UConn James

Bump. Sorry it took so long; made a trek to Maine to see an uncle who isn't doing well. When did I say that Kerry "wears flipflops"?! Read the first sentence of the fourth paragraph. Kerry wants the war fought more effectively and for the Iraqis to be trained faster to take care of their own damn country (something they should've done in the first $%^&ing place 20 years ago, so what makes you think sinking more money and lives will change the results?...). Does a natural belligerence get in the way of what the words say? Good debate tonight, I thought, tho I was disappointed that Kerry didn't fully explain the same thing that this thread deals with. Then again, the time limitation didn't much allow for it. God forbid the media ask and actually AIR this.

Et tu, ICE? Whatever happened to 'Relax, TD knows what he's doing'? 'Course, all of the usual suspects are now going to start numerous "JP just bought a..." threads. B/c as we all know, this isn't a place where we discuss the betterment of the team, it's a virtual church where we bow to the Bills braintrust. Nice that you've seen the light. But I don't know if it'll be that soon. Maybe you can meet up w/ MM next to the Fieldhouse and give him a What For.

JP's sig is actually pretty cool how the J works into the P which works into the L. Nice how he actually tries for the first few lowercase letters, but then gives up and goes for a straight line to finish. Some of the others do that for the whole thing... I looked at a lot of celebrity signatures a few months ago to get ideas for my own. I could never put a straight line for my name. I've tried to see how it would look and I just can't seem to do it. *Above conversation reflects the mere observations of UConn James, and in no way should be construed as a handwriting analysis suggesting that designee J.P. Losman, though the recognition stands that Drew Bledsoe sucketh mightily, will or will not become the Buffalo Bills starting quarterback in Week 8-12.

I think the key word you forgot is "yet." Rest assured, when more of the baby boom generation reaches retirement age, it won't be solvent. Both ECON profs I had in this, who had this as an area of focus, said it will likely happen in the next 10-15 years. I think the only reason it's being kept about is that it's hard to stop a government-sponsored Ponzi scheme (this is from both sides, only Dubya has the subgenious idea of putting it all in the stock market, an even bigger Ponzi scheme). The people who paid into the program are going to want their money back, tax-free and w/ interest. Gov't knows it can't do this, both b/c they're dependent on the free accrued interest for other programs and not w/o upseting a lot of people who have the highest voting percentage. I'm not really going to be saddened to see it go. People should invest more on their own in concrete assets rather than rely a gov't handout where the potential for abuse is high and w/o a guarantee of return. Wouldn't be surprised to either see SS taxes increase for the working generations or a reduction in benefits for seniors. Either way, a group of people are going to be pi$$ed off.

In case you missed the news flash, there's a LOT of disaffected, alienated Republicans (myself included) who are not voting for Bush. Whether it's cast for Kerry in people who want Bush out of office or for a 3rd party candidate for people who simply want to send a subtle message and hope it gets through where others have failed. And quite a few Rep. Senators have gotten vocal saying that Bush is running the war irresponsibly. In private, many more are prol'ly asking where Bush is taking the GOP. Myself, tho, I don't really care if someone has "Sen.", "Pres." or "The Rev." in front of their name. Blind idiocy comes in all shapes and forms.

Good God, I need to simplify this even more?! New Balance, friend. New Balance is the metaphorical Well-planned, well-designed and Cheaper war b/c not much is spent on the frills and advertising. True evidence that we read into things what we want....

Just be sure to be on time for your noon duel next to the Reflecting Pool. I rather prefer logical arguments to ad hom attacks, but in this case, I'll just save my breath and use my time productively and say that guy is an angry old coot.

Bush needs a new pair of shoes to keep his feet safe from pebbles. Congress, John Kerry included, gives Bush the go-ahead that he can work in more ways to do his own research and come back when he thinks he klnows what kind of shoes would work best (b/c Congress is kind of busy doing other things too). Choices include: the sandals, which are free and airy; the stalwart New Balance, a good shoe at a great price (and American made!); or the Nikes, a so-so shoe at an outrageous price. And then Bush comes back saying he REEEALLY wants the Imitation Nikes that Kerry has learned is all flash and the soles fall apart within 3 months. The Iraq funding vote "flip-flop" was tantamount to telling your kids to choose the New Balance before you give them the charge card. And telling Bush to roll back some of his tax cuts for the rich to pay for the war --- rather than send us into fiscal straits --- is tantamount to telling him if he wants the Knock-off Nikes, he needs to get his own (!) job to pay for them b/c middle class families can't eat a shoe. (Besides the fact that the Nikes didn't have nearly as much pebble-protection features as Bush said they had.)

