gehringer_2

17 minutes ago, Motown Bombers said:

I’m a woke ****lib who drives an EV so have fun with your gas prices. 

definitely a good time the have an EV. I just hope Tesla sales aren't recovering as a result...

2 minutes ago, mtutiger said:

I saw a AAA price map of Wisconsin yesterday, it was amusing how you could see the dividing line in terms of which counties get their gas from Chicagoland and which ones get their gas from Pine Bend (outside of St. Paul)

I've been inside the Pine Bend refinery. Marathon also has a refinery north and across the river from Pine bend but it's maybe 1/2 the size or less.

15 minutes ago, Motown Bombers said:

I’m a woke ****lib who drives an EV so have fun with your gas prices. 

actually Whiting is also apparently in the middle of union lock-out. Management is trying to keep the plant running and that's usually a disaster waiting to happen. 

The bad part is that at this point this is hitting mostly areas that are mostly already trending blue. Some Whiting supply must also go to Ohio but I have no idea how much.

5 hours ago, oblong said:

Not that it changes his point, but that gas station is near the airport is notorious for being $1 more than nearby stations.

 

The BP Whiting Refinery (near Chicago in Indiana) suffered an unexpected outage Sunday night . It is the biggest refinery in the Midwest and it when goes down, it adds about $1 to prices throughout the region. Press reports say expect 2 weeks, but guaranteed nobody at the refinery would be telling the press the truth about anything at this point so that's just worthless speculation - timeframe could be anything.

Insult to injury for the American driver.

37 minutes ago, Mr.TaterSalad said:

Democrats ran a middle aged, centrist, milquetoast white woman in Sara Gideon against Susan Collins in 2020. Not only did she lose, she lost by nearly 8% points. She lost at a time when Biden won the state and she underperformed Biden. She lost when everyone was predicting she would win. She lost when polling predicted she would win. Graham Platner is problematic in a lot of ways. The Nazi tattoo and the reddit comments about rape are indeed a problem. They will be used as attacks by the Republicans on him. But it isn't like running a middle aged, milquetoast, centrist, white woman worked last time. Sara Gideon lost. She's not the Senator. So I don't know that running a 70+ year old centrist, milquetoast white woman would work either. The polling certainly seems to indicate it won't.

One angle is just that, that the party rank and file are out of patience with the national party for setting them up with losers. And that is Platner's potential weakness - do the folks excited about Platner (and a lot clearly are) represent a winning voting coalition in the state or just themselves as the activist/progressive wing?

15 minutes ago, Motown Bombers said:

She wasn’t getting the outside funding like Platner. She actually got more donations from Mainers. It does cost a fortune in Maine actually because republicans are going to drop $50-60 million into the race. It’s probably going to be one of the more expensive races in the countries because Collins is the most vulnerable republican. 

Once you get to a certain point, all more money gets you is more TV, but TV has a too many competitors today to be the whole game, so in this era the money effect goes flatline at a certain point. Musk has found that out in a few races he dropped big $$$ into.

2 minutes ago, Motown Bombers said:

Maine is an old population that elects old people. Not sure what to tell you. There’s no evidence they prefer younger candidates judging by their federal delegation and governor. 

so... then if they love old candidates what was wrong with Mills that no-one was stepping up to support her financially? It doesn't take a fortune to run in Maine. A candidate that was attracting support and had a functional internet fund-raising link should not have had to drop out for lack of funds. Candidates in the last few cycles have proved over and over again that you don't the party to raise money if you are attracting supporters - and Mills supposedly had Schumer's support - so why was she broke?

That's actually the part in this that to me doesn't add up. If Mills was the establishment/party candidate, how is she broke? Did the party and establishment donors cut her off? If so, why? Did they already sense she was a lost cause?  Is she not really broke but using that as an excuse to get out of a campaign she decided she didn't want to be in? Pretty odd all the way around.

3 hours ago, Motown Bombers said:

Maine just elected 80 year old Angus King

that may be for a lot of reasons, but I would argue that the idea that older adults like old candidates because they are old, which seems to have been what you were arguing, is false or at least pretty weakly true. If anything older adults have the same skepticism about an old candidate as anyone else would, and look for the same kinds of evidence pro or con about a candidate's capacity as anyone else, and may actually have a sharper eye for recognition of signs of deficits. 

47 minutes ago, Motown Bombers said:

Not buying the age thing at all. Maine is an old state. They elected Angus King. They support Bernie Sanders. This is the same issue that Republicans face. Only the extreme partisans vote in primaries. 

the fact that you are old doesn’t mean you are OK with old candidates. We know better than anyone else what a bad idea it is. 

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.