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1988 East German Map of West Berlin

None of The Countries That Bordered Poland In 1989 Exist Today

https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/father-speaks-after-family-pepper-sprayed-in-little-village/

Trace it back even further to the election of Reagan in the wake of an ineffectual Carter presidency that itself was supposed to be the moral and ethical antidote to the brazen criminality of the Nixon/Ford run. The whole thing was set in motion at the polls by the Silent Majority still sore that LBJ was such a race traitor.

I'm highlighting this part to remind everyone to be careful what you wish for when you cross your fingers and hope Trump dies.

I don't think "defund the police" was ever a serious movement. First of all, it was never a starve-the-police-of-all-funds-and-then-disband-them movement. The goal was to recognize that a lot of what police do today is really social services, in particular mental health, and that it makes more sense they be handled by people specifically trained for that kind of support, and so, some funding should be shifted from policing into social/mental health services to properly address the problem. Whether the money would still be earmarked for the police and re-expressed into mental health personnel on the force, or shifted away from police departments into mental health departments, was supposed to be immaterial. The point was to stop requiring police to perform services they were not specifically trained for, and to fund the proper performance of these functions by trained professional instead. It's a very reasonable and, I believe, noble approach. Instead, the RWM and their Russian benefactors seized on the unorganized nature of the movement by highlighting the phrase itself and recasting it as "ban all police and let criminals roam free". That's not anything like a brilliant re-interpretation of the phrase because as fruit, it just hung so low, a high-schooler could have come up with it. But the brilliant part was how they were coached to hang the phrase on the entire Democratic Party, everyone in it, and anyone who ever voted for them. And perhaps because of the unorganized nature of the original idea, Democrats could not effectively fight that off, in no small part because they do not have a left-wing media ecosystem with nearly as much reach to help them out of it. I think it's still a great idea to shift responsibility and its commensurate funding for social and metal health services away from police and toward trained and educated professionals who specialize in them, but the damage from that phrase was so total, we may never see that happen in any of our lifetimes, even you young guys. Given the MAGA takeover of the nature of governing (i.e., ruling) nationwide, it seems more likely we would see police be tasked with solving mental health crises by simply shooting the people involved dead, than we would be to see a shift in responsibility for mental health issues encountered in the street from cops to trained professionals. Neither one will happen, of course, but given the current climate, one is at slightly more likely than the other.

Trump ain't got eight weeks to do ****. He doesn't give a flying **** about healthcare for the people—he cares about how to manipulate the issue so he can get good and paid. Plus, there's a real political reason not to come up with any ACA replacement plan: once it inevitably goes upside down for some large constituency, Republicans would take the blame, which the party has exactly zero interest in doing. So, better to keep ACA on life support and wield it as a political cudgel while they continue to defenestrate until it eventually looks exactly like healthcare 2008, only with prices that are higher by a factor of multiples. That is something they can definitely hammer the Democrats with in 2026, 2028, and beyond, while we all die slow, avoidable MAHA deaths.

Yes, but healthcare subsidies are still a leverage point, are they not?

McConnell had the luxury of a party voting constituency with one-track ideologies on his side. The Democratic voting bloc is a coalition of disparate interests whose ardor for the party waxes and wanes with the priority their interests enjoy at that given moment.

Mayonnaise has a conspiracy attached to it? How does it go?

Many red hats were normal, or at least within shouting distance of normal, all their lives. Then they took the red pill and now they are literally deranged, which is why they are so worked up about some sort of derangement syndrome they are projecting onto the rest of the country.

Moving toward official Buy Borrow Die policy.

It's really not about policy or governance or even politics anymore, is it? It's all about personalities, for or against. Although those against his personality have plenty of policy evidence to offer up as well.

Are you asking me that because you think I think that?

Detroit is also not a top tier option if you’re a top tier player looking to win now for legacy teams that burnish your brand and increase your chances for the Hall.

Good. Journalism should be held accountable to the truth. Too bad there's an entire RWM ecosystem here that completely ignores such accountability standards.

So I read the tweet you post up to "Show more", and when I read at the end that "history is speaking to us, and all too often, those who refuse to learn from it are ...", I couldn't resist finishing it in my head as "... hoping to profit from it." Because that's why they're going all in on it.

Yes, this, but also, statues to Confederate traitors helps prop up their argument that they are not traitors after all, but rather, low-key American heroes being left for dead by the woke mob.

