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WHISTLEBLOWER POLL: If the Republicans were trying to impeach Obama...

11/14/2019

WHISTLEBLOWER POLL:

If the Republicans were trying to impeach Obama, or anyone else, and had some sort of "whistleblower" stashed away...

WOULD THE DEMOCRATS/MEDIA BE ALL CALM ABOUT IT AND SAY NOTHING?

OR WOULD THEY BE "ON IT" NOT RESTING TILL HE/SHE WAS REVEALED?

 
10%Dems/Media would be quiet
 
90%They would DEMAND to know
 
READER REACTIONS
  • Frank Drinkwinre they would demand to know and for them to testify.
     
     
  • Cathie Hephner
    Cathie Hephner Where’s the ”This is BS” button? I need that one in order to vote.
    STUPID SURVEY!
     
    • New Mexico Political Journal
      New Mexico Political Journal Cathie Hephner What’s stupid about it?
      Stamped on your forehead, apparently.
    •  
  • PHY
    •  
  • Kyle Armstrong
    Kyle Armstrong Who cares who the whistleblower is anymore. It's all be corroborated.
    Tommy EstesTommy Estes Until proven otherwise, I dont believe there is a whistleblower, period. It's just a little too convenient for the democrats to base their entire case on 'the whistleblower said', yet never have to produce a warm body.
    •  
    • Tommy Estes
      Tommy Estes Nancy Capels I'm familiar. Here again, no evidence at this point.
    •  
  • Charles Morris
    Charles Morris The whistleblower is an American hero. He was true to his oath to uphold and defend the U.S. Constitution against all enemies, both foreign and domestic. Based on the President's transcript of the call, the whistleblower's complaint, witnesses depositions and testimonies, it appears the president attempted to get Ukraine to investigate a political rival, and used a threat to withhold foreign aid as a leverage. While withholding foreign aid is almost certainly commonplace, using the office of the presidency in this manner is abhorrent. 
    Tommy Estes Tommy Estes Soo, biden gets a free pass, because he's running for POTUS? Doesn't work that way, despite what freak show the dems are putting on.
    • Charles Morris
    • Charles Morris Tommy Estes we aren't talking about former Vice President Biden, we are talking about current President Trump. When Biden was vice president the Republicans could have pursued him.
    •  
     
  • Jam Jones
    Jam Jones
    Image may contain: text
     
    Esther Rivera
  • Esther Rivera Jim Jones -- same BS another day. The first day of this kangaroo court was hearsay of hearsay and would never be allowed in a legitimate court of law. Katy Tur is CIA controlled mouthpiece.
     
  • Joseph Gonzales
    Joseph Gonzales They have nothing. This will be DOA before it even gets to the Senate. This is nothing more than an effort to weaken the President ahead of the election because the field of contenders is so weak and in some instances, crazy. A nothingburger as st. hillary likes to say.
     
  • Louise Riley
    Louise Riley 86 to 14 so far,, the smart ones are ahead, the rest,, well...
     
  • Fel Cohen
     
    Fel Cohen Anyone who has read George Orwell's 1984 would immediately recognize this as an alternate reality.

    "A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function, but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud." ~ George Orwell
     
  • Teresa Coburn
    Teresa Coburn Dem's be quiet?? They would be protesting, marching, parading and rallying in the streets! hahahahahah??????
    • New Mexico Political Journal
      New Mexico Political Journal Teresa Coburn You are beyond correct! 1,000,000% correct. The media would also be completely out of their minds. It would be nothing short of pandemonium. 
  • Mike Dossey
     
    Mike Dossey Yesterday I had got back in my truck and on KVIA they had a comment by one of the republicans who I swear had tears in his eyes crying like a little bitch. Great job Rino's
    Delete, hide or report this
     
  • Bill Roark
    Bill Roark What is the fascination with the Whistleblower? Everything he revealed has already been validated by other witnesses with 1st hand information. Or is the real reason to try to intimidate other witnesses from coming forward? Is the GOP also still trying to find out the identity of Deep Throat too?
    • Juli Adcock
      Juli Adcock Are you familiar with what the 6th amendment provides for with regards to confronting one's accuser?
      Bill Roark
    • Bill Roark Juli Adcock Since the whistle-blowers statement has been validated by statements from people who first hand knowledge of Trumps crimes and Trump has already admitted the whistle-blower had only second or third hand knowledge of the events the whistle-blower is no longer the accuser. The whistle-blower is a hero who was doing his job. The whistle-blower statute contain (anti-retaliation) provisions that generally provide that employers may not discharge or retaliate against an employee because the employee has filed a complaint or otherwise exercised other rights provided to employees under the statute. Since Trump has already made threats against the whistle-blowers life the whistle-blower has every right to keep his identity secret. Any other claims are attempts at witness intimidation.
       
