HanoiVillan

They're not rebooting Spiderman again, surely?

Yeah, basically the same journey. Still listen to masses of techno, but traveled from techno to noise to musique concrete to Stravinsky.

They have every right to hate him. He's spent that much on the squad because of the parlous state it was in prior to this season. Another way of phrasing your comment would be to say the squad was so bad they've spent £80m on it and still only got one defender who is actually of sufficient quality for the league he plays in. It was that bad because he hadn't invested for years. You simply can't stand still in football; we should know just as well.

Having gone the Bristol Road way today, to answer this hypothetical question for real, it does indeed seem to be much better. Maybe this should be in the boring thread?

But you're making my point for me. In 2000, Bush campaigned as a 'compassionate conservative'. Plenty of political writing at the time highlighted that Bush and Gore didn't actually have the sort of vast oceans of space between their views (as expressed by their manifestos) that we consider normal in 2016. One whole chapter of PJ O'Rourke's 'The CEO Of The Sofa' was spent highlighting areas of overlap in their manifestos, and the election is commonly thought to have swung towards Bush as much as anything because of his more relatable persona - 'the guy you'd choose to have a beer with' was as I recall the common formulation. Of course I'm not saying they were the same - obviously they weren't - but the ideological gaps were smaller. None of that counted for jack shit when Bush was president. With the arguable exception of No Child Left Behind, he didn't govern as a 'compassionate conservative' at all. Especially after 9/11, all of the stuff about conservatism that benefitted everyone went out of the window, and instead was pursued maximum culture war and Karl Rove's '50%+1' re-election strategy. Bush changed enormously, and his pre-election words counted for nothing at all when in power. You seem to be absolutely certain that Trump's words now, in a competitive primary, represent his true and total opinion on things, and are a reliable guide to how he would govern. Yet this isn't borne out by Trump himself, who was a major Clinton donor until the end of the noughties and has repeatedly tried to have issues both ways even in this primary.

Here's something that pisses me off: The New York Post is edited by a man named Col Allan. He really, really doesn't like homeless people, especially homeless people who have the temerity to enter his part of New York. He's fond of humiliating them on the front page of his shitty newspaper. Here's a mentally disturbed man who urinated in public: They put him on the front page twice. They assigned 16 different reporters to follow and harass this particular homeless man. They were obviously so proud of themselves, they decided to do it again the other day: Because another clearly disturbed woman has hoarded a load of useless shit and put it in several shopping trolleys. How catastrophic! Still, nevermind, justice was done, as the police arrived to remove all of her stuff, clearly inspired by the earlier headline. I sincerely hope they're very proud of themselves. The noble fourth estate. Brilliant.

If Bristol Road is better or worse than Hagley Road for exiting the city at or near rush hour.

His salary is ridiculous. Faulkner might have been shit but at least he was cheap.

If we got offers for Richards and/or Lescott in January and turned them down, that has to be one of the worst decisions ever made at this club. The pair of them are probably on £100k/week, and you could sell them both and actually the raise the average ability level in the squad. Not to even to get started on their attitudes.

I suspect those accounts very much mean everybody is for sale.

I find Serena sexy, myself.

Okay, I see. Yes, if he were elected, he would doubtless use 'executive actions' where possible, because all presidents do so where they can't get Congress to agree. However, these executive actions are certainly not immune from being overturned by the judiciary. For one recent example, some of Obama's executive actions regarding the EPA regulating carbon emissions have been overturned recently. Constitutional scholars seem to be pretty divided about whether a ban on all Muslims entering the US would be constitutional, but you can certainly bet it wouldn't go unchallenged. EDIT: I suppose the point I'm trying to make here is 'I'll worry about it when the time comes'. None of this should be taken as endorsing or excusing Trump, obviously.

Ah, okay, I wasn't aware of that. I'll read up on it!