Highly probable, but like everything else in this war, the inconvenient facts get hidden. Problem is that whatever money's paid to these f%^ks simply finances 100 more kidnappings. I heard on the radio they were released on condition that 15 Iraqis (civilians, they say) who need serious surgery will be taken to Italy to have it done. There probably was some green involved too.

Speaking as an observer not a fan, but yeah, it's time for him to be watching from a respected position in the stands, and perhaps act as an adviser to the program. I believe he has a lifetime contract, if not in writing then at least tacitly. It's a lot like Calhoun or Geno here, but I can tell you that in these types of situations, the coach always hangs on for longer than he should.

I think MM tried to do that by fining him in TC. I read that Bledsoe yelled at him to stay in the Raiders game when he said he hurt his foot again --- along the lines of "Be a man, take some Pepto Bismol!" To Big Mike's credit there, he stayed in and apparently made a good block later in the drive. Surprised it took this long for someone to say it. Let's see if the tough love treatment will motivate him. Too bad Matt Foley isn't around to tell him if he doesn't suck it up, he's "going to end up eating a steady diet of government cheese and living in a VAN.... DOWN BY THE RIVER."

Well, I rather think this would be an issue much like the Moon Mission. Issue a challenge to America's scientists and businesses as to where they put their resources b/c it's important to the national interests. AD, I'm sorry but if your political aims don't include being elected President, or if we have 126 candidates like S. Africa, you're NEVER going to be voting for someone you agree with 100 percent of the time on 100 percent of the issues. The system requires a candidate have so many electoral votes, which, if divided among more than three candidates, the House elects the Pres. But there's another thread for this.... So, you do a cost-benefit analysis and choose the candidate who most nearly accurately is in line with your own views when you balance all and bring all to mind, to borrow from Yeats. Kerry has a consistent voting record on energy independence. Provide more funding now to acheive independence by 2010, including to get 100,000 hydrogen-powered cars on the road by that year. Voted not to de-fund solar energy tax credits. Look at Bush-Cheney's proposals and actions and it focuses on drilling in ANWR and tribal lands that wouldn't net any oil for 25 years (if any is there), letting the Clean Air Act disappear into the wind, and trying to de-fund sloar energy credits through Republican Senators. The problem w/ alternative energies is that the monolpolistic oil industry doesn't have a monopoly on hydrogen fuel, solar power, wind energy, etc. Bush's employment history doesn't lead me to believe he wants to change things.

I think they actually did that in the redesign.... I can't say I notice it, but it's probably something nuanced that you'd have to be up-close to really see. Cleveland said they were going to do that to the orange in the helmet, supposedly to match with the sheen on the pants and it's the same deal. I have some issues with the unis, but this isn't one of them.

I don't know if I would. I'd have to hear exactly what HIS positions are on the issues. Being where he is, he tows the company line even though it was said quite often that he disagreed with decisions that were made, tho he always denied this. Re-read the comment Keillor made in his last paragraph about people who stand by and say nothing.... And it's also too bad that if Bush is back in the White House, any moderating forces like Powell isn't going to be asked back. That's how much of a Yes-man environment Bush wants and isn't good for the functioning of any organization --- See: NASA. They're also saying Rumsfeld will fade to black and Wolfowitz will take the post, which doesn't really comfort me any.

Could we maybe take a break from the constant ad hom one-liners that have been cut and pasted a thousand times? Seriously, it adds nothing to the debate.

Uhm, I rather thought that was a level-headed list of the policy problems that have waylaid the interests of the many versus the interests of the few and well-connected. For "angry," you're going to have to have a duel with Zell Miller, after you stand in line with all the other people he's lunged at. I think that man was Wes Clark, unfortunately he wasn't enough of a name candidate. He supports Kerry, and would probably serve as the Secretary of Defense. About the only guy left who was the leader of a sustained and efficient force in modern warfare. My brother served in the NATO coalition under him in the Boz. I think that would be a great change from the current staff of men who fight wars on paper.

