gehringer_2

mistyped that, I was thinking of Hawley, brain pulled up the wrong idiot.

if they regain the Congress they will be worse this time. The few GOP institutionalists left are seeing their numbers decrease almost daily - not to mention the likelihood that McConell keels over dead sometime soon - whoever takes over will be worse - a la a Cruz, Graham or Hawley

no doubt

yup. The old saw about the knife at the gun fight apply. But like every thing else, the filibuster has to go first. If the dems can't pull together the unity to do that, nothing else happens beyond spending money, which you can always get past either party. Not that that is nothing, but it has its limits. Then again, who knows, if the GOP takes Congress in 2022 we might all be thanking Manchin for his intransigence.

To penalize the many for the few argument as reason to forestall legal change doesn't actually hold though because that is exactly what is done every where in society. Some people drive safely enough that the marginal value of a seat belt is small. Society decided their being 'penalized' was a sufficient price to pay. You find a thousand similar cases - some people could keep opiates in their medicine cabinets and use them responsibly - no dice on that either. So as a general complaint - complain away should such laws be passed, but as a precedent to prevent the law from acting anyway (should the majority ever actually find it's political will) it's a losing arg.

IDK, there are two sets of voices in play here. First are the house conservatives like Bret Stephens who the Times generally allows to get by on a lower level of intellectual rigor in the name of 'balance.' Frankly I wouldn't bother. If your editors believe these people are wrong, provide balance by reporting on them, but not carrying them. OTOH, if the complaint is about their left side writers whose agenda is enlarging the anti-facist coalition then understanding that the left's tendency to eat itself from the inside out is its biggest challenge to successfully meeting the right side threat is worth the ink. You need to pull in the middle in America, and when you present intellectual constructs that the middle cannot make head or tail of you have lost/will lose. Like it or not that is the way it is. Even if the left continues to believe in its righteousness it needs to find paradigms and rhetorical systems in which to present its ideas that actually attract the majorities - in fact - supermajorities that are no required to accomplish anything. So I don't find anything wrong with NYT opinion writers sounding the alarm to segments of the left for whom purity to too much a virtue.

you aren't going to get constitutional reform until one or more of the large stats forces it. That is just the reality. Does anyone think there is a single sole in Wyoming who is going to say - "Oh my yes, our Senatorial representation really does need amending."? But it's two different questions: How it happens and whether it happens. FWIW, I wouldn't rate the odds of the US democracy just collapsing into some kind of Chinese style econo-autocracy as any worse than real Constitutional reform happening. We are already seeing that half of America seems perfectly willing to hold tighter to their myths than their survival. But if the Union is going to be saved long term, the large states will have to force it or it won't happen.

LOL - worrying about election security is what is known as 'rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic'. The problem in the US is not that election results are mis-counted, it's that correctly counted elections results do produce democratic outcomes. The Federal government is structurally undemocratic and getting more so all the time. That is what why the country is becoming ungovernable. If you want to continue to cling to an 18th century anachronism that it makes any sense for the Constitution for recognize states on an equal basis when half of them are completely incapable of independent existence today, be my guest, but don't turn around and ask why the country doesn't work. Until we stop feeding ourselves mythic nonsense about how great the US Constitution is (the Bill of Right maybe. Articles I&II not so much) and realize that the national contract is obsolete, things will continue to swirl down the tubes.

The different part is being a real functioning Human Being instead of privileged, self-absorbed jerk. ...just sayin'

Someday we get a constitutional convention when CA tells the rest of country to either rebalance representation or they are seceding. The US needs CA a lot more than CA need the US. There won't a civil war to hold the union together this time.

Looks like someone is going to tryu to grease the skids on the slippery slope....

in the 8 yrs between 2016 and 2024 something along the line of 30 million people will have been born and died in the US. 8 yrs is an eternity in the life of the electorate. That last 4 elections have been won by a total less than that.

LOL - Look at pop culture right now. What can't you go more than two places through a movie catalog without running into?... answer - a Super Hero. I don't believe the omnipresence of the meme is an accident.

so you know just how much what you did was the exception to the rule. In some places community colleges are trying to fill this role, but they are generally pretty poorly supported.