I agree. However, prisons are uniquely rubbish places for very old people. That's not to say they shouldn't be sent there, and these guys clearly deserved a prison sentence. But long sentences rapidly lose justification as the age of the inmates progresses. From the moment of arrest to the moment of release, these guys will have been in the justice system for about five years, which is hardly a trivial amount of time for people in their 60's and 70's.

I'm a bit at a loss as to how Clinton can be blamed for Afghanistan or Iraq, beyond noting his wife voted for the latter. I'd be more inclined to blame [c] on 30 years of neoliberal economic thought, dating from the late 1970's, rather than on Clinton or Bush personally, though of course both passed legislation that made the crisis worse when it occurred. The point about the economy, though, is it's like 'pass the bomb' - the one holding it when the music stops is the one who gets blamed.

I agree he's unlikely to be elected president. He hasn't even won his own party's nomination yet, and while he is the front-runner it's far from a foregone conclusion at this stage. Should he get through that, his general election polling looks pretty shocking, although of course a lot can change in a short time in politics. If you think he is going to get every idea he's come up with turned into legislation, I'm sorry but I can't agree. It's certainly never happened for any president yet.

I think this comment illustrates perhaps the difficulty that some people are having with this 'Trump is worse than Bush' idea. You've made two valid points - he said an outrageous and unquestionably racist thing about Mexicans, which he hasn't repudiated at all, and has made a commitment to barring Muslims from entering the country, a commitment which he will very likely be either disinclined or unable to pursue if he ever takes office, for all sorts of political, legal, constitutional and practical reasons. The more substantive part of the criticism is that a] he's 'vulgar' and b] he's unpopular. Both of those things are true, but are of course orthogonal to his suitability or otherwise to being president. The reason I have difficulty with 'Trump is worse than Bush' is that this rap-sheet is bad, but really rather light when compared to Bush. Much in the same way Villa players get better the longer they're out of the team, there seems to be a 'time heals all wounds' forgetfulness about where we were at the end of the Bush presidency. So, let's recap, choosing the three most significant facts which defined his presidency: a] the country was embroiled in two foreign conflicts, neither of which is it was obviously winning and arguably both of which it was 'losing', in some sense, into which it had poured billions and billions of dollars and thousands of servicemen's lives, b] he had overseen the failure to adequately protect, adequately help or adequately reconstruct a major American metropolis due to a natural disaster, and most importantly c] the American economy was entering its' worst crisis since the 1930's. Bush left office with historically-low approval ratings and with his own party's nominee campaigning against him. Trump would have to go some to actually be worse.

He's had some good assists this season. I think he's clearly talented, but took a long time to settle last autumn, and like everyone else he has regressed since the Liverpool game. He's more talented than any likely replacement we'll be getting as a Championship club, so I wouldn't sell unless for a very good price personally.

The only question I'm interested in is whether anyone is going to sign that guy whose dick fell out of his shorts at the Combine.

Doubtless the sentence reflects the advanced age of the guilty parties as well.

Eurgh eurgh eurgh eurgh. In two sentences you've gone from something you've read somewhere, which probably isn't accurate anyway, then turned that into disbelieving the victim and claiming that most victims of sexual assault are simply running a basic con. Have a word with yourself.

We really aren't. In 2013/14 - the most recent figures I could find - welfare fraud accounted for 0.7% of the entire welfare budget. If you include overspends, that rockets up to a massive 2.1% of the welfare budget. The amount people would have been entitled to claim, but chose not to for various reasons, is vast in comparison. Benefit fraud just isn't a problem on a national level in the UK.

I'll stop believing it's crap when my eyes tell me it's stopped being utter crap. EDIT: . . . and I will say as much then as well. Don't hold your breath.

Not much of it. I don't have Sky, and of the four games I've attended this season, three have been cheap cup tickets.

Are you for real? We're bottom of the table and get thrashed every week. We're the 3rd worst side in Premier League history - out of what, 600 or so? But 'we aren't crap'. Right-o.