WideNine

I realize her popularity, but her immediate "us versus them" attack upon the Lincoln Project group, that did the dirty work attacking Trump's many flaws allowing Biden to maintain the high ground, rings blindly partisan. Also racking up points for great social media "zingers" is not a very far-sighted or strategic approach to building the concensus and compromise needed to advance any of your agenda. By agenda I am referring to what legislators are supposed to do, craft and pass legislation that helps move this country in a better direction. I feel like she is just the next generation of partisan politics, not really a new thing accept the mud-slinging is faster and more visible via social networks. I am not exactly a Pelosi fan, but AOC showed zero respect for a woman who obviously was a pioneer for women holding office and paved the road AOC felt entitled to tread upon to gain office. There is a lot of growing up for that young lady if she wants to advance anything more than fringe policies that will be DOA on the congressional floor. She seems fearless and smart she will learn. It is hard to fathom, but I bet there are more than a few ex-hippies in Congress who were once wide-eyed and filled with uncompromising ideals.

The dems suck at sound bites. So in Minneapolis their police have had multiple high-profile instances of excessive force over the past decade. I know first hand as I lived there. But I do know that there was multiple attempts to fix that department before the Floyd tragedy. They have tried different police chiefs, but the root of the issue is likely Bob Kroll their police union head and an unabashed white supremacist. https://www.npr.org/2020/06/13/876640607/calls-for-reform-put-minneapolis-police-union-leader-in-hot-seat Hence the calls to defund the department, jettison the Krollites, and rebuild. But the GOP seize on "Defund the police" and run the campaign of fear that the Dems seek to defund all police departments. Ludicrous. Now you may have the far-left AOC cult followers (which is as dangerous a cult of personality following as the MAGA crowd) which may have run with that idea as if it were practical, but AOC has zero experience creating well-thought-out and balanced policy. Before winning her office her working experience consisted of being a waitress and bartender. She has yet to learn that her far-left Bronx lens of crafting sound policy will carry zero weight with much of the rest of the voting population. Either way, most reasonable centrist that are not for Trump understand that we need police reform, and that there are real, tangible policies that could move the needle in the right direction, but that having no police is a ridiculously bad idea. So...the Dems have to get better around avoiding those sound bites as they go straight into the GOP fear spin machine.

My favorite to date was the judge asking the Trump lawyer regarding PA vote counting observation, so was there or was there not GOP poll watchers in the room. Trump lawyer, " There was a non-zero number..." WTF?

There is nothing unusual about this. Trump and his family continue to push disinformation and baseless rumors regarding the election that are without merit. The only thing unusual about this election is how many eligible voters felt strongly enough to vote. So the sheer voting numbers. ...and that FoxNews unplugged Trump's Press Secretary when she started parroting the same nonsense. But the majority of those millions of votes, both the popular vote and electoral, are for President Elect Biden. Spinning wild conspiracy theories is not the same as reporting factual news, but it is the medium that Trump and many of his supporters live in.

In that context perhaps. Those social media companies are damned if they do an damned if the don't. If they let the misinformation and troll farms run free, they are grilled in front of Congress. If they crack down on them, fact-check them, and flag the disinformation they have a crazy President screaming for his free speech rights. 0 sum game.

What is truly lame is having a Presidential candidate with clear overall wins and enough votes in key swing states (over 10k in each) to be certified the President elect. Not doing so, is irresponsible and goes against established democratic norms. But Trump and his appointees do not care for democracy or the rule of law. It is the Trump appointee at the GOC who is personally holding up the certification process in a bid to legitimize Trump's fraudulent claims of voting fraud. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-gsa-letter-biden-transition/2020/11/08/07093acc-21e9-11eb-8672-c281c7a2c96e_story.html This is not a case of an election hinging on 500 votes in Florida as in the Gore case. If folks really want to "Stop the Steal" they need to stop Trump's overt lies and attempts to disenfranchise millions of valid votes casts by American citizens who do not support him.

Truth. Trump wants to selectively disqualify legit mailed in ballots where they favored Biden, yet count them in states where he won, or push for counting more of them where he was losing by narrow margins. Meanwhile in Nevada...

OK Mr. Analytics... I'll play. How is the article about Trump's Chinese business dealings incorrect?

No they don't. Unlike the Hunter Biden nonsense Trump was slinging, it is actually Trump who does business in China. And unlike the $750.00 he pays to the US in taxes, his business there paid 188,561.00 in taxes to China. https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/10/21/why-trump-chinese-bank-account-beijing-business-tax-returns-joe-hunter-biden/

