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gehringer_2

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Everything posted by gehringer_2

  1. not sure about this one. Carter's failure to deal with inflation was a big winner for Reagan and it wasn't nearly as big an issue yet in '76. Also Carter was much more appealing as a candidate than he was as the president. He was easier to run against in 1980 because most people judged his leadership deficient after he had been in office. No-one knew the bright happy pol Carter was in '76 would end up lecturing us about malaise and would let himself be totally paralyzed by Khomeini. Ted Koppel and 'Nightline' was the world's longest running Reagan campaign ad and RR never had to pay a nickel for it. An interesting one is whether Ford wins in '76 without "the Pardon". My guess is the effect is over rated. The people most disturbed by the pardon were democrats, who might have said "I'd never vote for Ford after the pardon" in surveys, but in reality probably wouldn't have without it either. And he absolutely did hurt himself in the debates - Carter bested him by quite a bit.
  2. Faedo's outing cementing his starting role - at Toledo.
  3. Chiarot has the size to hang when it gets physical, but your point still holds - even counting him with Seider it's not enough. IDK, Scotty used to hate the risk of young defensemen across the board, but I still wonder if it wouldn't be worth the risk to call Edvinsson up and see if he rises to the challenge. He's probably not doing much to add to his game at GR at this point anyway.
  4. We have term limits in MI and I'd say in general it made things much worse - you don't want government expertise to turn over too fast. With short limits the permanent staff ends up running everything and the reps themselves end up like the staff's interns. I'm not against the concept per se but the implementation here was too reactionary - they made the limits too short (3 x 2 yrs or 2 x 4 yrs) - for the state HOR that's only 6 yrs. They should be no less than 10 yrs, I'd say maybe 15yrs. I want the 20-30 yrs guys to roll out, not the person who's been there just long enough to understand the issues and start being an effective legislator. We have changed it in MI in the last election so it's now 12 yrs combined in both Houses, which hopefully works better - a House rep could stay 6 terms max in the House, or a Senator 3 in the Senate or some combination. I'd have gone one term longer but this should still improve the State House.
  5. But there is a another way to look at it, which is that primaries have a different nature for incumbencies. Your party chose a person as the best candidate, he/she ended up having wide enough appeal to win the office, why do you want to revisit that by running someone against them in a primary? That's basically strategic suicide for a party in the absence of some real issue with the incumbent. For a party to run against it's own incumbent in a primary is basically an intra-party impeachment-you're telling the world your party was too incompetent to get the choice right the 1st time and you, MR. Voter, didn't make a good choice in electing him. A lot of bad subtext there. Running anything other than tokens against incumbent will just never be SOP for a well functioning political party. With Biden you'd have to make a serious case that he was becoming demonstrably incompetent or something, and maybe some people believe that, but all I see is what is normal for a guy that is getting physically frailer but still has his wits about him. There is more risk at his age that he won't finish his term, but there's no guarantee either way. I'm old enough to remember that the youngest president we ever elected didn't finish his term either. In a perfect world it would have been nice if Biden decided early not to run again, but the problem is that there is no good time for a President to announce that without neutering his admin, so it even if there is some inclination (not that I think there was any with Biden) the shear momentum of trying to get things done works hard against that decision ever being implemented.
  6. In an open primary (Bernie/Hillary) people should vote for who they like - that's the whole idea. But the obligation for those who claim to be in the party is to actually support it after one candidate wins. When that doesn't happen (the Teddy challenge in 1980, Bernie Bros staying home in 2016), then you lose elections you might have won. That said, it's not an open primary when the president is an incumbent - it's a windmill tilt. A popularly elected president has not lost his party's nomination (if he ran for it) since before the civil war. So it goes back to my original contention - most candidates that are running a primary campaign against an incumbent president are either far too full of themselves (Teddy K) or just stalking horses for people behind the scenes more interested in mischief than anything else.
  7. The Yankees and Tigers had an exhibition baseball game scheduled for today but apparently a football game broke out at Joker Marchant stadium in its stead. 22-10 NY final.
  8. That is pretty certainly what got Trump into it in the 1st place. Once you declare for office you can live like a Prince on other people's money and not have to claim a penny of it as income. No way Trump could ever resist that once he figured it out.