I once considered myself a Republican, but this excerpt hits that nail on the head that it's the economic and war/security paranoia side that's had the old Republican Party pack its bags and move two blocks to the right. Clinton, Gore, Lieberman and the DLC were created before '92 as a moderating force to a too-liberal Democratic Party. And with all the aftermath of the past 4 years, many Dems up and moved to the right as well, which has made them more in line with the old GOP than most current Republicans. We just suffer the ad hominum attacks, complaints and shouting of the current age. I hope we get some good debates this time where the ISSUES are discussed rather than the men. B/c if Kerry does and takes a stand to this "Flip flop" charge, he'll show Bush for what he is.

Nope. Just like she doesn't have the right to tell him to not get a vasectomy. I honestly don't know where to stand on this issue b/c for every A there's a B. However, there was an interesting case... I'd say five or more years ago, where a man kidnapped the woman and kept her locked up until she could no longer have an abortion. It being time out of mind, I think I remember the judge was sympathetic to the man's plight. Don't know what came of it, tho. Roe v. Wade? Try www.findlaw.com

We're Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore How did the Party of Lincoln and Liberty transmogrify into the party of Newt Gingrich’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk? By Garrison Keillor Something has gone seriously haywire with the Republican Party. Once, it was the party of pragmatic Main Street businessmen in steel-rimmed spectacles who decried profligacy and waste, were devoted to their communities and supported the sort of prosperity that raises all ships. They were good-hearted people who vanquished the gnarlier elements of their party, the paranoid Roosevelt-haters, the flat Earthers and Prohibitionists, the antipapist antiforeigner element. The genial Eisenhower was their man, a genuine American hero of D-Day, who made it OK for reasonable people to vote Republican. He brought the Korean War to a stalemate, produced the Interstate Highway System, declined to rescue the French colonial army in Vietnam, and gave us a period of peace and prosperity, in which (oddly) American arts and letters flourished and higher education burgeoned-and there was a degree of plain decency in the country. Fifties Republicans were giants compared to today’s. Richard Nixon was the last Republican leader to feel a Christian obligation toward the poor. In the years between Nixon and Newt Gingrich, the party migrated southward down the Twisting Trail of Rhetoric and sneered at the idea of public service and became the Scourge of Liberalism, the Great Crusade Against the Sixties, the Death Star of Government, a gang of pirates that diverted and fascinated the media by their sheer chutzpah, such as the misty-eyed flag-waving of Ronald Reagan who, while George McGovern flew bombers in World War II, took a pass and made training films in Long Beach. The Nixon moderate vanished like the passenger pigeon, purged by a legion of angry white men who rose to power on pure punk politics. “Bipartisanship is another term of date rape,” says Grover Norquist, the Sid Vicious of the GOP. “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” The boy has Oedipal problems and government is his daddy. The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk. Republicans: The No.1 reason the rest of the world thinks we’re deaf, dumb and dangerous. Rich ironies abound! Lies pop up like toadstools in the forest! Wild swine crowd round the public trough! Outrageous gerrymandering! Pocket lining on a massive scale! Paid lobbyists sit in committee rooms and write legislation to alleviate the suffering of billionaires! Hypocrisies shine like cat turds in the moonlight! O Mark Twain, where art thou at this hour? Arise and behold the Gilded Age reincarnated gaudier than ever, upholding great wealth as the sure sign of Divine Grace. Here in 2004, George W. Bush is running for reelection on a platform of tragedy-the single greatest failure of national defense in our history, the attacks of 9/11 in which 19 men with box cutters put this nation into a tailspin, a failure the details of which the White House fought to keep secret even as it ran the country into hock up to the hubcaps, thanks to generous tax cuts for the well-fixed, hoping to lead us into a box canyon of debt that will render government impotent, even as we engage in a war against a small country that was undertaken for the president’s personal satisfaction but sold to the American public on the basis of brazen misinformation, a war whose purpose is to distract us from an enormous transfer of wealth taking place in this country, flowing upward, and the deception is working beautifully. The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few is the death knell of democracy. No republic in the history of humanity has survived this. The election of 2004 will say something about what happens to ours. The omens are not good. Our beloved land has been fogged with fear-fear, the greatest political strategy ever. An ominous silence, distant sirens, a drumbeat of whispered warnings and alarms to keep the public uneasy and silence the opposition. And in a time of vague fear, you can appoint bullet-brained judges, strip the bark off the Constitution, eviscerate federal regulatory agencies, bring public education to a standstill, stupefy the press, lavish gorgeous tax breaks on the rich. There is a stink drifting through this election year. It isn’t the Florida recount or the Supreme Court decision. No, it’s 9/11 that we keep coming back to. It wasn’t the “end of innocence,” or a turning point in our history, or a cosmic occurrence, it was an event, a lapse of security. And patriotism shouldn’t prevent people from asking hard questions of the man who was purportedly in charge of national security at the time. Whenever I think of those New Yorkers hurrying along Park Place or getting off the No.1 Broadway local, hustling toward their office on the 90th floor, the morning paper under their arms, I think of that non-reader George W. Bush and how he hopes to exploit those people with a little economic uptick, maybe the capture of Osama, cruise to victory in November and proceed to get some serious nation-changing done in his second term. This year, as in the past, Republicans will portray us Democrats as embittered academics, desiccated Unitarians, whacked-out hippies and communards, people who talk to telephone poles, the party of the Deadheads. They will wave enormous flags and wow over and over the footage of firemen in the wreckage of the World Trade Center and bodies being carried out and they will lie about their economic policies with astonishing enthusiasm. The Union is what needs defending this year. Government of Enron and by Halliburton and for the Southern Baptists is not the same as what Lincoln spoke of. This gang of Pithecanthropus Republicanii has humbugged us to death on terrorism and tax cuts for the comfy and school prayer and flag burning and claimed the right to know what books we read and to dump their sewage upstream from the town and clear-cut the forests and gut the IRS and mark up the constitution on behalf of intolerance and promote the corporate takeover of the public airwaves and to hell with anybody who opposes them. This is a great country, and it wasn’t made so by angry people. We have a sacred duty to bequeath it to our grandchildren in better shape than however we found it. We have a long way to go and we’re not getting any younger. Dante said that the hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who in time of crisis remain neutral, so I have spoken my piece, and thank you, dear reader. It’s a beautiful world, rain or shine, and there is more to life than winning. Excerpt from Keillor's new book (© 2004)

