gehringer_2

1 hour ago, mtutiger said:

 

LOL - very true.

1 hour ago, mtutiger said:

complete with insanely high gas prices and a wildly unpopular war.

The GOPs hope is that it will end and prices come down before the election and that people have short memories. The dilemma is that the only way to get Iran to relent is probably going to be to break a lot more stuff, and the more stuff they break, the longer it will take after it ends for enough things to get put back together so oil prices can come back down. One of the things that Americans are just phenomenally bad at is figuring out what the tother guy is thinking. Trump and Bibi have this grand idea that finally, after 45 yrs we deal the Ayatollahs the decisive blow. But it works both ways. In Teheran, the mullahs are thinking "after 45 years of pressure we finally have an opportunity to push the US back hard and get them off our case." The chances aren't that bad that they are going to be willing to take as much as we have the capability and/or stomach to dish out. And the status quo is untenable, both because there is a election on the horizon, and also because storage tanks in Asia are running down, and when they get critical the push back from China will start to mount and what that will look like is a huge wildcard.

1 hour ago, Motown Bombers said:

I do think Dems will take the senate but it's impossible without Maine. I think people are sleeping on Ohio, but in this environment with Sherrod Brown running, I think they flip it. North Carolina seems easier than Maine. Cooper is very strong going against a non incumbent nutcase. Alaska is another sleeper along with Iowa and I think Talarico has a shot in Texas. Collins is tough. They will have more oppo on Platner. There will also be another vote where Collins vote is meaningless and she can vote against the party like in 2020 when she voted against Amy Coney Barrett. 

with Platner, the question is how much if his past he will be able to write off as "I was a dumb young GI grunt".  He can probably finesse being a GI doing GI things if that's the era of stuff they come up with. You are spot on though that the GOP will be looking for every single woman he's ever failed to hold a door for.

I thought OHIO would have shifted more strongly a long time ago - I guess all the time I spent in Toledo gave me a false sense of security about the general sanity level of Ohioans. Better late than never I guess, if it happens.

4 minutes ago, Motown Bombers said:

I don't think Collins is going down easy. She looked dead in the water going against a young well funded Dem. She was down in the polls and pulled out a safe win in an election Biden won by double digits. Maine works a little differently. We also haven't even heard everything on Platner. The Republicans have oppo on him and I would not be surprised if there are women who come forward who say he sexually assaulted them. 

Sadly - if she doesn't that means we've all been whistling past the graveyard thinking that America is finally falling out of love with Trump.

Just now, Motown Bombers said:

I would not be surprised if there are women who come forward who say he sexually assaulted them. 

that would be the modern narrative.

6 minutes ago, Motown Bombers said:

And that is by electing senators like Fetterman who are fixtures on Fox News? The public is stupid and things Democrats have some sort of magic they could be doing to stop Trump as the minority party. The Dems did beat Trump and got the most votes ever but they never supported their candidate and pissed all over themselves and threw him under the bus. 

I can only hope Trump/Biden was the last gasp of their generation. For me, the number one sign of the intellectual and political bankruptcy of the old guard democratic party is that they are so  addicted to the corporate money trough themselves that they never even tried to mount an organized constitutional amendment effort against CU which was the single most important thing any honest political party should have been doing.  I'm just as happy to see all these corporate whores go away.

I loved Joe Biden but he made the worst mistake of a lot of people's lives by overestimating himself.

The public at large hates the Democratic Party only slightly less than it now hates the GOP. If the Dems are ever going to become a real force for social change in the US again, win big enough majorities to actual govern, the party is going to get rebuilt by a new leadership with a new set of ideas and a different appeal than the party that couldn't beat Trump twice. 

1 minute ago, Motown Bombers said:

I don't think Mills wanted to run. I think she was pushed into it and ran a half hearted campaign.

Don't disagree. But that just demonstrates how much Schumer's org is out of gas itself.

59 minutes ago, chasfh said:

Do we really expect this Platner fella to caucus with Dems and champion progressive policies, or even center left positions? I don’t. 

he's running as a progressive, completely the opposite of Fetterman, who ran as a conservative dem.

I'm with MTU - not my state, not my fight, but I'm glad you guys don't vote in Maine. 

40 minutes ago, Motown Bombers said:

Mills ran out of money.

which means what? Anybody can use the internet to raise money - dem candidates have done it from Obama to AOC. If you can't raise party funds and you can't raise direct funds, you have lost your audience, or you have a campaign org stuck in the past, or both. Mills biggest problem was that she is 78, and while the people of Maine love her, nobody wants 78 anymore.

Platner's parents may have been wealthy but at least they didn't buy him out of his military service. The risk with Platner is that the big rallies, where he apparently shines, don't necessarily translate in the GE - ask Kamala.

