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gehringer_2

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Everything posted by gehringer_2

  1. Yup. It's a movement that has always been co-opted by monied industrial or financial interests like the Koch's who basically use it as another propaganda arm for building 'reasonable' laissez-faire/deregulated economic policy arguments for unreasonable corporate behavior.
  2. No arg about that, but in the context of whether Harris is potential successor material for the Dems the nature of her VP tenure matters. A poor VP tenure put an end to Dan Quayle's political career, a strong one rehabilitated Biden's.
  3. I hate to be a wet blanket, this has been a fun streak, but I think there is some fool's gold here. There is no way the goaltending keeps up with the number of defensive breakdowns they are giving up. I fear there is a lot of regression waiting to rear it's ugly head if Yzerman doesn't do something before the deadline.
  4. I looked up Rectenwald and he sounds like a real prize. 🌰🌰🌰🌰 What would be even better than an Libertarian to muddy the water for Trump and the current GOP would be a good old fashion segregationist. That would split the MAGA vote better than probably anything else. Where is a Geroge Wallace or David Duke when you actually could use one?
  5. Suh was right up there with Juan Gonazales in terms of players you knew 10 seconds after they got here that they weren't staying. I don't know what people were smoking back in '15 with all the talk that he would resign with the Lions.
  6. Another game where the Wings needed their goalie to step up and he did. Riemer made a lot of fine saves (again). He doesn't control rebounds very well though. Walman seemed kind of out of it tonight. Rare to hear his name so little in the PBP.
  7. By now Harris has had a long time to make some kind of positive impression in her own party and can't seem to. Not a good sign. Ironic that Biden was all over the Obama admin and Harris is almost completely AWOL. So either a) Biden doesn't trust her because 1) she not competent 2) he's afraid she will upstage him b) She won't play good soldier. I have no idea which of these things, some of which would be Biden's fault and some of which would be Harris', may be true, but the Harris vice presidency has not been a big hit.
  8. I like the single long term appointment idea. Two big benefits - you get the obvious ones that an appointment in year X isn't still affecting the country 30yrs later, but I think just as important, both parties have been in a race to nominate younger and younger judges on exactly the theory that you can influence the court longer, so the byproduct is that you get judges too young to have decent track records and probably generally lower competence. If the justice has to go in 15 yrs, 60 is as good as 45 for the appointment age and I think that would be an improvement.
  9. But that isn't why. The why is simply the political reality that he is politically unpopular and may struggle to be re-elected even against the worst challenger in US history. I can't guess all the reasons the public has not embraced him. Age is certainly one but probably not the only. Lee has that part dead on. We can sit here as Biden supporters and claim it is unfair and irrational because his leadership and accomplishments are solid, but that and $5 gets us a Vente to share. The why doesn't matter, it appears he is not going to be a strong candidate for re-election. An open primary would have floated a Newsome or Whitmer or Landrieu or Josh Shapiro, or Buttigieg whose vote getting ability would have been proven by the process. All that said, it's early and maybe Biden will summon the physical energy and verbal discipline to campaign successfully, dispel the public's reservations and win big. Maybe.
  10. 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.
  11. Faedo's outing cementing his starting role - at Toledo.
  12. 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.
  13. 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.
  14. 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.
  15. 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.
  16. 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.
  17. 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.
  18. 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!
  19. 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.
  20. 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.
  21. 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?
  22. not counting last draft, which right now is looking nice, Cossa, Edvinsson, Kasper, maybe Solderblom still in play.
  23. 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? 🙃
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