caulfield12

http://www.fangraphs.com/leaders.aspx?pos=...=0&sort=9,d Moncada closing in on a 35% strikeout rate after today. Going to be something to follow with Davidson, Yoan, Adam Engel, Tim Anderson, etc. Yoan still putting up overall positive defensive numbers and a 0.3 fwar. 704 ops.

QUOTE (Jerksticks @ Aug 13, 2017 -> 04:48 PM) Strange Sox, I have a suggestion. Tomorrow is Monday. Get up and go to work and on the way maybe help someone out; either hold the door for someone in a wheelchair, give $20 or $100 to a homeless person. Then at work, tell somebody they are doing a good job at something. Then help somebody out on the way home and maybe call your mom and tell her thanks for all the sacrifices she made for you. Maybe not those exact things if they don't apply to you but you get the idea. You'll feel good about your day and you'll do more for humanity in one single day than all the days added together of being a part of demagoguery. You'll help more people in one day than all the shouting and labeling could ever achieve. You'll also realize that most people are like this every day and live in this humane version of the world that isn't on the news. You'll notice that there really isn't blatant racism everywhere, or misogyny, or bigotry. It's just on TV where they choose to point the cameras. It's a beautiful time to be alive, go help somebody that needs it, if you are able. Love you brother. Appeasement. That's what the Trump administration would love for everyone to do. Normalize and accept him and go about our collective business like absolutely nothing is out of the ordinary. Then, in the end, the fight to defeat those forces just gets bigger and bigger the longer it gets kicked down the road. Even if Trump is not there, Mike Pence would still be the clear favorite and the same dynamics would largely be at play in terms of either turning back the clock OR fighting for progressive causes.

QUOTE (TaylorStSox @ Aug 13, 2017 -> 04:07 PM) You can continue to attack the people that voted for Trump and compound the cultural schism. As a liberal, I choose to look for reasons a monster like Trump was able to win the presidency. It's a shame the Democratic party refuses to do the same, instead of trying to name villains. I refuse to believe a large portion of Trump voters chose him because he's racist. The people that swayed the election were the working poor who've become completely disenfranchised with the Washington elite. 6% racists was clearly enough to put the election firmly into Trump's column. The degree of complicity by the other 94% who ended up in the Republican column is up for debate. It becomes a question of what actually disqualifies a presidential candidate anymore? What values does America stand for? Watching many of these events unfold from abroad, Trump is an unhinged racist/bully who doesn't have many friends in the court of world opinion...and his administration consistently appears to condone violence against minorities, women, the LGBTQ community and immigrants, whether it's executed by the government or the police. Is that what we want to stand for to the rest of the world? A country where only the elites can succeed and everyone else better keep their heads down?

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Aug 13, 2017 -> 08:00 AM) The United States Dpt of Justice brought a civil rights violation action against Donald Trump personally because he refused to permit black people to rent apartments in his buildings. The Dpt of Justice said all he needed to do was agree to rent to minorities. He refused. Instead he spent a fortune in legal fees fighting to keep minorities out of his buildings. On the eve of trial he caved and signed the Consent Decree. Donald J. Trump is a racist. In the late 80s, Donald Trump argued that the death penalty should be re-instated for the 'Central Park 5', and when the accused were later found not guilty through DNA evidence, he refused to admit he was wrong and still thought they were guilty. Donald J. Trump is a racist. When the first African American President was elected, Donald J. Trump attacked the legitimacy of the President's citizenship with full knowledge that his attack was 100% based upon a lie. Donald J. Trump is a racist. During a television interview during his campaign he was asked about David Duke and the KKK and he outright refused to denounce him or his views (he finally renounced him weeks later after being forced to do so because of the political firestorm). Donald J. Trump is a racist. Then he refused to denounce the murder of a Muslim on a train in Seattle. Donald J. Trump is a racist. Then he refused to denounce the bombing of a mosque last week. Donald J. Trump is a racist. And this weekend he refused to denounce the views of Nazis. Donald J. Trump is a racist. But "nice" people voted for him. Serious mosque attack by whites in Canada unmentioned or commented upon...

