gehringer_2

49 minutes ago, IdahoBert said:

McGonigle gets an opposite field single, and Torres follows with a single as well. 

was out in his 2nd AB but still put the ball in play on a line.

36 minutes ago, chasfh said:

I don’t get to watch this game, or any spring training game not on MLB Network, because my access to MLB.tv is tethered to my Directv Extra Innings package, which does not kick in until Opening Day. And, inexplicably, MLB Network is not running the Yankees game.

also noted that there is no "TigersTV" on the MLB TV team purchase menu yet, though it appears all the other teams that dropped Diamond are there.

5 hours ago, NorthWoods said:

No season details yet that I've seen, McCoskey said today's game would stream free on MLB.tv

that's where I'm getting it.

2 hours ago, buddha said:

and its nice to see you and justice gorsuch on the same page, even though you'll be oblivious that youre reading from the same book. 

LOL - I've agreed with Gorsuch before, but agreeing with Gorsuch is really just a matter of random chance since his judicial philosophy doesn't correspond to any known consistency but his own.

If you want to take a serious shot at the Constitutional issue in the US, the root of the problem (which BTW has nothing to do with the current issues with Trump) is that we  claim to have a democratic representative government but in practice it cannot be controlled by the majority vote any more. At their core, all the of tensions between Presidential and Congressional power stem from that reality, that an elected US Congress does not adequately represent the will of the American public, with the result  that a popularly elected President too often faces a minority controlled legislature, and that gridlock paralyzes government, to the point that all manner of dislocations to the system result because the imperative to govern remains despite the institutional gridlock. The asymmetry of the states, which produce the Senate imbalance, compounded by ossified and distorted rules of procedure, plus the modern addition of data processing power that allows surgical Gerrymanders, have turned the Founder's "great experiment" in democracy into a deflated soufflé.

But we are so steeped in our myths of Constitutional inerrancy that we don't even come close to talking about fixing any of it. We have a fundamentally broken system, but are clinging to it like a drunk to his last bottle.

43 minutes ago, buddha said:

the executive branch via the administrative state has had power ceded to it by congress for decades.  part of that is via necessity as government has grown so much larger and entered every corner of american life (the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy), and part of it is from political necessity as members of congress figure it is much easier to let the executive take the blame for anything that goes wrong, and they can glom on to anything that goes right.

 

IDK, Congress passes a law to implement policy, creating and funding some kind of agency within the Exec to operate it. That isn't ceded power, that's just the way it has to work unless you want Congress creating it's own parallel bureaucracies. It's not really in the agency structure that Congress has abdicated, it's in allowing the exec free use of the military under non-emergency conditions without grant of any authority and its acquiescence to the proliferation of executive orders for the last couple of decades. Those abdications are real enough. Those are the problem, but that's not what the conservatives are trying to address with Unitary Executive theory.

33 minutes ago, buddha said:

"insulated from executive branch politics".  when has that ever been the case

then what are Isgur and the Federalists complaining about that there is such a pressing need for a more imperial 'Unitary' executive unimpeded by anything beyond his own fiat? It's their complaint.

28 minutes ago, buddha said:

since congress has ceded its power to the executive, it takes one bad actor to bring down the house of cards.

It isn't even so much that Congress has ceded its power, it's that Congress had been an active enabler. A Congress properly outraged at having been told bald-faced lies at confirmation hearings or at any of the Trump cabinet outrages of the day could have removed any one of these turkey's - including Trump himself of course. The tariff case never reaches the SCOTUS if the House doesn't suspend the 'emergency clock'. Trump hasn't had power ceded to him, he's been actively aided and abetted.  

22 minutes ago, buddha said:

sarah isgur has a comment on it in the times from back in december that people are pointing to as prescient, if youre interested.

Conservatives used to accuse Liberals of being 'Ivy Tower'. but it seems it's now  Conservative that pine for idealistic constructs that have no relation or possibility of implementation in the real world.

Independent administrative agencies insulated from executive branch politics are a perfectly practical solution to technological regulation. The Federal Society's complaint that they don't conform to their idealizations of government structure is windmill tilting of the highest order.

And she's dead wrong about campaign finance reform.

3 minutes ago, buddha said:

but i dont think this ruling has anything to do with it. ...

I don't disagree, I'm just pointing out that if you accept this logical construct of Trump's on tariffs (basically that the power of creation/destruction implies the power of complete regulation) I don't see how you can avoid the logical connection to how that would apply to CU. Granted that the law defies logic often enough.