Yep. We get their games often. Peyton Manning he's not. But is a good college player b/c he's smart and does his part w/in their system.

Can you kick a 42 yard FG? I can kick extra points and up to about 25 yards with about 90 percent accuracy. Which is better than the UConn kicker..... Think my eligibility's gone tho.

Uhhmmm. OK, you can find file types on Google. Just type, in quotes, "Parent Directory" and ".xls" and it'll give you some lists of Excel spreadsheet files. Hope that answers your query....

I haven't gotten Sketches b/c Jeff wanted to scrap it and start over before his drowning. But Grace is HIGHLY recommended. Just recently got the Legacy Edition remaster. He basically started the "emo" genre, but that's reductive to his entire style. Great voice and actual FEELING in the words and music. I can't tell you how many artists name him as a big influence. I'd also suggest Jane Monheit - "Come Dream With Me"

What's antagonizing about the lead? It was a simple question. You think you can get the real story from a PR firm? which is what the White House Press Office is. You want to distrust all media and simply want them to report/broadcast the Official Approved Version, you're free to, but it's not much different than listening to that hilarious Iraqi Information Minister. I actually majored in journalism. I'm also in Phi Beta Kappa -- read: Top 1% of graduates, so you're not dealing with a dumb a$$ (I'm sticking to the graphic design, but I did all the aspects). Yes, we all know about the problems of the media, and it's a pretty consistent rate of flubs in every newsroom, CBS, FOX, the Pat Robertson Network, whatever. 99 percent of reporters do not intentionally try to skew news. 100 percent are suseptible to reporting the opinions of people who are lying or have an agenda. They'll be set straight eventually, in the process noted before. Sensationalism.... Yep, sometimes, dead horses are beat. That's under the auspices of "Giving people what they want" when a lot of old newspeople don't *know* what people want. Some themes are hyped, as you say. (I don't know what you're watching (tho it's better to READ your news!) but the "disease era" reporting never went away, and for good reason.) Just b/c you don't see it in the Buffalo News this week doesn't mean it's not being covered somewhere. There's a finite space in a newspaper or 30 minute broadcast. Editorial decisions are made. If you think you can do it entirely w/o criticism, man, feel free to try! B/c everyone's intent on shooting the messenger these days when they don't like what the news is. Sometimes it's warranted, many times not. Do I look over your shoulder at your job and yell that you're cooking my steak wrong? 'Well, it's like the prostitute once said - it's not the work, it's the stairs.' -- Elaine Stritch