All Missourians hate Kansas, but only around 50% look to Kansas for ideas (and then have to reconcile skull-crushing cognitive dissonance). The rest of us just hate Kansas.

Don't hate the Rams; they were well above league average last year when factoring in degree of difficulty (i.e. four games against the teams that ended up playing for the conference championship, one of which utterly destroyed the best the AFC had to offer). The Rams had a winning record outside the NFC Thunderdome…

IANAL, but seems to me that this could just be positioning for a washout in a contributory negligence defense. It appears from the undisputed facts that the cyclists were responsible, at least in part, for their own injuries. In Ontario, when plaintiffs are negligent and contribute to their own damages, then the…

Adams: minus 5 points for shoving a fan with a level of force that would be permissible in golf.

Um, the "her son" in question is the deaf passenger, not the baggage handler. And if you read the actual article you'd see that the baggage handler in question is not a native speaker of English, and so used once-standard now-unacceptable terms without intending any disrespect, in an effort to accommodate the…

I wondered that myself, so I looked up the game report. 2 minutes for high sticking. Pretty ludicrously light.

I'm not convinced Gillibrand's bill was better, and she certainly did her bill no favors by portraying it as the One True Path to Righteousness. Amy Davidson has a good piece on it here.

Not so much good fortune as political kung-fu grandmastery. Akin was McCaskill's congressman; she knew he was the yutz of all yutzes, so she backed ads during the Republican primaries about how he was "too conservative for Missouri." Which is all the wingnut primary voters needed to hear. Then it was just a matter…

Not to nitpick (especially since TP got the attribution wrong as well), but KSDK is a St. Louis station, not Houston. They picked it up from their sister affiliate KPRC in Houston, which I imagine was who the donor actually talked to.

I hope I'm not too late to the party, new pals! 4957-4055-2993 (too busy being "respectable" by day to meet proper gamers offline).

Okay, not going to get into a debate on the merits of SWtOR, but voice acting was not a budget hole. BW hired professional VOICE actors—not celebrities, just people who know how to VO—for the game, mostly their usual stable like Jennifer Hale and Jo Wyatt. These folks make decent money, but probably only around $10k…

In order: not really, nope, agreed, agreed, agreed, and nope.

Well, that makes a great deal of sense as a reply to a statement somebody made somewhere. Not to me, here, but good effort.

Southern Illinois SHOULD just hate the rest of Illinois, seeing as the map as designed by Chicagoans just has "Here be Dragons" south of Sangamon County. At least Missouri provides some services to SoIL, like hospitals or, y'know... a reason to live.

I'm sure you did a good job, too, but how many more Christina Aguileras do we seem to get for every Jesse McGuire?

"Emotional impact," of course, being the only thing more subjective than musical taste. If you'd never heard either melody in context, I'd wager Russia's anthem would kick TSSB down the stairs in terms of "emotional impact," as would Japan's, or America the Beautiful, or Ode to Joy, or Yesterday. It has impact…

Still an improvement; performers are significantly less likely to forget the lyrics.

Radical proposal: we get a national anthem that isn't a terrible poem written by a non-poet set to terrible music written by non-musicians. That way we wouldn't feel obligated to throw a parade on the rare occasion somebody performs it tolerably well.

+1... +12... +13 [bang thwack thud loserhorn]

Screwy as it is at first blush for a CO to be able to reverse a court-martial's decision, it's really not all that different from civilian law—judges can direct not-guilty verdicts, governors and presidents can issue pardons and commutations of sentence, etc. It's just a different power structure in the military. …