14 minutes ago, Motown Bombers said:

 

what's interesting here is that logically, he is making the exact argument that would also defeat Citizen's United. Congress has the power to change corporate law and basically eliminate current corporate structure as a legal entity in the US and every US corporation as currently constituted with it, but the court ruled Congress does not have the power to regulate a subset of that entity's existence - i.e. political contributions. Exact same argument. Verrrrry interesteenk!

5 minutes ago, Mr.TaterSalad said:

 

LOL, YOU APPOINTED THESE PEOPLE SIR!

Good. Let him burn as many bridges as he can. It won't be the last decision this court has to make that affects him, but he's too stupid to think strategically - which is something to be thankful for.

5 hours ago, Motown Bombers said:

 

Kavanugh is still a putz, but note that he lost Barrettt. There is a certain amount of hope for her.

4 minutes ago, chasfh said:

Incompetence isn’t even the worst part—these are deeply-damaged people even beyond that—but let’s also remember that incompetence is the feature, not the bug. Trump doesn’t want competent people around him who know what they’re doing, because competent people have ideas and opinions about how things should be done, and they’ll tell you so. He wants incompetent people who know they are in over their heads so they just shut up and do exactly as they’re told, which is something any competent person would never tolerate as a condition of employment for long. In exchange, they get rich and they get to abuse the system and its people for jollies, which is something deeply-damaged people love to do.

spot on

25 minutes ago, Tigeraholic1 said:

Boeing never should have moved Engineering management away from the factory in the 1st place.

I don't think the proposal I just saw on ESPN to reward teams for winning after the ASB can work. It would just turn the season into something like one of those velo races where the cyclists try to creep around the track through the beginning of the race then suddenly take off sprinting to the end. A team would lose as many as it could out of the gate, then try hard in the 2nd half. I guess it solves the problem at the end of the season, but only by ruining the 1st half.

27 minutes ago, buddha said:

as long as there is a draft, there will be tanking.

you could penalize teams by "adding wins" to their record if they win less than a specified number of games.  all these ideas MIGHT affect the margins, but will not stop the problem.

if you can cut down the number of teams that see any value in tanking, to me that is enough. I don't care if one or maybe two teams tank, but when 30% of your schedule is, then it's a problem.

20 minutes ago, Tigeraholic1 said:

I was under the belief that freedom of speech meant free speech whether you like the speech our not. Speaking of Europe, I see the AFD was allowed to attend the Munich Security conference this year after being banned. They are the 2nd largest party in the Bundestag and rising.

everything has limits. There is no intrinsic law of the Universe that just because a particular set of words got put into the US Constitution they are necessarily the best rule for all societies for all time.

TBH, I think the rise of the mass media in the 20th century and now the rise of mass communication of any media in 21st has created a fundamental paradigm shift between the danger of suppressing speech and the danger of truth becoming impossibly hard to tease out of the avalanche of falsehood. I'm not sure what the all the answers should be, but the idea that 18th century implementations can be the only just ones for all people for all  times is an impossibly naive view of history.

Core values may remain but details are local. The core value here is not speech but truth. If your rules of speech do not support truth, you need to think about your rules again.

13 hours ago, Tigeraholic1 said:

 

 

None of the rights in the "Bill of" are absolute here either even though we like to talk to ourselves like they are, and liberal democracy (small 'l' small 'd') in Europe has manage to evolve pretty well without the more explicit kinds of statements we put in the Constitution. And to this particular point, Europe has more reason to remain circumspect of lofty pronouncements because they experienced political speech in Hitler that succeeded in producing 6 million+ murders and a war that destroyed most of their continent. If that had been our experience,  it might have changed our views about the rhetoric we allow in the political sphere too. 

1 hour ago, IdahoBert said:

Well after bragging about my generally excellent health at age 74, three days ago I suffered a visual impairment that implied a possible stroke or a detached retina.

Four or five times in the last 20 years I’ve stood up really quickly and saw shooting stars and weird images that got burned on my vision - it’s sometimes referred to as a visual migraine or ocular migraine - and it was kind of frightening because if these images stayed there forever it would be awful but they went away after 10 minutes.

Monday morning around 2 AM this happened again for the first time in three or four years but part of the image never went away and never will and is burned into my vision in the left eye forever. My doctor tested me for evidence of a stroke of which there was none and sent me to an ophthalmologist which allayed my fears of a detached retina. When I’m looking through my left eye only it covers about 1-12th of the visual area of my left eye. It looks like a childish drawing of a ball of yarn. When I’m looking through both eyes it seems like a mild shimmer at the very bottom of my vision. 

