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Me too. All through the 70s, back in the days when a man could support a family of nine on just his director-level GM salary, my folks would pile the seven of us (or fewer, once kids started turning 18) into our two cars (Chevy Bel Air station wagon, Chevy Vega [!]) and we would spend up to four weeks in a cottage near Traverse City, or Gaylord, or Lewiston, or Onekema, depending on the year. Four weeks! Can you imagine! I saw both Nixon resign and Elvis die while we were up north like that as a family. In the mid to late 70s, my dad stopped coming with us. He would keep working, and stay in the house all alone. That was his vacation—the rest of us getting the hell out of the house for all those weeks.

Some people, you cross them at all, they have to amp up the response to the max. Having access to guns makes it all potentially deadly.

Honestly, why did she let him keep talking? These people don’t respect the rules, so why didn’t she start shouting him down, like Trump would? Her apparently chastened silence is completely off-brand for her and her ilk. She looks red hat weak just sitting there taking punches. Maybe that’s what cost her votes? Or, perhaps it’s one of those things where they either explicitly or tacitly acknowledge the truth while they’re in a nonpartisan public forum, and then afterward they completely pretend it didn’t happen and start hammering home talking points to their partisan base predicated on lies about what was said in the debate? Am I making sense?

Looks like she’s about to rev up the vote-fraud-allegation portion of our program.

Oh, there we go—they’re going to adjudicate November 3rd as though it were the real crime, not January 6. They’ve been quiet about this election so far, but they’re going to get a lot a lot louder. Are they going to fix the evidence somehow? Because that’s what I would totally expect them to do, and not only that, I would not expect them to not do it.

Sure, I liked him while he was here. I thought he was great while he was here.

I'm not talking about wackjob twitter accounts and that kind of thing. I'm talking about mainstream news reports about politicos alleging fraud.

I suppose the tsunami of allegations will come soon enough, and perhaps I’m hanging around in the wrong circles, but I have heard surprisingly little about voter fraud in this election.

This dovetails into something I’ve been wondering: assuming Warnock beats Herschel next month, could the Republicans persuade Kristen Sinema and/or Joe Manchin to jump the aisle?

Indeed. I mean, look, I wish all the best for the guy, same as I would wish for anyone else. But I never actually rooted for him to win once he left, simply because he's on somebody else's team, and why would I root for the Astros? I also never pined for his return because I never felt connected to him as a person—or at least, perhaps more importantly, didn't feel he had any lingering connection to us once he'd gone. I don't recall anything he said suggesting he'd rather be a Tiger than not. Actually, I would presume he was probably ready to be anything but a Tiger by the time August 2017 rolled around. I understand that comes across as a brutal take, and I apologize for the feelings I'm hurting with it. But I'm borderline ASD, so it's not like I really care ... 😉😅

My problem is that after we went 1-6, and got there in some of the worst ways imaginable, I'd written off any hopes for playoffs for this team. Now I'm told that we have better than a puncher's chance to get into the playoffs. With this team. With this defense. It seems so unlikely, it's hard for me to get my head around. Particularly given the persistent six-decades-long futility of this franchise. But hey, if everyone says so, if 8-9 is a season to be wished for because it sneaks us into the wild card game, irrespective of whether we're equipped to win it or whether it accrues to the positive development of this team for future seasons, then I guess I'm on board

I bet Verlander would sooner sign a one-day contract just so he can say he retired as an Astro.

Can we offer them Aaron Glenn while they're at it? twitter.com/RobDemovsky/status/1592186515299655681?s=20&t=T6QtAOwnyetAnup6mA

You gotta admit, this has been a Lions season of a familiar type: run yourself completely out of playoff contention with a 1-7 record during the first half of the season, then win a few ... well, yes, meaningless, let's say that ... games to run yourself out of a top draft pick. It really is worst of all worlds, at least until you remember that no matter where the Lions pick, they have little idea how to draft or develop anyway.

