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"Thanks, Trump!" 😝 2. 🍔 McDonald's heats up fast-food price wars Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios McDonald's is launching a new $5 meal deal nationwide as the fast-food price wars heat up, Axios' Kelly Tyko and Nathan Bomey report. Restaurant chains are feeling compelled to put the "value" back into the value meal after years of price hikes have hampered sales, and McDonald's is under particularly acute pressure. 🔮 What they're saying: Neil Saunders, GlobalData managing director, recently told Axios that consumers really want everyday low prices, not limited-time deals and offers. "McDonald's $5 meal is sensible, but it will only be offered for a limited time so it will not resolve perceptions that the chain has become very expensive," Saunders said. Of course they did this because they expect Trump to be president ... 😏

I agree with this except the part about being buyers and sellers. I don't think we can deal Flaherty and then buy around him to compete this year. If we're going to make the playoffs, we need Flaherty in the rotation. Seling our best hitters in Canha and/or Kelly and/or Urshela and/or Foley won't make up the difference for us. I think we're selling, and at minimum, it's Flaherty for a near-major-league-ready stick. The other three guys might get us some decent depth pieces or lotto tickets, although let's see if Harris can pull of a Lorenzen- or Soto-type return.

I don't think Harris is selling Skubal, and I don't want him to, either. A team could use a premier talent to motivate fans to come while rebuilding, and this organization has already squandered too much goodwill during the last eight years to afford shooting themselves in the foot like that.

I’d humbly grant you forgiveness if you were serious instead of unserious. 😉

lol Deborah and Mark. Sounds like Gen Z's grandparents.

You know, if you don't care about supporting the team, there are any number of options at your disposal during this time of rebuilding. You can root for the Lions or Red Wings or U of M or other local teams. If you want to still root for a baseball team and don't want to waste your team on what a team you must think of as losers, you can choose to root for a team that has consistent success, like the Dodgers or Yankees, or who are doing well now, like the Guardians or Orioles or Phillies or Brewers or Mariners. Or, hey: how about the Twins or Nationals or Mets? They are all 8-2 in their last ten games, so they're hot. Maybe you can jump on one of their bandwagons for a while. Point being, if you must root for a team that is winning right now, at this minute, and you either don't understand or don't care about the efforts the team you are posting about here is undertaking to make the organization a winner—or, more likely, if you think the team organization is overrun with bad actors trying to undermine it at every turn so they can laugh at you for following them in the first place—then the Tigers probably aren't the team for you. Either way, even though there is a lot going on with this team that can be fairly criticized, the relentless, childish, and unserious negativity is just soul-crushingly boring. You can obviously stay here and post as much as you like, but if this is what we're going to continue to see from you, then I don't know who around here is going to take you seriously. Word to the wise.

Looks like they couldn't figure out how to thread the immunity-only-for-Trump needle effectively enough after all.

Right. Too bad we don't have any of those guys to sell.

This might be one of those situations in which MAGA put their heads so far up their own asses that they are now starting to believe those things they say that they absolutely knew were lies when they started saying them. It might be as simple as, keep telling yourself the same thing over and over and you will come to believe it.

I'm not giving up on Harris yet, and I'm not even willing to admit that he is a failure this year. Thee reasons: (1) it's still only June 20, for cry eye; (2) he's been on the job basically less than a season and a half so I don't believe he can be judged and dismissed on that basis; and (3) The rot was deep and it was always going to take a long time to clean it out, and I too thought we were closer than we are even with Avila's guys on the team, but now realize just how bad it all was and how behind the eight ball we were put. That said, politically speaking, they might have to address the terrible offense perhaps even before the All-Star break, if for no other reason than to keep the torches and pitchforks at bay.

It’s a week until the day of the schedule debate and I still don’t believe Trump is going to show up. The question I have is, how does he pulls out of it? They might complain that the basic rules are unfair to them despite having agreed to them before; or that the debates being moderated by CNN unfairly prejudices voters; or they might demand that Biden agree to two more debates under Trump rules or else. I’m sure there are other possibilities I haven’t thought of. But I would still be surprised to see the debate go on as scheduled, because unless Biden has a stroke or an otherwise cognitive episode onstage, I don’t see how Trump benefits from it.