    • New Mexico Political Journal
      New Mexico Political Journal Bill Roark It is truly bizarre the degree to which people who hate Trump fall into repeating and parroting the Democrats' talking points that they just now invented. In an effort to try to limit the proceedings against Trump to a one-sided proceeding, the Democrats started telling their followers that the American tradition is simply to take one person's testimony, then get other people to "corroborate" and that is the end of the story. No cross-examination, no calling of other witnesses, no raising questions about the accuracy of the original witness's statements or that of anyone else. It's as if they believed they can fool Americans into believing that 243 years of American jurisprudence---and another 600-700 years of English common law traditions---are unknown in the country. And you know what? People like Mr. Roark prove that that is true, Americans are totally tribal now and combining tribal instincts with ignorance of our own history makes for a very dangerous situation.
       
    • Bill Roark
      Bill Roark New Mexico Political Journal I don't understand how you can blindly follow Trumps propaganda. He clearly has severe mental health issues. America is far more important than Trump.
       
    • Juli Adcock
      Juli Adcock America IS more important than Trump and any other political figure, which is EXACTLY why it is vital that the rights of confronting, cross examining and innocence until proven guilty are preserved for even those that are hated. That is part of the foundation of America that without it, America would no longer exist. As far as New Mexico Political Journal blindly following Trump, that is truly laughable. The idea that someone who disagrees with you blindly follows Trump is a leap of logic that defies imagination.
    • Juli Adcock
      Juli Adcock Bill Roark If you were accused of a crime, would you want YOUR trial conducted in the same manner?
    • New Mexico Political Journal
      New Mexico Political Journal Bill Roark We receive hate mail because we DON'T blindly follow Trump. But in any case, following the law is more important---though it is a principle that the Trump haters are willing to sacrifice. Very short-sighted.
      Bill Roark
    • Bill Roark Juli Adcock First of all if I were President I wouldn't commit a crime by putting my personal interests above my duties to the American people. I also wouldn't try to intimidate witnesses by threatening there safety. When are you going to realize you are aiding and abetting a criminal that threatens America. 
      Bill Roark
    • Bill Roark New Mexico Political Journal Trump's court filings claim he is above the law. Do you really want to live in a country where every newly elected President become Dictator In Chief for the next 4 years? https://www.washingtonpost.com/.../b8811be8-eaaa-11e9...
      Trump’s broad claims of executive immunity lead to criticism he is acting above the law
      WASHINGTONPOST.COM
      Trump’s broad claims of executive immunity lead to criticism he is…
    • ock Bill Roark Assertions are easy to make, but a whole lot harder to prove in a court of law no matter how many times people say it. Have you checked on what previous administrations have claimed for executive privilege and immunity? I think you'd be surprised at what has been done previous to this administration is not as "out of norms" as this opinion piece would have you believe.

Email us with your feedback, comments, questions, and ideas.

Intelligent Political Discourse—for the Thoughtful New Mexican

 
 
 
 
 
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2016 Presidential Campaign - Republicans

Jeb Bush gets religion.

"They said he got religion at the end, and I'm glad that he did."  — Tom T. Hall. The Year Clayton Delaney died.

Well, it's official.  Jeb Bush has changed quite of few of his positions on illegal immigration.  The single most significant is that he no longer endorses the "path to citizenship" for those who came here illegally. 

This is, after all, the key portion of any proposal aimed at "reforming" our existing illegal immigration situation.

No sensible citizen can see any point in trying to deport between 12 and 16 million people currently living in America illegally.  And no candidate for any office that we know of supports that.  What the average American wants is for the country to "get a handle on it."  They want it stopped, our borders secured and future illegal immigration prevented.  It is a national security issue.

The Path to Legal Status

The only way to accomplish the above goals, is to identify current illegal immigrants, get them accounted for, have them documented, and placed on a path to legal status.  Neither they nor their children or spouses should live in a state of fear or anxiety.

But a path to "citizenship" is not the right course.  It is not morally or legally correct.  A merciful and compassionate nation can provide the safeguards of legal status without sending the message to the rest of the world that all you have to do is cross our border and you will eventually get to become a citizen, thus circumventing the legal framework scores of millions of Americans have followed, honored and respected.