  9. The problem for Americans in your position is that if people want the parties to generate better candidates, it would be more effective to get involved in party politics more at the front end than to simply be left with only a thumbs down at the other end of the process. That is the dirty little secret as to why the parties don't work well anymore - it's because everybody takes the position that it's up to someone else to make them work. It's partly a boomer legacy of having grown up believing someone else did all the work and you just got the benefits, but it's permeated Americans' approach to politics across all generations now. And I certainly claim myself - I think about getting more involved but in the end, don't. So there we are!
  10. Yup. All you really need to do is step back and ask yourself what rational person would be contributing the money to keep these charades alive. Basically someone(s) with alternative motives and the means to obscure their tracks. It's like Jihadism. The radicals can spout the Koran all they like, but if the Wahabi's had not been writing checks, the Jihadis would never have had a pot to piss in. Nuisance political campaigns are no different really. They always trace back to sources whose primary interest is generating FUD.
  11. you have 20 'regular' players. A decent hockey player has a roughly 10yr career, so if you are restocking via the draft you need 2 players per draft on average. Of course you don't build only from the amateur draft, but by the averages it's true Yzerman hasn't exactly being tearing it up. Then again, what kind of scouting and development did he inherit? The proof won't be so much from his early drafts as whether there is net upward trend in the results over 4-5 yrs.
  12. Bottom of 1st all Tiger nightmare. Malloy finds out an MLB ump does agree with his great eye at the plate and Keith K's on 3 pitches. It can only get better from here, right?.... RIGHT?
  13. not counting last draft, which right now is looking nice, Cossa, Edvinsson, Kasper, maybe Solderblom still in play.
  14. Makes sense. If you can't hold a conversation what else is there to do while you wait for your table mates to finish eating? 🙃
  15. Not a bad idea. Considering that the cost of Urshela is only a fraction of the investment in Baez they need to get a better return on, it's a reasonable strategy. The Tigers have gone from a team where most of the onfield chatter was in Spanish a few seasons ago to pretty much the opposite.
  16. That's the problem. The big money interests need the cult because that is were the voters are to keep them in power - they certainly can't run on the popularity of being robber barons. But the robber barons don't care really care about liberty or justice or good schools or even good roads, they will always be insulated against those things by their wealth, so they are perfectly happy to appease the cult in way that are destructive to the overall society. So their motivation is immaterial to whether the damage done is real. Back in the day - in the post WWII era, there was a concept that had some currency that the rich should be interested in good public policy because to invert the phrase - "what was good for the US was good for GM", that in a heathy society business ultimately does better. But that has broken down because we have a capital class today that doesn't even really care if their businesses to well, as long as they can squeeze all the value out out them, then buy up and squeeze another one dry. Any remaining idea of 'Noblesse Oblige" is dead in America today. Trump is a great fit in that milieu since he cares about nothing but himself anyway.
  17. It actually a good question, but the cross over I think is Racially Pure Patriarchy. The ascendancy of the tribally empowered white male is threatened by female power (sex) and circumscribed by the power of the organized masses (democracy and majority government of the great unwashed). That mindset lets you be puritanical and anti government.
  18. Thinking is hard. Easier to sub-contract that stuff to the Heritage Foundation, Federalist Society, or just Fox.
  19. Still, MLB pitching is big step up from AA - he hasn't done much to prove his odds of hitting adequately in the majors are very high yet. Keith has done a lot more and he's not a certainty by any means either. We need these guys to make it if the Tigers are going to be good, but sadly need is not enough to make it happen.
  20. No one ever said it better than Gene Wilder: "The common clay of the West....you know.....Morons...."
  21. There oughta be a law..... (we have that one in MI and the stores keep trying to get it repealed)
  22. I've always assumed that when the writer of Ecclesiastes was writing about 'vanity and striving after wind' he was thinking about theology.
  23. Who knows, maybe Lyon is a guy who's never had the right coaches or lockerroom, or maybe he's fortifying his Wheaties, and he can keep playing like this for 40 or so more games, but that is what it's going to take unless Yzerman pulls a rabbit out of his hat ....that just happens to also be a right shot Dman.
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