gehringer_2

2nd was a better inning from Jack but his FB velo sucks.

I'm finding the EV is close to perfect as an around the town vehicle, but when we replace the other car it will likely be with a hybrid SUV that gives me a 48" wide floor that can carry larger cargo

definitely a good time the have an EV. I just hope Tesla sales aren't recovering as a result...

I've been inside the Pine Bend refinery. Marathon also has a refinery north and across the river from Pine bend but it's maybe 1/2 the size or less.

actually Whiting is also apparently in the middle of union lock-out. Management is trying to keep the plant running and that's usually a disaster waiting to happen. The bad part is that at this point this is hitting mostly areas that are mostly already trending blue. Some Whiting supply must also go to Ohio but I have no idea how much.

The BP Whiting Refinery (near Chicago in Indiana) suffered an unexpected outage Sunday night . It is the biggest refinery in the Midwest and it when goes down, it adds about $1 to prices throughout the region. Press reports say expect 2 weeks, but guaranteed nobody at the refinery would be telling the press the truth about anything at this point so that's just worthless speculation - timeframe could be anything. Insult to injury for the American driver.

One angle is just that, that the party rank and file are out of patience with the national party for setting them up with losers. And that is Platner's potential weakness - do the folks excited about Platner (and a lot clearly are) represent a winning voting coalition in the state or just themselves as the activist/progressive wing?

Once you get to a certain point, all more money gets you is more TV, but TV has a too many competitors today to be the whole game, so in this era the money effect goes flatline at a certain point. Musk has found that out in a few races he dropped big $$$ into.

so... then if they love old candidates what was wrong with Mills that no-one was stepping up to support her financially? It doesn't take a fortune to run in Maine. A candidate that was attracting support and had a functional internet fund-raising link should not have had to drop out for lack of funds. Candidates in the last few cycles have proved over and over again that you don't the party to raise money if you are attracting supporters - and Mills supposedly had Schumer's support - so why was she broke? That's actually the part in this that to me doesn't add up. If Mills was the establishment/party candidate, how is she broke? Did the party and establishment donors cut her off? If so, why? Did they already sense she was a lost cause? Is she not really broke but using that as an excuse to get out of a campaign she decided she didn't want to be in? Pretty odd all the way around.

that may be for a lot of reasons, but I would argue that the idea that older adults like old candidates because they are old, which seems to have been what you were arguing, is false or at least pretty weakly true. If anything older adults have the same skepticism about an old candidate as anyone else would, and look for the same kinds of evidence pro or con about a candidate's capacity as anyone else, and may actually have a sharper eye for recognition of signs of deficits.

the fact that you are old doesn’t mean you are OK with old candidates. We know better than anyone else what a bad idea it is.

LOL - very true.

The GOPs hope is that it will end and prices come down before the election and that people have short memories. The dilemma is that the only way to get Iran to relent is probably going to be to break a lot more stuff, and the more stuff they break, the longer it will take after it ends for enough things to get put back together so oil prices can come back down. One of the things that Americans are just phenomenally bad at is figuring out what the tother guy is thinking. Trump and Bibi have this grand idea that finally, after 45 yrs we deal the Ayatollahs the decisive blow. But it works both ways. In Teheran, the mullahs are thinking "after 45 years of pressure we finally have an opportunity to push the US back hard and get them off our case." The chances aren't that bad that they are going to be willing to take as much as we have the capability and/or stomach to dish out. And the status quo is untenable, both because there is a election on the horizon, and also because storage tanks in Asia are running down, and when they get critical the push back from China will start to mount and what that will look like is a huge wildcard.

with Platner, the question is how much if his past he will be able to write off as "I was a dumb young GI grunt". He can probably finesse being a GI doing GI things if that's the era of stuff they come up with. You are spot on though that the GOP will be looking for every single woman he's ever failed to hold a door for. I thought OHIO would have shifted more strongly a long time ago - I guess all the time I spent in Toledo gave me a false sense of security about the general sanity level of Ohioans. Better late than never I guess, if it happens.

Sadly - if she doesn't that means we've all been whistling past the graveyard thinking that America is finally falling out of love with Trump.

that would be the modern narrative.

I can only hope Trump/Biden was the last gasp of their generation. For me, the number one sign of the intellectual and political bankruptcy of the old guard democratic party is that they are so addicted to the corporate money trough themselves that they never even tried to mount an organized constitutional amendment effort against CU which was the single most important thing any honest political party should have been doing. I'm just as happy to see all these corporate whores go away. I loved Joe Biden but he made the worst mistake of a lot of people's lives by overestimating himself.

The public at large hates the Democratic Party only slightly less than it now hates the GOP. If the Dems are ever going to become a real force for social change in the US again, win big enough majorities to actual govern, the party is going to get rebuilt by a new leadership with a new set of ideas and a different appeal than the party that couldn't beat Trump twice.

Don't disagree. But that just demonstrates how much Schumer's org is out of gas itself.

he's running as a progressive, completely the opposite of Fetterman, who ran as a conservative dem. I'm with MTU - not my state, not my fight, but I'm glad you guys don't vote in Maine.

which means what? Anybody can use the internet to raise money - dem candidates have done it from Obama to AOC. If you can't raise party funds and you can't raise direct funds, you have lost your audience, or you have a campaign org stuck in the past, or both. Mills biggest problem was that she is 78, and while the people of Maine love her, nobody wants 78 anymore. Platner's parents may have been wealthy but at least they didn't buy him out of his military service. The risk with Platner is that the big rallies, where he apparently shines, don't necessarily translate in the GE - ask Kamala.

LOL I owned pretty much that exact computer, keyboard, monitor and printer but not the pack of Salems.

And his campaign is that he saw it and realized he was on the wrong side. If he wins we'll see what he is, but we know Collins is a proven lying scumbag Trump enabler, so he can't be any worse and he could be a lot better. There is no perfect in life and especially in politics. I know there is a conspiracy theory line that he is a GOP mole. Anything is possible, but I don't see the point of going through all that if Mills was such a weak candidate, and if Mills believed that she certainly would have stayed in anyway. Not specific to Maine, I think another aspect of the generational shift in politics is that 'gotcha' opposition campaigning against people's history is going to fade from importance as long as those people don't lie or deny it but simply admit it and say they've moved on - because in the upcoming generations everyone has stuff in their social media past they know they would disown today - the upcoming generation of voters is going to identify with that and that will neuter it as a campaign strategy.

It's too late to debate the candidates, she's not running anymore. Not many political candidates suffer from lack of optimism; if she dropped out she didn't see a path to a win.

At this point, Hitler can have his soul if I get his votes. Unless there is evidence that he's going to change parties after being elected, I'm more interested in his future than his past. Also, a guy campaigning against the military-industrial complex is probably hitting a right note when Trump wants a $1.5T defense budget.