caulfield12

Trump’s future be pretty much damned anyway climate change “policy” https://www.yahoo.com/news/trumps-future-damned-climate-change-policy-090015859.html

Cue reference to fans not supporting “competitive” teams in 2010, 2012 and 2016. (Note: Adam Dunn’s historically-bad 2011 and the signings of LaRoche/Cabrera/Bonifacio didn’t exactly help restore the faith.)

Wouldn’t stop and frisk more appropriately be applied to past and former Trump admin. members?

Except Yelich can’t be considered THAT good unless he can repeat this level another year...and, fwiw, the Indians already have two huge offensive talents in Lindor and Ramirez, and it still doesn’t mean a thing if they come into the post-season flat from having no competition in the AL Central. It’s going to take Jimenez being a 900 ops bat and another superstar before they can begin to even consider challenging the Indians. Or Moncada waking up. The timing’s not right, and both those guys get opt outs after 2 or 3 years, no way it will be four unless the front loading is off the charts. And, even with Machado OR Harper, they still might not have enough pitching or offensive firepower to match up with Boston, NYY or Houston. Of course, they go risk averse yet again and pick the wrong second tier free agents and get stuck at .500 again and they’ll have completely lost an entire generation of potential Sox fans.

https://eand.co/why-america-stayed-a-backwards-society-and-collapsed-while-the-world-grew-and-prospered-f1b32a413276?source=email-778470e473a0-1538867325915-digest.reader------0-50------------------4d49b46c_ca07_44a7_883e_85e1f3236229-24&sectionName=ranked This author posits the theory that America “succeeded” largely due to Jim Crow laws and forced segregation (legalized apartheid)...and has seen falling overall middle class incomes since 1971 as the rest of the world started catching up after rebuilding at the end of World War II. Europe and Canada, etc., deliberately chose more egalitarian societies with a wider social safety net and generous health care benefits.

If US House districts were as big as their contribution to the economy

https://wallethub.com/edu/states-most-least-dependent-on-the-federal-government/2700/#red-vs-blue Red States are far more dependent on the Federal government than Blue States

It’s equally insane and disengenuous to put up a county by county map of the US and ignore population density and GDP...or the fact US districts and territories like DC and Puerto Rico have no say in the S.C., while Wyoming played a role equal to California with under 1 million residents. Should we go by which states spent more on/for Medicaid costs and related deaths for opioid addictions? At any rate, Rabbit will come to your rescue and bemoan the tenor of Filibuster. https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/06/opinions/kavanaugh-confirmation-margaret-chase-smith-opinion-gergen-piltch/index.html David Gergen has worked for both Republican and Democratic administrations and is as moderate/pragmatic as it gets. But if she wanted to keep bipartisanship alive and find the best possible outcome for the Supreme Court and country, why did she not also condemn the egregious mistakes of her own party, the party that now controls all three branches of government? She should have criticized her fellow Republicans for the withholding of documents and the empty FBI "investigation." She should have decried the GOP's rush to judgment and ignoring of Ford's own right to due process. Surely, she should have rejected President Trump's ugly taunting of Ford and the awful theory put forth that another man was the one guilty of Ford's assault. To use such a pivotal moment, with all the eyes and cameras on her, to critique just one side and cast doubt on Ford's words was not what Americans needed. Citizens and politicians alike needed to hear an honest accounting of how this process became so ugly. We needed to be reminded not only of the way Democrats tried to block Kavanaugh but also of how Republicans blocked Merrick Garland (one of the most qualified nominees to the Supreme Court) without giving him a hearing at all.

Not really. The blue states could just buy soybeans from Brazil, dairy from Canada, etc. How do you think Japan survives despite limited amounts of farmland? The irony is the overall costs to consumers would actually be less if you take away the government farm subsidies and protectionist tariffs on food imports. And the majority of those farms are not run by the middle class, they’re run by huge agribusiness corporations. Individuals in the farm economy only represent 2-4% of those Red States.

The biggest problem in the current system is small businesses/entrepreneurs/freelancers/independent contractors/(gig economy) can’t afford health care costs. That logical risk aversion...the tendency to look for the security of a bigger company or even public sector work like government employment or teaching...is really throttling what should be a dynamic element of the economy. Of course, it’s also much harder for the “small people” to compete for loans, or venture capital investment, for that matter. Trump might have wiped out a lot of regulations, but business loans are going to be more and more expensive with interest and bond rates rising. Naturally, the pool of investment money tends to be controlled by the biggest and most successful corporations...with the inequality/concentration of wealth continuing to worsen. Of course, America currently has no strategic plan for grand projects (Space Force?), infrastructure, educational reforms, etc. Some of the many reasons we are becoming increasingly divided.

