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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.

Right, agree, and here's something I haven't seen said yet: it's not only that Scott will appeal to some black conservatives who might otherwise hold their noses and vote for Biden—I think he will also appeal to white voters exactly because he is the kind of obsequious black man they feel comfortable with, aka One of the Goods Ones. Red hats don't like angry black folks, which serves as their default idea when contemplating black people in general, and Scott is the opposite of that, and that comports with their wishes, hopes, and views of what America should be: white people firmly in charge, black people cheerfully in support roles. He's a throwback, and if there's one thing red hats want, it's to throw America back to something like pre-1954. Plus, Scott can serve as a sort of Trump Translator to moderates and uncommitteds, a la Key and Peele, softening his worst messaging to try to keep them from peeling off and voting for Biden. The more I write, the more I'm talking myself into it. I don't think Trump is dumb enough or clueless enough to bring on a firebreather like he is. Hope I'm wrong, though!

Honestly, I'm not even sure what the actual problem is regarding Fani and Wade. How does their relationship prejudice the case against Trump? EDIT: Seriously, tell me how.

And the dead students, too. Not a win.

Seriously, choosing Tim Scott as VP would probably be Trump’s best move as of today. I wouldn’t worry about our losing the election because of it, but temperamentally he would be better than another fire-breather like Stefanik or a national joke like Katie Britt, because he could make actual in-roads with conservative black voters, which arguably make up the majority of that demo. Of course, then Scott would have 7-1/2 months to repeatedly shoot himself in the **** in a disqualifying manner, too, so hell, bring him on.

Naw, I can't be the first one to ever notice this ...

I may have been a little loose about "routinely", although of the 24 total pitchers who have won 300+ games, ten of them pitched in our lifetimes. So it's as possible that great pitchers could rack up 300 wins under a new deadened-ball era as it was for pitchers in the 70s, 80s and beyond to.

Put a full court press on getting players in the pipeline from populous cricket countries like India and Pakistan and that would take care of any pitching quality problem overnight someday. In the meantime, I do think there is enough pitching quality even today, particularly given how they can break down and rebuild pitchers as the Tigers appear to be doing with Troy Melton. Personally, I don't think depth of pitching quality is as big a potential problem as that of pitchers' development getting way, way ahead of hitters' development and driving down offense. The advances in velocity, movement, and pitch shape threatens to drive offense below 1968 levels at some point. It's getting to the point where the only way hitters can eat is if pitchers make mistakes.

They will have to accept more bad results after a while, such as keeping a pitcher in who's getting shelled because everyone else on the staff is totally gassed from the prior couple days. That may lead to a relaxation of the 13-pitcher rule, or maybe even expansion to 27 guys and allow 15 pitchers. Or maybe the answer is a situation where teams carry 26 on the active roster and three on a taxi squad, and they have to declare a 26-man active roster at the beginning of each series. That way they can keep 13 active pitchers at all times and have three more pitchers in reserve on the squad, for a total of 16 pitchers in the bigs. Baseball would have to work with the Players on rules for it, so teams can't keep the pitchers on the taxi squad indefinitely. Maybe the rule should be, teams have to rotate out all three taxi squad spots every new series, so that no players spend consecutive series on the taxi squad. Something like that.

Al Avila deserves all the credit for picking Melton in the draft. The only thing the pitching development people did was break him down completely and rebuild him from scratch. They would have never been able to do that if Al hadn't picked Melton for them in the first place. Al set them up to succeed. He's a genius. Rehire Al. 😉

Can't win, don't try!

I was so hoping at that moment that we had ended Aaron Rodgers' career.

Obviously a Hamashole.

Even better! The Party will control and disseminate the fascism message like Twitter appears to be trending toward.

Which is why it will never happen, so get used to four-inning starting pitcher outings, and maybe even one time through the lineup max for each pitcher.