johnzo

yeah, I figured that some team out East would've come for Denmark on day one. Love this in that it might put him back in blue, hate it in that the guy deserves some respect and dollars from the league. Given how people were talking about how free agent money was tight this year, maybe it's the B+ guys like him that are gonna take the hit in wallet.

I hereby retract my attempt to rationalize this signing.

Maybe the Riders are looking at Owens as primarily a DI kick returner / backup receiver. The Roughriders didn't really have a return threat last year. But then again, Owens didn't return kicks at all last year...

Burnham, Arceneaux, and Williams? Not fair, man. I would trade any Bomber receiver for any of those three. (assuming that Williams gets his mojo back after a horrendous injury, of course.)

Congressional Republicans have rolled out an ACA replacement proposal that eliminates the requirement that health insurance companies cover people for pre-existing conditions. (which is very popular). It also stipulates that you can't use your own health savings account* money to pay for an abortion. *An HSA is a tax-free savings account that one uses to pay for health care expenses. Don't know if there's a similar thing in Canada.

Yeah, outrageous. Doesn't rise to the level of criminal conspiracy, I don't think. Much as I want to see this entire administration in the rearview mirror (preferably with skid marks on their necks and faces) I also want to know more before judging this particular bit of stupid.

We'll see. CNN is now reporting that four trump campaign people were talking on the regular with Russian intelligence during the campaign. On one hand, scapegoating the Russians for the election loss is like yeah whatever. Clinton had lots of stink on her (some deserved, some not IMO) and the Trump campaign was pretty shrewd about their use of data and microtargeting voters. All due credit, they did some pretty inventive facebook stuff to squeak out their win. On the other hand, were the Russians attempting to influence the election and did the Trump campaign collude with them in that? And if so, what's in it for Russia? And what's in it for Trump? There's a lot of smoke here. Why not investigate? On the third hand, hope your vacation is excellent, KBF. Could definitely use some sun myself...

http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/13/americas/refugees-flee-united-states-for-canada/?iid=ob_lockedrail_bottomlarge A Manitoba story from CNN. Refugees crossing from the USA and landing in Emerson, MB. Welcome Place sounds like they're doing good work.

Intercepted calls show members of the Trump campaign had repeated contact with Russian intelligence before the election, officials said Holy crap. That first sentence is journalist porn. And 19% of the state Russian energy company was just sold to an unnamed purchaser .. and Trump still refuses to show his tax returns (this is custom in the USA, but is not law, and it's about vetting the Presidential finances to make sure that they won't be beholden to outside or financial interests) and the US IC is yelling at anyone who will listen that the Putin regime deliberately interfered in the election. Interesting times.

Would love to see Matt Walter in Blue. I was impressed with how little dropoff there was in the Stamps running game when he spelled Cornish a couple years ago. (course, it's hard to judge talent from time in Calgary what with Huff's golden touch and all)

KBF, where are you? As for democracy failing, we've all had a lesson in American division of powers in the past few days ... Trump people clowning up the White House and being checked by the courts ... the private media holding their feet to the fire and aggressively soliciting leaks from insiders .. and some senators -- ruthless alpha-male Republicans who have been in Washington forever, guys like Roy Blunt .. are rumbling about Senator investigations into Russian penetration of the White House. You can kind of see the founding fathers' design at work -- divide up power between enough ambitious assholes and they'll hold each other accountable. It will be interesting to see if GOP-on-GOP violence continues or escalates. Their discipline has been remarkable since the Gingrich / Clinton era.

Truth. I certainly got lots of stuff that makes my knee jerk. I have to say that I'm appreciating the political conversations on MBB. Everyone online is retreating into their own echo chambers. Having a place where diverse viewpoints can talk in a largely civil manner helps me challenge and clarify my thoughts on lots of different issues. (maybe it seems uncivil here at times, but compared to other places, this place is like the Swiss parliament.)

My memory of Canadian crime reporting is that typically the ethnicity of the accused is not reported, unless the cops are requesting help looking for a suspect. For instance, these recent CBC stories about sex assault charges make no mention of ethnicity. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/navy-lieutenant-kingston-ontario-sexual-assault-1.3956078 http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/hamilton-doctor-charged-with-3-more-counts-of-sexual-assault-1.3968607 http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/historical-sexual-assault-christian-school-1.3938888 They do identify the accused in terms of their jobs and background, though, so on those grounds identifying the accused as a refugee doesn't really seem to be that unusual. Interesting that the first cases I found when googling for "charged with sexual assault" are all about people in positions of trust and/or authority. Doctors, military officers, pastors. I guess that's the threshold for reporting these things: is the accused prominent enough?

http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/85-002-x/2016001/article/14642/tbl/tbl05-eng.htm There are about 25,000 sexual assaults of all levels in Canada annually. The vast majority of them receive no media coverage. It's only notorious cases like Ghomeshi that really make a media splash.