No official insider trading yet …

Great point on the nationalization of issues due to the collapse of local media. I hadn’t contemplated that before, but it makes total sense. And that provides them a nifty license to steal, too, because they are not running or being elected on any state-level issue, so they don’t have to address them as state elected officials. All their constituency requires is that the elected officials publicly breathe fire on nationalized cultural issues, which will make everyone’s endorphins rush, while the politicians fix public policy and raid the state treasuries to directly feather their own nests, which their constituency will ignore because policy stuff makes their eyes glaze over.

I have my money on punt.

The only two outcomes I can envision are (1) punt the decision to after the election; or (2) write a super narrow decision that can apply only to Trump in this specific situation, while urging Congress to write legislation to deal with future cases. Which way they end up going will come down not to established precedent, or constitutional interpretation, or anything stupid like that, but a calculation of which one will provide maximum benefit to their patron while minimizing public blowback on themselves so they can maintain whatever veneer they have remaining.

The picture might reflect the most IDGAF face I have ever seen.

I think the thing teams look for more than someone to help them get to October is someone to help them get to November. That’s why I think the most likely trading partners for Flaherty, assuming continued health and dominance, would be the Dodgers, Braves, Yankees, and Phillies.

Here’s how you know things are officially bad and in dire need of change: the beat media are aboard now:

This is fair as far as it goes, although the problem with making determinations about disqualifying “steroid guys” is that we don’t definitively know who was and who was not on steroids. We only know what the media try to convince us about that.

I would think a team would have to have a more than 50% chance of making the playoffs before they seriously consider selling off the top of the system to make the playoffs. I don’t think 12% or 7% is gonna cut it.

Don’t look now, but Tigers not the only AL Central team turning into a pumpkin lately …

I think Baby Doc has proven that he is willing to spend to win, and that he is hands off on the business side, which is almost the perfect combination for an owner. I am born again on him as an owner who will release the resources the front office needs to win, and a lot of that spending in the first year-plus of Harris's tenure is in fixing the rotted system of scouting, development, analytics and the like. We needed that. So if you don't believe that Harris is incompetent, and that Baby Doc has established himself as willing to spend to win, then really, then I believe there's no cause to hammer them on today's roster construction, roster deployment, positional flexibility, etc., because it's not putting us in a position to win a ring right now. They are still trying to figure out who they have and who they can take forward with them, and if so, where they are best utilized. We are working toward the future, so making the playoffs is a nice-to-have in that situation, not a do-or-die goal, which is why we are not liquidating the top of our farm system to trade for rentals to make the third playoff spot, and also why we didn't offer dramatic overpays just to what they could out of this past winter's poor free agent market. This organization is simply not ready to do that yet. I can't imagine how pissed off fans would be if we had committed to five years and $100+ million to aging Matt Chapman, which is what I think it would have taken at minimum to get him to agree to Detroit, only to surround him with the rest of the team as currently constructed and we're still under .500. As for Hinch: I think he was caught in the middle on the trashcan deal and became the fall guy for the players and the ownership, who were the engineers behind the thing and who Baseball had zero interest in punishing.

I don't see them keeping Kelly and Rogers and Dingler on the major league roster at the same time. Kelly is out of options; Rogers gets arb next year and I don't us signing and then optioning a $2-ish million catcher; and it would be unethical to basically scuttle Dingler's career by keeping him permanently in AAA just in case. One of them is going to go, and I'm wondering whether going to be Rogers instead of Kelly, because they are both 29, and Rogers is as good now as he's ever going to get. Absent reading anything about this, seems to me it could go either way.

Do you think the Tigers are at the endpoint of their roster construction, meaning, this is the roster they expect to compete with now and in the future? Do you believe if this roster doesn't succeed they will blow it all up and start over? Do you think the front office and ownership are incompetent, or even uncaring, and that there's no hope for a winning franchise as long as they're around? I'm just trying to get a feel for whether you think we're in a temporary growing-pains situation moving toward a more permanent competitive situation, or whether you think this is as good as it's gonna get and that there's no hope as long as this crew in charge?

I wonder how many other neighborhood names did they botch besides Lakeview?