gehringer_2

The strain of Patriarchal Authoritarianism is a common bond. You also see that predisposition with the revanchist anti-Vatican II, anti-Francis sector of the US Catholic hierarchy as well.

The thing with a cult is that for each member there is some lever which is the key. If Trump's pique at Netanyahu puts a few more MAGA off their feed, it may be marginal but it all helps. The other piece with some of the more out-there Evangelicals is that they need Israel to demolish Al Aqsa and start on a new Temple before the events of the 2nd coming can get underway - so the success of the Jewish state is a sine qua non for them.

Seriously, I'm all in with the white woodwork. I would not paint the hand rail. You don't want to use paint - esp latex, on any surface that gets a lot of handling. Even if you were willing to clean it fastidiously, paint wouldn't stand up to that either. And good wood grain always looks richer anyway. The color is close to the color we painted our previous house, maybe a shade or two darker. We used a a two shade light/dark combo and that is a little darker than our darker pick. Now to be honest, we knew we were selling that house so we picked more neutral hues then we might have if we didn't care about that. We would normally go for more color - the current house is mostly in light greens. But of the neutral palettes I prefer beiges to grays - I don't care if that's old school - grays are cold.

of course the way these guy lie, even to each other, means there is little assurance any deal reached in Caucus even holds all the way to the vote on the floor!

Stupid tack to take. Given standard usage, (and SCOTUS has been known to resolve such cases with direct reference to the dictionary) 'Defend' is a higher obligation than 'Support'. You can support without defending, you can't defend without supporting.

Moi? Never.

The stain work is nice, but I can't escape the feeling that overall it's going to get you down.

actually of that list, Lipcius held his own in his limited audition - 38PA at 103 OPS+. Possible utility guy of the future there.

this could be in 'MediaMeltdown' but I was in the car earlier this afternoon and browsed past NPR and they were announcing that 'Scalise would be the new Speaker'. Whoa? The GOP got their act together that fast? Get home later and hit the interwebs and he only has a majority of the caucus no House vote even scheduled. The recent incompetence level at NPR is sad to hear. I know they don't have the money to keep their top people anymore, but they could at least find some cheap inexperienced ones on the way up who have a future....

FIFY

They've gotten one bad year and one great year. Who knows what they get next year? If they win the WS what they got this year should assuage some of the pain if the future years look more like last year. If not, not so much!

The year plus probably the additional $35M?

I think this is fair logic but I don't know if that is how your average football coach thinks!

probably the best bet if you don't want to lose your money. 😉 I's also assume they aren't going to do anything to block Keith. If there is anyone in the system that is the real deal it's likely him.

Or take a contract to buy an MLB ready high level hitting prospect. The guy whose contract is being moved is probably being non-productive..... That's a trickier play but there are always some possibilities out there.

It's all good. Balanced schedule means he still gets to visit.

Indeed, but I suppose technically it was Wagner that had the primary prison recruitment mandate.

NCAA football as a true competitive team sport remains a joke until/unless they put stronger SOS factors back into tournament selection criteria. It's a great season of exhibition games and great spectacle and makes lots of folks big $$ - but as team competition Logan Roy said it best -- you are not serious people.

This is still working pretty well for Putin in asiatic Russia but now it's a car for the wife once you're dead.

There is quality on the pitching side though. Run prevention gets you there just as well as run scoring. Tigers should be making a hard run at Gray or Snell.

It's a big assumption that people wouldn't be just as good at finding other reasons to kill each other in the absence of organized religions - genocides by Stalin, the Khmer Rouge, Rawanda come to mind. Even the Holocaust, while it was directed at a religious group, was not a religious imperative of German Lutheranism. Religion often becomes the stalking horse to dress up more fundamental aims of conquest, greed, land, ethnicity. Still, if conquest were made a harder sell without the availability of the gloss of God's consent, that might be progress.

A guy at AEI wrote a piece this week - can't remember which paper I saw it in, argued the only way out for the GOP (and country if the 2 party system is to continue) is institute ranked choice voting in all primaries as a means to neuter the power of the fringe in the primaries. Could work. The only other thing would be to rebuild party membership back to 40/40 and 20 independents so more normal people would vote in primaries, but thats a lift I don't anyone knows an answer to.

There is no end to where you can take it. I used to assemble XL systems that pulled data from industrial instrumentation databases, process it into live real time diagnostic reports and then have those send their data into monthly financial reports. Stiffness was really problem though - when something broke..... The funny thing is that the stuff you code in VB you can at least comment. There's no neat way I ever came up that I liked to embed the documentation information about what a spreadsheet is doing inside the spreadsheet at the cellular level. You can add text to backing sheets or stash text in hidden rows and columns. Workable at some level, but all kludges. I do not remember those tasks fondly.

Right. And I would guess that since Baseball pretty much has mid-summer to itself, a 'summer championship' could easily become a bigger thing media wise and financially than the end of year tourney.

McCarthy's Speakership had only one value - it demonstrated that giving away the store to a faction creates an unstable situation. We all knew this in January, but I guess it had to be proved to the GOP. So, I would think that leaves us in a situation where the majority of the GOP realizes that they can't just duplicate the McCarthy mistake with a new face - i.e. get someone into the job only after a long negotiation that buys enough fringe votes with giveaways that another unstable, unworkable Speakership is created. This is all pretty obvious to anyone capable of 2 + 2 = 4. The problem is that those GOP members still cannot face the crisis of tribal identity that a reach across the aisle for a consensus majority requires. And as is usually the case in human affairs, psychology will win out over logic and it will get even worse before it gets better.