gehringer_2

Climate change is a hard issue because it's invisible and requires people to believe experts and as we see with COVID, as a culture our system for validating publicly accepted truth is totally dysfunctional. But I do think climate is the one thing that could galvanize a new political coalition -- if severe weather continues to intensify everywhere. That is something tangible enough for people to see for themselves so it might be the one thing that finally makes the issue too obvious to ignore.....maybe

Yes- and that perception is a big problem. And I take it back to persuasion. The problem for progs is that they are always too much the 'Brave new Worlders.' Intellectually they are in love with solutions that upend everything, so when they talk about things like climate change they tend to project a vision of the future that is all hair-shirts and birkenstocks instead of how we get to clean energy with the *least* dislocation to our present order of living. That's were you need to be to get the people in the middle. Most people don't want the lives they live upset. And of course the progs are wrong about the way progress works. We will not have less energy when we get to clean energy, anymore than we ended up with less horsepower when we stopped using horses. Progs understand the threat, but most don't really understand technology as a principle.

could be. I've tended to interpret populist movements as what happens when policy politics have lost direction. As what you might call the fall-back position that a party falls into when it doesn't have or know what else to sell. In the 30's and 60' and 80's as I noted above, you had clear understandable policy arguments that interested enough people that it sort of drove populism down to minimalist existence. Plus the periods where clear foreign policy issues dominated. Today, the nation's foreign policy confidence is gone, and (as I have oft argued) domestically no one is presenting a politics that looks like any kind of answer. To too many moderates, the left's program just looks like the kind of warmed over 60's Euro socialism that even Europe had to largely move away from. And we know the right's is still gnawing the bones of failed Reaganism. That becomes the opportunity for petty grievance politics to dominate. And other big overlay is the drift in US Christianity from enlightenment theology back to a more superstitious mind set. This is the movement that supplies the GOP's hard base of support today and its issues are fundamentally non-political - which presents a big problem to political governance.

engineers do chaos theory also my friend.....

but as always, you have to crawl before you can walk. If Progs won't support moderates over conservatives, they will never move the center close enough to where they are to get anything they want. That's just reality. If we had a three party system where a block could swing it's support to a second moderate party they could have more leverage, but unfortunately (or not, YMMV on that) the US system doesn't and never has worked that way. It has *always* been incumbent on the left and right to persuade the middle before they can get what they want. The left did it in the 30's and 60's, with the social net and civil rights, the right did it in the 80's with Reaganomics. That is just how it works. Party Politics is the US can only be done from the inside out. If you can't persuade your own side, you never get an opportunity to persuade anyone else.

Victor was off to a hot start in Venezuelan ball: https://www.freep.com/story/sports/mlb/tigers/2021/12/14/detroit-tigers-winter-leagues-victor-reyes-joe-jimenez/6499707001/

Riley Greene finds your lack of faith disturbing.

well, sure. But us criticizing them here is not going to be the formulation of the Democratic Congressional Campaign effort.....at least I would hope!

Yeah, Dems have to realize politics is not like football. If you score, you might actually get to keep the ball too.

voters don't pay for Senate campaigns, but coal companies do.

cade had 4 pts, Hayes had 1 assist, and they won the game. Go figure.

If you are going to play yourself out of 1/1, might as well be a year when it's not going to cost you a consensus 1/1 QB.

It would take a minor miracle for W Castro to make the team out of ST.

UM students apparently passing around a petition to move the start of classes back two weeks. Not likely happening.

I haven't looked at the schedule but they usually leave a lot of off days for the 1st couple of weeks, so Hill probably makes the team out of ST, then someone gets cut once they need to add a pitcher.

until the windmill builders are ready to donate more to his campaigns than the dying mining co's anyway. Who knows, that day may not be that far off.

Manchin is already too late to anything for the coal industry. Since 2010 38% of WVa mines have closed and production is down 53%. He'd be doing his constituents a lot more good trying to pass BBB and send some of those dollars to his state. Coal is not coming back.

Maybe Manchin figures if the gets enough progs to say bad things about him it will make a party switch before 2024 easier.

Charlie Batch's last stand. 0-9 as a starter than season.

I suppose the rationale is that if the vaccinated carry Omicron asymptomatically and still shed it, they will infect the unvaccinated and they will get sick and the hospitals don't have room for more?

The pylon is on the chalk line, so it is out of bounds, but on the other hand the vertical plane above the sideline has never mattered. As long as your feet got down it doesn't matter how much of your body or the ball is across the sideline plane. So if they changed the rule about contacting the pylon that sounds a good correction.

I'd chalk this one up to the fact that the Lions O Line moved some people but mostly that Murray missed a ton of open throws. But hey, you are supposed to win if the other guy has a bad day.

The catch rule over-ruled the ball in the end zone rule there. It wasn't a catch so it couldn't be a TD regardless of whether the ball was in the end zone.

That is the real brilliance of BOR, that with the singular exception of the 2A, the statements are all conceptual instead of concrete, which has allowed the document to remain relevant despite the evolution of society into something beyond the imagination of bunch 18th anti-monarchists. The real problem is in the 1st two articles and the history of state additions, which has created a structure that has become non-democratic.

Damn! 66 Impala SS in blue was my first car. Not the rag top - but other wise identical.