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There is a desire among right wingers to increase the white birthrate substantially, not only to overcome the population decline that will come with expelling practically all immigrants of color (and, bonus, their American citizen children), but also to attack women's advances in education and employment, doing all they can to force women to stay home and pump out three, four, five, or more babies—just like when America was "great". I know many people here think the confabulating right wing elites we see tweeting fire and brimstone all the time are stupid and ignorant and couldn't plan or strategize their way out of a paper bag, but I do believe they understand that by degrading the educational system, they can create a system in which far, far fewer students move on to college, and far, far more high school graduates (and, just as importantly, dropouts) can make up for the loss of immigrants populating the manual labor jobs. A less-educated workforce is a more blue collar workforce, and the more less-educated people the right wing elites can engineer, the better they can fill those lowest-paying of jobs with American citizens. Couple that with killing off unions for good and repealing labor and minimum wage laws, and we can get back to a country in which something like 88% of the men, women, and children who make up the labor force are manual, industrial, agricultural, domestic, or otherwise unskilled, and the remaining 12%—the educated professional and business class, which the right wing elite brainiacs assume will include themselves—can live very, very well off their backs. You know—Make America Great Again. It'll take time, maybe a couple or three decades, to see the fruit of their efforts, but if they can drive Democrats and other liberals entirely out of the body politic, as they will also seek to do by any means possible, they stand a good chance of achieving this version of the American Dream, at least in part.

President Vance will make it four.

And the moral is, don't run a woman candidate for president. After all, Jill Stein hasn't won yet, has she?

For this to happen, Trump would have to feel he is more powerful than Elon.

Any insights into what people who actually live there are saying about all this?

lol "right now" EDIT: kudos to @pfife for getting there first.

The problem I can see with this idea is that the red hat faithful believe Elon Musk is a hero. Why? because the RWM is telling them that. How do I know this? From listening to just three minutes of RW radio while driving through the south in late October. That's all it took for me to fear the election was lost.

I'm not sure they understand it will lead to inflation, or even that it's a possibility. I think a high percentage of MAGA politicians, like their constituents, are completely drowning in the kool-aid when it comes to Trump and the economy. They truly, honestly believe wages will skyrocket, prices will plummet, immigrants will disappear, all that,, the day Trump takes office. And when none of that happens, they'll blame the Democrats, the deep state, the media, academia, and who knows, maybe a few new enemies they will identify, like everyday people who would never vote for Trump.

That's a fracking good idea.

This was laugh-out-loud funny. Thanks.

It’s fair to put the onus on Bears players only if they have a lot of potential they are not living up to, and they’re being coached up to at least an acceptable level. If they are doing the best they can but they simply are not NFL material, that’s on the front office.

Better make that movie in a hurry, ‘cause Ryan Gosling is 44.

Definitely one of the fifteen greatest players in modern baseball history, and he doesn’t get talked about in those exact terms enough. I think too many people get caught up in his whole refers-to-himself-in-the-third-person thing, which might take a bit of the shine off his star for them, but really, you could count the number of players who were as complete as he was on the fingers of one hand.

OK, I’ll give you the laugh on that instead of the confused look, because I know where you’re coming from, and how that’s not actually true.

That’s what they want you to think. No, seriously. Get you looking the other way. Yeah, that’s a thing.

Never mind—I’ll step back in here because you’re going to sidestep this and complain about gotchaism and all that anyway. If you believe that abortion is murder, and you also believe there should be the death penalty for murder, then by the transitive property, you believe that women who are convicted of getting abortions should receive the death penalty. Tell me what this logic is missing, please.

Isn’t it?

I would think stoning the woman to death would be far more biblical. But yeah, I think you’re in the ballpark.

Thanks for the offer. I’ll let the legal firm of Howard, Fine & Howard do the talking for me.