I was also wondering that in the moment, being up four, but IIRC there were something like thirty-odd seconds left in the game. Taking the safety, Bills would have had to free-kick from the 20, Vikes would probably have established field position around their 40, then the Vikes would have had two, maybe three?, plays to get into decent position for a game-winning FG. Had the Bills been up six or better, it may have made more sense as a calculated risk.

I can't see Verlander coming back under any circumstances. He's older than Scott Harris, and I can't envision Harris ever being in the market for players older than he. I gotta believe Harris is looking for players with a future rather than players with a past.

After an instant career revival in Houston that includes two rings and soon-to-be two Cy Young Awards, coupled with a new Tigers front office regime with no ties to anything or anyone from the past, I see no path for Justin Verlander to come back to Detroit ever again, except to pitch against the Tigers.

Does Pelosi command AOC and Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib? I have my doubts about that. In any event, wouldn't they would need more than two or three Mitts to drive the selection of Liz Cheney as Speaker of the House? Seems to me there are more Congressional reps who are temperamentally more like MTG than Adam Kinzinger.

Cruz would be an easy reject because he is so offensive personally, and he was a wackjob from Day 1. I wonder whether someone like Elise Stefanik, who started out as a mainstream conservative and then went completely off the reservation to keep her seat because of Trump, could slither back into the mainstream under the radar and undetected by the American media and people.

Ask any one of those 13 questions, and the second question would never even be heard as Pence’s handlers would immediately commandeer him out of the room, while the rest of the media pummels the CNN reporter for jeopardizing their future access to Pence and perhaps others in the party without significant conditional concessions.

That would be the best thing that could arise out of a Republican House majority, although I don’t think there are enough Mitts in the House to make this happen.

Then prison.

The true reason there are no third parties is because the system is designed for only two parties, and the reason for that is the way the president is chosen. The president must be elected with at least 50% of specially-designated Electoral Votes which roughly correlates to the popular vote. If no candidate achieves that, there is then a one-state-one-vote special election in the House to choose the president, a solution designed to favor incumbent parties over upstarts, since there are no third parties in Congress to support the third candidate. Since there is practically no chance a third party can put a president in the White House, almost no rookie politician would choose to go into a third party in the first place. A third party may align better ideologically with the rookie, but politicians are more practical than ideological, and, notable exceptions notwithstanding, any person choosing politics as a career who wants to have any influence within the system at all will have to be on one of the two big teams. The only way I can see a third party getting a seat at the adult’s table, within the current system, would be through a mass defection from one of the two current parties, and that would result in a power shift from the dying party to a second big party, rather than becoming a true power-sharing arrangement with a major third party. The only other way, if America ever truly wanted more than two major parties, would be to ditch our current system in favor of a parliamentary democracy, which would require a complete rewriting of the Constitution.

If Trump is done and gone, then he’s taking a few million voters with him, because there must be at least that many who vote only for him. The question then becomes how many of those lost votes might be offset by moderate conservatives coming back to the party, those who used to reliably vote Republican but reluctantly went Democrat or stopped voting because the party went nuts. If the Mitts were to become ascendant again, how of those exiles many would come back? If it’s a 1:1 ratio coming back, Republicans might be OK, or even better off if the ratio is more than 1:1. I don’t think it is, though—I think Trump energized the voting process and drove more R voters to the polls, and Republican pols must agree, because otherwise why would they have been so eager to debase themselves by publicly fawning all over him? A complicating factor, though, is how the Republican base has become fractured among three distinct constituencies I can identify: the exiled Mitts; the ride-or-die red hats; and a faction that digs the cruelty and the fascism Trump unearthed in his base but without all the crazy acting out—those are people who would gladly vote for DeSantis or Abbott over both Mitt and Trump. That’s probably where the religious right will park their votes. If Trump gets spun out, finally, can the party reconcile the remaining two factions? Who caves for the other? I think it’s more likely the Mitts cave for the Christo-fascists, which they will justify because tax cuts, because they really don’t care or think about the social issues much. That would not only be sad, that would make it harder for Democrats to run against and win.