kimmy

Cruz may not personally believe the earth is 6000 years old, but picking Liberty U as his launchpad shows where he's aiming his campaign. He'll be pandering to the evangelicals, trying to pick up the supporters that made people like Santorum or Huckabee factors in previous years. And of course he was already the darling of the Tea Party types; Breitbart has been sporting wood non-stop since Sunday. This is the wing of the party that has been saying ever since Romney's defeat that they have to stop nominating moderate candidates because "the base" won't turn up at the polls to support them. -k

They're students at Liberty University, Argus. It's basically Clown College. -k

Senators!! -k

Apparently, attendance at the Ted Cruz event was MANDATORY for Liberty University students. This group of students wore their "I Stand With RAND" t-shirts to express their feelings about that. -k

I missed where it was established as fact that this is a common problem. I've heard it claimed that scientists do this, usually by Breitbart/Townhall types, but for me it's a first to hear that bureaucrats also use climate change to get funding. Funding for what? Can you give examples of what you mean? -k

North Carolina famously passed a law that forbids government agencies from considering possibility of sea level rise when making policy. Why? Because real estate developers lobbied for it. It would have reduced the value of their beach-front property developments. -k

but it's not a policy. There's not a policy against using that phrase, the one that was mentioned earlier. -k

Dwayne Johnson always belonged to the US; Canada just borrowed him for a couple of years. As for Cruz, you can keep him. No backsies! I wonder how many tin-foil hat birther types will be demanding to see his birth certificate? -k

You're intelligent enough to know full well that this (non)directive is entirely about tailoring the administration's messaging to make it palatable to their core voters and donors. -k

So Ted Cruz is going to make it official tomorrow. Good for him. He'll make sure we have lots of entertainment. He's announcing his candidacy at Liberty University, which is one of those schools where the geology department teaches that the earth is 6000 years old. Rick Perry is also very likely to run, so it seems likely that Perry and Cruz will be in a dogfight for both Tea Party supporters and for Texas donor money. Ted Cruz is the only guy I can think of who could make Rick Perry seem like a thoughtful, reasonable candidate. -k

Yeah, Tim, I'm sure that is Rick Scott's primary concern here. Making sure that the scientists aren't being lazy. -k

And still don't. -k

Nelson may have had fewer games against Western opponents than Eakins, but Nelson also has more wins against Western opponents (4 vs 1). Also, arguing that Eakins' record isn't that much different from Nelsons' requires adding the losses during the 5 game Craig MacTavish "transistional period" to Nelson's record, which isn't fair because MacTavish was running the practices and the bench during that time. Eakins was 7-19-5, MacTavish was 0-3-2, and Nelson is 13-17-6. And Nelson has had no Taylor Hall, no David Peron, and had Jeff Petry traded away. Trying to sell the injury to Nikitin as a positive for Nelson doesn't work when Nikitin's replacement was guys like Keith Aulie or Jordan Osterle, whoever that is. A lot of good things have happened since Nelson has taken over. The powerplay is dangerous again. (Notice how we had a great power play under Kruger, then it became the worst in the league as soon as Eakins came to town, and now that Eakins is gone again, it's the hottest PP in the league.) Eberle and The Nuge are on fire. Yakupov has gone from impending bust to promising player again. And it's just obvious from watching the games how different the players are. Last night was a good example. The Oilers give up a bad goal and the Flyers add 2 more in a hurry. Under Eakins, you could have turned off the TV right then, because the game would have already been over. They had no fight and no confidence under Eakins. Every time they were faced with adversity they crumpled. But last night, they managed to come back to tie it up before the period was over, and went on to win. Under Nelson the Oilers have won 5 games in which their goaltending save % was under .900, including last night. Do you know how often that happened while Eakins was coach? Never. Zero times in 113 games. Under Nelson, they have the confidence to fight back after giving up a bad goal, and under Eakins they always imploded. Nelson has imparted the team with intangibles that they were completely lacking when Eakins was in charge. They act like a real team again. Obviously the team still has a lot of problems. But why screw around with the coaching yet again when we've somebody who is making progress for a change. Why repeat the mistake of replacing Kruger? What makes you think MacTavish isn't just going to go pick the next Eakins? There's also the problem of who would actually want this job. Groucho Marx once said "I wouldn't belong to any club that would have me as a member" and I think that a similar problem faces the Oilers in trying to acquire a premier coach: no premium coach is going to come work for this ridiculous franchise. They won't get Mike Babcock. They might get some guy who got canned a few years ago and is desperate to get back into the NHL. Who else is out there? Wait for the Sharks to fire Todd McLellan for failing to get their loaded team into the playoffs? The Canucks brought in a big name veteran coach prior to last season, and he just about ruined the whole franchise. They fired the guy last summer, replaced him with an AHL coach, and they're dramatically improved and going back to the playoffs. Todd Nelson has the players playing better, feeling confident, and developing in the right direction. Why fire him and risk bringing in the next Dallas Eakins or John Tortorella? Eakins was a cancer and he had to go. There's no reason to replace Nelson right now, same as there was no reason to replace Kruger 2 years ago. Instead of keep screwing around with the coaching, maybe MacTavish should concentrate on fixing the terrible goaltending and defense. Too bad MacTavish is too stupid to do anything right. He's the second biggest problem with this team, behind Kevin Lowe). Nothing good is going to happen until both of those failures are gone. Pretty funny to be having this discussion in the Playoffs thread. My kids will be in college before we see the Oilers in the playoffs again, and I don't even have kids yet. -k

