gehringer_2

off to a great start.

it's a weird deal. Nobel set it up so most of committees were Swedish, but not for the Peace prize. That committee is chosen the by the Norwegian Parliament. -wiki

Norwegians choose the Peace Prize - the folks that already announced they weren't refueling USN ships.

I use gmail but with a third party mail app (Thunderbird) on my computers so I haven't been affected there, but but the presorting did come through on the iphone mail client and I had to turn it all off there.

yup - the problem in housing is on the supply side. The intention to increase housing starts was a good one, but there was not much 'there' there about how to do it. There has to some relief on code and yes -even ADA req's. US building codes have gotten pretty ridiculous - they have become largely a rent seek for specialty contractors, and it's a big reason it's not profitable to build less expensive housing. Newsom has talked a lot about this in CA, but not too many others.

Do you remember Bill Clinton and the so called 'Sister Souljah' moment during his campaign? Likewise Obama as a candidate waffling on Gay Rights? It seems every Democratic candidate is expected to explicitly disown part of the left wing in order to inoculate themselves with the larger electorate. GOP doesn't seem to have that problem.

TBH, I was unimpressed on the housing rhetoric - sounded like mostly fantasy to me. It was all intention but thin on how to actual do the job.

It is strange that Manfred and MLB are getting such a pass on having two orphan teams, That is such an unprecedented failure. I guess it just means that it's official that no-one really cares about the fan in the stands. As long as there is a TV contract the owners would be happy to play their games in a shoebox. I look for the next generation of stadia to have even fewer seats then this current generation, which had fewer seats than the ballparks they replaced, and the generation after this is like to be just a couple of rings of luxury boxes with AI crowd noise. As per the story above they are planning the ballpark in Vegas with essentially no parking. And did it say the site was 7 acres? A baseball field is 4 before you even get to the stands.

My only joy in this is that Tesla is leading the way down.

for the coaches?

With Biden I don't know if he was done in more by his own policies than by his inability to be out there as an energetic advocate and explainer. He left the stage too open and it was was easy for the opposition to focus on democrats whose priorities are less attractive than Biden's.

If you take this a true, what would still be bizarre is the magnification factor involved. Vietnam was a 1000x more significant issue to American than Gaza, the CRA's impact was objectively seismic compared to anything Biden accomplished. Do we blame information technology that a country amplifies everything out of proportion now?

which is also bizarre since Biden's economy was gangbusters for them all. Greed knows no bounds apparently.

and maybe another aspect of this that back in the day, when the economy got bad, unemployment was a more immediate effect, you were either working or you weren't or at least worried about you job or not. But today we get a lot more underemployment, so administrations come go and GDP waxes and wanes, but maybe your is relatively secure, but it's just a ****ty one so nothing changes for you.

If Trump is still president after 2028, it will not be because they repealed the 22nd amendment, it will be because the Constitution has been abandoned.

this is tough for me to gauge. The fact that Biden objectively had the best economy going in a long time still runs into the fact that that still isn't lifting large swaths of the population the way it used to. It's in large part de-industrialization/de-unionization, it's partly technology, it's just change in general that has shifted the economic landscape in ways no-one on either side paid enough attention to for too long. But the bottom line is that if you had 4 working limbs and an 8th grade education between 1946 and ~1980, you could go get a unionized industrial job somewhere, and bingo - you were in the middle class. So that became the expectation. Maybe that period was just the historical anomaly, though Europe's experience seems to argue it is primarily an American problem. At any rate, it's easy to argue too many Americans don't vote in their best economic interests anymore, but maybe too many Americans can't see the difference when it comes to their day to day lives.

there is, unfortunately, probably too much truth to this.

Hindsight history is one of my pet Peeves. It's an easy cop out for the Dems to blame all the issues on "Reagan Started It" when they've had 20 years of the Presidency since to have done something about the direction things were going. Clinton and his 'New Dems' had bought into the "knowledge and finance future" paradigm as much as any repub ever did. And the concentration of the historical blame game continues to be an intellectual diversion from the effort of figuring out what to do about where we are now. The Dems still don't have any consistent economic message for how to rebuild a private sector middle class economy (Biden had an idea but never articulated it in any effective way) which is what has left the door wide open to a charlatan like Trump to sell his snake oil.

LOL - maybe at some point they will get it. The main reason there are so many undocumented residents in the US all along is that no matter how you decide to try and change that situation, it's going to be very expensive, and no-one has ever really believed the problem is so serious to have appropriated the money to deal with it - from border security to asylum courts, it all takes money and no consensus has ever emerged in Congress that there aren't more important things to spend money on than that. So this is the dog catching the UPS van. They've manufactured a public belief in an immigration 'crises' to whip up the culture warriors and other miscellaneous xenophobes to get elected, but guess what they are finding out? Gonna cost a lot of money - and when it becomes a matter of finding money, suddenly the problem doesn't look any more serious than it really is, which in the overall scheme of budget priorities, isn't very.

a lot of things were disappointing about the Carter admin by the end. The Rose Garden paralysis over Iran really hurt him. Sure it was a crisis but you don't stop everything in a nation of 300 million over what's happening to a couple of hundred. He couldn't figure out how to hit the tone for something being serious without being all consuming. But all that said, without a plan to deal with inflation, Carter loses that election no matter what else he does or doesn't do.

It's like it comes and goes. He was hitting 97 in a previous outing - then poof.

yeah - Back in an era when noblesse oblige was a thing, you could elect the rich guy because he was harder to bribe. The problem is that today's rich guys don't want to serve, they just want to get richer.

I am so past expecting anything from Rubio.

The case you are trying to make if that you care more about whether an idea is right or wrong than whose idea it was. Reagan was right on some very big issues and older Americans in particular remember that. That is what the larger public want to see leaders do. You gain credibility with a voter if show you are willing to act in the public interest instead of only party interest, and you do that by admitting when the other side gets something right.

Reagan fired the controllers for striking against the government. In the time since then, most states where public employee strikes were legal have also moved to make them illegal again. That was historically the norm before the 70' era and that is what is has returned to. The deal when you go to work for the people is that you don't go on strike. I think most people agree with that. And there is solid logic behind it. Public employees doing critical (and mostly monopoly) services have an outsized negotiating leverage which basically makes collective bargaining that is fair to the public side impossible if a strike threat is present.