gehringer_2

they did mess around a long time with Cade. I sort of thought when they announced surgery for him it was going to transpire that the diagnosis had changed to 'compartment syndrome' for which surgery is more common, and which is not always easy to tell apart - but the team press releases continued to say stress fractures. Maybe it was just healing too slow for their liking because it's more common to just leave that alone to heal by itself - esp since he wasn't going to be try and come back until next season anyway. Or maybe in folks that tall it needs more stabilization....

this kind of jujitsu is like taking candy from a baby with the GOP House because the Freedom Caucus is full of people who clearly never did their homework in school, and still don't today. Besides, reading stuff is 'woke'.

Disagree. While actually making cuts to entitlements is *general* election suicide, *talking* about them to the RW base is primary and RW fundraising gold and red meat for his legislative right flank. Thus McCarthy is doing everything he can to signal to the Freedom Caucus that entitlement cuts are at the top of his agenda, while I'm sure he has no real intention of ever seeing any happen on his watch. All of which could blow up in his face, but that's the tightrope he's decided he wants to walk.

LOL - Here is real context: Biden is the President. He had a Dem Congress for two years - how many SS/medicare/medicaid cuts did he propose? Can you count to zero? 'nuf said.

Not exactly - IIRC, Cade's stress fracture was in the TIbia. The Tibia bears 85-90% of your weight. Riley's injury is reportedly to the Fibula, relatively low weight bearing (5-15%). So treatment/rehab may be easier. But it depends a lot on how long he has been trying to work/play through it and possibly making it worse.

IOW, another sociopath, making his own way at anyone else's expense.

c'mon Archie. In his 'victory' speech to his caucus after the vote he was crowing about the next step being to come back with another pass at social welfare benefits cuts/work requirements etc. That's exactly what he's talking about. Taking Biden out of context from years ago is just silliness. Those 'freezes', when offered, were a strategy to prevent cuts from occuring in social benefits *only*. Mostly by tying in defense and welfare spending together, the objective was to prevent defense supporting budget cutters from protecting it at the relative detriment of social welfare spending. The technique largely worked because it exposed that even the most ardent GOP bugget cutters had their own sacred cows they wouldn't sacrifice and thus there has never been a 'freeze' of more than a year here or there.

At least with it being FIb instead of Tib there will be less need for him to be competely off his feet.

yeah - you could be 100% capable in every ordinary aspect of your life and still feel like you are drowning everytime you step in the batter's box for batting practice and can't see or get around on anything, which is one possiblity of where Austin is.

Hard to know - the flip side would be that stress fractures usually take time get to where they hurt enough to make you wince so there is at least some likelihood he's been nursing this privately for a bit. But if they really are catching this at the 1st sign of discomfort, he should be at the short end of the recovery time range.

IDK - I might rather have one or two guys completely outclassing their MiLB competition than have 8 guys batting 280 there because probably none of those 8 guys will ever make an impact in the Majors but that one guy might.

On the 1st throw you note, if the receiver had been Baez, Akil would have had the assist. He has been making some better throws recently.

to add to this, I came across the story on May 24th in the Athletic - Stavenhagen confirms Meadows is in the clubhouse everyday with his mates, puts on his uniform and works out - just doesn't play. So no doubt you (and I) have see him in the dugout. https://theathletic.com/4545548/2023/05/24/the-tigers-are-providing-more-mental-health-resources-but-important-questions-remain/

I'm just saying, while the Dems have exceeded their expectation on turnouts, they have to remember that when Trump was on the ballot the GOP did too. Much like the midterm paradigm is conventional wisdom, it's also political standard wisdom that once you have to govern, you going to make some people who voted for you mad by something you did and thus you are going to lose them the 2nd time around -- e.g Obama got a few million fewer votes in '12 than '08. I hope very much that it is even more true that people that voted for Trump in 2020 have soured on him since, but I have no proof they have. I will say people have been posted bits from Fox where they seem to be giving the GOP a little more push back. If there is actually any trend there it could be significant.

