gehringer_2

Here in the People's Republic of Ann Arbor, we just voted to allow the City to start up it's own electric utility. Talk about daylight madness. Granted DTE has done a ****ty job of line maintenance here for about 20 yrs - they basically stopped tree trimming hoping people would start paying them for it. Well they didn't particularly care to, and the power outages in town are probably the #2 civil complaint after the potholes. So in the last couple of years, after the "public power" political drumbeat started, DTE has upped line replacement and maintenance in a big way, but the it was too late to salvage their reputation in town and the public utility initiative sailed through in the election. Now of course it's the City that is already responsible for the roads, (that #1 complaint) which they can't figure out how to maintain, so doesn't it make perfect sense to give them charge of something infinitely more complex to do than paving roads and filling holes? Sure it does.....

No, but his buddy RFKj may be the worst pick in the world to try and end it.

Yup. You can have all the stuff in the world, but you have to have command. His walk rates last year were too high. Certainly something everyone assumes will fall into line, but he hasn't proven it yet.

It comes down where you put resources to get the best return. As long as there are owners out there willing to rack up deferred liability out to 2050, a team like Detroit will probably remain better able to use its resources more effectively on scouting and development and rehab recovery. I don't see trying to 'outstupid' the orgs that have income to burn as a likely route to more winning. No - I don't care about the money per se, but the team won't operate at a loss, so big non-productive contracts do affect what else they can spend on, Ilitch's personal wealth not-withstanding.

One interpretation of Cleveland is that he believed it was the government that was the primary culprit in mal-distribution of wealth because of a highly regressive regulatory and tax-system (largely tariffs in the pre-income tax days). So he might have a foot in both the left (anti-wealth disparity) and right (anti-government 'interference') in today's paradigms. Some of the leaders around the turn of century were pretty economically radical. Hayes apparently favored nearly total inheritance taxes. With money running US politics today, no leader today can be as patently anti-rich as some of those guys were. There are certain steps that a system may take that turn out to be irreversible, and it appear to me that Citizen's United was one of those. We've politically empowered monied interests to the point where they can stop the political process from ever controlling them again. If the US fails to repair its broken politics and thus ultimately fails - and right now I see little prospect of that repair, CU will be the root cause.

Always good advice, even if it came from a lapsed Anglican.

Wasn't it poor line maintenance by AEP that brought us the great 2003 black-out?

This is why I never got my panties in any kind of bunch over the supposed influence DEI at schools like UM on the larger culture. All this stuff rolls mostly right off the kids' backs. It's millennial - and older - faculty that were the most charged up. The bulk of students just saw it as extra work and a distraction, and I'd guess for every student that got "proselytized" by it, one other was driven to become more conservative/reactionary. Personally I never saw anything particularly onerous in anything I was asked to participate in, my larger concern was always the return on investment on the resourced devoted to it. Interestingly, from what I've been reading, the research on diversity program effectiveness done by business says stop talking about who is right and wrong or oppressed and oppressor and just spend the time educating people on how to have their antennae up and be more inoffensive - you play on people's natural predisposition to self-improvement. And given that young people today tend to be deficient in sophisticated social skills today anyway, I can get behind that. Also apparently, simply dropping the 'E' seems to make a difference in how people respond. Folks seem to be OK with "Diversity" and "Inclusion" but "Equity" immediately makes them think their own jobs are at risk. One analyst I heard discuss this said "Equity" is a problematic term because people don't parse the difference between "equity" and "equality" very well.

that didn't age well.

Tim Allen is less funny as .... almost anyone.

