gehringer_2

It might not be interesting, but from a functional standpoint, the draft could probably start going deeper with the NBA having developed a more formalized minor league system. The comparison to football shows the two round draft was originally apt. Before the g-league, neither sport had a minor system and football drafted 6 rounds into a 53 man roster, while basketball drafted two rounds into a 15 man roster. That's pretty comparable. If it got/gets to where to each NBA team carried another 15 players assigned to the G league, doubling the draft to 4 rounds would follow - roughly.

That's why the public's fascination with 'new faces' is so destructive to good leadership. Talk is cheap, anyone can say anything. But your record, what you actually did, can't be waived away with 30 seconds of appealing rhetoric. If there were one thing I wish America would stop doing so much of it's *listening* to politicians. Stop listening at look at their records. That's the only thing close to truth you will get access to.

If Christie had actually been as governor the person he projects himself as now, he'd be more appealing. But with any politician I'm far more interested in 'what did you/have done' than 'what can you say that sounds good'. He did not cover himself in glory as the Gov of NJ and his rejection of Trump only after being rebuffed in his efforts to join the circle don't combine to paint a person who *acts* with nearly the level of principle he talks. That said, when it comes to the GOP the one eyed man may still be king in the land of the blind.

If Cade Cunningham weren't Cade Cunningham, Monty would have put Killian back in the game and tried to recapture the flow the offense had that went straight down the tubes when Cade came back in. It's terrible to watch a team double Cade all the way out to the time line and the Pistons don't have the movement, passing, or shooting to pick up the easy buckets that should be making available.

Pistons fold like a cheap suit. Still so far away.

Pistons build a 10 pt lead late with Sasser and Hayes, Cade comes back in and turns it over 3 times.

Of course how much of that was because the reporter exercised editorial selection on what he was willing to put on the airwaves in that era, you will never know at this point.

interesting idea. He did not pitch as well in the second half of the season as he did in the first.

and of course we don't know what he was asking the Tigers for to stay, which has to be weighed against how much the Tiger FO believes (rightly or wrongly) he may have damaged his marketability with his 'eccentricities'. I don't think you can generalize with much certainty, but to do ahead and do it anyway ;), I think teams don't suffer any more overall by being too willing to let guys walk vs being too willing to overpay.

I agree with a lot of your post but one complicating factor for religious American Muslims that I would add is that Democratic liberalism on sex and gender doesn't play any better with religiously conservative Muslims than it does with religiously conservative Christians.

this happened on Oct22 last year. Hu was seen at Zemin's funeral afterwards. from WIKIp:

LOL - "True Democracy is not the way to run a country" Ron should watch his step. The Athenians made Socrates drink hemlock, probably not the least for espousing that view.

It's the NFL, there are no perfect teams, and even if there were, by week six or so they'd have enough injuries not be perfect anymore. If the outcome of games wasn't in doubt, it wouldn't be sport.

There is a deeper point about the abortion arg as well. It keeps working because it's the signifier for the broader critique that despite their rhetoric about guns and 'free' enterprise, the GOP is fundamentally not a party of personal freedom anymore. That's why the abortion issue rhetoric keeps working. It's today's shorthand for the whole debate around the elevation of religion over an open political process. Call it the left's dog whistle to avoid talking about religion directly. OTOH, the flip side of the abortion issue is that I fear it's going to drive more true believers/evangelicals more firmly to acceptance of fascist politics in the US: So for a couple of generations, US anti-abortion forces could sustain both a belief in democracy and in the righteousness of their cause because it was the evil un-elected SCOTUS that had thwarted justice and once that was finally fixed through a democratic process, all would be well. Well guess what, they got their SCOTUS that gutted RvW and surprise, the democratic process is now rejecting their righteous cause at the ballot box all around the country. The only available conclusion is that democracy itself is a failed construct because it does not conform to the will of their god. This won't be a comfortable outcome for US politics, not that one was ever possible anyway.

Agree. Or maybe put it that FP matters to US voters only in direct proportion to how many US boots are in harm's way somewhere.

LOL I just try to avoid looking at the NBA draft lists from the last 10yrs. 😭 Well, who knows, maybe Thompson, Duren and Cunningham will finally be the core that pans out.

TBH, I'm stuck by how little energy this conflict is generating here. Oh, there is plenty enough to feed the cable news cycle, and plenty of Arab and Jewish PR/agitprop money sloshing around to make sure there is grist for the media mill, but we should realize by now that magnification by social media and the national news media really bears little true correlation to underlying public energy around the issue. I'd guess in general Americans are burned out on the ME. We just expect horrible things to happen there. It's the nature of America that every conflict around world has its partisans on both sides living here, but it's easy for the noise they make to obscure the wider apathy.

I believe they hate Harbaugh for two sets of reasons. For some it's because he can be a real jerk. He's calmed down a lot but in his first couple of seasons he seemed to go out of his way to insult people - particularly other coaches like Day. People don't forget that so some of this is just his own Karma come home to roost. But the other is that he is way too much a players' advocate for most of them to take. Whether he sees the consequences or not, JH has been pushing for player rights, player mobility and player participation in the profits from the get go, and that scares the heII out of the rest of the NCAA establishment and pretty much makes him personna non grata in the teachers' lounge.

Cade McNamara knew every sign that UM used for two years and he's now playing for a rival B1G team. Every coach knows signs are of strictly transient value. There is so much BS being shoveled here

I think we can go overboard with drawing parallels between Xi and Putin. China is not Russia. China is always going to see how far it can get with pressure and coercion, and cycling between periods of pressure and accommodation can be expected from China - that's not much different from what Reagan's approach to Russia was.

I think polling models are falling apart for a lot of reasons and political pollsters tend to be whistling past the graveyard about it. There was a interesting piece in the Times about phone etiquette and we reached a point of complete inversion. It is now expected that you never answer a cell phone call in real time and compared to earlier generations when a call has so much priority you would answer a it in preference to a live conversation you were in the midst of. And the land line phone is rapidly becoming extinct and cell phone numbers don't localize reliably by area code. Add to the basic problem of the their tool transforming, that the style of use of that tool also completely age dependent, and then finally what I think is the most difficult problem is a basic shift in how American's use language. The pollsters are stuck with an un-resolvable contradiction: They need to keep asking questions with the same wording in order for their previous modeling to apply, but Americans are not using language the same way we used to. A far more flippant and faux negative style of communication has become the norm in the US. An American will respond negatively about almost anything as a first response today, regardless of how seriously they actually hold any kind of formulated negative view - negative has become the default cultural stance, and this is a change from previous generations where the default linguistic stance was generally more positive. I believe this is a significant but largely unrecognized issue in opinion polling.

Ohio just legalized so that problem just got taken care of for the people of Monroe.

did they have to re-configure your venting in tnat?

I think Kenneth Copeland has said, probably not even realizing the the connection, that he started out in life wanting to be a rock musician.

I'm still waiting for someone to tell me how you can pay a collegiate coaching staff an 8 figure salary total and the whole staff is too dense to realize and/or solve the problem if some other team has their signs? My friend would say you can't be serious.