Husker_x

Our staff is miserable at clock management.

It's pretty clear that Tommy just plain sucks.

- Tre Bryant- Desmond Fitzpatrick - David Reese I'm excited to get Reese locked up. Baller.

Imani for five again . . .

Almost died laughing. +1

Amen. We are rightly skewering one of the single worst calls in the history of Nebraska football, but that one call is only the crest of a tidal wave of stupid. Langsdorf is a freaking joke. Mike Riley's "Real will to run the football" is a load of horsesh#it. They have no will to run the football. They want to run some half-assed muddled mess of an offense with the pass defense to match. After living through the Callahan era, this is more depressing than words can describe. Oh, and I'll throw it out there. Why was DPE in the game? Was there some secret plan there? I saw one muffed punt and one screen, then to the bench.

It doesn't matter. What the hell would you call a QB run or any kind of fancy play in that situation? Why would you even allow the potential for a f#ck up? Coaches can dance and dodge all they want; they give in to Jano, this game is in the books, and the only thing we get to whine about is Langsdorf bombing it downfield to nobody fifty times while our RBs hardly touch the ball on a windy, rainy day. The entire coaching staff has exposed themselves in five games. People are damn skittish for a damn good reason. Riley took a can't-lose situation (the game and his tenure) and managed to turn the entire fanbase into rabid monsters, squandered all goodwill he inherited, and with the Alex Lewis crap out there, he's now going to face a test keeping this team from completely imploding. This is not what we asked for when we booted Pelini.

He can snicker all he likes. His ass deserved to be canned well before we tossed him. What I can't get over is we tossed him to hire a smarter, seasoned coach who ends up making some of the worst play calling decisions seasoned fans have ever seen in their lifetimes, the result of which is the worst season record (so far) the same fans have seen in their lifetimes. To borrow a phrase from Ron White: "You can't fix stupid." I'm a patient man, but losing games like this is on a level of unacceptable Pelini or Callhan never reached. In that sense the comparisons are unfair. Riley had better unf#ck himself in a hurry. This act will wear thin real, real soon.

I think there's probably a grain of truth in there. Not that the earth needs to do anything. It doesn't notice or care. But many scientists believe we are in the midst of a sixth mass extinction caused by humans, which has resulted in the fastest rate of species extinction in millions of years. Left unabated, humans will almost certainly be a part of the extinction. Not to get too political, but this is one of the reasons I don't understand how Christianity got mixed up with the right wing (although on a positive note, I find Pope Francis very refreshing). I always thought growing up that it was a moral imperative to protect and cherish the environment. Why that isn't a cornerstone of modern Christianity is beyond me: it's maybe the moral imperative, especially when you consider the impact on the poor especially if we fail. If we fail, it won't matter if you are poor or rich, we will be exterminated. Speaking specifically about climate change, the poor will be the first to experience the pain of droughts, mass migrations, etc.

Yeah but then what? Even if he somehow won Iowa and New Hampshire, that's because those states are almost entirely full of white liberals, who are the only people he has any ground with. He has like 5% support in the black community. Yeah and that's one of Nate Silver's bullet points on why he can't/won't win the nomination. Clearly he has some heavy lifting to do. The thing is, he does have some time to do it. We haven't even really gotten to the point where most Americans are paying attention to the election––except maybe to gawk at Trump––so if a major grassroots movement emerges (say at this march on Washington he has planned a few days after the first debate), he could move the needle. I don't know how much of the black vote dislikes Bernie Sanders and how much of it is people simply not knowing him from Adam. Hillary Clinton is like the Coca Cola of Democratic politicians. Not hard to say you favor her when she's the only person you've ever heard of in the race.

I certainly don't hate the guy, and I'd be willing to consider his stances/arguments if he runs. Due diligence and all that. It's just extremely late in the game. I don't see a pathway to victory, and neither does anyone else. The narrative that the establishment democrats are trying to protect Hillary I think is missing the mark a bit. When they urge against him running, it has a lot to do with fundraising and time––or how little of it is left to mount a plausible bid for the White House. We turned the calendar to September today. That leaves a little less than six months to accomplish a hell of a lot.

I think he's planning to run in 2020. He'll have to sober up by then, so I won't hold my breath.

I think there's probably a grain of truth in there. Not that the earth needs to do anything. It doesn't notice or care. But many scientists believe we are in the midst of a sixth mass extinction caused by humans, which has resulted in the fastest rate of species extinction in millions of years. Left unabated, humans will almost certainly be a part of the extinction. Not to get too political, but this is one of the reasons I don't understand how Christianity got mixed up with the right wing (although on a positive note, I find Pope Francis very refreshing). I always thought growing up that it was a moral imperative to protect and cherish the environment. Why that isn't a cornerstone of modern Christianity is beyond me: it's maybe the moral imperative, especially when you consider the impact on the poor especially if we fail.