Doctors know that they can make a lot more money in big cities than in remote rural communities. This is the same in Canada and the US. The government-intervention solution involves shanghaiing doctors to work in rural locations (a la Dr Joel Fleischman in Northern Exposure...) I don't see a free-market solution at all. Not sure what this has to do with the next GOP nominee for President. All the GOP nominees are in agreement that Obamacare must be repealed and replaced with a solution that is Market Centered ™, Patient Focused ™, and Empowers Individuals ™. There's no disagreement among any of them. I have been reading that Carli Fiorina wants to run for the GOP nomination. The name might ring a bell; she was CEO of Hewlett-Packard about 10 years ago, leading the company through a run of thorough mediocrity. Perhaps her campaign slogan could be "I didn't build this, I just ran it for a few years. At least it didn't go bankrupt." I think most Presidents can sum up their legacy about the same way. -k

While the original poster honed in on the word "pride" itself-- as in the Pride Parade, I think it's the deed, not the word, that the scripture is warning against. Prosperity gospel preacher Creflo Dollar may not use the word "pride" to describe his new goal of buying a new private jet, and not just any private jet but a top-of-the line $65 million dollar Gulfstream G650. But pride is exactly what it is when he asks his flock of suckers to send him $300 apiece so that he can travel in luxury comparable to billionaires. -k

There seems to be a history of this sort of thing in Florida. Researcher forced to rewrite paper to remove the phrase "climate change". Former state employees say they were under orders not to use the phrase "climate change". Rick Scott can say that the policy doesn't exist, but we know that there's lots of policies that don't officially exist but exist anyway. "Cactus Club" doesn't have a policy against hiring overweight waitresses either. -k {there's no such thing as a Code Red!}

I doubt anybody buys a Lamborghini to be driven around by a chauffeur. And I think the cost in time and inconvenience of having to go to court to fight a traffic ticket might be a bigger punishment for a big-shot than a monetary fine. -k

I don't want to contribute to thread drift, but I wanted to mention... I understand exactly what Argus means in saying he'd probably become an anti-Semite if he had to live among the Haredi. There's some appalling news stories that come not from the Middle East, but from enclaves like Williamsburg New York. Women being harassed for their clothes, gender-segregated buses, aggressive proselytizing, harassment of non-Jews in the neighborhood. I read pretty recently about a plane headed for Israel from New York that was delayed for hours because a group of Hasidic Jews refused to sit near women. They eventually managed to arrange for other flights for some of the other passengers so that the group of Jewish men could sit by themselves. Once the flight was in the air, the men walked up and down the aisle chanting prayers loudly for 10 hours; one passenger described it as "a nightmare". I think that surrounded by such people, one would quickly forget that they don't represent the whole community, because like anything else the obnoxious few create a bad impression of the whole. -k