And it’s REALLY hard to believe the GOP wants to limit immigration, which is the ONLY potential way to balance outgoing monies for SS, Medicare and Medicaid with declining incoming revenues. Of course, a majority of the retired or retiring Baby Boomers are white, while a majority of the younger workers supporting them in the next 20-30 years will be non-whites.

However, in addition to having more population, blue states also have higher GDP per person. The average GDP per person for a blue state is $55,194 and the average GDP per person for a red state is $48,725. The blue states also have a much deeper lineup in terms of GDP. Seven blue states have GDP's over $500 billion- California, New York, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio and New Jersey. Only one red state has a GDP over $500 billion- Texas. In fact, Texas produces 27% of the entire GDP of the red states. Among the blue states, although California produces $670 billion more GDP per year than Texas, it still only constitutes 20% of the GDP of blue states. This image, like the ones that adjust the map for population, provides a different perspective than the typical election result maps that show the geographic space in which each party wins. This image also makes it clear how ridiculous the Republican's contention that Republicans are generally "makers" and Democrats are generally "takers" is. To be clear, we don't know from this data how much of the GDP is created by Republicans in each state vs. Democrats in each state. But, many of the most liberal cities and states have the highest GDP's per capita. For example, in the most recent mayoral election in San Francisco (2011), the two Republican candidates combined received 0.5% of the vote, and San Francisco has one of the highest GDP's per capita of any city. Clearly, we do not live in a country where either party has a monopoly on "makers" and if anything, the more liberal areas tend to have a slightly more productive citizenry. These results are consistent with the general tendency for the economy to perform better under Democrats. It is also consistent with the correlation between education and economic productivity at the state level. See more graphs about: GDP

Well, short of some crazy wack jobs assassinating Supreme Court justices and turning real life into a Grisham/Clancy/Dan Brown thriller, there isn’t anything left to do except wait for 2020 and make vague intimations of changing the Constitution to make it possible to recall/impeach individual S.C. justices for unspecified “criminal acts.” https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/05/opinions/gop-outplayed-dems-opinion-zelizer/index.html How the Dems got outplayed (once again) on Kavanaugh

Paragraph 2 is no longer a viable or winning political strategy...it’s simply going to be spun as taking money/opportunity from hard working Americans (whites) and redistributing it to Muslims/immigrants/undeserving/lazy/blah (Balta’s phrase) people. Of course, it won’t be spelled out quite so explicitly...it will just be intimated. At any rate, there are more adamantly opposed to affirmative action/redistributionist policies than in favor. In fact, you can’t even get Dems winning on a consistent national basis arguing that the Top 80% should benefit from taxing the Top 10-20% at considerably higher rates...as a way to pay for all those things you want to provide in Paragraph 1 without going trillions more into debt.

One of his classmates disagrees. In a statement obtained by theNew Yorker, which he signed and anonymously submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee and the FBI, the classmate wrote thathe remembers hearing Kavanaugh “talk about Renate many times,” giving the impression that “Renate was the girl that everyone passed around for sex.” He writes in the statement: https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/kavanaugh-treatment-renate-schroeder-high-170338460.html

Manchin and Bredesen (TN candidate) are having their funding cut off by some liberal PAC’s after expressing their cases for Kavanaugh.

“Progressives may claim Trump is Caesar at the edge of the Rubicon, but they have embraced the bastard love child of Joseph Stalin and Franz Kafka and enlisted the American political press to smear, defame and attack anyone who stands in their way.” If the mainstream media and George Soros were so influential as claimed, the GOP wouldn’t have control of all three branches of government, and the majority of state legislatures and governorships. Very few legitimate national Democratic candidates are extolling getting entirely rid of ICE, or guns, or believes that Medicare for All is feasible. In fact, almost everyone prefers to close the loopholes for small business owners and independent contractors, rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater. What they do agree upon is that unchecked/unregulated corporate power constitutes a threat to democracy and our shared system of values.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/susan-collins-kavanaugh-speech-diagnoses-americas-deepening-division-235214542.html We are on a dangerous road, and the judicial confirmation wars are going to get a lot worse for our traveling down it,” wrote Benjamin Wittes, editor in chief of Lawfare, in a column for the Atlantic arguing that Kavanaugh should not be confirmed because the preponderance of the evidence, in his mind, “leans toward Ford.” The story of how we got to this contentious and ugly place has many chapters to it. The most recent was written only 18 months ago when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., did away with the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees in response to a decision by Democrats to refuse to allow a vote. At the time, Democrats were retaliating for McConnell’s refusal to give Obama’s choice in 2016 for the Supreme Court, Judge Merrick Garland, a vote. And in 2016 McConnell had his own justification for blocking Garland, based on what he saw as Democratic sins of the past. The tit-for-tat has gone on for decades, escalating over the past 15 years or so. The losers of this fight are not Democrats or Republicans but the American people, especially minorities and those without power, for whom an independent and trusted judiciary is a crucial bulwark against abuses. As Collins said in her speech, “It is when passions are most inflamed that fairness is most in jeopardy.” The law is supposed to be a central protection against unfairness. But the Supreme Court may now be truly broken in that it is viewed as a political institution rather than a body where outcomes are decided by an agreed-upon set of rules. “There’s no time for nuance; there is only time for war,” wrote Amy Walter, national editor of the Cook Political Report. “So, war it will be for the foreseeable future.”

