johnzo

Everyone reporting that Mike Flynn will testify in exchange for immunity from prosecution. If I weren't on my phone I would post a George Takei "oh my!" gif here.

Yeah, he's falling back on the old Republican standby: "It's Obama's Hillary's Democrats' fault. They had seven years to plan for this. They passed fifty Obamacare repeal bills. And then they got unified control of the American government -- an opportunity that comes along about once a decade. Slam dunk, right? No, they shat down their pantlegs. Imagine a football team entirely composed of Johnny Manziel clones. That's the federal Republican party.

It'll be interesting to see if there's an Ollie North in this crowd of venal shitheads, someone who loyally takes the fall.

Washington State did take the Medicaid expansion. From what KBF says, it sounds like his friend is using the individual market exchange to buy her coverage. The Affordable Care Act has two big parts: The first is the Medicaid expansion, which raises the income limit for medicaid access. Medicaid is wobbly and has issues, but my understanding is that it's much, much better than having no coverage. No medical coverage means the only healthcare you get is on a cash basis, or in the ER. The second part is the health insurance mandate. This is for people who don't qualify for government coverage and who don't have coverage through their job. It tries to force people to buy health insurance by hitting them with a tax penalty if they don't and provides subsidies to make insurance coverage more affordable. The idea is that insurance companies need young, healthy customers to subsidize the older, sicker ones, and the mandate helps insurers do that. Additionally, all health insurance plans have to cover a bunch of stuff like maternity benefits that a lot of people may never need, but it's in their policy anyway. It's like if I bought car insurance and had to buy coverage for an RV as well, even though I don't own an RV. (I think this is a net good; pre-ACA, there were lots of complete junk insurance policies out there that would take your $100 a month and do absolutely nothing for you. But it sure doesn't look good for people looking at an invoice for a thing they're forced to buy.) So yeah, the insurance mandate is super controversial and there are tons of stories about people who have not been well-served by it. Their premiums have gone up and their access has gone down. Some states have only one insurer willing to sell individual insurance policies, the rest don't think they can make any money on them. Additionally you have the brutal optics of governments shoveling money into insurance companies, who are not well-loved. The ACA is in definite need of repair, but I don't think the AHCA really improves it, it destroys a ton of the good stuff in the ACA while improving none of the bad stuff.

I knew Kelvin Anderson was a good back, but I didn't realize he had eight straight 1000-yard seasons. Holy cow, that's amazing. Backs don't last as long these days... I remember a game during O'Shea's rookie year where he had like 20 tackles for the Ti-Cats, he was all over the field, like he was seeing the play a minute before it happened. Soon as I could, I changed my football number to 59. Been a huge fan ever since and was over the moon when the Bombers hired him.

Providers not taking your insurance is a problem for a lot of people in the USA, not just people who are buying individual coverage through the exchanges. I'm working in the tech field, have got prettty decent insurance and I still have to pick and choose providers based on who'll take my insurance, and I've had to fight with my insurance company to cover stuff. For me, it's an inconvenience and a pain but I can certainly see this being a way bigger problem out in the sticks. Were things better for your friend before Obamacare? Does she think that Trumpcare will make things better for her?

The Republicans and associated media have spent eight years playing defence. The only thing they know how to do is "But Obama!" and "Her emails!" Now, suddenly, they have to try to move the ball. Look at the AHCA, the flailing Repeal Obamacare legislation. They've got no playbook, they've got a QB who is despised by his OL, and the head coach is an idiot they hired from some message board, and he'd rather tweet and watch Sportscenter than run a practice.

Yeah, Newman came back from a pretty gruesome injury, I'll always respect that. Good luck to him in his next chapter.

I hope that Dave Winter's work pans out. He's been trying to do this for a long time ... back in 1998, Marty York reported that he had a deal with the league to do a game. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/rec.sport.football.canadian/dave$20winter|sort:relevance/rec.sport.football.canadian/G-uj8E7cu2o/bGHc7HPbtDAJ I can't blame the CFL for holding him at arms' length, though. Nothing against Dave Winter personally, but video games are a rotten business full of pretenders and vaporware and if I were the CFL I'd wanna see a really good demo before opening up my IP.

Mass Effect: Andromeda releases tonight! I'm a huge fan of the series. Hopefully the mixed reviews of the preview are just the usual entitled nerdbleats and the game is up to the standards of the first trilogy.

My votes: Calvillo, Osbaldiston, O'Shea, Simon, Fernandez, Greer Four CFL all-time greats with long and distinguished careers plus two of the most dominant receivers of the eighties.

