gehringer_2

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.

maybe shouda just joined the LDS?

1 hour ago, RatkoVarda said:

Here's a sentence I never thought I'd write:

I'm pretty sure the head of the MLBPA can bang as many of his sisters-in-law as he wants without losing his job

the problem is, he had an inappropriate relationship with a union employee, who happens to be his sister-in-law

that's even better.

7 hours ago, NorthWoods said:

"inappropriate affair" with his sister in law.   She probably couldn't resist the beard.

do a terrible job for 10 yrs, waste money on possibly fraudulent activities, featherbed your buddies, but then get fired for who you sleep with? As American as apple pie and.....baseball.

1 hour ago, Screwball said:

This table looks pretty clean, but the same thing we used to play. Part of the deal was also about the "stuff" you put on the table. I don't remember what it was. They would have like a large salt shaker with small pebble type stuff they would sprinkle on the table. The more "stuff" the faster it was. Kinda like oil and bowling lanes. I don't remember, 25 ft long? It was fun.

Loser buys the next round.

A friend just put one in his basement rec room.  They call the powder 'sand' but it's a mix of things that are softer than beach sand type sand as you don't want it to scratch the table.

2 hours ago, Screwball said:

That's weak, even for you.

Ghislaine Maxwell was on trial in 2022. None of the perpetrators were charged or named. Biden was president. The lead prosecutor was none other than Maurene Comey, daughter of James Comey. They knew and did nothing.

They should rot in hell.

Looks right now that getting Maxwell sent up is more than these folks are going to do about anything. And she could have blown them all out of the water and wouldn't either. And now they've apparently sent her to Club Fed. 

The problem with this whole mess is that there is still way more smoke than fire. They had enough to charge Epstein for a 2nd time, they had enough to give Maxwell 20yrs. The rest is still buried in charges, countercharges and redactions.

1 hour ago, CMRivdogs said:

Nixon also lost his race for Governor in California. prompting the following quote saying, "you won't have Nixon to kick around anymore because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference."^[8]

 

I remember seeing that and hoping it might actually be true. Sadly not so much....

35 minutes ago, Motown Bombers said:

Clinton was popular when he left office. One of the most popular outgoing presidents. Gore running from Clinton probably hurt him more than it helped. 

I think Gore hurt himself more that Clinton helped or hurt him. His campaign was pretty artless - esp early on.  And even the liberal press was writing nice things about W's time in Tx. Plus W caught the afterglow of GHWB's rapid rehabilitation from re-election loser to fondly remembered ex-prez.

It certainly never entered my mind that with all the legacy, expertise and connections that W had available to him that he would end up running the most outright incompetent WH since --- probably before Herbert Hoover.

9 minutes ago, Motown Bombers said:

Nixon is a pretty strong comp. Senator from California > Vice President> loses as incumbent Vice President> comes back 8 years later and wins. Nixon would probably have run in 64 if Johnson was an unpopular as Trump is. 

And Nixon just barely edged Humphrey in the popular vote. I think the conventional wisdom is Wallace drained more votes from Nixon than Humphrey, but who really knows?  The South was still pretty nominally Democratic at that time so without a favorite son how many of those votes might have gone to Humphrey by habit?

47 minutes ago, oblong said:

Whenever I refer Presidential precedent I don't like to do so before FDR.  It really was a different office before him, then again before Lincoln.  More administrative in nature.  And like you say the media angle. Also the nature of how they were elected matters.

I like to imagine a scenario in 1991 where you tell the dems at the time "Bush can be beat".  Would that have changed anything?  Clinton muscled through but some others may have not bothered thinking Bush's 90% approval rating wasn't worth the hassle at that point in time.

Mondale was really the best example of a retread candidate in recent history.  VP on a ticket that lost re-election?  Really?  You can't do better?

the Presidential nominating system has been like the NBA draft, every reform they have made has produced worse outcomes. Of course, the NBA still has a chance to make changes in a positive direction if they figure them out because they don't also have to cope with Citizen's United.

2 minutes ago, Tiger337 said:

Tony Clark is too soft.  He just doesn't  care enough.  You can tell by his body language.  He has the talent, but never does  anything when it counts.  We would lose all of April and May with him in charge.  now, we can hope for a full season.    

what else can you expect from a guy with a silly beard?

✂️✂️

If you haven't heard it, last week Vicky Ward was on Fresh Air. She was one of the first investigative journalists to  work on Epstein, initially before anyone knew anything about the sexual abuse side. She began to uncover more stuff and Epstein got her reporting on him spiked.  At the time for various personal reasons she took her work in a different direction. But one of her interesting holdings is that Epstein had never been into under age girls until he hooked up with Maxwell. In not so many words she's saying it was Maxwell who first cultivated Epstein's proclivities. Doesn't make that much difference in the overall scheme of the larger public issue this has all become and efforts for accountability, but interesting to hear someone who did a lot of earliest research hold that Maxwell was as much or more the driver than Epstein.

49 minutes ago, Screwball said:

Why wasn't something done over the last 20+ years?

fair question. I have no problem with the hammer falling wherever it may on those that covered for any of this in the past.

But action can only take place in the present, and someone is in a position to do something about it now.

If the past were an adequate excuse for the future we'd all still be caves.