Okay. Let me get more specific then, and respectfully suggest then that if TUP wants to get factual about Islam and Muslims and their attitudes in Canada, "billionbibles.com" might not be the best source to cite, seeing as how it's a site that's explicitly about converting Muslims to Christianity. Their page on Halal meat is pretty hysterical -- one shouldn't eat Halal meat because it is slaughtered in the name of Allah and to eat it is idolatry. And their "Allah, the moon god" tick is weird and stupid. Presumably, they also refer to Christmas as "Christmas, the rebranded Saturnalia." The other unattributed cite that TUP uses is from Margaret Wente, who seems legit and who writes about sympathetic subjects. Personally, I am much less concerned about the expansion of Sharia law in Canada than I am about the fact that a young white man was radicalized into murder-spree terrorism, and that is probably the source of my frustration here.

It is very sad that in a thread that's about a massacre of Muslims, we are busy judging Muslims.

Nice summary, DoD.

The thing I want to know is, how did this kid get radicalized? And what should we do to prevent other kids from being similarly radicalized?

Hundreds of Muslim visa-holders detained at US airports, including 13 here in Seattle. Lots of airport protests, New York federal judge declares an injunction against the enforcement of some parts of the anti-Muslim executive order. My wife's out protesting right now, but told me not to come as I'm a green card holder and my legal ability to stay in this country can be revoked without a heck of a lot of due process. That's immigration law for you. **** is getting real. I just signed up for a monthly donation to the ACLU. People were earlier talking about the lies of Donald Trump, how ridiculous they are etc. The most interesting thing I've read about that is that these things are not meant to be true .. they are things that need to be believed in order to set the stage for the next move. The 3-5MM illegal votes is a great example of this. It's laughable, there's no proof, and if HRC picked up five million illegal votes the exit polls would have shown it. It looks like an ego thing for Trump, him raging about losing the popular vote, but my money is that his people are laying the rhetorical groundwork for more voter suppression. Lots more voter suppression. They could take the Texas model nationwide -- in Texas right now, you can be arrested for running a voter registration operation. Listen for people repeating that "3-5 million illegal votes" number, trying to make it take root.

There was a story on slam.ca about Toronto not being in a hurry to hire a general manager ... yikes.

How good is that line when it's healthy? They were missing two canadian starters for a bunch of last year, that'd be tough sledding for any team. (Except for Calgary, because apparently Hufnagel has a special lawn where starting-calibre CFL players grow like dandelions.)

Reinbold has been a good STC, hasn't he? I think the Duron Carter signing makes sense in one light. The guy is like Milt* in that he'll get his thousand yards and his TDs no matter who is throwing the ball. Carter could be a fantastic security blanket for a baby QB. All he needs to do to succeed is be a good teammate and not say things that make his baby QB punch him. * of course he is unlike Milt in just about every other way.

EXCLUSIVE FIRST GLIMPSE FROM INSIDE THE NEW MOSAIC STADIUM AS IT IS READIED FOR GAME DAY:

If we were having this conversation in 2008 we'd be talking about how the Bush years destroyed the Republican party -- it's a very similar dynamic to 2016. American politics, for the past couple of decades or so, have been extremely cyclical. That said, it was Republican dominance in state governments in 2010 that allowed them to gerrymander the hell out of the House and cement their decade of dominance there. If Democrats had more state game, the House would be in play. That's the important thing for the next four years -- make the Dems more competitive in the minors, make the federal House look more like the popular vote, and then start the sepinas. As an example of gerrymandering: Pennsylvania has some seriously funky looking congressional districts. Here's a map of how the southeast part of the state is carved up. Check out districts 7 and 16. Especially 7, it's the green area splotched at random through the southern half of the region. In 2012, Dems won the popular vote 50-48 but only won 7/19 seats. In 2016, the Dems had even bigger problems, they lost the popular congressional vote and got completely skunked, winning only 5/19. So yeah, like KBF says, much work needs to be done on the Dem side.

That doesn't sound like a fake number. The Democrats have been eating it lately. A lot of their problems in the House are due to gerrymandering ... Republican state governments have arranged congressional districts along ridiculous partisan lines. But if the Democrats weren't getting trounced at the state level, the GOP wouldn't have that opportunity, so yeah, you're right. Lots of work to do.