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If they even live to use them. If they don’t, they paid in for nothing, except for meager survivor benefits, if they even apply. By the way, here’s a tip: as soon as you qualify for 100% Social Security benefits, take it. Do not wait until age 72 or whenever to get 125% benefits or whatever it is. That’s an enticement to get you to delay and gives the government five more years to hope you don’t live to take even a penny.

Agree. It is far less important to actually prove malfeasance than to just loudly allege malfeasance. In the end, all they will remember is the loud allegation.

I’m not clear on whether this is actually bad for US and how much, but either way, I don’t know, I just can’t bring myself to become indignant over technical violations by a country trying to preserve its very existence.

Some people simply cannot abide sharing equality with “lazy” people. After all, if everyone ends up equal no matter what, what’s the point of working hard to get what you can?

Why am I just a little surprised that rather than ”request a meeting at [his] earliest convenience”, they didn’t simply demand that Garland immediately come to Mar-a-Lago alone for a little chat.

You may remember I mentioned that Miggy is the last player standing who played regular season games in Montreal. There is only one other active player who played against the Expos, and he’s starting against the Tigers tonight.

Because Chapman is left-handed, and if there’s one remaining thing Schoop can do, it’s hit left-handers. He’s actually better against southpaws than Haase is. In any event, we can’t simply never play Schoop ever again as long as he’s on the roster.

We already know why one boat anchor in particular is still playing. Owner fiat. The best we can hope for is 60-day IL, which seems unlikely unless he becomes literally debilitated.

Most hitters are streak hitters.

He also spearheaded the rescue of the economy after the Bush crash, passed Dodd-Frank, stopped Iran from nuclearizing, normalized relations with Cuba, improved America's image abroad dramatically, and, oh yeah, 86'ed bin Laden with extreme prejudice. And he did all of it without even a whiff of any scandal. Obama was no joke.

Not for me. Never heard it before.

LOL "pull a Deuce". Sounds ... messy.

Is it weird, though? Back when the World Series was the only really sports championship, you really did the best teams in baseball, or at least one of them was based on the win-loss record (pythag and cume WAR aside). So America had a running start with the idea before the dilution of playoffs from other sports and, ultimately, from baseball itself. I think people are always going to believe a league's finals winners are really the best team, regardless of regular season record, if for no other reason than they were the best when it counted. And without looking too deeply into it, they may be right in some cases.

I did not imagine originally that Musk bought Twitter to amplify Russian propaganda, but I do now. I don't think Musk is necessarily in the pocket of Putin, per se, in the way many think of Trump as being so. I do think they are all fellow travelers with an interest in destroying democracy so they can destroy the need for competition in general and gather up all the money unto themselves. And if they were to somehow emerge victorious—I don't know how, but if so—it'll be a short honeymoon because they will then turn their guns on each other and ultimately destroy themselves, the way rival despots have throughout history. World keep turning.

I swear to god, when I clicked through to the article and saw the subhead, I thought it read, "People of color compromise two-thirds of GOP primary field". I had to re-read it a couple times to make sure I got it right. Anyhow, two things about this: It was America itself—in fact, the ideological forebears of the Washington Free Beacon—that came up with the one-drop rule in order to segregate people with any African "blood" whatsoever from polite white society. So it doesn't matter whether Obama's mother was white or not. If you're even partly black, the people around you identify you as black. Not white, or half-white, or Halfrican, or anything else along those lines. You're black. Period. I will bet you dollars to dimes that Tim Scott, whom the article acknowledges had ancestors who were brought to the United States as slaves, has at least a little cream in his coffee himself, basically because his ancestors were brought to the United States as slaves.

I found an even worse example than the 68 Bulls: the 1952-53 Baltimore Bullets, with a record of 16-54, made the playoffs, and that's only because they were in the same division as the 12-57 Philadelphia Warriors! The Bullets were in fourth place, 29.5 games behind the third-place Boston Celtics. That's gotta be close to a record spread between third and fourth-place teams. That may not have happened even in baseball, with double the games. So how could this happen? The NBA allowed eight of their ten teams to make the playoffs. Talk about the meaninglessness of regular season games.

One more for now: I love county-level US maps, and this one is super interesting to me: Macomb County is super Catholic, Oakland County is less so, and Wayne County is basically protestant.

I wouldn't have thought we would be tied with Russia, but there we are.

Now this is rather interesting. More on the concept here: https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/human-development-index#/indicies/HDI

Related to the above:

This is from a couple of years ago.

It's going to eventually be eight divisions with four teams each, which won't be all that much better. I get that the playoffs are a crapshoot and all, but I would prefer not to have sub-.500 teams making them in the first place. The 1987-88 San Antonio Spurs made the NBA playoffs with a 31-51 record. I wouldn't want MLB to become that.

I went to see "Damn Yankees" at the Marriott Theater in Lincolnshire, which is basically like AA ball for Broadway—it's that good. All the actors are card-holders and a few have screen credits, so the result is high-quality, tight, and generally excellent. And of course, when they sang the standard "You Gotta Have Heart" early on in the show, I, probably uniquely among the entire audience, couldn't stop thinking about the Detroit Institute of Arts. This is one of the greatest local commercials in history, perhaps for any TV market, and if you're of a certain age, you will probably have this running through your head for the rest of the day, to which I can say only: you're welcome.

I’m going off what Petzold wrote about him last night.

Alex Lange is establishing himself as a bullpen linchpin, and he’s practically free through next year and cheap for another three years after that. I think he would have to return a position player well into the top 100 who will be ready no later than next year, at minimum. It’s going to take a lot more than another Maton and/or Vierling to pry him from Harris’s warm, live hands.