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Any quotes from Bill Clinton about this that are more recent than 22 years ago?

By the way, this general notion that Democrats are waiting to fall madly in love with their candidates in the same way Republicans do with Trump remind me of the gainsaying that used to take place on the old board about religion and atheism. Posters there who professed to be Christians used to insist that atheism is itself a religion, with its own worship structure and everything. Those posters could not possibly conceive of the idea that atheists could not need something or someone in their lives they are compelled to worship, as though worshiping were a basic human function like breathing, eating, or ****ting. This is a patently ignorant idea, of course, since atheism is definitionally the absence of religious worship. Same with the idea that Democrats must be waiting for someone to fall madly in love with, as the red hats have fallen explicitly in love with Trump. There may be a sliver of the current Democratic base that is like that, but there is no way that sliver is not way, way, way smaller than the large swath of the current Republican base who have fallen madly in love with Trump. So I am not buying it when I hear anyone opine that Democrats are en masse falling madly in love with this horribly-flawed politician or that, simply because Republicans have fallen so madly in love with Trump. That sounds like something MAGA is trying to sell us to denigrate Democrats as being nothing more than puddles of emotional goo and/or to cover for MAGA's own unrestrained emotionally-gooey horniness for Trump.

You are literally my only source for this information. Well, you and Jonathan Martin's evidence-free opinion column.

The $64 question at hand is, did this Platner guy become popular among "the left" before all this bad news about him came out, or after? Also, I must not be part of "the left", because I had never heard of this guy before I started you posting about him here.

Remember, business crime is no longer considered crime.

I know this Jonathan Martin guy, late of the National Review, is basically saying as much in his Politico article, but do you honestly believe the Democrats of Maine are essentially "leftist" red hats who will embrace and love and worship this guy the worse the news gets, and will stuff the ballot boxes for him to get him elected? Because as far as I can tell, that has not happened for any Democrat I can think of since basically Huey Long.

Well, the NBA is a Black thing, so ...

OK, I see. I wondered whether you were suggesting that he understands that, because of the Constitution, he has to step down in January 2029, to which I might reply, lol as if. I mean, that might be right, although he also strikes me as a guy who ... ahem ... whistles past the graveyard when it comes to contemplating his own mortality. I happen to believe it's more likely he is building the vanity project because he intends to never leave office as long as he is alive, versus securing his legacy in the face of his inevitably close mortality. He may intellectually acknowledge that he is going to die someday and probably soon, but that doesn't mean in his heart that he actually believes it.

@romad1? Is that what you meant?

I don't know whether I've mentioned this here—I certainly did in the old forum—but I have long regarded the Department of Defense as being, in reality, the Department of Offense. We don't defend against anything, because nobody ever attacks us in the serious of a nation-state, which is what armed forces are constructed to defend against. But we sure do go the the offensive in countries (and, now the high seas) all over the world, to defend the interests, mostly economic, of the people in power in this country, and we have ever since 1898. "Defend the interests". Maybe that's what they mean by Defense after all.

When you say "limited time left as President", how do you mean this?

If I could hop in a Time Machine and go back to experience life for a little while, one of the things I would do is see a town league game from the 1900s or 10s or 20s. There were literally thousands of them littering the American landscape, and every burg of over 500 people definitely had at least one team representing their town in a league spanning a couple or three counties. I think most of them were semipro, players making a two or three bucks a game. Maybe teams hire a ringer from a competing town and pay him five bucks to help them win the league. The quality was probably at least the equivalent of D league ball, but it was probably the best quality ball the vast majority of the country had available to it, and towns celebrated these teams and the players who played on it. They would look forward to the new season all winter, talk about the local league around the hot stove, and tell stories (and tall tales) for decades about the men who played for their towns. It all seems very romantic to me.

Depends on the robot K zone effect on pitching. If Baseball went to 100% ABS that would dramatically change the way pitchers approach the zone, which would change hitting. With the challenge system I would guess that would change pitching approach a little, but it really depends on how aggressive hitters are calling for challenges, which I’m not sure they would be so much. I suspect the majority of challenges will be catchers looking for strike three, versus hitters looking for ball four.

Were it not for his military actions, we’d have no idea who the guy is.

This was basically the beginning of his low point.

I don’t know if he does. He is up and down and his control issues sometimes costs him. That said, I’d be willing to suppose a five-year deal if Harris thinks we have a way to tweak his approach to bring those control issues into line.

Then maybe we should trade all our good players and pitchers for bags of balls and give up on 2026 so we can finally win our ring! Tell me about sim team slumps … 😩

I remember being a bit surprised when a direct report of mine at the website I worked at, a young native-born Mexican woman, had joined a Spanish-language evangelical congregation, because Hispanic = Catholic was so ingrained into my mind. But remembering back on what she was like? I could totally see her riding the Trump train.

They have already conditioned us to accept that Trump and the rest of them had sex with underage girls on a serial basis, so the revelation of such could be hardly surprising, almost to the point of ho-hum. So it's got to be better than 50-50 that what really happened is worse than even that.

U.S. citizens. It's coming closer, folks.

Not the red hats. Remember, these people in large part embrace the prosperity gospel. Trump is wealthy because God favors him, and God favors people who favor whom He favors. Unrelated comment: Pouring $200 million into a vanity construction project at the White House is not the act of a man who expects to leave willingly in three years.

They'll pay her and she'll come back into the fold. Heck, maybe she understands this idea so deeply that her post itself is a low-key bid to get paid.

I think it's more than that. They want people to suffer, and they want people to die, because that's how they demonstrate their power over the entire country and everything in it, which is quite explicitly their goal. Having the power of ruination and life-or-death over the people is how they maintain their control over everything. The suffering and death are not merely consequences. They are tools. Related to this, there's zero advantage to the republicans for everyone to be prosperous, despite their promises, and I'm including the red hats themselves, because prosperous people have the luxury of free time to complain and protest and push back and work to kick the scoundrels out if they become unhappy with them, which inevitably always happens. Abolish the middle class, demote them to working class status, put the working class on the constant edge of starvation, and they'll be too focused on getting by day to day to think about luxury items like protesting and voting and upending the current political order. I believe that's the thinking on the inside, anyway. I guess we'll see how far they are allowed to get along with that.

Good find. A couple comments on this: Hispanic Protestants may be desperately trying to demonstrate their "Americaness" by supporting Trump, the raid, the deportations and the rest of it, but If things go as far as MAGA and the Red Hats want it to, they'll find themselves being rolled over along with the rest of them, especially if they look the part. The 32% of people prefer “the U.S. to be a nation primarily made up of people who follow the Christian faith" are willfully failing to recognize that Christians are already a super-majority in this country.

Practically from the moment they announced the trade. The haul we gave up for him ... Got a couple good years out of Dany Patterson, though. But Gregg Zaun was flipped over to the Royals before he stepped onto the field for us and had a pretty good run with the Jays we could have used. (Although that would have precluded signing Ivan.) I remember being especially hopping mad to let Catalanotto go, and he did have a fairly decent career after that, but Francisco Cordero was the real kick in the balls from that trade.