"What do you say to people who say the president wasn't specific enough, he wasn’t hard enough?” Pirro asked Huckabee. “Are these Trump haters who just will look for any reason to dump on the president?” Huckabee responded with a touch of incredulity. “[W]hat is he supposed to say?” he said. “Is he supposed to do what Barack Obama used to do and jump to a conclusion, and make a decision about something, like he did in Ferguson, Missouri, which turned out to be totally untrue? The president has to be careful.” Huckabee said that Trump “condemned” the fact that a “coward” had driven into a crowd of people. “What else is he supposed to do at that point?” Trump has not always been “careful” in jumping to conclusions in the immediate aftermath of apparent terror attacks. He called a violent incident that occurred in the Philippines a “terrorist attack” even though officials there later deemed it a robbery. He similarly rushed to decry terrorism after attacks in London and Paris. If anything, Saturday was an aberration. Rarely, if ever, has Trump been this “careful” after violence occurs that he assumes has been committed by Muslim extremists. And while Huckabee accused President Obama of rushing to judgement after Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, the former president was actually criticized for waiting too long to address the situation there, something he acknowledged in an interview the following year. “When Ferguson happened, there was a gap between how quickly we could pull together a police task force, recommendations. And so in that lag, it feels as if I haven’t spoken to the moment as effectively,” Obama said. “I suspect that if I were to do it over again, there might be something I could say that would’ve crystallized it more effectively.” http://www.thedailybeast.com/mike-huckabee...hoo&ref=yfp

To my fellow progressives: Single payer is good, but unnecessary http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/heal...cessary?ref=yfp Simple but logical explanation...modeled on the Swiss system.

Except we're not the Royals with all the players set to hit free agency simultaneously. We have two clearly defined groups of talent that are roughly two years or two and 1/2 years apart.

Meanwhile, Trump's popularity for threatening North Korea with nuclear Armageddon rose a full six points. President Donald Trump is finding favor in the polls following his rhetoric against North Korea earlier in the week. On Wednesday, Trump, in a warning to North Korean leader Kim Jon Un, said Pyongyang would “face fire and fury like the world has never seen” if they continued making threats against the United States and U.S. territory Guam. And since then, the president’s approval rating has jumped up six points, according to daily presidential tracking poll by Rasmussen Reports. Fifty-three percent of voters still disapproved of Trump’s job performance, according to the poll released on Friday. However, support for Trump’s job performance was up to 45 percent compared to the 39 percent reported a week ago. Meanwhile, 29 percent of voters strongly approve of the president’s job performance while 44 percent said they strongly disapprove. https://www.yahoo.com/news/threatening-nort...-172636226.html

QUOTE (Jerksticks @ Aug 12, 2017 -> 10:35 PM) I know what happened, and I'm not defending it. I'm just saying that calling all the people who voted for Trump "racist" is a terrible thing to do. Why draw conclusions from my comments like that? Ahhh because you wanted to I'm guessing. But I'm not going to assume like you did. So why don't you tell me why you chose to take my simple defense of 10s of millions of nice people, and come to the conclusion that I support the actions of a domestic, racist terrorist? Please tell me how you arrived there. "Nice people" whose very silence condones the actions of overt racists...with maybe ten notable exceptions in the Republican Party today. We all remember huge arguments back and forth over the Berkeley protests...but this guy actually killed one, four were in critical condition at latest report and a total of NINETEEN injured by his intentional actions. There's no moral equivalency there. If you watch the two or three videos and still aren't repulsed by his actions, I'm not sure what can even be said anymore. Former KKK leader David Duke strikes out at Trump for condemning a white nationalist rally: 'It was White Americans who put you in the presidency' In a series of tweets Duke questioned why the president, whom he usually supports, is attacking white Americans who put him "in the presidency." https://finance.yahoo.com/news/former-kkk-l...-200532936.html