That's what all of MAGA is going to hammer us with starting next week. They will use the opportunity yo celebrate the defunding of public media so they never have to be confronted with such truthful accounts ever again.

Yes, but also, it forces them to have to read, and that hurts the head.

Wanna talk about deficiency in model construction? How about when a guy who is nothing but a DH, as Shohei Ohtani was in 2024, has a defensive WAR of -1.7, as he did last year? That suggests he lost almost two games for his team with his glove, even though he never touched a glove the entire season. Now that one, I may never understand.

That wasn't the answer last year.

That may be, although on balance, left-handed pitchers in the minors are substantially more hittable than left-handed pitchers in the majors. Look, I want Carpenter to be a good hitter against left-handed pitchers as much as the next guy does. It's just that despite all the chances he has gotten to demonstrate as much, he has not been able to deliver on the opportunity. His 78 sOPS+ this year is basically the same as it was in 2023 (81) and 2022 (67), so he has simply not been improving at it. It's fair to a point to wonder whether the Tigers have given Carpenter every opportunity needed to demonstrate that he can improve against LHBs. But it's hard to take seriously any insistence that Hinch is simply blind to Carpenter, or has it in for Carpenter, or is simply too stupid (or, more probably, too analytically ideological) to see just how good Carpenter could be if only we penciled him into the lineup against LHPs every single time. You know, just throw him in there and he's bound to improve at some point, isn't he? But the team's coaches have watched Carpenter hit morning, noon and night practically every day for eight months running during each of the past four years; we see him only during actual games, and even then, only when we actually watch them. And oftentimes our opinions are influenced in his favor because we remember seeing discrete events such as this or this or this. (Just for fun, listen to what the Yankees analyst had to say about Carpenter after that last one.) So I gotta believe that Tigers coaches have seen enough to know that Carpenter's is just not going to get any better at hitting left-handers on a real ongoing basis, and no amount of wishcasting is going to change that.

Statues and memorials are not about preserving history. They are about honoring historical persons and events. Take down the statues of Confederate traitors to the United States and the historical accounts of them are still available to peruse in any number of other sources. People who support memorials for Confederate traitors while opposing memorials to pioneering fighting forces of color are telling us everything we need to know about them.

One problem with voter ID is that certain parties within state government can manipulate what is and is not considered valid ID with the apparent purpose of suppressing the vote among certain classes of people. Some states require voter ID strictly and only official state issue; others allow non-photo ID such as fishing licenses. In such cases, certain types of people more likely to engage in those activities are privileged with looser requirements to prove their identification than others who are not given to those types of activities. Native American communities, low-income, elderly, and rural voters are disproportionately affected by voter photo ID laws. This is partially because photo IDs aren’t as common as many people assume: 18% of all citizens over the age of 65, 16% of Latino voters, 25% of Black voters, and 15% of low-income Americans lack acceptable photo ID. Elderly and low-income voters may not have the availability, financial resources, or mobility to obtain the necessary identification, and rural voters may face significant barriers to obtaining the necessary documentation due to their geographic isolation. Further, many rural and Native Americans born at home or on reservations and tribal lands lack the mandated paperwork needed to obtain a government-issued ID that fits the legal requirements to vote. In short, many citizens find it difficult to obtain government photo IDs both because the ability to get to the facility to obtain it is limited or blocked, and because the necessary documentation, such as a birth certificate, needed to prove one's identification to obtain valid photo ID for voting is often difficult or expensive to acquire. Aside from class and racial discrimination, there are other peculiar ways voter photo ID laws turn voters away from the polls. For example, people who change their last names after marriage or divorce and don’t have a permissible ID that reflects their name on the voter rolls may be unable to cast a ballot. College students are also uniquely impacted by these laws, as their primary form of ID can often be a student ID, which isn’t always accepted as a valid form for voting. In all these cases, voter ID laws deny eligible voters access to the ballot box. One other problem is that on the ground, the law can be applied on an uneven and discretionary basis. Poll workers can take it upon themselves to choose to ask certain people showing up for every piece of required ID needed to cast a ballot and refuse them if they are missing any, or if they consider even one piece to be invalid based on their own discretion; while the same poll worker can wave through someone else without requiring proof because the poll worker knows and likes that person, who may not even be legally registered to vote.