I'm speaking generally here, MC - from this perspective (i.e.having voted 13 times for president) it gets hard not to get tired with people who get all down and dumpy when the Pres doesn't turn out to be Jed Bartlett or Elivs Presley. When the republic is reeling and fundamental institutions are dying from lack of maintenance, we damn well better be able to get excited over a guy that has some kind of loyalty to principles and institutions and shelve the concerns about how much fanboy joy the Pres gives some cohort. The generation of kids that grew up with helicopter parents don't want to find out the hard way that they weren't done any favors by being led to believe someone else is going swoop in and take care of all the stuff for them that isn't entertaining enough to be fun.

It's more than the worker side however. Unlike say Germany, in the last 70 yrs the US has pretty much gotten out of the business of doing public vocational training. We have relied on industry to do their own, and for a long time that worked. But in the quest for ultimate ROI, American business has decided it's easier to steal skilled tradesmen from each other than spend the money to train them themselves - only to see them stolen by someone else. Net result is US trains a lot few tradesmen than it once did, thus perennial shortages. Of course the loss of defined benefit pension plans has also contributed to skilled workers' increasing willingness to move around as well. A lot of this kind of thing could be addressed if we had a politics that worked - we could do vocational ed again, incentives are out their make a company investment in workers lower risk. These are mostly not particularly partisan issues if properly framed. But there is usually at least on special interest that opposes whatever needs to be done. As long as the system is controlled by those willing to spend the most to protect the status quo on a political issue, we will continue to be unable to solve even simple problems.

It's also the the larger demographic trend. The very center of the baby boom is exactly at retirement age so you have an unprecedented number of people leaving the labor force. On the other end the cost of child care drives more parents with small children out of the low wage workforce because the income trade off is not good enough. Higher wages won't do much to stem retirements, but they could pull more parents who are at home back into the workforce.

population is still getting older, demand will still be weak once supply chain issues taper off so the long term trend will remain deflationary. On the inflation side the labor market is finally tight enough to produce some wage inflation, and the the stimulus on the fiscal side is large. But the monetary stimulus on the fed side has also been large and as the Fed tapers that the extra effect of the fiscal stimulus will be blunted. I can see the problem being that as the Fed tapers, it will depress the market and the Wall Street people will start screaming about it. One of the problems ever since 2008 is that too much of the stimulus in the economy has been monetary, and that money tends to flow too much to investors, compared to fiscal stimulus which flows into the economy on more of a bottom up basis. But we have a pretty spoiled investor class in the US now. The Fed should be able to control this inflation if politics allow it to.

well, they lost by less than they were out rebounded by.

Should they make the playoffs they should be a better team with Vrana and Bertuzzi ( and maybe Berggren) than what we see right now. So maybe a 4 or 5 game series where they lose close twice.

well, that didn't take long: https://www.detroitnews.com/story/sports/college/2021/12/10/fake-slides-now-against-rules-after-pitt-qb-picketts-trick-vs-wake/6462187001/?itm_medium=recirc&itm_source=taboola&itm_campaign=internal&itm_content=RightRailArticleThumbnails-Redesign

you know you could just gargle a 1/2 ounce of Tanqueray and get the best of both worlds.....

All, true. Long story short: I didn't say there weren't reasons for a tournament, only that a larger tournament would do less to determine which of the consensus elite teams was the best. That was supposedly the original motivation for instituting the current championship playoff. It was just too terrible to have to contemplate the possibility of two different schools finishing at the top of the two polls. Mich/Neb must never happen again! Now of course that is only one reason for a playoff. Whether it's best one or the only one is in the eye of the beholder.... A 12 team tournament may have any number of virtues, but resolving the old split poll situation to pick "the best" team from the one or two that rose to the top during the season isn't one of them.

be nice if they show up for this one since it's Friday night and I don't have any homework.

And the difference between Tx and Ca is more than just wages. For example, real estate costs for the franchise in CA are probably something like double on average.