidel Castro is dead. John Kennedy is dead. Nikita Khrushchev is dead. The original Cuban refugees are either all gone or very old. The Marielitos have been in the US for 40 years. It's time to heal the Cuban American community by letting the old people and their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren make peace with the past, which they really can't do as long as the festering wound of US boycott/travel ban/etc continues. We have normalized relations with many regimes with worse human rights records and that are far more serious threats to the US than the current Cuban government. I'm hoping that if the Dems win the Senate that the Biden Administration will move on normalization.

You think?????

Sad but true.

With Biden, what you say is true. Biden is perfectly capable of seeing both Russia and China for what they are. With Trump, Russia was a serious problem because Trump apparently desperately wanted Putin's approval was manipulated by him. Trump wouldn't say anything bad about Putin or Russia. Ever. This isn't fantasy. He didn't condemn the near-fatal poisoning of the Russian journalist that made world headlines in the last year. He dismissed the reports of Russians paying bounties for killing US soldiers out of hand even when the Brits took it very seriously. Former intelligence officials and foreign affairs experts have repeatedly noticed and remarked on Trump's regard for Putin.

"Establishment of religion" does NOT refer to a building or other meeting place. It specifically prohibits the government from favoring a particular religion over other religions. That was the original intent because the British forced the Anglican Church on the colonies -- including supporting it with compulsory tithes -- and some colonies, like Massachusetts Bay, had persecuted non-Puritans. Two centuries of court decisions have led to the "establishment of religion" clause to mean that the government should be neutral toward religon in general, not giving religious groups/organizations advantages or disadvantages. The majority's argument in this case was that houses of worship were treated differently from businesses and other venues where people assembled.

"Orange Man" as you call him is a wannabe dictator whom Putin played like a fiddle. He was too f'n lazy to actually read the intelligence briefings he was given, and too much of a snowflake to allow Biden to have them after he was declared the winner of the election. His attempts to subvert the election border on sedition, perhaps treason. I'll settle for Cy Vance and/or Letitia James throwing his ass in jail for tax evasion and fraud committed on New Yorkers.

I look forward to the POTUS NOT admiring Vladimir Putin and kissing his ass at every opportunity, including dismissing reports that Putin put bounties on American soldiers as "not reliable". There is more evidence for Russian bounties on American soldiers than there is for the election fraud Trump keeps whining and ranting about.

He/she/it realizes all that but he/she/it refuses to admit that his lord and master f'd up on his response to the pandemic and lost the election because of it.

I have no doubt that Trump fantasizes about it but he simply doesn't have the balls to risk treason. Moreover, I doubt that the US military will go along with it since the reason for martial law are civil unrest or rioting. Unlike Trump, American military men and women, top to bottom, take their oath to preserve, protect and defend the US Constitution seriously.

'Cuz it's the best shirt he owns? I checked to see what a "gaylord box" is because from what it sounded like, it sounded like it was some kind of bin. Gaylord boxes are pallet sized cardboard boxes with covers. Some have integral lids and others have lids. Who the hell ships anything without taping down covers or lids?

I think that Allen would be fine with another OC as long as it wasn't some idiot who thinks he's God's gift to offensive football and installs an offense that doesn't fit Allen's skills and demands that Allen be something he's not.

I was struck by the obvious incompetence exhibited by this nut-case, so I looked her up and found that she had bonafide legal credentials earlier in her career, including being a federal prosecutor for a decade but that was more than thirty years ago. She moved on to defending ENRON executives and other slimebags with deep pockets and embraced Far Right politics in the 1990s, and now apparently leans on alt-Right conspiracy theories to hide her legal incompetence.

My experience in public service on the state level leads me to agree with you. Career civil servants in junior and middle levels of government are the people who make government agencies work. They owe their loyalty to the state (or to the United States in the case of federal employees) not to a particular governor or POTUS. The political appointees in high up the political food chain are the individuals beholden to the current office holder and who do the current office holder's bidding. I have absolutely no doubt that untermenschen in the FBI, DHS, DOD etc have knowledge/evidence of wrong doing that they've collected/assembled and passed on to their superiors via emails that have been buried in those superiors' archived emails. My guess is that the fear of what might come to light under a Biden administration is what is behind the discussions about pardons for the Baby Trumps and Crazy Rudy. I think that if Flynn was the person who attempted to make this bribe, that his pardon is likely voided, and Trump may also be criminally liable for participating for granting it.

Fans of other teams who come here to discuss football aren't necessarily trolls. Trolls come to a another team's fan site to stir up trouble. Zerovoltz hasn't ever done that. I think that the 2017 trade between the Bills and Chiefs, the subsequent stardom of Mahomes, and the emergence of Allen and the Bills as an AFC power link the two teams together to form a potential rivalry.