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Maybe some of them want to go back to the '50s, but Trump and his inner circle are explicitly trying to force the country back into the Gilded Age.

Naw, I agree with you, he's never going to face justice. I'm just left hoping that when he realizes he is going to die soon, he doesn't have the nuclear button within reach.

At least someone got their $100 worth!

One nation, under Don, divided for his convenience, with liberty for him, and loyalty oaths for the rest of us.

I am pretty firmly on the left, and I am neither anti-American nor anti-western. I say that because I think it matters when evaluating whether the left, as a governing political force, has been captured by antisemitism, and I don't think it has. On Israel specifically: I don't think the "colonizer" framing is wholly inaccurate. A significant strand of Zionist ideology has drifted rightward over decades toward expanded settlement, annexation, and in some quarters explicitly expulsionist thinking. That's documentable, not propaganda. And criticizing that trajectory isn't antisemitism, even if some people putatively on my side of the aisle weaponize the criticism in antisemitic ways. On the broader point, I agree that rhetoric matters. But the distance between fringe influence and governing control is not the same on both sides right now, and I think that distinction is doing a lot of work that we keep glossing over. You mention presumed leaders of the far left now, and I know who Ilhan Omar is, but I had to look up Rossana Rodriguez, because I had no idea who she was. That's not an accident, because she's fringe. By contrast, the figures who set the Republican governing agenda are not fringe anymore—they are the agenda. The asymmetry is real and significant. Are there people on the left moving toward antisemitism? Yes. Are there more than there used to be? Perhaps, maybe even probably. Is there any realistic danger they seize control of the Democratic Party the way nativist, antisemitism-coded elements have routinely seized control of conservative and reactionary parties throughout history, and are doing right now in the GOP? I don't see it. I don't think it's even close. I'd just ask that we not fall into the trap of a "pox on both houses" framing, because while that feels fair and balanced, it obscures the fact that the two poxes are nowhere near alike in scope, scale, or institutional capture.

Of course Republicans roundly criticize Democrats for that. i would expect nothing less.

I promise you that, if the **** ever does come down for him in some beautiful world, he will claim someone else posted his “truths” and that he had no knowledge of it, and he will expect that argument will stick. Not for nothing, I also predict that if he ever goes to trial for his dismantling of America’s greatness, he will show up with newly grayed hair and either using a walker or sitting in a wheelchair.

Exactly what I mean.

I’m always envious of grocery stores I go to in just about every other city. It doesn’t matter where I go—Michigan, Wisconsin, Alabama, Idaho, you name it—they are always bigger, brighter, cleaner, better-stocked, and more orderly than ours in the city are. They’re cramped like 1980s, and they’re generally dirty, like dirt caked onto the floor kind of thing, with routinely under-stocked shelves with big holes where products are supposed to be. Even when I go in the afternoon, there are still palates in aisles waiting to be unloaded, with no one around in sight. And it’s not just Krogeriano’s, which is bad enough … it’s Jewel, it’s Aldi, it’s Pete’s, it’s Fresh Market, it’s Cermak, it’s all of them. I love this city I’m in, but the grocery store vibe here is one real downside to it.

TBF, it’s hard to exactly nail the dialogue of a whole other bygone era when you don’t live during the era. TB even more F, you don’t have to nail it exactly—you have only to make it seem to the modern audience that you have.

Unmentioned in the Times story but mentioned on CNN: the price index rose 0.6% for this month alone, the equivalent of 7% or so annual inflation.

A distinction without a difference.