Yeah - Tibia was the inital story. Of course when you have beat reporters who remain sports medicine illiterate enough that they don't even have a clear idea of what TJ surgery is after covering baseball for years, what do you expect?

oh - hell yes. If correct this time that is hugely good news.

Agreed there. It's funny - I'm pretty sure there was a copy of the 10 commandments on one of the hallway walls in my elementary school, (talking 60+ yrs ago) and I'm sure we sang Christmas Carols in music classes, so the Judeo Christian culture was imposing itself everywhere, yet it was a completely passive thing - it was simply a matter of its ubiquity. And despite that cultural immersion it was in a sense completely unrecognized, and our schools actually were scrupulously secular in all educational aspects and everyone was happy to have it that way. Certainly the English history of sectarian strife between Catholicism and Protestantism meant the US inherited a strong stance of religious tolerance to the point of adding it the Constitution, - but I'd argue it was on one level only theoretical. And I say that because it was a tolerance that always assumed a more global acceptance of Christian dominance. While there were certainly some free thinkers among the Founders, to most people in America 'Freedom of Religion' never actually meant more than freedom from Christian sectarian coercion and maybe a stronger rejection of anti-semitism than Europe usually mustered. They had no real imagination of the implications of the concept beyond that. I don't believe the idea of rejecting the dominant Western religous paradigm altogether was ever a serious part of the consciousness in pre 20th Century American. The idea on the part of the Christian religious that they would ever be in a defensive posture wrt the larger society never crossed anyone's mind, and the result was a certain kind of tolerance born of knowledge that the dominant culture could be "magnanamous" because it knew its position was so fundamentally secure. Fast forward to today and in the face of actually losing that cultual hegemon, the sectors of the Christain church that have forgotten that they were charged to be 'in this world but not of this world" don't like that new reality very much and are perfectly happy to fight back politically even if it means ignoring once fundamental US civic principles like separation of Church and State.

Stops are good.

I'm not following where you are going? Are you posing the scenario that athiests would complain if school students did a play that was overtly proselytizing or am I missing your meaning? A play which simply depicted/referenced the Crucification of Jesus as a historical event could go a hundred different ways so that seems too general a concept to pin down who might be mad about what.

Not necessarily new. I've seen him in the duguout on occasion since he's been on the DL. But sure, a better sign that he is with the team than not.

don't see this at all unless a much much stronger candidate arises. That person is not on the scene yet. I can't see Dems crossing over in primaries for Trump unless there is someone out there with a bigger potential to win the general than Trump and we are a long way from that so far. If anything Dems would cross over for any moderate that might be on a state ballot just to thwart Trump and hedge their bets against a Dem general loss - assuming they have nothing interesting on their side of the ballot.

wasn't losing control of either chamber still important under the current conditions with a renegade SCOTUS and the House GOP party being outright crazy?. You are exactly right, the conventional thing happened, but that's also my point, if the conventional thing happens in 2024 for Dem turnout, Trump could win easily. I'm not predicting disaster, but damn - nobody can afford to get one bit complacent because TFG has a path back as wide as Broadway if they do.

Yeah, Bernie can be a major putz, but OTOH, he has the secure knowledge no-one is actually going to need his vote. Would he be there if his vote was going to matter? IDK, but I agree his position here is pretty callow.

And just as an evidentiary note, if the 81 million that voted for Biden had still been energized in 2022, McCarthy would still be minority leader.

It not about changing minds as much as turnout. What is easy to lose track of is that Trump got 8 million more votes in his *loss* in 2020 than in his 2016 win *after* his demonstably feckless presidential performance. He got more votes than the dems cast to elect Obama either time. So Trump has proven he can outpoll a 'normal' Democratic winning vote. It took a turnout not seen in my lifetime for Biden to get to 80 million votes. I'd love to be sanguine that those people all stay energized as they were 4 yrs ago, and that Trump has burned enough bridges since Nov 2020 election to have tarnished the allure that got him 74 million votes, but I can't say I have any particular reason to believe either. And I worry about the Dem side voter's tendency toward "we already fixed that problem" thinking.