johnzo

Man why is this forum so high on Butcher? Guy was super super raw last time we saw him on a CFL field.

Always been a Durie fan ... respect to anyone who can come back from a massive injury like he did. (He missed his last two seasons of university ball due to nerve damage in his knee, but still jumped to the Argos the season after, somehow.)

Tate's release would be a big deal. Don't see him fitting in Edmonton or BC or with us.. Paul Wiecek will be so sad. Best fit I see is as Drew Willy's replacement in TO or QB1(b) with the Jonestown circus. Or maybe backing up Harris or Collaros out east? If I were Jones I'd definitely kick the tires on Tate, he's got more upside than Glenn.

Yeah, this sucks. An angry population is easy to motivate in bad directions, and people on the left have absolutely no clue how to respond to that anger. And when I say forces, I mean both legitimate economic forces and less legit agitators like Fox News / talk radio / twitter trolls / etc. I think this accounts for the huge frustration among the Bernie folks in the USA ... conditions seemed ripe for a genuine socialist populist to emerge with bipartisan nationwide support and completely shake up the American political etch-a-sketch. Instead the Dems went in for Clinton. There's definitely some truth to the stereotype of a coastal elite that lives a completely different life than their inland cousins. Here in Seattle I'm surrounded by people who very deliberately moved away from the small inland towns they hated, and they are really really not the best ambassadors for urbanite left-wing ideas.

Truth. I gotta get back to Winnipeg for the Fringe Festival and a Bomber game this summer, I took my wife a couple years ago and she really loved the scene there (except for the mosquitos and the Bombers stinking up the joint against Edmonton) so it's an easy sell for a vacation/visit home. Anyway, regarding failed states, there's all kinds of shitty refugee situations in Africa. http://www.unhcr.org/en-us/africa.html has the details. Civil wars, religious wars, anti-lgbt laws, etc. As for why a sudden surge, I think it's a case of the surge just getting noticed. African immigration to the USA radically increased in the 2000s, per http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/14/african-immigrant-population-in-u-s-steadily-climbs/

If abortion is legal, it's insane to prevent people from using their own money to buy them. The money in an HSA is contributed by the HSA's owner. With you 1000x on the contraception thing. It's strange how the people who hate abortions are also against the government helping to pay for peoples' contraception. It was an Oklahoma state rep or senator who proposed the father permission rule. Probably not a huge surprise that I disagree with that, I think that women's bodies are sovereign and I don't think men should have any abortion-authorization rights. I could get into why I believe that but that could become a super heated discussion very quickly so happy to just agree to disagree on that one and move on unless people really want to talk about it. Good on your adoptive parents; people who work hard for kids are heroes.

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.