Other than Francona, what “great” managers can we list that at least SEEM to be relatively humble? Bochy, I guess, would be another.

Even couples who successfully save $1-2 million for retirement can see it quickly destroyed by long term care expenses. My mom’s assisted living cost in Iowa is $4500 per month, and that’s considered very cheap/affordable. Nursing homes, $7-10,000 per month...and this is the Quad Cuties, not Chicago, NYC or SF. It doesn’t take long to run out of assets...until you’re only left with the family home (if it hasn’t been reverse mortgaged to draw out more cash flow), and sometimes even then the government will try to seize that before Medicaid finally kicks in, and being taken care of by the government at the end of life is not a situation anyone would wish for. There has to be a better way.

https://eand.co/will-and-should-america-break-up-with-america-7a2dfbab5224 Should a collapsing America Just Break Up with Itself? Americans don’t agree on two things anymore. Personhood and violence.They don’t agree that all people are people, or should be, or even can be — and therefore, many Americans appear to believe in many or most of the following things. It’s perfectly acceptable to rape women if you can get away with it, it’s perfectly fine to put children in camps, it’s perfectly desirable to suggest, believe, “know that” some groups are inherently superior to others, it’s quite alright to want to ethnically cleanse a society, it’s perfectly healthy to “debate” ideas like authoritarianism and fascism (as if two world wars hadn’t settled the question). Need I go on? Agreements about these two things — personhood, the idea that all people are equal persons, and violence, the idea that because all people are equal persons, no one is to do violence to another — are the fundamental building blocks of a democracy. Unless people can agree on both, definitionally, a society will cannot remain a democracy — it cannot really forge a social contract through consent, because some people are not people, but inhuman, and the people who are will therefore have license to do violence to them. But that is precisely where America is today. So where will it be tomorrow? Let me try to answer that question, by referencing another one. The question “will America break up?” is often seen as about differing political attitudes within a democracy. But I think it cuts much deeper than that. It is about differing attitudes to democracy — different attitudes to political systems entirely.

It’s interesting to note the Brewers are having a lot of success with ex AL Central guys. Moustakas, Cain, Kratz, Jeffress from KC, we contributed Saladino, Swarzak last year, Junior Guerra, Cedeno, Soria. And their huge breakthrough hitter, Aguilar, came from CLE.

https://www.mavsmoneyball.com/2018/10/4/17939512/dallas-mavericks-hire-bob-voulgaris-in-front-office-role-gambling-research Or even what the Mavericks are doing...

Where’s the proof that the White Sox are doing anything Interesting or remarkable? The rebuild is riding on Moncada, Kopech, Anderson, Jimenez, Cease, Robert and Madrigal being studs. How did they use analytics or non-traditional avenues to scout any of those guys? The only positional player they’ve really been right on is Abreu in the last half-decade. KW and Paddy are the ones who pursued him, how did analytics play a role? Heck, they might have the most boring name for a proprietary database system in the history of the sport. At any rate, for months and months, we’ve been hearing the strength of the system was high end collegiate pitching...and that many of these guys would end up in the bullpen. But the results down the stretch were not exactly confidence boosting. What is it that the White Sox actually do well, right now? We have a pretty terrible defensive team...other than Anderson, Moncada (when focused), and Engel, who can’t hit. We’ve got fielders who can’t hit and a bunch of hitters who can’t field, to many to name. Our one seeming advantage is overall team speed and aggressiveness...but we also stopped stealing bases, and that philosophy runs counter to nearly every team in baseball (anyway) and also causes lots of injuries/wears down players to boot. We have a bottom 5-10 manager and a bottom 5-10 front office. The ONLY thing saving the White Sox is being in the worst division in baseball, with 3 rebuilding small market teams, and the Indians being small market, too. If we were in either the AL West or AL East or all the teams played balanced schedules with top five advancing, this franchise would be in pretty serious trouble.

Meanwhile, Sasse/Flake/Murkowski/Collins can all pretend to be more principled...defending the values of the Constitution, uniting the country, etc.