If someone who is granted legal status eventually wants to become a citizen, that person should have to return to his or her country of origin and wait in line like 20 million people around the world are doing at any given time.  Failing that, America will forever send the signal that anyone in the world can "jump the line," and that there is no reason at all to obey our immigration and naturalization laws.

We Like Jeb Bush

We are glad Jeb Bush has learned this lesson.  He is a fine speaker, and can eloquently explain his positions on complex issue.  If he were not named "Bush" he would be an actual top tier candidate—in all that that title would entail, including likelihood of acceptance and support of and from the American people in the primaries, and in any theoretical general election.  

We also recognize that he already is a de facto top-tier candidate because of his fame and his fundraising.

If he were to be the nominee of the Republican Party we would heartily support him and endorse him.  We hope, however, that he is not, as he does not give the center-right coalition the best chance of winning.

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  • Movies, Television, Pop Culture
    Selma   ????? We have now seen the Oscar-nominated movie Selma.   Our earlier allusion to criticism that sounded as though it was in an Oliver Stone category for historical fabrication is some...

Sports

Sports

The Major League Baseball Playoffs are not realistic, and destroy the actual meaning of the sport. 

Major League Baseball is unique in this respect—its postseason is markedly different from the way the game is played normally.  No other major league sport suffers from this flaw.

Not that much is wrong with baseball. In some respects it's the most well thought-out sport there is.  The "perfect game" many aficionados say.

But the Major League Baseball postseason experience is unique in the world of professional sports, and not in a good way. 

In fact the playoffs are flawed in such a way as to detract from the sport itself and diminish the game and what it means to be the world champion of the sport. 

Among the Big Four team sports of North America: football, hockey, basketball and baseball—and all the 122 professional major league teams competing in the NFL, NHL, NBA and MLB respectively—it is in baseball alone that the postseason turns the sport itself on its head and makes it reflect something that it is not.  This article will explain why that happens and why it is wrong-headed.

 

Background on the The Frequency of Play

The 30 teams in both the National Hockey League and the National Basketball Association teams play a very similar schedule.  On average, each team has a day off between games, sometimes two days off.  Though there are back-to-back games, they are relatively infrequent.  NBA teams play between 14 and 22 back-to-back games a season, and for the NHL it usually ranges between 9 and 19. The NFL has a full week between games, the exception being the new Thursday games that each team plays once, leaving them only four days' rest once a year.

But baseball players play every single day.  Ten days straight, then a day off, then seven more games, then a day off, then ten more games.  Typically a baseball team plays 27 games every 30 days.  For the NHL and NBA it would be 14 per month, and for the NFL the number would be 4.

 

Getting to the Playoffs:  It's a grind

In all four sports, getting to the postseason requires a total team effort—in fact an all-out total organizational effort.  Teams must be deep, have bench strength and the capability of moving players in and out of the lineup, and on and off the roster, who can take the place of key players who go down for an injury, or who have to miss games for whatever reason.  While this is true of the other three major sports as well, it is most certainly even more of a concern for baseball teams because of the sheer volume of games in which a team must field a competitive lineup.

Each league's regular season* is a marathon, not a sprint.  NFL teams play for 17 weeks, 16 games.  The NHL has an 82-game season over six months, paralleled by an NBA season of 84 games over the same timeframe. Baseball is the biggest marathon of all—a true test of resilience and endurance—162 games usually starting around the beginning of April and finishing about the end of September.

NHL teams carry 23-man rosters, of which 20 can be active for any particular game.  The NBA is similar, with 15-man rosters of which 13 can be on the bench for a given game. In the NFL, the teams have 53 players on a roster, but only 46 can suit up on game day.  In Major League Baseball, teams have a 25-man active roster, and all 25 are at the park every day.

 

The Postseason Playoffs:  Sport by Sport

The National Football League:

Of the 32 teams, 12 qualify for the playoffs.  The playoffs are conducted in the exact same manner as the regular season.  Each team plays once a week, the exception being that the four top teams get the first week off.  For a typical qualifier to reach the Super Bowl, the team must play three consecutive weeks.  At that point both remaining teams have two weeks off before the Super Bowl.

In short, the playoffs, with a game each week, reflects the same means of advancement as is present in regular season grind.

The National Hockey League: 

16 of the 30 teams qualify for the postseason.  The playoffs are conducted in the exact same manner as the regular season: a game, a day off, a game, a day off, a game, a day off, and so on.  Just as in the regular season, there are occasionally two days off.  But the playoffs require the same stamina, the same approach as that required to make the playoffs.