You're describing real things, and I don't want to minimize any of it. The incidents in Chicago, the university harassment, the attacks on Jewish students, the Johnson administration's handling of that human rights report. All of that is documented, troubling, and worth calling out forcefully. But here's where I'd draw the line: what you're describing is a surge in antisemitic behavior in urban areas, much of it traceable to radicalized fringe actors, online agitators, and a specific political moment inflamed by the Gaza war. That's real. What I would resist is the leap from that to "the left"—let alone the Democratic Party—having embraced antisemitism as a core value. Johnson's handling of that report was cowardly and shameful. But a cowardly and shameful response as a concession borne of political calculation isn't the same as core ideological antisemitism, and it's definitely not representative of Democratic governance writ large. The far left has absolutely provided cover for some of this, and that's a legitimate indictment of a certain strain of activist politics. But the far left isn't the Democratic Party, and recognizing the asymmetry that exists matters, because the Republican Party has largely been taken over by its radical wing, to the point where figures who would have been considered fringe a decade ago now set the governing agenda. That's not at all true of the Democrats. Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and the party's mainstream leadership have been meaningfully critical of campus antisemitism and pro-Hamas rhetoric. The Democratic Party hasn't been captured by its loudest voices the way the GOP has, and pretending the two situations are equivalent in the interest of both-sidism actually lets the bad actors on the left off the hook by miscasting all this as mainstream partisan symmetry, rather than specific aberrant behavior that demands to be condemned. So, yes to everything you're citing as real. No to the implication that Democrats own antisemitism as a value.

I'd feel a lot better about this were the country not so exquisitely gerrymandered.

Correct—I don’t. And you don’t.

And yet I’d bet money the vast majority of MAGA veterans will either give him a pass on it, or fully embrace this as a respectful gesture of support. Or am I wrong, @Tigeraholic1?

You’re close—more like, they’ll explain it to you like they’re a four-year-old.

This makes it look like the mechanic in color is the Republican and Rickets in black and white is the Democrat. Either way, whoever wins will caucus with the Republicans anyway.

I honestly don’t know what you’re referring to when you say this. I might be a bit ignorant of the details you’re aware of.

Theoretically, I’m not opposed to the idea of moving the mound back measurably, like a couple of feet or so, to provide extra time for the batter to react to the balls, although there would be a bunch of consequences to reckon with. One of the big consequences would occur when a pitcher moves up from a 60’ 6” league to a 62’ or 63’ league. Besides the extra strain that gets put on a pitcher’s arm as they try to make up the difference without losing their velocity (because pitchers are human and they’re going inherently to want to preserve that as is), they would also have to rework their entire repertoire of pitches to go 62’ or 63’ instead of 60’ 6”, and there are going to be casualties along the way, both in health and career terms. Also, that would mean all the minor league teams would have to move their mounds back, as well all the independent pro teams that feed players into the systems, and probably all the college teams as well. Elite high school teams in California and the south, which feed pitchers into organized ball, would feel pressured to move their mounds back, too, which might force entire state high school athletic associations to mandate the move, which would cost taxpayer money. And if the Asian leagues don’t comply as well, that would reduce the amount of pitchers that could step right into a rotation or bullpen and contribute to a big league team. So all the mounds in Japan all the way down to the high school level (and HS ball is HUGE in Japan) might well have to make that move. There are probably other consequences as well, but that’s one big one that occurs to me.

The idea would be to discourage the spin race by making it practically impossible to spin the ball as we see now. I might even say that spin rates have gotten so high that there must be pitchers who are overtly trying to break the record for highest-spin rate, just for the recognition.

If being critical of Israel, and not co-signing onto the resolution flatly equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism, is itself anti-Semitic, then the Republican campaign to set the bar at "you can be either pro-Israel or anti-Semitic, choose one" has been wildly successful.

That might be countered by fewer pitches per at bat, which I believe is a worthy goal.

Then how about changing the ball to limit spin? Lowering the seams would probably do that. They could also consider changing the surface of the ball from leather to some synthetic, and maybe even include microtexturing to the ball, to produce more symmetric boundary-layer separation that suppresses seam-shifted wake effects. Maybe another way to skin that cat would be to redistribute internal mass outward toward the cover of the ball, to increase rotational inertia without changing total mass. One last way, which is probably the most radical, is increase the size of the ball itself, maybe by a quarter inch and a quarter ounce. But even without that, if you put all three of others together, you could probably reduce max spin by 500 or more RPM, with the effect of reducing strikeout rates, increase balls in play, and tilting the advantage away from flame-throwers and toward command pitchers. If they coupled this set of changes with true robot umpiring on every pitch, which would force pitchers to have to come into the a hitter's zone to get strikes at some point, I bet they could move the K/9 rate from mid-eights to mid-sixes or less overnight. Counterpoint: MLB Marketing and Players would both hate this.