I know other people to whom this is happened and it doesn’t affect driving or reading and your brain does you the favor of overlooking it as a problem after a while.

so the next time I think of bragging about my health I’ll be more circumspect about it. 

Other than the normal farsightedness my vision has been near perfect all my like - and then a couple of years ago the 'floaters' started. It's a little similar as your brain learns to ignore them too, but I've found I've had to start looking twice - especially when driving, because if there happens to actually be something there behind by the floater, you may not see it at all on a quick glance and are not going to know it. (You already have a small blind spot in each eye where your optic nerve originates, but with two eyes they are not in the same spot in your binocular vision. A floater is usually kind of spindly, but still, add another spot in one eye that moves around, and if it a piece of it happens to line up with the optic blind spot in the other eye, that's going to be a little gap in your total vision and you will not be able to sense it. Or the opposite happens: you think you see something but it turns out you only caught a glimpse of the floater moving a bit.

In fact I'm thinking these things are where a lot of 'ghost' sightings used to originate. They move a little bit in your eyeball and it is very much like seeing a ghost because your brain doesn't understand the sudden shift in illumination on small bit your retina and tries to interpret it as something real.

7 minutes ago, IdahoBert said:

Sister Wives. 

exactly. Sister Wives, Wive's Sister. Sounds close enough to me.

1 hour ago, Tigeraholic1 said:

But, but tariffs….

 

Ever heard the one about you get 2 economists in a room and you get 3 opinions? Here is Fed Governor Micheal Barr on 2/17:

Quote

Turning to the other component of our mandate, inflation based on personal consumption expenditures remains elevated at 3 percent, about where it was a year ago. Disinflation, which started in mid-2022, slowed last year, as goods price inflation picked up, in large part due to tariffs. That pattern appeared to continue in the inflation data released last week. Looking ahead, it is reasonable to forecast that tariff effects on inflation will begin to abate later this year, but there are many reasons to be concerned that inflation will remain elevated. I see the risk of persistent inflation above our 2 percent target as significant, which means we need to remain vigilant.

Speech by Governor Barr on artificial intelligence and the labor market - Federal Reserve Board

35 minutes ago, Motown Bombers said:

1964 was the last time A democrat won the majority of the white vote. The Civil Rights act and riots in cities like Detroit pushed voters to the right. 

and speaking of riots. The '68 convention mess probably cost the Dems that election more than any other single event beside the War itself.

Just now, lordstanley said:

Seider has safely completed the Olympics.

🎉🎆

7 minutes ago, MotownWebGuy said:

I turned off Vignette ads on Monday because Google does not make it easy (if you can at all) to identify specific ads that are causing issues and eliminate them, so I stopped them all.  This issue should have been resolved then...

If you are still getting them, then it's Google screwing us. There has been a drop in revenue in the past two days which reflects the changes I've made.

I'm currently on vacation and don't have a lot of time to deal with this issue, but I'll check again and see if there is any additional changes I can make.  Hopefully this resides soon...  Maybe a cache refresh is need on users end?

thank-you for the effort!

13 hours ago, oblong said:

And they knew about it. LBJ was bugging planes and phones. He went to the majority leader and called it Treason. But they couldn’t say anything because they were illegally bugging.  Then Johnson calls Nixon and they do a verbal dance and a game of “I know that you know that I know…”. 
 

of course the question is whether they really would have had a deal. But Nixon and Kissinger sabatoged a potential deal for political purposes. 

It probably had some effect, everything has some effect and it was a close election and maybe it was enough -  but I think it's also easy to overestimate it because there is always such a strong bias to want to blame more stuff on bad people like Nixon. 

So some of the things I think you have to add to the mix:

-Revisionist history in the US about VN is strong. By 1980 everybody was always against the war, but that just isn't true. In 1968 most Americans still wanted a 'win' not just a peace. The WWII mindset that the US was invincible was still very dominant. The idea of walking away without victory was still hard to swallow, even after Korea (maybe especially because of Korea). The anger at Johnson was  as least as much over him being unable to win the war as for having gotten into it.

-Everyone knew Humphrey was a stronger 'peace' candidate than Nixon and that a deal was going to be more likely under Humphrey, so I'm not so sure how much difference the existence of any preliminary announcement was going to make. Humphrey had already said publicly that he was willing to go further to get a deal Johnson had been. I think that actually hurt him with the hawk part of the population - he was an appeaser!

-S.V. didn't want a deal on N.V. terms so it was not going to be an easy needle to thread in any case.

I was still pretty young but I liked HHH. The problem is a lot of people saw him as a caricature - it was a big problem for him.