gehringer_2

1080P not kind to Daniella's make up job. She looks ceramic. 

1 minute ago, monkeytargets39 said:

We are also now alone in 1st place in the Central

the Wire to Wire dream lives

Elite 8 is 50% B10, and all 'classic' B10 schools.

Carpenter finally gets to 1st

Gleyber reached for the 4th time tonight.

Finnegan finds his groove after the walk to Machado.

2 minutes ago, monkeytargets39 said:

Now is not the time to bring in Seabold, btw

maybe it was....

What plate coverage, Peralta couldn't get it past him in, out, up or down.

Tork swung at a pitch he could hit but he didn't.

LOL - IFH.

Just a freaking fly ball Riley.

Colt with a new bat waggle

gleyber is late on the FB but stays alive to walk.

what is this, 2006? Don't we have a pitcher than can play his position?

1 minute ago, IdahoBert said:

Kaline would’ve caught that ball that Carpenter missed. 

Perez might have for that matter.

Colt says "I've got a glove too you know"

Bad throw happens to be into the runner and Tork is out...😡

Carpenter and Greene picking up right where they left ST,

let's not go 0 for the season Kerry.

Kerry needed to get there sooner to make a better throw there.

yeah - nice play by Tork goes for naught. 

Just now, IdahoBert said:

Then he’s robbed of a HR. 

well, he wasn't fooled

1 hour ago, Screwball said:

What's up with him and cars? He should just hire a driver. No pun intended.

thrill seeking behavior? Death wish? The big crash that messed him up the first time was pretty nuts, no sane person would have been trying to take the turn he did.

8 minutes ago, chasfh said:

I wonder what our resident Trump supporter makes of this? 🤔

 

I’ve been thinking about the Republican betrayal of the party’s own tradition because of a comment about my work by Glenn Loury, the conservative Black economist. When I was on The Glenn Show in December, he criticized my new book American Contradiction because of my “apparent disregard for the positive contributions of conservative thought and policy to American life.”

Loury and I could probably agree about many historical contributions of principled conservatism, including respect for America’s constitutional tradition and rule of law, skepticism about concentrated governmental power, and support for the independence of civil society and private initiative. I’m sure we’d agree about the importance of patriotism, civility, tolerance, and other values that have been part of a democratic conservatism—democratic in the sense of upholding the democratic “rules of the game,” including free speech and fair elections.

But as Trump has acted with reckless disregard for those principles, Republican leaders, major donors, and corporate supporters have either fallen silent or actively enabled his lawlessness and corruption. That complicity makes you wonder: Were they ever serious about those conservative principles? And since they don’t speak up for them now, what do they stand for?

Since when, for example, was it a conservative principle to concentrate all federal power in the president and deny Congress its constitutional role? How does a party that ostensibly opposes centralized state power square that opposition with the centralization of power in one man?

...

HOW DID REPUBLICANS COME TO BETRAY their own philosophy? A key factor has been the party’s weakness, the fear that it was only getting weaker, and a consequent openness to desperate measures that could enable it to entrench itself in power while it could.

In his 2017 book Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, Daniel Ziblatt argues that the strength of conservative parties in the 19th and early 20th centuries determined whether a country followed a stable, settled path to democracy or an unsettled path with authoritarian reversals. Britain’s history is an example of the first; Italy’s, the second. Although Ziblatt’s book is about Europe, the political process he identifies seems to be playing out now in the United States.

“Strong conservative political parties,” Ziblatt argues, “led to a stable long-run path of democratization” for several reasons. Conservatives had “a realistic basis for assuming electoral success” and “the resources that allowed them to sideline their own radicals.” They accepted the “rules of the game” in a democracy because they believed they could win that game or at least keep radicals on the left out of power. But when conservative parties saw themselves as likely to lose, they often turned against democracy. That has been the story of recent American politics. In this case, Republicans have also turned against their old leadership and many of the defining elements in the conservative tradition.

...

In every election in which Trump has run, he has warned that this is Americans’ last chance and that they won’t have a country unless they elect him. If you’ve agreed that America is in extreme danger, it has made perfect sense to repudiate a conservatism that didn’t just fail to prevent the dire trends wrecking the country but contributed to them through its support of pro-immigration and free-trade measures.

Republican elites haven’t cared all that much about Trump’s betrayal of conservatism because of what he hasn’t betrayed: the party’s corporate and class allegiances. Trump’s populism is all in the rhetoric and the scapegoating, not the substance of government. His tax legislation in 2017 and again in 2025 has redistributed income upward; his government appointees side with corporations over workers. Pro-business policy is what many Republicans mean by free-market policy. They are not bothered if the “invisible hand” is replaced by a “conspicuous fist,” as long as that fist generally comes down on their enemies.

Republicans go along with the betrayal of conservatism also because they care more about results than rules, whether those are the rule of law, the rules-based international order, or the rules of civility and decency that Trump routinely flouts. They admire that Trump gets things done and look the other way at how he does it. Although they must know he is corrupt, because he hardly makes a secret of it, he is also delivering the result that matters most to them: power for “us” over “them.”

What Stephen Miller famously said about international politics—“we live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power”—reflects the mentality now dominating the Republican Party. Some analysts make the mistake of intellectualizing Trump and taking seriously the ideas of the various schools of right-wing thought that compete to provide fig leaves for the worship of power. But as Jan-Werner Müeller has suggested, it’s an error to assume that right-wing political leaders today are “inspired by comprehensive worldviews” or “that far-right parties succeed because voters find their philosophies attractive,” when the leaders are opportunistic and self-interested and “most citizens have no clue” about what right-wing intellectuals are saying.

The driving impulses on the right are old and primitive. As Never Trump conservative intellectuals discovered to their horror, ideas and principles don’t much matter in the party that Trump took over. It’s a world where, as Miller says, strength governs, power governs, force governs—and conservative thought is expected to be loyal and submit.

Probably not much because he hasn't read anything this long since Penn, if he ever even did then. 

1 hour ago, buddha said:

if they went full tank, the move would have been to trade larkin.

Yup - I remember a long interview with Yzerman when he took the job and the concept he laid out was to bring in talent no older than Larkin and to have a cup challenging team while Larkin was still in  relatively prime production. He clearly thought at the time he could pull off a gradual build without going any further down. 20/20 as they say...

On 3/23/2026 at 10:24 PM, gehringer_2 said:

The talks announcement came out, the inside traders already had their bets down. Now it will take day or two when nothing good happens for that bit of false optimism to evaporate (or for everyone to figure out the announcement was purely a market play) and the S&P will resume its down trend and WTI will float back up to $100.

Ok, it was 4.