gehringer_2

yes and no. There is a lot more energy around the Evangelical anti-abortion position as that carries the tone of a religious crusade. OTOH, for the majority of status quo supporters it isn't that big an issue. I don't think it will energize the middle toward the left as much as it lets air out of the balloon on the right. Everyone with a pulse knew this would be the ultimate outcome if they sat on their butts after Obama, but it wasn't enough to drive enough of a wave of turnout other than in '18. But the right side grievance generating machine is pretty well oiled today and it may chug merrily along even without one of it's biggest single issues.

sounds like everybody loves Jimmy Rutherford, but he's a little cheap.... I don't know what kind of personal changes they made when Boudreau got there but the turn in the record was pretty dramatic.

yeah - if a contract has an opt out, I find it hard to fathom anybody's lawyer would agree to attaching vague, non-verifiable conditions to it.

to play Devil's advocate for a minute, I'm going to create a straw man here just for the sake of thinking about an argument. Let's go back to the question over slavery. In an ironic way it is in a large measure the people of the Old Confederacy who are arguing that abortion is too great a moral imperative to leave to a compromise consensus, which of course is pretty close to the exact position that abolitionist forces argued against the Old South in demanding slavery end everywhere. Funny how history turns the wheel. That said, while there is a parallel kind of motivation to taking both abortion and slavery abolition as moral imperatives that are justified in being imposed on others, the underlying argument for that moral imperative is much different in the two cases. First of course, slavery was a continuing frontal assault on the most fundamental charter statement of nationhood in the DOI, the contradiction of which was obvious to all even at the time of the writing of the Constitution. "All men are created equal" carries none of the arguable ambiguity of when life begins. Further, the understanding of the immorality of slavery requires no particular religious background, it quickly came to be shared nearly universally across the globe by the religious, secular, and humanist alike, even if that view did not, as a matter of fact have 'deep historical' roots. In the end there were no 'moral' arguments to stand up in favor of slavery, only property interests. In contrast, complete abolition of abortion depends nearly solely on arguments stemming from a single religious view, which is not even a consensus within US Christianity, let alone the entire now largely secular nation. In case of abortion there are also clear competing moral issues around the rights of the mother. Thus I don't think it's unfair to conclude that imposing emancipation on the South was justified but imposing abortion abolition on the US is not.

True, and a measure of American misogyny that only women are criticized for lecturing. Well sometimes black men as well.

LOL- the modern language minefield. A recent topic that has come up here is that the IEEE is having to deal with the fact that in control theory 'master/slave' is common terminology to describe the relationship of various components in a control system and people are pushing back on that. Well, that is the nature of the relationship as a general proposition. If you change the terminology will that terminology just also become pejorative eventually? And there is always a tension between social sciences types who are more than happy to see language 'evolve' and the hard scientific community for whom stability in language is actually a desired thing. If we tell someone they need to 'learn to speak well' is that far enough away from saying, "Well, you seem to be well-spoken" ??? Beats me!

I think the problem was worse than that. Politicians had done their job at the state levels and it left what was increasingly regarded as an intolerable inconsistency across the country. The national legislature can't resolve the question to the overall public will because it is no longer a sufficiently democratic institution to codify the public will on any issue with a moderately narrow consensus. Maybe it's unfair to blame Congress for being what it was designed to be but it is what it is at this point. The court was/is sort of in the 'nature abhors a vacuum' situation.

Yup. We see that it's absolutism that gets both side in trouble. Sure the left thinks that it solidifies that privacy arg to claim it as an absolute right, but you are correct, taken to the extreme it undercuts the practical appeal of the argument. And again - it goes back the truth that nobody knows and anyone who claims they do is a liar or arguing from faith rather that fact. Faith can be a wonderful thing in life, not so much in law or politics.

so in essence the current court exposes the bad faith of the whole American conservative jurisprudence effort of the last 40 yrs by doing all they can to reverse a court that tried to do the right thing.

This I will not argue. It is not an easy circle to square.

not at all, an argument based on personal privacy needs no historical antecedents to be understood or explained as a free standing rational argument. Whether someone wants to cite history is superfluous there. What Alito wants to argue indirectly is the personhood of an embryo, but he can't do that without resorting to some kind of indirect or implicit religious argument because there is no other ground to stand on to there. Short using a backhanded argument to introduce a religious approach no-one has any damn idea about when a human's life as a sentient being begins and there is no deductive process in the world that will get you there. All that is left is for people to make a good faith effort to be reasonable with each other about imposing their beliefs on each other.

But it's a fundamentally flawed way to argue anything. "history" in and of itself never has any probative value with respect to values -you can find anything you want in 'history' good and bad, and anytime any justice goes there (and especially to Catholic Scholasticism) I'm going to call nonsense. It's just another way to import some particular culture's superstitions into a modern gloss. If you can't make a rational argument that is intelligible to a current audience you don't actually have an argument. Which is why I will continue to make fun of Alito.

all racist, right?

Very possibly, but I'm not sure whether it's only that or that he still too paranoid about showing up the guy next to him. On the few occasions when I've heard Shep work without an ex-player he suddenly seems to know more. But regardless of why, between that and being too much of a booster about the home team's talent he could certainly be a lot better. We also need to accept that there may be a conscious decision to keep the telecast to lowest common denominator baseball tech.

Dan is the best of '84 team lot but he could be a lot better pretty easily. The thing that holds Dan back is a little work on his verbal tics, which isn't even that hard to overcome for most people. Just ditch the 'you knows' and he'd be more than 1/2 way home. The other thing to consider is that Gibson, Morris and probably even Petry ($6M career earnings) don't need the job. 81 games on the road is a grind and none of this current group may even want to do it full time - and of course as noted Gibson probably can't.

Right. There is a kind of 'damn with faint praise' - 'isn't *this* an exception to the rule' kind of feeling to the way both 'articulate' and 'well-spoken' have traditionally been applied to men of color. Just come out and say "Obama is the finest orator to have held the office since JFK" and you don't get into the problem.

He is catcher after all. 🤔

And I actually hate it when good language gets taken out of circulation because it ether gets appropriated or stigmatized for some social or political ends. But it happens, what can you do?

"well-spoken" has become kind of code-word phraseology though. There are other ways to express it. I think one could say his erudition is off the charts and it wouldn't have the baggage.

It's a fair point. Surveys consistently show that Catholics may love their church (no doubt many because of ties that come with being born into it) but pretty much ignore it's theological demands. Social alignment between church and parishioners is probably higher in Evangelical churches because a higher number have chosen their church because they were already predisposed to what was being said there.

Lets see: a)Russia is Ukraine's savoir because the Pole are just waiting to oppress them. b)Every measure of oppression is on the table for Ukrainians that oppose us. hmmm...... The Muscovy Imperialist elites are such and odd combination of cruel, brutal, and stupid.

LOL! As I starting reading this tweet I was hearing Jim Price's voice in my head before I even saw the pic at the bottom!

the positive sign is they played a whole game with only one defensive bobble and it didn't cost a run. And Skubal, but that's as close to a given as anything with this team.

This the way it goes when teams lose. The next thing will be the offense will start averaging 6 runs and the BP will self-destruct for two weeks.

Slider is not there.