It is just indicative of how dumb many Americans are. I tried to explain Don the Con to all the MAGA folks. That his business prowess was a fiction created in Hollywood, but they actually think "the Apprentice" was real life. Trump had been a celebrity since the eighties, his persona shaped by the best-selling book “The Art of the Deal.” But his business had foundered, and by 2003 he had become a garish figure of local interest—a punch line on Page Six. “The Apprentice” mythologized him anew, and on a much bigger scale, turning him into an icon of American success. Jay Bienstock, a longtime collaborator of Burnett’s, and the showrunner on “The Apprentice,” told me, “Mark always likes to compare his shows to great films or novels. All of Mark’s shows feel bigger than life, and this is by design.” Burnett has made many programs since “The Apprentice,” among them “Shark Tank,” a startup competition based on a Japanese show, and “The Voice,” a singing contest adapted from a Dutch program. In June, he became the chairman of M-G-M Television. But his chief legacy is to have cast a serially bankrupt carnival barker in the role of a man who might plausibly become the leader of the free world. “I don’t think any of us could have known what this would become,” Interesting read: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/07/how-mark-burnett-resurrected-donald-trump-as-an-icon-of-american-success

And it is just trial data that companies always release when positive as it makes their stocks go UP. They have to test against more groups, apparently the elderly were not a large sample in the testing cohort. At least 2 more months and Moderna is working on a similar vaccine approach... There have been other vaccine announcements throughout the year that have fizzled out...nothing about the timing of this announcement has anything to do with Trump, other than he thinks the universe revolves around him.

That would be cruel.

I imagine if the Jets ever do start winning a game Gase will get a call from upstairs....

The GOP created the issue with delayed counting of mailed in ballots in PA. I find it amazingly audacious for any of them to B word about a process that they forced that created a delay that they manufactured. Despite spending $1 million on new equipment to open envelopes and count mail-in ballots quicker, Lawrence Jr. said it'll still take days to count a quarter million ballots without action by lawmakers and Gov. Tom Wolf to allow for sorting before Nov. 3. "People have to know we will not have results on election night if we can’t pre-canvass," Lawrence Jr. said, using the term for early counting. "Even with the equipment we have, it’s still a labor intensive process. It took us 17 days in the primary to count (105,000) mail-in ballots. We’ll have a better process in place, but we'll have many more ballots." Wolf, a Democrat, and the Republican-controlled Legislature are stuck in a logjam over the issue. Wolf this summer asked for counties to be allowed to start sorting mail-in ballots 15 days before Nov. 3. Republicans in the General Assembly have countered three days, but only included that offer in a bill that would ban drop boxes throughout the state.

What short memories the Trump supporters have. Elections have always been called after election night by the media, no conspiracy they just look at the vote totals coming in and how many are left uncounted. They then count it state by state when they believe the uncounted ballots cannot overcome a lead - there is generally a lag from media outlet to outlet depending on how much they want to vet the information. They called it for Trump in 2016 and although there was plenty that marveled that so many polls were wrong, and that so many people could support that odious, orange, philandering, TV con man, folks did not attack the election process with calls of voter fraud, or calls of conspiracy. Just calls from democrats and many independents for what went wrong with the democrat's campaign. Pretty sure even those "radical" media outlets (apparently all the major outlets that are not FOX news) called it for Trump after election night. You also see folks that do not understand the basic premise that you have vote totals from those that go to the polls, then millions of ballots that were sent via the mail that then have to be counted and tallied. This is why Trump's lead at some of the swing-state polls vanished as valid mailed-in ballots and absentee ballots and military ballots are counted and added to the totals. It is a normal lag that could be resolved if GOP leadership in PA for instance allowed them to begin tallying the mailed in votes before election day. But the GOP would not allow it - so you have the inevitable lag of counting all those ballots later. I did not expect Trump to lose and show even a molecule of dignity - why start behaving like a responsible full-grown adult now? I also fully expected his gullible, conspiracy-slurping, followers to be just as classless. Same with the spineless GOP wastes of oxygen in the Senate. So, no surprises so far.