Undoubtedly, but John McCain was getting up there as well when he ran, and that after a bout with skin cancer. Nobody can tell the future when it comes to those things. The stresses of being president could give any of these people a heart attack pretty much at any time. I think if Bernie gets the nomination, his vice presidential selection had better be good. X, do you see this any differently than me in thinking that Bernie has better than 5% odds to actually get the nomination? I don't know if I can put a number on it. He's closing in in Iowa and New Hampshire and the debates haven't happened. If people get behind Bernie in a big enough way to win an election, it will likely mean a mass uprising. Hard to predict or account for all the variables in something like that. Mostly I think that if we want to see Bernie elected, all of who back him better get off our asses and do something about it.

Undoubtedly, but John McCain was getting up there as well when he ran, and that after a bout with skin cancer. Nobody can tell the future when it comes to those things. The stresses of being president could give any of these people a heart attack pretty much at any time. I think if Bernie gets the nomination, his vice presidential selection had better be good.

You haven't been around polls for very long I take it. This type of stuff happens all the time. When Romney was toying with the idea of running again earlier this year, many polls came out with and without him as a candidate. This happened all the time with Jeb Bush as a candidate well before he declared in June of this year. What it does is provide a snapshot of what the race might look like with another big name in it. It's hard to find a bigger name than a sitting VP. If it's one poll, or five polls, or ten polls, fine. Like I already said, early in the race when contenders are still mulling, it's understandable. Right now polling data seriously affects the trajectory of campaigns. If you go to RealClearPolitics today, you will see Biden hanging beneath Clinton and Sanders at 14%––with no asterisk or caveat or anything. Why are we not seeing the poll where that 14% is being distributed among actual candidates? In my view they should be limiting major national polls (internal campaign pollsters could put Santa Clause on the list for all I care) to the candidates who have declared. If nothing else, it's for the sake of accuracy.

Always with the extremes. By putting the vice president's name into a field he is not actually a part of (yet), they're skewing the poll results for no other reason than to drive the media's obsession with the horserace. That's not a conspiracy. That's the infotainment media's primary function: drama, conflict, BS. I don't particularly care about polls a year before an election, but we're getting into the meat of campaign season now. The Republican debates have started and anyone who has a real prayer of winning has already entered the race (Biden has no chance whatsoever for a host of reasons, chief among them being he hasn't even begun to put his stamp on the early primary states). You also left out Sanders, who is leading in some polls in New Hampshire and is within seven points in the latest Des Moines Register poll in Iowa. Nobody is ceding anything.

I took a phone survey for Quinnipiac today, and when the question came up about who I was likely to support (I forget the exact wording), Biden's name came up. This is both astounding and frustrating, because as of today, 8/30/15, Joe Biden hasn't announced a candidacy. He's not in the race. No one could stand for him in the caucuses or vote in the primary because his name would not be on the ballot. This has been going on for months. Polls continue to rank participants that aren't participating. I don't know if this is a common scene in the political world, but it smacks of a serious agenda.

That's kind of funny, because in many respects America is beginning to resemble a third-world country. Name your topic. Education, gun violence, criminal justice, healthcare, current infrastructure, infrastructure spending, economic inequality, alarming rates of science denialism, militarized police force, wars of aggression, blatantly corrupt campaign finance, etc. and so forth. Sometimes I can't tell if people can't see what's in front of their face or simply don't want to. Also it would be nice if people would quit pretending that our only two options in creating a functioning economic system are Ayn Rand or a Hippie commune.