2 hours ago, Tiger337 said:

LOL 

I owned pretty much that exact computer, keyboard, monitor and printer but not the pack of Salems.

2 hours ago, Motown Bombers said:

What if I told you he was a backwater operative who was part of the military industrial complex?

And his campaign is that he saw it and realized he was on the wrong side. If he wins we'll see what he is, but we know Collins is a proven lying scumbag Trump enabler, so he can't be any worse and he could be a lot better. There is no perfect in life and especially in politics.

I know there is a conspiracy theory line that he is a GOP mole. Anything is possible, but I don't see the point of going through all that if Mills was such a weak candidate, and if Mills believed that she certainly would have stayed in anyway.

Not specific to Maine, I think another aspect of the generational shift in politics is that 'gotcha' opposition campaigning against people's history is going to fade from importance as long as those people don't lie or deny it but simply admit it and say they've moved on - because in the upcoming generations everyone has stuff in their social media past they know they would disown today - the upcoming generation of voters is going to identify with that and that will neuter it as a campaign strategy.

2 hours ago, Motown Bombers said:

Janet Mills literally went face to face with Trump, stood up to him, and he backed down but we need Platner because he’s young and has a beard. 
Why isn’t there pressure for Ed Markey to drop out? 

It's too late to debate the candidates, she's not running anymore. Not many political candidates suffer from lack of optimism; if she dropped out she didn't see a path to a win.

9 minutes ago, Motown Bombers said:

What if it’s a Nazi that voted for Collins as recently as 2020? 

At this point, Hitler can have his soul if I get his votes. 

Unless there is evidence that he's going to change parties after being elected, I'm more interested in his future than his past.

Also, a guy campaigning against the military-industrial complex is probably hitting a right note when Trump wants a $1.5T defense budget.

6 hours ago, Motown Bombers said:

So the options now are a rapist sympathizing Nazi republican or Susan Collins. 

 

if it has a pulse and caucuses with the Dems it's better than Collins - who has made her career by convincing people that because she feigns concerns she isn't as big a liar as the worst of them.

3 hours ago, monkeytargets39 said:

I feel like in an emergency it’d be Lee at SS for the next couple games

yes - in fact Hinch even made the comment in a recent presser that Lee 'has played there'. I wonder if Hinch had checked how long ago it had been.

5 hours ago, chasfh said:

Riley, Tork, Torres already playing every day. So is Kevin, he was splitting SS with Javy when he was available. Kevin at third with Javy at SS and Wenceel in center with Javy SS. I don't think you and A.J. are that far off.

with the roster reduced, everything  converges

27 minutes ago, mtutiger said:

Generally not a great sign when the lies are so big that even Joe Kernan doesn't want to touch then

$6.00/gal gas? Double digit interest rates? What crack pipe is Scalise hitting?

It rhetoric a la Neil Simon. Through the pasta at the wall and take whatever sticks.

15 minutes ago, NorthWoods said:

Trusting in Mcgodigle is not living on the edge.

It would be nice if it were only a matter of trust in McGonigle as a player. It's more the team risk issue that any player may be forced to leave a game by something that happens to him that's beyond his control - HBP etc. They are basically saying they are willing to lose a game rather make a roster move - or alternatively I guess you could say they are admitting they don't have a single healthy SS left in the system they trust to go into a game and play better than a guy (Lee) who hasn't played there in 3 yrs. On second thought maybe the latter is actually the case.

16 minutes ago, guy incognito said:

Not necessarily true though. If the districts in the North flip the country, then the districts in the South can be restored. People have to stop worrying about the details of the win and Just find the straight line path. Win first and everything else can follow.

have I said before that I really hate bringing in old relievers at the end of their ropes?

I wanna million back every time he walks the lead-off hitter in the 9th.

just totally surprised they are going without a true backup SS. 

2 hours ago, chasfh said:

I agreed that I thought at first we might call Max up, not that Kevin would play shortstop every day. But let's set that aside.

A.J. Hinch has been fired. You've been named manager. This is your roster. How will you deploy it? I assume you start with Kevin playing shortstop every day. What next?

 

Perez is my CF against RHP, Vierling against LH. Riley, Tork, Torres, McG play every day. Colt plays 3B everyday unless the matchup is really bad and I put Jung there. Light a candle every day that no-one else goes down before McK gets back!

4 minutes ago, mtutiger said:

Also mentioned his before, but there are VRA districts in blue states too... And after the decision not clear whether these states won't just revise their own districts without these in place constraints. NY, CA, even IL (which is already gerrymandered to hell) could theoretically draw out R districts on their existing maps without VRA requirements.

I really don't like the VRA being gutted and the precedent it sets, but this is the other side of the coin as well.

yes  - as example you could probably wipe out at least one GOP district in the Detroit NE burbs by dividing part of the city into it, though redistricting is off the table in MI.