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I've been avoiding this thread because, based on its placement in General and not Political, I figured this was a pro-betting thread, so I wanted to respect that. But since you guys have opened up the floodgates, I'll just say that here I believe that gambling addiction is going to become the nation's #1 health problem in the next five to ten years, yet another thing we can thank our estimable Supreme Court for. 😏 And now I will drop this point, unless people want to keep talking about it, after which I can then blame you. 😁 From a personal standpoint, the best thing that ever happened to me was the moment I tried penny-ante gambling when I was in grade school and started losing immediately. I also got cheated out of winning by a bigger kid in my class. The last straw was, I had lost my last penny in five-card poker during lunch, I saw it was an old one, like, 1917 or something, and I said let me keep it and I'll pay you tomorrow, because I liked old coins. And the bigger kid grabbed my hand and forced the penny out of it to take it away from me. That was basically the end of gambling for me. Ironically, I run both a college football bowl pool and a March Madness squares pool (coming up next week!), but I do those because I love the pool-managing part, not the gambling part. And, true to form, I have won exactly one money position in the 26 years of the bowl pool, and exactly one first-round square in the seven years of March Madness squares. Meanwhile, I see the same people in my pool winning every year over and over again. That is just beyond my understanding.

So, looks like it's The Miggy Show in Lakeland today. Practically every tweet this morning by the beat press is a breathless report of what Miggy is doing right now. I don't know how to feel about that. I mean, I know how I do feel, but what I'm not 100% sure of is whether it's not such a good idea to have His Miggyness looming over this team once again. I've been so excited to read reports of camp cohesion this spring. I hope his presence doesn't put a damper on that.

A couple weeks ago 60 Minutes had a segment about that nutty Moms For Liberty group, the one with the sex scandals (natch). Scott Pelley was interviewing the leaders and they could not talk their way out of a paper bag. I mean, man, talk about C+ students just riding the crest of a wave. It’s just a matter of right place-right time for them. No one will even remember the organization, let alone know who these people are, a year or two from now. They couldn’t carry Terry Rakolta’s jock.

I feel as though Florida may be reaching their tipping point on the whole singular focus on this whole anti-woke horsesht. The legislature is rebelling against some of the stupider and more craven acts, like the proposed state law to punish local officials for taking down Confederate memorials, which is straight-up fascism. That and several laws long such lines were not even put up for a vote in the legislature by their house speaker. There will always be a lot of people who want to cruelly punish other people they hate on a non-stop basis, but they will never achieve majority status over people who may exist somewhere along the sliding scale of empathy for that kind of thing, but who just want a quiet, peaceful society, so they can live without that. I think that might be what’s happening in Florida, and in the end, Ron DeSantis is no Huey Long. He does not have the charm, charisma, or control of resources and militarized policing to force Florida’s residents to accept such displays of institutional cruelty. IOW, when it comes to this anti-woke crap, it’s a treadmill to oblivion. There’s no there there.

The tricky part about protecting people from the pollution is, what is determined to be the pollution and who gets to determine that. Once a society decides to tackle an issue like this, it opens the door to litigable value judgments about what constitutes pollution or even malice, and as we can see from the school library controversies, different people and communities have different values and judgements about that. It’s why the argument for letting everyone have access to everything and figuring out for themselves what’s pollution or not is so seductive, even though that itself has tremendous potential down sides. There is no perfect solution, which I guess is in part why the Constitution strives for the practicality of “a more perfect Union”, rather than the illusion of “the perfect Union”.

The thing I remember most about Justin Thompson, other than the predictions of his inevitable stardom, was how weirdly he torked the upper half of his body when he pitched, and you couldn’t help but think, “this guy is one big injury just waiting to happen“.

Prepare to be underwhelmed.

I think they’re doing that for business reasons, rather than promotional reasons.

I believe practically everyone who is all in for or on Trump have already revealed themselves.

Assuming this is a justification for the idea that Trump is flying under the radar to the majority of Americans who continue to know nothing about him other than his charming You’re Fired schtick, and thus he will win in November thanks to an electorate largely ignorant of the worst of him, I think where this breaks is that Trump’s worst antics even while firmly ensconced in the bosom of MAGA gatherings are easily accessible to the rest of us through the mainstream media, which are still the most highly-consumed. Trump’s not hiding anywhere anymore. We can all see him, one you would have to be assiduously avoiding him to never see it.

“Learning disability” was the catch-all phrase they used to apply to kids 50 or 60 years ago when they wanted to justify pulling us out of regular school and putting us on the short bus to special ed.

I think they will have had more than their fill of him eight months from now.

Hard to see how Trump can win once he has expelled all the RINOs from the party.

Who wouldn't vote for that!

It obviously won't affect core red hats in the least, but hopefully it peeled off a few thousand voters off the margins.

I wonder whether these are not actually real but rather a part of Russian psyops effort, i.e., faking these bombs to spur support among red hats when they see their fellow Trumpers supporting Russia. Of course, this could also be part of a Ukrainian psyops effort to horrify Americans in voting against Trump because his voters look so obviously anti-American at their core here. And of course this could be totally real. Any way to find out for sure?

It's Ch-EYE-na.

I was so unhappy when we traded Frank Catalanotto.

Everything I’m seeing today is that MAGA are very happy with Katie Britt’s audition on Thursday night and she has the inside track to be selected by Trump as his VPILF. We all remember how well that worked for John McCain.

Putin isn’t Satan to MAGA. Zelenskyy is.

I rewatched Major League for the umpteenth time, and it’s one of my favorite baseball movies. The storyline is trite and they have a few terrible scenes, but the script and jokes are pretty sharp, the performances are generally above average, and the baseball scenes are also above average. Also, great to see actual major league teams being portrayed in the movie. I don’t think there is any way MLB allows that for a similar movie today, since the movie is not at all worshipful of Major League Baseball. One thing that does strike me is how wrong a choice Tom Berenger was for the Jake Taylor catcher role. He has no sense of fun at all, and just like all his other movies, he has this look of a tough guy flaunting a I’m-having-a-bad-day-and-you’re-the-reason vibe. I think the movie would have benefited a lot by having someone like Tom Selleck in the role, or, better still, Kurt Russell—guys who could play both baseball and comedy for real.

Lara Trump, or any Trump for that matter, couldn’t give less of a sht about blasphemy. At least blasphemy about god.