It's possible that the costs of enforcing a proportional fine system could be more than made up for by the increased fines for high-income offenders. Fines serve 3 main purposes in our justice system: -compensation for harm caused. -punishment for the offender. -closely related to punishment, deterrence of future offenses. Fines for every-day offenses are on a scale that's meaningful to the large majority of the population. $200 is a figure that's meaningful to most of us here; Argus being the exception obviously. For most of us, $200 out of our pocket is a figure that we can relate to: it probably means putting off a luxury purchase you were saving for, or borrowing from our savings, orsomething. For some, $200 is more than just an inconvenience... for those on a tight budget living paycheck to paycheck, a $200 speeding ticket could be devastating... they definitely should not speed. But for a lucky few, $200 is completely inconsequential. It's ass-wiping money. Well, not now that the bills are made of plastic instead of paper, but you know what I mean. For an extreme example of how meaningless monetary fines can be, look at the effect of fines on the serial-criminals at HSBC. Monetary fines is always our go-to when it comes to dealing with minor offenses, but it doesn't fit every situation. For bad drivers, we have demerit points as well as monetary fines. No matter how much money you have, if you commit an offense you get the same number of demerit points as the poorest driver on the road, and money can't make them go away. If you keep screwing up, you can lose the privilege of driving no matter how rich you are. That strikes me as inherently fair, and I think it would be appropriate if we had something similar to use in other situations. If the banking world had a demerit system, HSBC would have earned them a "time out" by now. -k

Well, most of the articles about this incident have a picture of Miss Beyda, so, you know, that's a pretty good clue. So, I read some articles about this, and watched some of the video from the council meeting. And it is clear that some pro-Palestinian student council members didn't want a Jewish person on the council because they felt that she would oppose their agenda. The UCLA student council had a heated debate an vote over an anti-Israel BDS ("boycott, divest, sanctions") resolution just a few months ago. Two of the students who voted against Rachel Beyda-- Manjot Singh and Negeen Sadeghi-Movahed-- were co-sponsors of the BDS resolution that council debated in November. The first student-- Fabienne Roth-- who began questioning Beyda asked point blank how she could be unbiased, given that she's active in the Jewish community. When that question was called inappropriate by the council president (who is himself Jewish), a second student-- Ms Sadeghi-Movahed-- asked if she could rephrase the question by rewording it to question whether Beyda perceived a "conflict of interest", rather than discussing Beyda's religion directly. A third student-- Mr Singh-- questions whether she understands what "conflict of interest" actually means. Later, Fabienne Roth accused Israeli-born council president Avinoam Baral of nominating Beyda to be a "political pawn". In November, Baral had expressed frustration at being unable to participate in the debate regarding the BDS resolution. As council president, he was not allowed to speak or vote on the issue unless it was a tie, in which case he would have been allowed to cast a deciding vote. But as the pro-BDS side won the vote handily, Baral had no opportunity to express his views. Baral had been Internal VP, but just prior to the debate on the BDS resolution the President stepped down, forcing Baral, the #2 guy on council, to assume the duties and leaving him unable to participate. There seems to be some belief that the former president, who was strongly pro-BDS, stepped down precisely for the reason of making Baral unable to participate. -k

I'm too happy with my life right now to think that I would have done it any other way if I'd had a choice. -k

By sheer chance, I saw a re-run of the Monorail! episode of the Simpsons today. I think it's the most memorable episode of the whole series, and Leonard Nimoy guest-stars as himself. -k

I've read that sentence at least 10 times and still have no idea what the hell you're talking about. But you're wrong in the rest of your post. The leftish groups you mentioned have neither the amount of pull in the nomination process nor the degree of public distaste that the Tea Partyists and the Moral Majority blowhards possess. -k