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I'm constitutionally unable to able to ignore the panhandlers without guilt pangs. I don't know why.

Courtesy of Greg Abbott, the big city has absorbed roughly 30,000 migrants shipped here during the past year. As a result, entire families perch on street corners and retail stores to panhandle. I see several each day when I am moving about the city. At my grocery store, there are usually four families perched there every time we go, one stationed at the end of each parking row closest to the front door. I keep dollar bills in my car so that when I pull up to a traffic light and someone, usually a middle-aged man, walks down the line with a cup, I sometimes put a dollar in it, as long as he makes it all the way to my car and the light hasn’t changed to green yet. (Also, as long as he’s not smoking a cigarette. I draw a line at that.) With the families, though, I’m not quite sure what to do. I gave a dollar a couple times as I normally have, and I’ve gotten an unbelieving look and a flat “thank” in response, as though it were woefully insufficient. Which, yeah, I know it is. I totally get that. A couple times I gave two or three dollars, like, a dollar per person there, and I get the same response. Probably because when multiple bills folded, it still looks like a dollar to them, which looks woefully insufficient. So, am I supposed to give them a five so that they can see it’s that and not just a single? Or a ten? That’s what I don’t know. So I usually end up giving nothing, and I feel like a jerk. But if I were to give five bucks to a family at the grocery store, I have three other families staring at me while I do it, and then I feel like a jerk for giving to one and not to all. It’s really uncomfortable either way. Am I really supposed to make a show of walking to each family and hand out twenty dollars to them panhandling outside the grocery store? Plus, I’m not sure there’s not some sort of criminal gang behind the families forcing them to panhandle, taking the money away from them at the end of the day, and brutalizing them while they are out of our sight. That feels like a pretty likely scenario in at least some of the instances. The best situation would be the families aren’t there in the first place, of course, but I wouldn’t want to co-sign onto whatever brutal tactic the city would have to employ to force them to stay away. This is a bit of a problem and I’m not sure what my responsibility is here. #America2024

tl;dr he had a vague idea of what needed to be done and no idea how to actually do any of it.

Matt Manning has been just so good this spring. I am really looking forward to seeing him pitch in April. He seems like a lock for the fourth spot and now it’s between Reese and Casey for the fifth spot. Looking ahead, he goes to arb for three years in 2025-27 and then he’s probably gone in 2028. His agent is Scott Boras.

This guy is not a submariner. He’s a straight side-armer, and I’m thinking his motion might be harder/worse on his elbow than a submariner like Chad Bradford, or Tyler Rogers, might experience with theirs: https://www.mlb.com/athletics/video/comparing-rogers-bradford

MAGA: Fake news.

True assuming the only effect of Trump is that Tradrepubs find a way to vote around him. But I do think a bigger effect of Trump is that millions will rush to the polls at one in the morning on Election Day just to make sure they are in line for the opportunity to vote against him—pretty much as I said, prematurely, in 2016.

Vast majority of MAGA would ignore it, but it would help peel off a few thousands people on the margins.

MAGA: 91% is an A.

Also MAGA: Mike Pence is just another RINO. Good riddance. Don’t let us see you on the streets around here at night.

I’ve seen pitchers throw like this, and I wish I could bring any of them to mind, because I’d like to see how their careers went.

I disagree with RJ Anderson from CBS Sports. The Tigers GM job was not a **** job, and the org would not struggle to find people to take it. There would always be hundreds of people who would take the job practically sight unseen, since there are only thirty major league GM jobs in the whole world. They are great jobs for people who are good at it, regardless of the team. Avila was simply very bad at it. Before you get me wrong, I’m not saying anything like Al Avila is a bad man. I’d bet he’s good to his family, goes to church, gives to charity, loves kittens and puppies, all that. But speaking only in professional terms, he was objectively wrong for the job that he Peter-principled his way into, possibly made worse by the likelihood that he campaigned Mike for the job he was grossly unqualified for.

👍🏼

Yes it was stupid, and to your implied point, having it hang over the case is doing the prosecution no favors. I suppose the fact that he is who he is shouldn’t lead the judge to make subjective judgments, but really, judges do that all the time, don’t they? I would just hate to learn that people conclude that having them stay on the prosecution team together would corrupt the case, or objectively hinder their ability to prosecute it, because it would do neither.

