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I’ll be impressed when there are any consequences for this.

Really? I thought it was more like 20.

Just quit on him, already.

I do wonder whether one of the problems might be his moving to a new league. I’d done a research piece showing that it was much harder for a batter to move from the NL to the AL than the other way around. That would have been through 2016. Not sure how that conclusion holds up for the past five seasons. In any event, maybe part of it is that faced the best of one league’s pitchers for eight years, so he got familiar with a lot of them; now he’s facing the best of the other other league’s pitchers. There might be something to that. I think the least likely outcome is that he’s done done.

Scott Coolbaugh, you’re fired.

This isn’t even the worst two-week stretch he has had in his career. He had worse in 2016. You can give up on him if you like. I’m sticking around a bit longer.

He doesn't care if you're black or white.

@Useful Idiot: take two aspirins and read this.

Says the guy who strained to get "apostrophication"! 😆

Bill Kristol is Bill Buckley sans the erudition.

The "time for gentile politics as usual has come to an end" made me literally LOL.

Yeah? You think MTG and AOC are yukking it up together over Dom P at The Monocle?

Jesus.

Sounds something like the liberal Catholic Church of my youth. Glad to see there are still vestiges of that surviving through this weird fundamentalism time.

I think they get one of the two next MLB franchises. There’s a lot of outside and tourist money there, which is also why Vegas will get the other team.

So now they’ll do the next best thing and get elected to the school board so they can rid the neighbor’s children’s schools of every last CRT-infested math book.

I imagine they don’t. I also imagine that didn’t factor into the decision much.

That’s part of the equation. Where were the Karens of the 1960s when it came to making decisions about what to show the American news viewer regarding Vietnam? Nowhere, because Karen is a modern social phenomenon that is not just a purveyor of snowflakery—she is a product of snowflakery as well. Karen was born and grew up during the sanitizing of the Middle East wars on TV newscasts, and that’s as back when the nightly network news really mattered.

I won’t argue with you there.

I don’t think the 1960s explains what’s happening in New York or Chicago or Boston or even Atlanta today. Their economic and liveability revolutions all came within the past 30 years. My point was where I think Atlanta will go next if they continue down the path of legislating the evangelical agenda But I do agree that the 1960’s started precipitating the rotten core you see in cities like Birmingham today. “And if you ask me, it all started with that commie stooge Martin Luther Coon!!” 😉

I definitely think it started with that intention. I’m not talking about belief in a deity that came from the first caveman wondering how did I get here—I’m talking about Religion, Inc. Catholic Church comes to mind as one of the OGs of the organized religion scam.

Religion is all about the fiction that it is better to delay gratification in this life in order to achieve perfection in the afterlife. That’s how the poor comfort themselves with their circumstances and, not for nothing, why the rich seek to maintain that thinking among the poor to control them and forestall revolution, to the point of enshrining gratification-delaying principles into law and directly citing that very religious thinking as the inspiration for it.

The continuing educational subordination of the south is a direct result of Jim Crow as well. Remember they spent time and treasure creating parallel systems of everything, particularly education, and even though the second-class system they created for blacks was terrible, punitive and cheap by design, it still cost a lot of taxpayer money to maintain. This kind of circumstance doesn’t turn around by magic on a dime. Even if they were to … ahem … get religion this morning and commit to achieving first-class public accommodations status on par with the best cities in the north and west, it would still take three or five or maybe even more decades to actually achieve it. Of course, that’s definitely not the kind of religion those folks down there are interested in getting.

As I mentioned, Atlanta is just beginning their race to the bottom now. Once they get all the same laws just punish just as hard in place, we won’t see practically anyone who’s not a modestly educated Christian wanting to live there anymore. And if Virginia follows suit, it’ll happen there, too.

My wife and I are taking a driving trip through the south. While here, we have stayed in downtown hotels in Louisville, Jacksonville, Montgomery, and now Birmingham. Nashville is next. The thing that has struck me about these downtowns is how ragged and rundown they are. Lots of buildings vacant, hardly anyone on the streets at night, some street lights are out, and people without homes the only ones on the streets after maybe nine o'clock. It's not like that in my city, which is very clean and well-lit and well-trod by people both resident and tourist well into the night. So what's the difference? Why are things like that in these southern downtowns but not in mine? I think the original difference is slavery. People think that ended in 1865 and that everyone just did a 180 on it, but we all know that's not true. The south tried to keep de facto slavery going with Jim Crow laws for as long as they could afterwards, finally starting to crack a century later. One of the things that started turning states around on Jim Crow was economics: corporations started refusing to even do business in Jim Crow states, let alone relocate there, until that was finally changed. Economics is what got their attention. Still, the south is way behind the north in economic development. I looked up which Fortune 5000 companies have their headquarters in Birmingham, which is the #41 market in America. There is not a single company I'd ever heard of, and in fact only four of the top 500 are there. Why is that? I believe because the legacy of slavery in the south, with its lingering social impact, has hampered economic development in the deep south for generations still to come. Companies relocate to other city downtowns (like Chicago) all the time, but none of them go to deep southern cities, despite the favorable weather and corporate tax advantages, because no company with a highly-educated executive workforce could ever get their people to relocate to Birmingham, Alabama. And as states like Alabama race to the bottom to punish people for having pregnancies they don't want or otherwise can't handle, they are not only never going to have highly-educated people wanting move there, but they will also experience a brain drain of people who grow up there as these states enact more and worse punishing fascistic laws. And that's perfectly OK with the evangelical Christians who run politics in the deep south because of the book of Genesis. Always remember that Eve did not tempt Adam with fruit from an apple tree. The story is that she tempted him with fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. It is knowledge that so many people who run politics in the deep south fear. They fear smart people. They don't want them around. Smart people are too smart for them. Smart people make people who run things in the deep south feel inadequate about themselves. That's what these retrograde abortion laws (not to mention voting restrictions and open gun laws and all the rest of that) will finally accomplish: they will keep highly-educated smart people from moving there, and they will drive the highly-educated smart people who are still there away as well. Detractors might point to Atlanta and say see, you're wrong, they're in the deep south and look, they have a thriving economy. To which I would say, all that came when Atlanta tried to be like the north when it came to social and legal protections. Now that Georgia is engaged in a race to the bottom as well, that will eventually change because sooner than later, no one will want to live there anymore, either. I promise you.