I recommend everyone reading the book "Everybody Lies" ... author interview excerpt follows. In the book, he argues with solid statistical backing that Obama would have won by 6% more in 2008/12 if not for racist elements in the electorate. Not close to fifty million, but a realistic estimate is at least FIVE to SEVEN million. As a barometer of our national consciousness, Google is as accurate (and predictive) as it gets. In 2016, when the Republican primaries were just beginning, most pundits and pollsters did not believe Trump could win. After all, he had insulted veterans, women, minorities, and countless other constituencies. But Stephens-Davidowitz saw clues in his Google research that suggested Trump was far more serious than many supposed. Searches containing racist epithets and jokes were spiking across the country during Trump’s primary run, and not merely in the South but in upstate New York, Western Pennsylvania, Eastern Ohio, rural Illinois, West Virginia, and industrial Michigan. Stephens-Davidowitz saw in the Google Trends data a racially polarized electorate, and one primed to respond to the ethno-nationalist rhetoric of Trump. There were earlier signs, too. On Obama’s 2008 election night, Stephens-Davidowitz found that “one in every hundred Google searches that included the word ‘Obama’ also included ‘KKK’” or the n-word. Searches for racist websites like Stormfront also spiked. ..... Seth Stephens-Davidowitz The first thing was that the level of racism in this country was a lot higher than I had realized. I think a lot of people thought that Trump would be done as soon as he started saying all these racially charged things. I think when you look at this internet data, you see the demand for this type of material. I mean, I had even been studying white nationalist sites like Stormfront for a long time, long before most people knew about it, and still I was shocked by how widespread the appeal of these sites were. Sean Illing This is what we should’ve been paying attention to, not these outdated polling methods. Seth Stephens-Davidowitz You can't really predict using surveys who's going to turn out in an election because everybody says they're going to vote, nobody wants to admit that they have no intention of voting. But you can predict who's going to vote based on their Google searches. People search how to vote, or where to vote, or polling places weeks before an election and that predicts that turnout will be high. In this election, you saw very, very clearly in the data that there was a huge decrease in these searches in cities with enormous African-American populations, for example. It was very clear in the Google search data that black turnout was going to be way down in 2016, and that was one of the reasons Clinton did so much worse than the polls predicted. https://www.vox.com/conversations/2017/6/13...-everybody-lies

Jimenez with a 1.196 ops at Winston-Salem...Aaron Judge first half numbers. Or Frank Thomas coming out of Auburn.

Moncada looked like he totally forgot how to play the game of baseball after Thursday night's heroics...oh, well.

Moncada just handed them the lead...same time the Twins were blowing a huge lead in Detroit. (Shouldn't have traded Kintzler and Jaime Garcia.) Cardinals on verge of reeling in the Cubs, too.

How many baserunners have they lost the last 40 or so games? Have to be leading MLB in that category...and it's mostly unrelated to stealing bases.

QUOTE (JenksIsMyHero @ Aug 12, 2017 -> 06:49 PM) Bulls***. Stop with this nonsense. I've seen a lot of Republicans, high profile Republicans, rightly calling this an act of terrorist by Nazis/white nationalists. It's a large part of Trump's base that hasn't wavered in their support. Not a perfect Venn diagram alignment, but let's not pretend all those Republicans have consistently sopoken out in similar situations against Trump. Otherwise, why make such a politically calculated statement so as not to offend those voters? What would he stand to gain?

Moncada just not picking up Kennedy...who is far from overpowering...at all tonight. At least he had that one great defensive play, his patented athletic throw going towards short LCF.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Aug 12, 2017 -> 06:30 PM) The Nazis were there in response to the treasonous slaver's statue being taken down. That statement is taking their side. http://www.history.com/news/history-lists/...n-the-civil-war In all fairness, George Thomas is probably the only general who "heroically" turned against his home state in the Civil War. Of course, Lee wasn't just any general, he was asked by Lincoln himself to lead the Army of the Potomac across the river and to invade his home in Arlington. We need to look at context when we judge history. Is Lincoln to be denigrated because his initial solution was to send all the Southern slaves back to Africa in order to avoid war? It was pragmatic, but certainly not acceptable judging backwards in time from 2017 America.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/12/politics/tru...ment/index.html Trump's incredibly unpresidential statement on Charlottesville Chalking it all up to a violent political rhetoric that occurs on both sides and has been around for a very long time contextualizes and normalizes the behavior of people who should not be normalized. It is not everyday political rhetoric to scream epithets at people who don't look like you or worship like you. Trump's right that this sort of behavior has existed on American society's fringes for a long time -- but what we as a nation, led by our presidents, have always done is call it out for what it is: radical racism that has no place in our world. So, that's the big one. But there are other things in Trump's statement that are also worth calling out -- most notably "not Donald Trump, not Barack Obama." What Trump is doing here is pre-emptively absolving himself of blame for creating a political climate in the country in which people like these "Unite the Right" demonstrators feel emboldened enough to rally in public. Not my fault, Trump is saying. There were hate groups and hate speech under Obama too! With someone dead and more than two dozen people injured, this is, of course, not the time for assigning blame. Or for making political calculations. This is a time to say: We stand together against what we saw in Charlottesville today. Trump didn't do that. Not even close. Then, last but not least, is what Trump said a few paragraphs after his "on many sides" comment. Here it is: "Our country is doing very well in so many ways. We have record -- just absolute record employment. We have unemployment, the lowest it's been in almost 17 years. We have companies pouring into our country. Foxconn and car companies, and so many others, they're coming back to our country. We're renegotiating trade deals to make them great for our country and great for the American worker. We have so many incredible things happening in our country. So when I watch Charlottesville, to me it's very, very sad."