I wonder whether one strategy the administration has will be to indict Democratic congressional reps from red states on … ahem … trumped-up charges that will lead to their removal and open the door to governors in those red states to appoint Republican successors to those seats, thus widening the R majority by—what I am sure they will claim with a straight face—democratic means. I don’t worry about giving them any ideas with this post—the Miller-Bannon strategy coalition has already at least spitballed this idea, I’m sure.

The first few months will be the key. They will definitely overreach and try to cause as much damage to hurt as many people as they can manage to get away with. If the pushback is too great and they fold quickly, then I might agree with you. If they ignore any pushback and plow forward to go against even the wishes of the red hat base, then it will be Katie bar the door.

It’s all grins and giggles until someone gets executed by firing squad for killing a baby.

Totally agree you didn’t imply he was cheap. Speaking only for myself, I don’t want another owner who spends with his heart and would throw his money (and bunches of years!) at the likes of Pete Alonso and Nick Pivetta—decent players, but overrated for what someone else will eventually pay them.

You are replying to the wrong guy. I was not commenting on the divorce statement, or even speculating whether Ilitch will sell. I was simply responding to the idea that a sale and a new owner will de facto be a much better situation, and even that it will be a specific guy. It’s within the realm of possibility that both those condition would come to pass, but I don’t take on faith either of those ideas being certain.

I’d been assured repeatedly that the problem was that today’s pitchers are pussies. Seriously, we have talked about all this here. I had thought years ago the problem was pitcher torquing their elbows in unnatural ways to get maximum spin, as well as expending maximum effort on every pitch. The smarty-pants at the analytical websites were putting the entire blame on increased velocity for a while. Turns out it was all of it, doesn’t it? What I hadn’t considered enough was how kids throw a bazillion pitches at their own version of max effort throughout their preteens and teens in a bid to advance as far as possible, increasing the possibility of injuring their still immature arms; and what I hadn’t considered at all was how the way pitchers train during the offseason to work on stuff, and then come in ill-prepared for spring training, contribute to injuries in March. That was a new idea for me. I found this graphic to be really interesting: I had never considered injury by time of year. It is super high in spring training, when pitchers are still cold vis a vis game-condition throwing, leading to way more injuries, probably especially to guys who want to impress and are fighting for big-league jobs in the first place, so this makes sense. A lot of attrition in spring, and then it dissipates once they get to April, probably because all the vulnerable guys got exposed right away, and plus now that the remaining pitchers made the team for sure, they can lay up a little. Plus it’s April, it’s cold, the games might even be perceived as mattering a little less, so maybe pitchers take it a little easier in April than in spring, or in later months. But take a look at the August bump, and then September drop. My initial take is how pitchers move from bad teams to contenders, so in an attempt to prove themselves and win games that are more important practically single-handedly, they amp the effort up, which lead to more injuries; and then, in September, pitchers start laying up on effort as either their team already makes the playoffs and they consciously save themselves for October, or else their team falls out of contention early and so what’s the point of going max effort anymore? I would love to see this data broken out by pitchers on teams whose fates are decided early, versus those teams who have to fight all the way to October 1 for a playoff spot. But by far the most interesting revelation to me is how restricting workloads could be leading to more injuries, as even starting pitchers have switched their training regimen from endurance-based in a bid to get 24 or 27 outs, to short-burst strength training to max out effort because you know you’re only getting either 15 outs or 18 batters anyway. Even the idea of pitchers getting injured less after the implementation of the pitch timer is interesting, the suggestion being that pre-pitch timer, pitchers could take as much time as they wanted to gather strength to pitch another max-effort pitch, whereas now they are forced to pitch less than max effort because they have fewer seconds to recover before they are compelled to throw. What a fascinating concept. So really, a lion’s share of the reason pitchers get injured appears to have to do with the incentives they’re chasing, and their approach to pitching given the particular set of circumstances they’re experiencing at the given moment. This must be by far the best research study on the subject that’s ever been released. The $64 question, then, is: what now?