gehringer_2

The marker would be to see couple of elected official change parties. Instead of fighting back they are just resigning. The gap is too wide now, this aint Don Riegle's party politics.

For Biden to lose you have to posit that upwards 5-10 million Biden voters who were anti-Trump enough to come out in 2020 don't care enough to vote this time, despite Trump post 1/6/2021 having shown himself a much bigger threat than anyone imagined even on Nov 2, 2020, plus Dobbs in the meanwhile, plus 8 yrs of population roll-over toward Millennials/GenZ. Pretty hard to square all that with what the polls say.

Another question I would be south FLA. The Cuban vote has been one of the most conservative segments of the Hispanic voting public, but they have also been the most staunchly pro-democracy/anti-dictator. Does Trump playing poodle to Putin drive Miami's Hispanic vote toward blue?

There is one other aspect to this which is a little odd to me, and that is that Democratic Party leaders apparently don't believe the public polling either. They either have their own internal polling that contradicts it or maybe they are all just happy to whistle past the graveyard (always a possibility) but if a large swath of the party believed these polls I believe the grumbling about Biden would not just be grumbling at this point, it should have reached a cacophony. So there is mismatch there also.

If the GOP refugees would wake up and realize that having now been pretty formally excommunicated it's really time to stop gnawing the cold bones of old dead plots to 'regain' their party and accede to joining the opposition. You'd think that, but it's still not happening.

The non-crazy part of American Christianity is very conflicted about pushing back publicly against their political brethren even as they have more and more come to realize they need to be challenged. It's a fine line to walk without simply becoming their mirror image in apostasy. Puts me in mind of the kinds of things Gandalf and Galadriel said when refusing the ring. Once you cross line from humility to claiming moral authority in the name of a greater power you put yourselves in peril of losing the way back.

A movement takes money and bodies. The money and the bodies don't need to be the same people!

I don't know how you get any sane person to coach NCAA basketball since 'one-and-done" came into being. There has been talk that supposedly, OAD was going to end under the next NBA CBA. Will that actually happen? Does it even matter if the whole NCAA amateur system is ending? Who knows!?

It's all about control for the tribe. If you used to be a majority and are becoming a minority, majority rule suddenly doesn't seem like a such winning proposition any more. Lubricate that with the money of the capitalist class who doesn't really care about good government one way or the other but knows that the broader the level of participation of the public in government, the more constrained they are going to end up by regulation in the public interest that crimps their profits. So you have a malcontented class and a source of funds to drive the movement - so here we are.

Yeah, I don’t know how much the U cares about bball. Remember how long the program languished under Tommy “I don’t work overtime” Ammaker and Ellerbe? Juwan has given them enough reasons to move on, but my guess is that he’ll wear out his welcome on the behavior side before he does on the record side.

yours is a common view, that often leads people to stay home, but the logic of that still escapes me. There is always a difference between the candidates. If you can't find some difference and push the process at least incrementally in the direction you prefer, all you have done is take yourself out of the process. There is no such thing as a meaningful abstention in our process, no one cares about the principles of your stance. If you don't vote, all you do is guarantee that no one in the process will ever care what you think.

LOL - the SO just added Cadillac Mtn to the agenda for this summer's road trip. I told her NBD - if we continue on to the Canada maritimes we can see it earlier than that.

It's seared into your memory because Nick Punto had more career PA against the Tigers than any other team.

good adjective for a dancer maybe.

To finish the little digression here, I will say that what Hayak argued in 'Road to Serfdom' is correct on one level, you will ruin an economy and polity if government 'control' of the economy reaches too high a level, when too many economic decisions are colored by political or even corrupt and otherwise non-economic factors. What Hayak was wrong about was his measurement model. His model was that government control of the economy was equal to the government's share of spending in GDP. That is another example of a plausible but flawed model leading to flawed ideology. What Hayak missed was that in the modern welfare state, the majority of government spending is transfer payments, and transfer payments are fundamentally different than other forms of spending. When the government buys jets for the Air Force, that is spending where all the decisions are driven at the political level. If the government owns the car company, the decision about where to buy steel becomes a political or patronage decision, likewise who to hire or where to put the factory. Too much of that and you do tank the economy and the general level of liberty in society. But in the US over 50% of government spending is transfer payments. In a transfer payment an individual ends up making the decision about how that money is spent and he spends it in a free market. So it's a completely different animal with regard to what Hayak was worried about. Once you take out the transfer payments, the percentage of US (or Euro welfare state) economy 'controlled' by direct political/government decision making falls below the practical concern level for a failing 'socialist' - old school meaning- economy.

True - they were not going undefeated the rest of the way, though losing the next one to the Panthers might have been the better choice standings wise, but not that big a deal.

But to be fair, what Bernie describes as Democratic Socialism is a more limited concept that the broader concept of Socialism as understood say - 75yrs ago. Bernie is interested in redistribution of resources and much greater regulation of private interests. Maybe I've missed it but don't remember him talking much about the public ownership of production resources and nationalization of industries (other than maybe healthcare, which is a very unique 'industry') as was seen in post war England. Many countries, like those in Europe that Bernie cites, do perfectly well with the social welfare aspects of 'Socialism' that Bernie is describing here, but they by and large do not practice socialization of the means of production on the model of post war British coal. It's the latter that inevitably leads to economic malaise more than any expansion of social welfare programs in a regulated capitalist economy. This ambiguity/evolution of the practical meaning of 'socialism' leads to a lot of silly politics. People like Bernie like to give themselves the charisma of wrapping themselves in terminology that makes them seem more chicly radical than they are, while the right wing sells horror stories of the economics of the Soviet Union and pre-Thatcher England that Scandinavians can only laugh at.

They came sort of close to multi-party socialism in England and that didn't even work.

Nice semantic overlap that the original connotation of supporting those who used tanks aligns with the modern idiom of 'being in the tank for.'

I haven't checked it out as I don't have any dead batteries right now to compare, but even if there is something to it it's going to be very inexact. But on the other hand, if you just want to know if a battery that you find in a drawer is worth getting the meter out for maybe.....

I don't know which is worse, his bigotry or his ignorance, but they do run neck and neck.

this is going to depend on the type of battery. An old style carbon-zinc battery will actually stop bouncing as it discharges because the can is dissolving as part of the reaction and so getting softer. But I assume these are alkaline batteries. The effect here is not due to the case because an alkaline battery is wrapped in a steel can that is not part of the reaction. I'd guess what is happening is that as an alkaline battery discharges the electrolyte, which in a fresh battery is pretty well immobilized, eventually turns more liquid and if there is free liquid inside the battery that will suppress the bounce - or the opposite - but affect it one way of the other (just like raw egg won't spin but a hard boiled one will). I'd guess it may still depend on manufacturing details that may vary by manufacturer though..... Guess I'll have to get out the voltmeter and check this out......

After getting 30 games with the DBacks in 22 (mostly at 2B) and not hitting much, Kennedy started out last season with a lot of promise at AAA putting up a 925 OPS though mostly OBP and little power. In August the Diamondbacks called him up for 3B but after he had only 4 hits in 10 games they pulled the plug and sent him off to Oakland, who sent him to AAA but at that point he played only 11 more games and didn't do much. Has played 2B and 3B recently. Compared to Lipcius probably more bat upside.

😢 Another of my AAT's bites the dust. (maybe)

When will they have to re-up Raymond and Seider?