X - I'm not a Trump supporter but I disagree wt anyone labeling a candidate based on some guy in the crowd. The same is true if Sanders was the speaker and someone yelled out 'communist power' (yes I know socialism isn't communism in the same way conservatism isn't racism - by the way it was mainly southern Dems who were in the old white power organization of the past KKK). I personally don't know of any repub who believes what I have placed in bold in your quote - that again is a broad brush accusation that cannot be substantiated and only distracts from the discussion. Are their repubs who act/believe that way - I'm sure there are. Are their libs who would like to install a Soviet style gov't here - I'm sure there are - but those are all exceptions. Trump has struck a nerve about issues that need to be fixed in the country - that doesn't mean his solutions are correct but just that he gets support because he's willing to talk openly about them. As far as I can tell, he hasn't put forward serious, WORKABLE, solutions to the issues he raises - this is why I believe his star will eventually fade. His supporters, while vocal now, are not the totality of the republican base much less the republican party as a whole. Yes, Trump uses red meat to stir people up - but eventually a more rounded diet will be desired and a more 'conventional' candidate will rise to the top. I didn't actually mention the white supremacist in the crowd, and when you have a crowd of twenty thousand, you can't exactly pick and choose who shows up. With that being said, it's not surprising either that Trump attracts the racist bloc, given his bombastic rhetoric and general stance towards immigrants and everyone else he considers "losers." Like him or not, Donald Trump is the Republican frontrunner (and has been for some time), and therefore at least temporarily he is the standard-bearer guiding the Republican debate. His plan, which has been widely hailed on the right and aped by other candidates, is exactly what I said: to deport ~12,000,000 people from this country. It's an undertaking that will at the very least require a hugely expensive police campaign to weed out all the "illegals" and force them, no doubt often at gunpoint, to return to wherever they came from. Many of them will be met with poverty, starvation, and violence when they arrive. If you disagree with Trump that it's "workable," I'm sorry but in his eyes you're just a loser who doesn't have it. Probably you should be deported as well. The Republican establishment may roll their eyes at this eventuality, but this is again where someone like Hitler (or pick your tyrant if you like) is a good reminder. Things don't always go the way you hope they will. Everyone who's gotten into the habit of taking this insane doofus lightly has had egg on their face so far, and nothing––no matter how grotesque or deplorable––has slowed him down. The more vitriolic and xenophobic he becomes, the larger his lead grows. That's the fact of the matter. That is the GOP in the present moment. If you're not on board, I'd suggest you lend a hand in taking your party back. I'd do it quick, too, because from my vantage point it looks like the walls are fallen and the castle is burning thanks to the people you claim are not representative of the Republican zietgeist.

I don't think it's possible to ignore the manipulative and directed way in which Trump is stirring up nativist sentiments to fuel his primary run. It's also not hard to connect those dots with similar tactics used throughout history. Using the age-old "They are coming to take our country away from us" mantra is a vile campaign tactic––which of course is why Trump is leading the Republican party in every poll. The Republican base is either comprised of or deeply sympathetic toward racists and xenophobes, who believe priority #1 in "making America great again" is to forcibly cleanse it of eleven million illegals, who are really nothing but scapegoats distracting an ignorant electorate from what's really happening in this country.

It worked for Caesar . . . for awhile.

I agree, and it has a lot to do with why our political system is malfunctioning, to put it mildly. Take the Hillary e-mail scandal as an example. I've heard some pretty outrageous accusations and conclusions thrown out there. I imagine a fair percentage of the right wing thinks that Hillary Clinton herself under criminal investigation for "destroying" a server that contained classified information. That's not entirely accurate. But what partisan hacks learned centuries ago was that if you tell a lie enough times––best when attended with a BREAKING NEWS swooshing graphic and some exciting music––it starts to take the form of truth. Hillary Clinton is not under criminal investigation and she did not destroy a server, and there is some confusion as to when the "classified" material was classified, and why it was classified. The problem is even if the hosts that put this stuff out there end up being proven right in a few months, we still have ourselves a classic case of the Boy Who Cried Wolf. Eventually you get tired of being burned by this kind of stuff and go look for sources that don't have a vested interest in the destruction/humiliation of political opponents.

Yes. The reason I favor this approach is because of the decline in overall usage rates in Portugal when they tried decriminalization. It's not perfect. Drugs are still very dangerous. But the case studies we have indicate that locking people up is not only ineffective and expensive, but harmful to society overall. Canada also offers one model of what we could do in response to your perfectly reasonable concern about addicts and violence. However, I don't think we can rationalize locking up nonviolent offenders on the basis that someone somewhere who does drugs might also commit an act of violence. If we followed that rationale for everything, we might as well ban food, because all bank robbers, rapists, and serial killers eat. I don't dispute that. If you want to open the conversation all the way, as far as it can, we also have to think about things like: what do we hope to accomplish by locking people up? Do we want them to have a high likelihood or a low likelihood of returning to prison once released? What should their prospects be when they're released? How do we keep the recidivism rates down? There's a lot to it.

Whoops, another straw man. Got a real collection going in this thread. Saying that something is acceptable is not the same thing as saying something is the majority view. Also, the majority of Americans probably could not tell you what Socialism is, or how it differs from Marxism, Capitalism, or––most importantly in our immediate political context––democratic socialism. I can't stop because I never started. You have missed my point two or three times now. I'm increasingly convinced this is deliberate. My worldview is not dominated by the left vs. right thinking that's entrenched in the news-infotainment business. One book I read in high school that has served me well in life is Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman, a media critic who frames his book about influential forms of media and technology in light of the differences between an Orwellian and a Huxleyan dystopia. Check it out.