gehringer_2

that didn't age well.

Tim Allen is less funny as .... almost anyone.

It is a hard group to predict. On the positional side, they've shown they can do some things, but not that they can do them consistently over 162. A couple of guys swinging better or worse will create a big swing. On the pitching side, Cobb is not an exciting pickup, Skubal is the one guy on the team that can't be any better than he was last season, and the rest of the arms are either untested and/or promising but recovering from injury. Which is why I'm anxious to see another front of the rotation guy signed.

good thing the football game is about to start. Wings give up 2 goals in the 1st 2 minutes of the 2nd. 3-0 TB

Bingo

And Thompson can't sink a trey with no-one within 20 ft of him. /.sigh./. It's ironic for all the talk there has been in the past about Cade and Ivey not being optimal on the same team, Ivey is the slasher with the speed to make teams pay for bringing their D up court.

what the heck was JB doing there - you needed your guys on the court more than you needed the TO, then THJ can't make FTs.

that was pretty bad. You hate to say the fix is in, but the fix is in.

Most recent thing I have seen was from last month - he's supposedly started running. A "fighting chance" to be ready. (?) https://www.foxsports.com/mlb/javier-baez-player

Yes - you are correct. Truman has served more than half of FDR's term but I forgot the amendment didn't apply to till the Presidency after him. Apparently his prospects for re-election in '52 were pretty bad anyway, but that just goes to the point about most presidents not sustaining their popularity.

Flaherty is the guy that would make my off-season. Hinch and the kiddy corps will find ways to score runs with or without Bregman, but while the Tigs have a lot of arms, they need another one that's bone fide top line, and Jack should be it.

I rather doubt all the people who have been chronically politically unhappy since about 2012 are going to get much happier under Trump. If the GOP doesn't hold in 2028 (and it's hard to imagine Trump giving Vance any air of his own) we will be on track to have 4 consecutive elections where a party either fails to re-elect an incumbent or hold the office. And actually Clinton, Bush and Obama were more the outliers serving two terms three times in a row - 4 of 5 if you count back to Reagan.) Other than the early stretch from Washington to Jackson there have been a lot of one term Presidencies. And I think this is the first presidency that has ever started out as lame duck on day one. I suppose you can say Truman was an immediate lame duck after his 1st election, but he had already served 3/4 of a term before he stood. Trump obviously is a past Prez, but with the 4 years out it's not/won't be the same admin at all. So we have no history as to how that plays.

If you look up the idiom "legend in his own mind" you will find a picture of Cade.

His term is going to be determined in large part by whether Powell and Fed's actions over the last 30 months was enough to stop inflation, or if they missed just enough that they are going to have to do another dose of contraction. If it's the latter, Trump is probably doomed before he starts, and there is really nothing that can be done to unbake the current economic pie. If he pressures the Fed to cut short interest rates more, inflation can only get worse than it would have. If the Fed starts raising again, in the public view he will have failed before he started. Tariffs will be both inflationary and recessionary, so there is almost no way to win with that tool. Tax cuts that increase the deficit would be easy to campaign against with the cost of government borrowing going up. Now if we are lucky and the Fed has actually hit it right, and the CPI holding pattern of the last couple of months is just a blip on a longer downward trend, then none of the above may have to happen. But no-one knows with any certainty which is the case. DJT has led a pretty charmed life to far - I'm sure he believes his luck will hold.

and to finish the thought. I would posit that this almost certainly driven by increasing social isolation. People who must work hard to get by but do it in a socially cohesive and supportive environment could take a lot of emotional reinforcement from their experience. most of which is missing for most of them today.

approve/disapprove has become pretty useless because as you note, it's meaning to someone being surveyed has shifted from being a euphemism for "would you vote for this person" used to soften/evade the direct question, to "are you happy with things". Those are two significantly different questions. The malleability/transformation of language is a problem for pollsters. The very much want to be able to keep asking the exact same question over time in order to provide anchor points for use in adjusting samples, but whether the pollsters like it or not, language use does change. And worse than that, the whole emotional state of the population changes. Americans are more discontent for less reason than they used to be. That's not to say a lot of people don't still have it hard, but the degree to which people are willing to accept/expect life being hard has fallen - a lot.

29 years since Ozzy got one for the Wings. Ozzy had a goal and two assists in '95-'96, but not in the same game!

and if a knit cap is a toque, what is one of these?

Of course you know who has a vested interest in tax law being complex? The Lawyers. And of course we know who writes the tax laws - The LAWYERS! It's the perfect circle impenetrable circle. A system incapable of self correction.

I'm sure this system is going to work out well.

isn't that the new thing, that the schools can start paying athletes out of their income instead of outside money? (i.e. the $20M) Isn't the whole idea being to get off the unsustainable NIL rat race? If it's the schools money it seems title IX was bound to apply. But as I recall the deal with the judge did include funds to women's sports. Heck - Title IX has been in place for years and they still put a ton more resource into FB than anything else. 🤷‍♀️

System in the US seems to be trending to a different model. You won't get in to see your doctor, but the 'system' that your doctor/hospital are part of probably has an affiliated 'urgent care' facility you can get into to see someone in your plan on short notice. But a different weakness in the US system is getting in to see a specialist once you've done the urgent care or ER walk-in and preliminary diagnosis was made that you need to see the specialist. Unless you are already so sick you were admitted, that specialist referral can easily be months.

LOL - if the Tigers really have put an offer on the table and Boras is forced to come back to them because he wasn't able to beat it, I don't think he will be have much success convincing the Tigers to start negotiating against themselves - though I'm sure he will try.

I don't think that part is particularly out of line. I've worked at places in the past where they reserved to right to require doctor's verification for more than 3 sick days. Seemed pretty typical.

I saw that too, but TBF that was poor choice of words - they didn't extrapolate unknown data, the applied rates determined from the known data to the places that didn't have data. It all sounds terrible but it's still meaningless to see those numbers without comparison. I know a *LOT* of Americans who can't get in to see their doctors for months at a time. I'm sure that leads to a lot of late and 'too late' diagnoses as well. So what does the US morbidity/mortality look like on the same comparisons? Do we count the number of American's whose medical debt contributed to their suicides? It has been true in the past the Canada has been really bad about elective orthopedic surgery like hips and knees, which is were some of the most egregious wait list times are generated. But just because it's not life threatening doesn't mean it's not a bad situation. You see reports of Canadians coming the US for those kinds of treatments.