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When I see both teams in colored jerseys, my gut reaction is that I put on the wrong game.

Paying attention is exactly the point. You're reading a governing trend from the noisiest data points: aldermanic social media posts, a primary race in a single Illinois district, candidates distancing themselves from AIPAC. That's real political pressure, and I don't dismiss it. But political pressure from a vocal constituency is not the same as ideological capture of a governing party. The Democratic mainstream haven't abandoned Israel, but while they have complicated their relationship with the current Israeli government, that's not the same thing, and besides, it's what Israeli opposition figures and mass protest movements have done as well. The distinction that actually matters is the one between policy-driven anti-Israel sentiment (even when it's overwrought, and even when it edges into troubling territory) and the kind of ethno-nationalist, eliminationist antisemitism that has historically seized control of parties and governments, and is doing so again on the right in real time. The former is a problem that bears close watching. The latter is the thing that has historically gotten people killed. Conflating them because they share some surface rhetoric muddles, not sharpens, the analysis, and lets the genuinely dangerous version off the hook by treating it as merely one data point along a bipartisan spectrum.

I don’t know the details of Virginia Giufree’s death, just the description of it as “taking her own life”. It seemed to occur while she was still active in her campaign to out the most powerful men in the world as principals in an international sex trafficking ring, and in public at least, she seemed energized to be doing so.

Jahmai Jones takes the borderline called third and leaves one challenge on the board.

This team is a walking dead worst-case scenario.

I know he won't address it, because it's a checkmate question. If he were to reply at all, I would guess it would be with a whataboutism.

Christ Almighty, you red hats, what else do you need to hear!

LaceyLou, you are FIRE! The 1850s would actually be perfect for him: slavery still in force, nation divided and ripe for the pickings ...

Sorry, out of reactions: 😂

I suggested some time ago in one of these threads that the league should announce a year in advance that they're changing the ball the following season, then as soon as the season is over, give a few dozen of the new baseballs to every player who requests them so they can get used to them over the winter, and they can come into camp familiar with it if they want to make themselves so. Maybe I should suggest that to the commissioner. rmanfred@mlb.com—that should get there.

I can't add any more reactions today, but 😂

My Mets friend is salivating a bit because he knows the Tigers are struggling through injuries and losing, and the Mets are a heady 5-5 in their last 10, so yeah, I would like the Tigers to stick it up his butt. 😁

I have to admit my thinking on colored uniforms was shaped by my eleven-year-old self. I loved the green, gold, and white A's uniforms, and I still do, but I don't like them on just about any other team.

Maybe some of them want to go back to the '50s, but Trump and his inner circle are explicitly trying to force the country back into the Gilded Age.

Naw, I agree with you, he's never going to face justice. I'm just left hoping that when he realizes he is going to die soon, he doesn't have the nuclear button within reach.

At least someone got their $100 worth!

One nation, under Don, divided for his convenience, with liberty for him, and loyalty oaths for the rest of us.

I am pretty firmly on the left, and I am neither anti-American nor anti-western. I say that because I think it matters when evaluating whether the left, as a governing political force, has been captured by antisemitism, and I don't think it has. On Israel specifically: I don't think the "colonizer" framing is wholly inaccurate. A significant strand of Zionist ideology has drifted rightward over decades toward expanded settlement, annexation, and in some quarters explicitly expulsionist thinking. That's documentable, not propaganda. And criticizing that trajectory isn't antisemitism, even if some people putatively on my side of the aisle weaponize the criticism in antisemitic ways. On the broader point, I agree that rhetoric matters. But the distance between fringe influence and governing control is not the same on both sides right now, and I think that distinction is doing a lot of work that we keep glossing over. You mention presumed leaders of the far left now, and I know who Ilhan Omar is, but I had to look up Rossana Rodriguez, because I had no idea who she was. That's not an accident, because she's fringe. By contrast, the figures who set the Republican governing agenda are not fringe anymore—they are the agenda. The asymmetry is real and significant. Are there people on the left moving toward antisemitism? Yes. Are there more than there used to be? Perhaps, maybe even probably. Is there any realistic danger they seize control of the Democratic Party the way nativist, antisemitism-coded elements have routinely seized control of conservative and reactionary parties throughout history, and are doing right now in the GOP? I don't see it. I don't think it's even close. I'd just ask that we not fall into the trap of a "pox on both houses" framing, because while that feels fair and balanced, it obscures the fact that the two poxes are nowhere near alike in scope, scale, or institutional capture.

Of course Republicans roundly criticize Democrats for that. i would expect nothing less.

I promise you that, if the **** ever does come down for him in some beautiful world, he will claim someone else posted his “truths” and that he had no knowledge of it, and he will expect that argument will stick. Not for nothing, I also predict that if he ever goes to trial for his dismantling of America’s greatness, he will show up with newly grayed hair and either using a walker or sitting in a wheelchair.

Exactly what I mean.

I’m always envious of grocery stores I go to in just about every other city. It doesn’t matter where I go—Michigan, Wisconsin, Alabama, Idaho, you name it—they are always bigger, brighter, cleaner, better-stocked, and more orderly than ours in the city are. They’re cramped like 1980s, and they’re generally dirty, like dirt caked onto the floor kind of thing, with routinely under-stocked shelves with big holes where products are supposed to be. Even when I go in the afternoon, there are still palates in aisles waiting to be unloaded, with no one around in sight. And it’s not just Krogeriano’s, which is bad enough … it’s Jewel, it’s Aldi, it’s Pete’s, it’s Fresh Market, it’s Cermak, it’s all of them. I love this city I’m in, but the grocery store vibe here is one real downside to it.

TBF, it’s hard to exactly nail the dialogue of a whole other bygone era when you don’t live during the era. TB even more F, you don’t have to nail it exactly—you have only to make it seem to the modern audience that you have.