It is almost pointless to try to reason with a lot of the MAGA folks, just as bad as my wife trying to reason with AOC groupies. They are not American in the sense that they want to abide by established democratic norms, they are cult followers. Enamored by personalities and will run with anything that they think can support their cult leader rather than abide by law and order and recognize that EVERY voting fraud claim has been struck down as baseless, lacking any evidence in every court instance to date. The far-right are turning cannibalistic all in the name of Trump. In their twisted views long-standing GOP political appointees are being ostracized as suddenly part of a left-wing plot, FOX News is part of a left-wing agenda, anyone that tells trump he is full of crap and a sore loser is being booted from the cult. The real answer may actually be that in a democracy less citizens voted for the fat, orange, incompetent, felon this time around. Case in Point: When Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger cannot manufacture a win in Georgia, the GOP Senators there David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler go all MAGA-rampage on him: "The management of Georgia elections has become an embarrassment for our state. Georgians are outraged, and rightly so," the two said in a statement. "We have been clear from the beginning: every legal vote cast should be counted. Any illegal vote must not. And there must be transparency and uniformity in the counting process. This isn't hard. This isn't partisan. This is American." The two Republicans, whose Senate races are likely heading to runoff elections after they failed to garner 50% of the vote in their respective races, said Raffensperger has "failed to deliver honest and transparent elections," and failed Georgia voters. Republican Raffensperger's response: Raffensperger rejected the senators' calls to resign, saying in a statement that "the voters of Georgia hired me, and the voters will be the one to fire me." He also called the general election Tuesday a "resounding success" in terms of election administration, noting the low wait times at the polls and the number of Georgians who cast ballots. "I know emotions are running high. Politics are involved in everything right now," he said. "If I was Senator Perdue, I'd be irritated I was in a runoff. And both senators and I are all unhappy with the potential outcome for our president. But I am the duly elected secretary of state. One of my duties involves helping to run elections for all Georgia voters. I have taken that oath, and I will execute that duty and follow Georgia law." Raffensperger said his office is investigating any illegal voting and rejected Perdue and Loeffler's claims there was a lack of transparency. "We were literally putting releases of results up a minimum hourly. I and my office have been holding daily or twice-daily briefings for the press to walk them through all the numbers," he said. "So that particular charge is laughable." Raffensperger suggested the two senators begin focusing on Republicans maintaining their majority in the Senate. MAGA folks then run with stuff like the alleged burning ballots hoax that was retweeted endlessly - we REALLY need to invest in education because Americans are straight-up dumb. So think about this... in the swing states, under the watchful eyes of all the Trumpers they can pack safely in a polling station as poll watchers, a covert far-left operative takes a bag of Trump ballots, walks out, takes a stroll into a wooded lot, and films the act of torching ballots, then posts it online because you know... that helps Biden. Seriously brain-dead, sub-moronic, Q-Anon conspiracy slurping idiots. Then you have the, "Why is the media calling it for Biden already?????? CONSPIRACY!!!" crowd. What short freaking selective memories they have. Do they remember that the media always projects the winner? How long after the 2016 vote did it take for the media to announce Donald Trump as the winner? Anyone??????????????????? Set the wayback machine to November 4th 2016 and hear is an article from that objective outlet Breitbert (formerly run by that con and Trump campaign advisor who is currently being indicted for stealing build-the-wall donations) with all the MAGA folks crowing about how all the liberal news stations were crying over Trumps victory election night. Hmmm.... so they called it for Trump after election night. Not happy about it, thought most of the MAGA folks were stupid as f*ck, but called it for Trump. Where was the conspiracy then folks? https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2017/11/08/2016-election-night-flashback-top-14-media-meltdowns/

Weather has historically been something teams had to adjust to play in. I actually like that element of the game. They challenge both teams and have led to iconic NFL games. It is generally considered an advantage to the outdoor team as long as they practice enough in the elements. There is nothing that prevents an "outdoors" team from performing well in a dome, but indoor teams can really struggle with the winds and elements. When I lived in MN they lamented how "soft" their team became after playing in a dome, how they had lost their edge against GB and their home field advantage against warm weather NFC central teams. Something to consider, but the last game vs. Seattle it was in the 70s. If the East comes down to playing in New Era in the cold and elements against say, a warm-weather team,...advantage Bills.

This. How over the line does a possessed football need to be? They started talking about making "football moves". He caught the ball, the ball broke the plane, he maintained possession throughout. And they ruled not enough evidence to overturn call on the field.

I think Allen is about team, not that I think he would take or deserve some kind of bargain-basement agreement, BUT I could see him taking a very long-term agreement that spreads the hit out over the years in a more cap-friendly way that allows Beane to continue to surround him with talented players.

Tampa let Brady throw and throw the ball (he is second in the league in passing attempts) and it was working for them, but age is a real thing and you can't keep pitching at that rate in your 40's and recover. Belichick was smart in that he crafted a team that could run the ball just so he could take some of the season load off of Brady's arm and keep it more fresh for the post season. Tampa has a really good team, and just needs competent QB play to win games. I expect them to bounce back, but passing as much as he has, I don't expect Brady to have as much success down the stretch. Like in previous years his passes lose velocity and he starts to dirt some easy throws and is less successful on those outs that have to travel further faster to avoid being jumped for picks. Still a really smart player who generally does not create a lot of negative plays... it is possible that he is a bit delusional about his waning abilities - it happens with sports icons. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

That time of year when QBs playing into their 40s start getting the noodle arm....maybe Marsha MVP talk will slowly sink along with his play.

I figured, but why make teams burn a challenge when it is that close. Guy sails over the pylon or tip toes close the the end zone, would be a good moment for the refs just to make sure they either got the TD right or if they missed one.

Seems almost pedestrian. Ho-hum....just Allen with another 400 yard game and a 81.6% completion rate and a rushing TD. So this is what it feels like having a real QB and on the path to winning the division again...it was so long ago it feels like a dream. It's all going to be OK....

Prayers out to the Allen family during their time of loss.

Seattle went away from playing the heavy zone we have seen for weeks and decided to blitz Allen a lot. I think that is proven to be a bad idea... feel like he would have had even more yards if some of our key guys were healthy. Apparently Carroll thought we would go more run heavy after watching our game against NE and wanted to bring pressure with run blitzes.