gehringer_2

As does Soto..😪

Medicare is the more serious problem, but the solution to that is a more general re-alignment of medicine in the US for all. SSI is not as bad. Relative small changes drive big differences in the out years. Some means testing, add a single year to eligibility, increase the payroll tax a single point - despite the way things get talked the solutions for SSI are hardly end of the world fixes, it's just very hard in the present inter party politics for anyone to touch any important issue because the old system of the two parties giving each other cover when that kind of fix was made is dead. And to TBH, the SSI issue is somewhat transitory. Once the boomers start dying off in numbers the system will begin to right itself based on a less skewed population distribution and more stable long term population numbers.

Which is why she won't do it. She may talk about how terrible Trump is as long as she's selling herself as the alternative, but I'm on the side that doubts she will actually do anything to prevent him getting elected if he wins the nomination - i.e. go third party.

LOL - The Candidate keeling over would create existential panic in either party this cycle. 😱

I think Manuel has made it pretty clear no moves will be made in season, at least unless something completely blows up ( murder, mayhem, etc). And Bacon is right. All firing Howard now does is satisfy some fans' sense of retribution, but that's not in any way productive. OTOH, in any normal time, I would be surprised to see Howard extended, but things are so crazy right now. Maybe the people on the inside - Ono/Manuel - see some kind of major re-alignment coming down the pike in the next year or so, in which case maybe you don't want to make a new hire until the dust settles. I'd actually find it hard to believe if there were not a lot of informal networking and quiet discussions going on between groups of University Presidents and ADs about what kind of future they want to drive toward. That's all pure speculation of course but just mention it as the kind of thing that may be driving top level decision making that we don't get much insight into.

But I have the math on my side.

I don't remember if it was Campbell or Holmes that made the statement that they have a strong predisposition towards re-signing their own players that they have gotten to know rather than take chances on FA's who are locker room unknowns. Now like every other statement, I'm sure there is some wiggle room. You can do some research, you may have ex-teammates you trust that vouch for a guy's personality/work ethic etc. Bottom line though is that they want to know guys in depth before they spend their money on them.

with all due respect, the system doesn't care about that. What you really are saying is that you'd rather see Trump win than vote for Biden. That's the bottom line practical fact. It is what it is. Like I said, the process doesn't care a whit about what principle you believe you bring to the decision all it cares about are the vote totals. Voting is not a symbolic gesture, it's a practical action.

and this is the key and why all the polling in recent cycles is just so much guess work. 17 million more Dems came out in 2020 compared to 2012. It's almost pointless to bother asking the poll question once you pick the Dem/Rep sample ratio, you've already picked your answer because no-one's mind is changing. It's all about and only about the turnout.

This is the exactly the kind of thing that if those people were fully functioning humans, should drive them to vote Dem in the fall. But will it?

The marker would be to see couple of elected official change parties. Instead of fighting back they are just resigning. The gap is too wide now, this aint Don Riegle's party politics.

For Biden to lose you have to posit that upwards 5-10 million Biden voters who were anti-Trump enough to come out in 2020 don't care enough to vote this time, despite Trump post 1/6/2021 having shown himself a much bigger threat than anyone imagined even on Nov 2, 2020, plus Dobbs in the meanwhile, plus 8 yrs of population roll-over toward Millennials/GenZ. Pretty hard to square all that with what the polls say.

Another question I would be south FLA. The Cuban vote has been one of the most conservative segments of the Hispanic voting public, but they have also been the most staunchly pro-democracy/anti-dictator. Does Trump playing poodle to Putin drive Miami's Hispanic vote toward blue?

There is one other aspect to this which is a little odd to me, and that is that Democratic Party leaders apparently don't believe the public polling either. They either have their own internal polling that contradicts it or maybe they are all just happy to whistle past the graveyard (always a possibility) but if a large swath of the party believed these polls I believe the grumbling about Biden would not just be grumbling at this point, it should have reached a cacophony. So there is mismatch there also.

If the GOP refugees would wake up and realize that having now been pretty formally excommunicated it's really time to stop gnawing the cold bones of old dead plots to 'regain' their party and accede to joining the opposition. You'd think that, but it's still not happening.

The non-crazy part of American Christianity is very conflicted about pushing back publicly against their political brethren even as they have more and more come to realize they need to be challenged. It's a fine line to walk without simply becoming their mirror image in apostasy. Puts me in mind of the kinds of things Gandalf and Galadriel said when refusing the ring. Once you cross line from humility to claiming moral authority in the name of a greater power you put yourselves in peril of losing the way back.

A movement takes money and bodies. The money and the bodies don't need to be the same people!

I don't know how you get any sane person to coach NCAA basketball since 'one-and-done" came into being. There has been talk that supposedly, OAD was going to end under the next NBA CBA. Will that actually happen? Does it even matter if the whole NCAA amateur system is ending? Who knows!?

It's all about control for the tribe. If you used to be a majority and are becoming a minority, majority rule suddenly doesn't seem like a such winning proposition any more. Lubricate that with the money of the capitalist class who doesn't really care about good government one way or the other but knows that the broader the level of participation of the public in government, the more constrained they are going to end up by regulation in the public interest that crimps their profits. So you have a malcontented class and a source of funds to drive the movement - so here we are.

Yeah, I don’t know how much the U cares about bball. Remember how long the program languished under Tommy “I don’t work overtime” Ammaker and Ellerbe? Juwan has given them enough reasons to move on, but my guess is that he’ll wear out his welcome on the behavior side before he does on the record side.

yours is a common view, that often leads people to stay home, but the logic of that still escapes me. There is always a difference between the candidates. If you can't find some difference and push the process at least incrementally in the direction you prefer, all you have done is take yourself out of the process. There is no such thing as a meaningful abstention in our process, no one cares about the principles of your stance. If you don't vote, all you do is guarantee that no one in the process will ever care what you think.

LOL - the SO just added Cadillac Mtn to the agenda for this summer's road trip. I told her NBD - if we continue on to the Canada maritimes we can see it earlier than that.

It's seared into your memory because Nick Punto had more career PA against the Tigers than any other team.

good adjective for a dancer maybe.

To finish the little digression here, I will say that what Hayak argued in 'Road to Serfdom' is correct on one level, you will ruin an economy and polity if government 'control' of the economy reaches too high a level, when too many economic decisions are colored by political or even corrupt and otherwise non-economic factors. What Hayak was wrong about was his measurement model. His model was that government control of the economy was equal to the government's share of spending in GDP. That is another example of a plausible but flawed model leading to flawed ideology. What Hayak missed was that in the modern welfare state, the majority of government spending is transfer payments, and transfer payments are fundamentally different than other forms of spending. When the government buys jets for the Air Force, that is spending where all the decisions are driven at the political level. If the government owns the car company, the decision about where to buy steel becomes a political or patronage decision, likewise who to hire or where to put the factory. Too much of that and you do tank the economy and the general level of liberty in society. But in the US over 50% of government spending is transfer payments. In a transfer payment an individual ends up making the decision about how that money is spent and he spends it in a free market. So it's a completely different animal with regard to what Hayak was worried about. Once you take out the transfer payments, the percentage of US (or Euro welfare state) economy 'controlled' by direct political/government decision making falls below the practical concern level for a failing 'socialist' - old school meaning- economy.