In all seriousness it should not matter whether it's the president of the United States or the president of the He-Man Woman Hater's Club. The things that matters are, is there a conflict of interest raised by the relationship, and is the relationship in and of itself material to the disposition of the case? The answer to both questions is, to all appearances, "no". So all discussion of distractions and whatnot is immaterial, except perhaps to what the judge feels personally comfortable with, and his personal comfort should not be a matter of jurisprudence.

So justice isn't blind? Huh. Whoda thunk.

What are the chances someone on the Trump team engineered the docs dump through a friendly Potemkin in the Manhattan DA's office to bury the prosecution in a paper blizzard and force them to ask for a delay to review everything? I'm not saying I believe it.

OK, and Trump challenged it, and he got some action. Not the action he wanted, which was a complete dismissal of the case with the court's apology, but he got more than he should have as it specifically relates to how it affects the the prosecution and resolution of the case, which is not at all. You point out that most any corporation would not allow this to happen, and that's true as far as it goes. But do we have any idea whether there is a specific prohibition on intraoffice dating at the Fulton County DA? Forced to bet, I'd have to bet no, because if there were, that would surely have been cited as reason #1 for the action. Instead, we hear that there is the "significant appearance of impropriety that infects the current structure of the prosecution team", and that "as the case moves forward, reasonable members of the public could easily be left to wonder whether the financial exchanges have continued resulting in some form of benefit to the District Attorney, or even whether the romantic relationship has resumed ... an outsider could reasonably think that the District Attorney is not exercising her independent professional judgment totally free of any compromising influences. As long as Wade remains on the case, this unnecessary perception will persist." In other words, the judge is setting the rule all by himself, independent of what the actual policy might be, based solely on what "outsiders" might think, and not, pointedly, that the resulting relationship is either de jure or de facto prejudicial against Trump's case. He already rejected that idea when he wrote that the Trump team "failed to meet their burden” in proving that Willis’s relationship with Wade—along with allegations that she was financially enriched through trips the two took together—was enough of a “conflict of interest” to merit her removal from the case. Mainly because there was no conflict of interest in any real sense. IOW: the judge was skeeved out by their canoodling and clutched his pearls worrying about what people must think.

If you want to hear unvarnished commentary on a baseball podcast, the kind that does not fluff a particular team, Major League Baseball, or The Office of the Commissioner of Baseball, you can't do much better than Foul Territory. They can have as much annoying insidery banter as any other podcast, and they sometimes pull punches on player commentary because they are still part of the brethren. But when they get on a roll about the state of the game, it can be really exhilarating, because they are beholden to nobody on the inside. The stuff they've said, for example, about Anthony Rendon after his ill-advised comments, and about the Oakland Vegas A's situation in general—just 👩🏽‍🍳💋.

If they were on opposite sides of the case I can see how that would raise questions of a possible fix. And if this were a DA and, say, a police evidence specialist who could potentially use their expertise to surreptitiously adulterate evidence to unfairly bolster the DA's case, same thing. But these are two lawyers on the same team, who presumably have no more way to corruptly manipulate the outcome of the case than any other two lawyers on any other prosecutorial team. So why does it matter that they're ****ing, or even that she supported him financially in any way? How specifically is this prejudicial against Trump's case?

Perhaps the red hat spin on this will be, the Deep State and their enemy-of-the-people media running dog lackeys are so maniacal in their quest to get Trump that they forced this guy to resign immediately, perhaps with threats to his life, because absent that, he would never have left his girlfriend's side and foregone the opportunity to GET TRUMP. 😁

In a world where anything is possible … 😁

I didn’t think it was one single poll of insubstantial sample size indicating this. I’ve seen this suggestion in news items for a few months now. But you’re more wired into the minutiae of the polls than I am, so I’ll take your word for it. For your part, I’m confident you will concede that I did not state categorically that black voters are moving toward Trump in great gobs, but that I qualified it with if true, speculatively.

Okey doke. Hope you're right.

That might be, although if the polling we've been seeing is any kind of accurate, black voters have already been moving toward Trump, if ever so slightly, and I don't think it's because they're angry about their social standing in America under Biden, because Trump is saying zero about helping remedy anything like that. So Tim Scott might hurt because he's an uncle tom, but he might help because he'd be a black man who is one too many KFC buckets from the most power office in the world. Can't know either way until it plays out.