gehringer_2

I love Brantley as a player, but he had too much trouble staying on the field even when he was younger and now he's old.

then again - it's Buffalo. They often get a lot of snow and it's sort of a point of pride to cope.

Disagree - maybe. Did Giannis ask the arena guys if they could leave him some time to shoot? Otherwise it appeared he interfered with the arena staff people just trying to do their jobs - a shoot around after the game was apparently not on the schedule. It would make sense if Harrell took the ball away and told him to go the locker room to support his arena guys.

the distribution of the snow seems to be wildly variable in this storm. The stadium is apparently in an area hit hardest but the airport not nearly as bad. It was only closed for a few hours because visibility was zero.

but shall it be made glorious Summer by this son of Harris?

So far this is not sounding like something that is going to resolve any time soon - meaning less than a couple of months. /..sigh.../

Well, maybe right? He is supposed to have a cannon arm.

yeah - as a candidate you can spend almost unlimited amounts of other people's money on yourself and your entourage. That's pigs in clover to Trump.

could be a move back toward the traditional concept where your utility guys are better defenders. We've gotten used to the fact that Avila had moved away from it.

the problem is a basic conflict of interest. You can't very will spend billions standing up a force and then turn around and tell the guy visiting from DIA - "yeah - they're going to dissolve into thin air the minute we are gone." That ain't gonna happen! 😉 So it's almost inevitable our client armies will always be relatively overestimated. Actually I suppose the Iraqi army by now has maybe, sort of, almost, turned into a real independent operating force. And if you could somehow expunge 15+ years of the history and jump right from Saddam to today, you could argue Iraq is better off than it was in 1995 in terms of more or less being able to take care of itself and being a less despotic place despite the level of political chaos and even if it doesn't look much like anything Paul Wolfowitz or even Ahmed Chalabi ever envisioned.

Harris being pretty conservative about keeping arms. Soto, Jiménez, Rony García and even Cisnero appear to be back (as per Petzold). Bryan Garcia and Funkhouser the only notable exits from the pitching ranks other than Chafin, who made his own choice.

I would guess he treasures his freedom almost as much as he needs the constant ego build of his rallies.

I'd put a bit of nuance on my take of this. It was an intelligence question but it was not in terms of intelligence gathering or knowing what the Afghan army had vs the Taliban - the technical capabilities analysis was probably fine. It was a more fundamental failure of analysis in not considering what the motivation of an army is/was. The Afghan army could have held out for many month, if they had wanted to. But why would they want to when they knew defeat was inevitable once our support (primarily air) was gone. An army only does that if they have somewhere to go into exile in hope of a change in their support base, say a friendly regime across the next border (as the Taliban had in Pakistan when we initially 'defeated' them in 2001/2). The Afghan army didn't have that. They knew their cause was lost, it would be irrational to keep fighting just for the sake of American political PR issues. In retrospect this truth is so obvious it seems absurd we didn't see it staring us in the face.

Major injury to his right shoulder - labrum surgery - then a fractured leg...the shoulder maybe still affects his swing?

This actually looks worse than Feb 4, '77, which was the last time that part of the country got buried. We went through Buffalo to Toronto the day after the snow had stopped that year and it was pretty epic.

RIght, but just to clarify I didn't mean to imply indict the day he was appointed - I meant put an SP in place the day he was appointed.

Month to month core rate increase was 0.3% percent on the last readout, which is 3.6% annual but nobody really cared to talk about it because everyone wants to look at laggy year to year numbers........ So they get housing costs primarily from rents. If leases go up, that's a big step jump that stays in the year to year numbers for at least the term of the average lease - i.e. 12 mo. Meanwhile purchase house prices get hammered but since mortgages are more expensive that doesn't show up, if at all, until everything is over and interest rates start falling again. It's all navigation looking in the rear view mirror.

This is the key. I 'm more skeptical, but I'll be happy to be wrong. There are enough positions in need of upgrading that they could do a lot of work toward being a better team without ever getting to 3rd base, which is also OK I suppose.

any kind of word on Soderblom?

to a large extent this a comparison of problems with much different time scale solutions. Economies can bounce back and be built up by the quarter. The planets align to provide an opportunity like this to help free a population from tyranical government and incorporate it to the 'West' (a poor term but for lack of better shorthand..) maybe once every few decades. As I write the above I am immediately skeptical of it's neo-con tilt, but TBF, the neo-con program for Iraq didn't fail for it's concept as much as for its projection of a cultural framework onto Iraqi society that was too different from what was actually there. One assumes that being less culturally distant, we comprehend what we are doing in Ukraine more clearly. We hope.

The problem is if they were going to keep him they needed the version that was still <30 yrs old. He had once provided some speed and forechecking but those skills were going to be fading.

We can hope. But if they nominate some kind of steady-eddy-non-controversial plodder who decides he has to review every page of the case files himself ---- well you get the idea.

Definitely. One of those moves that may have made sense at 50,000 ft that still hurts on the ground.

He's going to have to develop some kind of stop action in his delivery to pitch there.......

another major delay though. If he was going to do this he could have done it the day he was appointed. It's not like it was difficult to see where things would end up.