The "general public" is kind of a nebulous concept. Part of what makes the USA so chaotic is that the general public contains multitudes of people with values that aren't super compatible. Example: the federal government owns scads and scads of western land in sparsely-populated states like Montana and Utah. Grazing rights on those lands are highly highly regulated. Environmentalists, vegetarians, hikers and campers .. none of these folks want expanded grazing on federal lands. Beef ranchers feel differently, and beef ranching is huge in the western US, economically and culturally. So who do we regulate in favor of?

Speaking of EPA mileage regulations....

Wikipedia has a breakdown of recent generation trends in the USA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_United_States#Electricity_generation Coal and natural gas each account for about a third of our total generating capacity as of a couple years ago. Coal is trending downwards and gas is trending upwards. Coal is getting hammered from all sides: it has to compete with both cheap natural gas and politically sexy renewables. And it's ugly, when its burned it pollutes like crazy and mountains are literally destroyed to mine it. There's a lot of news down here about coal miners being a perfect Trump constituency: entire towns in the US coal belt are dependent on a failing industry that government has been eager to regulate.

I'm sure you know that government interventions -- mileage requirements, subsidies, tax credits, emission regulations/targets -- are a major driver in electric vehicle development. The EPA is the agency that designs and enforces a lot of those interventions. Also, George Soros is a Tesla investor, and the US government is helping to prop up Tesla right now, giving their buyers a $7500 tax credit. More tax money funneled into his pockets! Tho I don't know how Al Gore gets his cut.

It amazes me that it got to a free vote. I am no Canadian political scientist, but from what I remember you wouldn't see the caucus defying the leadership like that in a Harper or Chretien government. Yeah, this looks pretty evil. Good on the MPs who voted for it.

Today's big Stateside news is that the CBO* says that the pending American Health Care Act, aka "Trumpcare", aka "repeal and replace" will result in 24 million fewer insured Americans in the next decade. It will cut about a trillion dollars in spending over that period and balance that with ~$800B tax cut, the vast majority of which will benefit American with family incomes over $200K -- the top two or three percent. * Congressional Budget Office, a bunch of accountants and economists who determine the deficit and economic impacts of bills that Congress is pondering. Congressional rules require that the CBO score the final impact of bills under serious consideration by the House. They are officially non-partisan, and the current director of the office was appointed by the republican congress of 2015.

Reading Young's wikipedia article, damn there is some baggage there, and a bunch of mediocre numbers in the NFL. Add in five years out of football to dull his instincts, him not being in game shape ... and this has big dud written all over it. Wonder if they'll use him as a wildcat runner? Ease him in as a change-of-pace QB? If he's got any giddy-up at all maybe he can push some CFL LBs around, but then the Riders' interior OL is pretty weak, probably not great to run behind. I think the best scenario for Kevin Glenn is to be #2 out of camp and then pick up the pieces when Young flames out. Otherwise, if he hits any kinda rough patch, the calls for Young are gonna be deafening. I remember when the Ottawa Rough Riders parachuted Andre Ware (another Leigh Steinberg guy) in to save the franchise. The first game he dressed, the Riders' starter (was it Sammy Garza?) was stinking it out, the whole crowd started chanting WE WANT WARE. And eventually Ware went in, scored a touchdown off a turnover / short field, and that was his brightest moment in the CFL.

Don't we already have a thread for news from around the league?

from the linked article... Each of the 300 players on that list gets a 25-play highlight reel? Am I reading that right? My god, that's a huge huge huge amount of film for not a lot of staff to assemble and evaluate. It's unbelievable the amount of work they do to add 6-7 guys to the team. I guess if their CFL gigs don't pan out, everyone in the Bomber football operations org will have a fallback career in video production...

I have heard speculation that a special tax on foreign remittance would be a funding mechanism for the trump wall. Foreign workers sent about $25B from the USA to Mexico in 2015. It was Mexico's largest source of foreign income, beating oil.

I think there's been plenty of attention paid to the Ryan health care agenda these past couple weeks ... lots of protests, hassling lawmakers, news coverage, etc, but that's from within my Seattle bubble. The goal for the political folks in my circles is to not let the outrages pile up into fatigue. Fight where we can -- in Congress, against the AHCA and similar awful ****. In a lot of cases, there is a disconnect between the Republican agenda and the interests of their voters. That's a wedge that can be exploited. Trump's platform was essentially socialism for white people. Everyone gets coverage, everyone gets jobs, it'll be just like the fifties (absent the 90% federal tax rate on incomes over $1M, which no one seems to remember) Gotta stay hopeful, engaged, and win in 2018.

And yet another chapter in the saga of Kevin "No Respect" Glenn. Signs a place where he'd be the undisputed starter, team goes out and gets high-profile NFL retread.

Week 1, Game 1: Saskatchewan is in Montreal. CFL schedulemakers FTW. Real interested to see what Durant plays like when he's got a chip on his shoulder.