 

The National Basketball Association

16 of the 30 teams qualify for the postseason.  The playoffs are conducted in the exact same manner as the regular season: a game, a day off, a game, a day off, a game, a day off, and so on.  Just as in the regular season, there are occasionally two days off.  But the playoffs require the same stamina, the same approach as that required to make the playoffs.

Major League Baseball

10 of the 30 teams qualify for the postseason.  (Although four of those teams qualify only for a one-game do-or-die play-in game.)

Here is where all similarity to baseball ends. 

Unlike the other three sports whose playoffs mirror the test of the regular season, and whose conditions are the same as the regular season, Major League Baseball playoffs in no way resemble the sport itself.  In hockey, basketball and football, the teams win playoff games and reach the pinacle of the sport in exactly the same way that they qualify to try to do so. 

Not so in baseball.  They are two entirely different concepts.  Teams make the playoffs only because they have depth, five-man pitching rotations and can play day-in and day-out at a high level.  But the baseball playoffs suddenly become a kind of "all-star" game within each team's roster.  MLB playoffs are conducted in a way that more closely follows the NBA and the NHL.  Teams have enormous numbers of days off. 

Here's the key point:  No Major League Baseball team could even qualify for the postseason if they played the same way during the regular season that they do in the playoffs.  None.

In the regular season Major League Baseball teams have to use a 5-man starting rotation, with pitchers pitching every 5th day.  There are not enough days off to have even a four-man rotation, let alone a team with three pitchers.  Even the best team in baseball using only a 4-man rotation, would wear them out, and most likely end up with a record of something like 66-96, or 70-92—and that would be if they were otherwise teh best team in the sport.

 

The 2014 Baseball Postseason is Typical

As examples, last year's World Series teams the Kansas City Royals played only 15 games in 30 days, and the San Francisco Giants played only 17 games in 30 days.  The 12 to 15 days off in the non-baseball fantasy world of the MLB postseason, means that teams can turn to three pitchers and give all of them plenty of rest.  But it isn't the way baseball really works.

At one point, the Royals had 5 consecutive days off, and the Giants had 4.  This never happens in the regular season.  Even the All-Star break is only three days.  Very rarely is there anything beyond a one-day break, and even that happens only a couple of times a month. 

What this means is that neither team used the team that got them to the playoffs.  (The NFL, NBA and NHL teams ALL used the very same teams that got them to the playoffs.) 

Baseball teams use a three-man pitching rotation in the playoffs.  Sometimes, they essentially opt for two pitchers only—conceding the likelihood that some of their games are going to be lost—when their third-, or rarely fourth-best pitcher has to face one of their opponents' two-man or three-man rotation members. 

Imagine an NFL team using only one running back and three wide receivers, instead of rotating through their roster in the course of a playoff game—or using only 4 defensive backs and 4 linebackers, instead of rotating 8 or 9 DBs and 6 or 7 linebackers?  In hockey, would a team use only two or three of their forward lines?  Would an NBA team use only the starting five?  They would never make the post season if they tried to present that product to their fans during the regular season.

Those are the equivalents of what Major League Baseball sets up every fall.  No other sport drags its playoffs out in such a way as to completely change the playing field—completely change the dynamics of its game.

Why Does Baseball Do This?

MLB does this because the TV networks want to drag out the games so that they can try to have one game each day  This requires an unnecessary staggering of games, and creates the phenomenon of 15 off-days in a month.

What about travel days?

What about them?  Baseball has travel days constantly.  A team may play in Chicago one day and in Miami the next, or in New York one day and Phoenix the very next day.  Travel days as a routine part of the game are again, a phenomenon of television, and stretching out the playoffs.

In years past, travel days were employed only when necessary. The famous "subway series" games were played on seven consecutive days.  Why?  Because there was no "travel day" required to go from Brooklyn to the Bronx.  Today, they would put in artificial travel days.

Even fairly long train trips didn't necessarily matter.  The 1948 World Series between the Cleveland Indians and the Boston Braves was played in six consecutive days, October 6 & 7 in Boston, October 8, 9 & 10 in Cleveland, and October 11 back in Boston.

This reflects actual baseball, the way the teams play day-in and day-out, and the kind of unique test that baseball presents to its athletes, its managers and management, and to its fans.

In the modern world of charter planes, teams fly from coast to coast to play games on consecutive days.  The artificial "travel day" should be eliminated so that teams can play in the playoffs in the same way that got them there in the first place.


*All these leagues also have pre-seasons and training camps, which add an additional 6-8 weeks to each player's year.


Email us with your feedback, comments, questions and ideas. 

Religious Issues

Religious Issues

  • Religious Issues
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