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Aug 12, 2017 -> 05:41 PM) I missed this earlier. He didn't just whitewash this s*** with his "many sides," he literally took that Nazis' side with his "cherish our history." Fwiw, I took that to mean Robert E. Lee more than Nazis, but not much better in this current climate. The name of the park where the events were supposed to take place had recently changed to Remembrance Park or something like that. (The unfortunate thing is a timely and well-reviewed movie like "Detroit," about the 1967 race riots in that city, will come and go with nary a shoulder shrug.)

By late Saturday afternoon, a number of prominent Republican lawmakers including Sens. Cory Gardner, Orrin Hatch, Tim Scott, and Marco Rubio, along with House Speaker Paul Ryan and Rep. Cathy McMorris Rogers had condemned the actions of the white supremacists in far stronger language than the president. Gardner went as far as calling the incident “domestic terrorism.” "Mr. President - we must call evil by its name. These were white supremacists,” Gardner tweeted from his official account. Rubio also wrote on Twitter that it was important “for the nation to @potus describe events in #Charlottesville for what they are, a terror attack by #whitesupremacists." Trump’s response to the Charlottesville white nationalist demonstrations also showed the limits of Gen. John Kelly’s power as the newly-installed White House chief of staff. Kelly has spent the last two weeks trying to professionalize the decision-making process inside the White House, but he has been unable to steer Trump away from controversy, including his provocative statements on North Korea this week. Politico.com

http://www.milb.com/scoreboard/index.jsp?s...mp;ymd=20170812

At least three are dead right now....not sure which is more indicative of how far off the rails America has gone, this situation or North Korea? You know it's bad when you are way to the right of Orrin Hatch... Fellow Republicans slammed Trump's lack of directness and attempt to inject moral equivalence into the situation of chaos and terror. "We should call evil by its name," tweeted Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, the most senior Republican in the Senate. "My brother didn't give his life fighting Hitler for Nazi ideas to go unchallenged here at home." "Very important for the nation to hear @POTUS describe events in #Charlottesville for what they are, a terror attack by #whitesupremacists," tweeted Sen. Marco Rubio, a competitor for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination. "Mr. President - we must call evil by its name. These were white supremacists and this was domestic terrorism," tweeted Sen. Cory Gardner, a Colorado Republican. CNN.com

https://www.yahoo.com/style/breitbart-edito...-174958691.html Apparently a percentage of the right wing now believes images of the Statue of Liberty are essentially anti-Trump/anti-alt right...

The "average" American retirement investor simply needs a balanced set of no-load index funds from Vanguard...if you want to get fancy, you can add small/midcap and real estate investment trusts to provide some diversification as those two groups over the past twenty years are performing as well as any categories. As we all know, less than 2% (the opposite of the 98% quoted) of professional investment advisors can actively beat these indexes on a regular basis, and they're so talented they're not working with those with under $100/$250/$500k net worth families anyway. Probably starting boutique or hedge funds for high net worth individuals. We also know the "average" investor following this Vanguard strategy would be at a 6.5-7.0% rate of return going back to the 1998-2002 financial "crises." Yet those with investment advisors constantly buying and selling, churning their clients' money in constant search for higher returns (and often they advise mutual funds with front end loads that kill return rates) are probably in that 4-6% range and making more money on your portfolio than they should be on commissions/brokers' fees. If they can consistently put up 10% ROI, great, but that's not the case for your typical Edward Jones or Charles Schwab guy. And I thought the Republicans were always in favor of getting rid of Social Security so people could manage their own money and get higher than a 2.5% or whatever the government generates??? I have never met a single Republican who thinks they can't manage get their own money better, and that's roughly 35% of the US population, much higher than the quoted 2%. (See GW Bush administration efforts to privatize.)

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Aug 12, 2017 -> 07:18 AM) I will never understand why it's supposed to be good for these guys to be able to sell you what's in their best interest, not yours. If nothing else, there should be an additional level of scrutiny/accountability in their dealings with anyone over age 60...