It is a hard group to predict. On the positional side, they've shown they can do some things, but not that they can do them consistently over 162. A couple of guys swinging better or worse will create a big swing. On the pitching side, Cobb is not an exciting pickup, Skubal is the one guy on the team that can't be any better than he was last season, and the rest of the arms are either untested and/or promising but recovering from injury. Which is why I'm anxious to see another front of the rotation guy signed.

good thing the football game is about to start. Wings give up 2 goals in the 1st 2 minutes of the 2nd. 3-0 TB

Bingo

And Thompson can't sink a trey with no-one within 20 ft of him. /.sigh./. It's ironic for all the talk there has been in the past about Cade and Ivey not being optimal on the same team, Ivey is the slasher with the speed to make teams pay for bringing their D up court.

what the heck was JB doing there - you needed your guys on the court more than you needed the TO, then THJ can't make FTs.

that was pretty bad. You hate to say the fix is in, but the fix is in.

Most recent thing I have seen was from last month - he's supposedly started running. A "fighting chance" to be ready. (?) https://www.foxsports.com/mlb/javier-baez-player

Yes - you are correct. Truman has served more than half of FDR's term but I forgot the amendment didn't apply to till the Presidency after him. Apparently his prospects for re-election in '52 were pretty bad anyway, but that just goes to the point about most presidents not sustaining their popularity.

Flaherty is the guy that would make my off-season. Hinch and the kiddy corps will find ways to score runs with or without Bregman, but while the Tigs have a lot of arms, they need another one that's bone fide top line, and Jack should be it.

I rather doubt all the people who have been chronically politically unhappy since about 2012 are going to get much happier under Trump. If the GOP doesn't hold in 2028 (and it's hard to imagine Trump giving Vance any air of his own) we will be on track to have 4 consecutive elections where a party either fails to re-elect an incumbent or hold the office. And actually Clinton, Bush and Obama were more the outliers serving two terms three times in a row - 4 of 5 if you count back to Reagan.) Other than the early stretch from Washington to Jackson there have been a lot of one term Presidencies. And I think this is the first presidency that has ever started out as lame duck on day one. I suppose you can say Truman was an immediate lame duck after his 1st election, but he had already served 3/4 of a term before he stood. Trump obviously is a past Prez, but with the 4 years out it's not/won't be the same admin at all. So we have no history as to how that plays.

If you look up the idiom "legend in his own mind" you will find a picture of Cade.

His term is going to be determined in large part by whether Powell and Fed's actions over the last 30 months was enough to stop inflation, or if they missed just enough that they are going to have to do another dose of contraction. If it's the latter, Trump is probably doomed before he starts, and there is really nothing that can be done to unbake the current economic pie. If he pressures the Fed to cut short interest rates more, inflation can only get worse than it would have. If the Fed starts raising again, in the public view he will have failed before he started. Tariffs will be both inflationary and recessionary, so there is almost no way to win with that tool. Tax cuts that increase the deficit would be easy to campaign against with the cost of government borrowing going up. Now if we are lucky and the Fed has actually hit it right, and the CPI holding pattern of the last couple of months is just a blip on a longer downward trend, then none of the above may have to happen. But no-one knows with any certainty which is the case. DJT has led a pretty charmed life to far - I'm sure he believes his luck will hold.

and to finish the thought. I would posit that this almost certainly driven by increasing social isolation. People who must work hard to get by but do it in a socially cohesive and supportive environment could take a lot of emotional reinforcement from their experience. most of which is missing for most of them today.

approve/disapprove has become pretty useless because as you note, it's meaning to someone being surveyed has shifted from being a euphemism for "would you vote for this person" used to soften/evade the direct question, to "are you happy with things". Those are two significantly different questions. The malleability/transformation of language is a problem for pollsters. The very much want to be able to keep asking the exact same question over time in order to provide anchor points for use in adjusting samples, but whether the pollsters like it or not, language use does change. And worse than that, the whole emotional state of the population changes. Americans are more discontent for less reason than they used to be. That's not to say a lot of people don't still have it hard, but the degree to which people are willing to accept/expect life being hard has fallen - a lot.

29 years since Ozzy got one for the Wings. Ozzy had a goal and two assists in '95-'96, but not in the same game!