gehringer_2

I still think it's a dumb hill to die on, get changes in structure as your big gets, the cap is just a number that is inflatable later when you have more of the foundation of a better deal. It still only affects a few teams, if they they think it is the future earnings of the whole sport, they don't do math very well. If this were the NFL and most teams were near or at or trying to play to the limit of the cap it would matter, but more than half the teams in the majors weren't even within $100 million of it last season. How is raising the limit maybe another $20million for only 4 or 5 teams going to close any of that $100 million gap for those 16 teams? If you're going die on a hill for revenue, at least do it for something real like a % split - NFL/NBA style. I'd more believe the owners are playing the union - crying all these big crocodile tears about not wanting to give in on the lux tax just so in the end they can give that away, keep everything else and keep laughing among themselves at how they took the union again.

with attitudes as hardened as they are, you wonder who is out there still getting vaccinations who by now didn't already have one or had no intention of getting one, but nearly 100K people in MI got a vaccination last week as per michigan.gov/coronavirus.

things not sounding good from Kharkiv and Kherson.

she went to Harvard? The school that gets applications from the most qualified students in the country that they can pick and choose? Maybe Carlson knows something but nah, let's be honest, this is a racist troll playing on an affirmative action myth. But just on the probabilities, it's more likely her LSAT's were +90 percentile. By her bio she had distiniguished herself as early as HS, finished Harvard Cum Laude, and oh - just happened to impress a JOTSCOTUS enough to be tapped for a clerkship. Yeah, sounds like someone who never would have made it on her own smarts..... In fact yeah - Tucker is a grade A large asz-hole. (LOL - the fact is that the students at Harvard more likely to get a pass on admission requirements are WASP legacies....)

as long a shot as it is, Ukraine's best hope probably is still that something inside Russia changes. That seems impossible, but things like that always do until they happen.

even mother nature has had enough of Putin. The Russians planned in moving during what is normally the weeks of hardest ground freeze in Ukraine and instead the weather went into the 50's for a couple of weeks.

Well, if they are pushing hard for more than the tax level increase more power to them but it’s still the tax that’s being reported as a major sticking pt.

so they finally got Madigan? That's sure been a long time coming.

general sympathies might be against the owners as they are evil capitalists, but the fact that it's been mostly the players standing in the way of improving the game makes it damn hard to be in their corner either.

spot on Tater.

Just my guess, but the hotter it gets in Europe I think the more China will disengage.

I think the issue with Harris is not her administrative capabilities as much as her political ones - can she herd the cats that a president needs to herd to get anything done legislatively.

the problem for the players union is that they are fighting the wrong battle. The teams near the cap are not the problem for baseball salaries, it's the teams nowhere near the cap who won't be affected at all by whatever the number is. How much difference will the lux tax number have on the Marlins or Pirates? Exactly none. If anything, Manfred is right that the tax money is one route for low revenue teams to spend more - thought without a mechanism to force that, that's also is an empty promise. But It's teams *with* "cap space", that, and pre-arb salaries that hold down the revenue split, not the cap. As a union in toto, the player's union is a total failure - all they are interested is protecting the interests of their own "1%" class to sign half billion dollar contracts, which again, does nothing for the most of their membership or median salaries at all.

And sounded like a Trump cabinet meeting, didn’t it?

not home to watch this one but just ran through the clips - the Larkin goal - unbelievable body control. And the game winner courtesy of Bert and the quickest stick in the West.

yeah - it would be a great seed of paranoia to sow wouldn't it?

was it Churchill's line "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma,"

this is a thing to consider. So no matter how bad morale was among US troops in 'Nam, you weren't going to find may US soldiers ready to desert by walking into the jungle and looking for a handshake from the VC. OTOH, how hard will it be for a young Russian who feels he's been deceived to walk into the Ukrainian countryside and share a vodka over his sob story?

I'll return the favor a say you are over reading what I'm saying.. Your question was - or I least I read it as - is this happening because Putin or is he just being swept along a larger current of Russian cultural/political imperative. Or more simply, if Putin was not running Russia, would this be happening? To that question I come down pretty solid that I believe there is a very good chance - at least better than 50/50, that it would not. But since Putin suppresses open discussion in his country no question it's harder to tell, but that in itself argues a fair chance of disassociation twixt the tyrant and the population - wouldn't you think? Now if you want to argue that the animal spirits in the Russian national soul could not have produced any leader less fixed on the restoration of empire, then of course the conclusion would be - "it's not all Putin", but I'd disagree with that - Russia has produced a number of semi-reformist leaders - Krushchev in his own odd way - Yeltsin, Gorbachev, so it's not an impossibility.

actually I'd question that. Putin runs a kleptocracy, the politics are not important to the Russian Oligarchs - they support Putin because he's made them rich, not because they care where the lines on the maps are. A war like Putin appears to be planning will do nothing to add to their pockets and is starting out to do quite the contrary. Putin's ruminations are anachronistic, why would they appeal to any of his modern money men? Nobody did well under the Soviet empire but the apparatchiks - certainly nothing like what the oligarchs have achieved. And their self image is more along the lines of playboy of the western world. So no, I don't really see the logic of there being some great movement in Russian society to rebuild the empire.

the english guy still has guests on together.......Graham Norton.

well, TBH, it was his intangibles that were lacking, I would still like to have this speed though...

because like all good tyrants, he has neutered all competing centers of power around him.

still, speed has a value beyond pts - especially to a team that skates as badly as the Wings, and AA had it and the current Wings need it. It was still a great trade, but I wouldn't necessarily agree that in the short term it isn't hurting just because Gagner has equalled AA points.

Putin is too machismo to stop. The world can only wait and hope some mechanism remains inside Moscow capable of upholding KGB tradition and putting a bullet in the back of the neck of an asset that has outlived its usefulness to the Rodina.