LaBombo

Hope so, for his sake and ours. If he makes the club, maybe I'll see if I can make a Pineda jersey by dusting off an old one in the back of my closet and altering the existing letters on the back of it...H-A-R-D-E-N.

Alternate headline: "Twins won't rule out possibility of skipping 2019 season". Everything in the media so far about the Twins' plan for sweeping and comprehensive lethargy this off season sounds much less like a road map for building a competitive MLB team than it does a determined effort to rouse statewide outrage against the team's publicly subsidized ownership.

Hey, it could be worse... GOP-Controlled Wisconsin Legislature Votes To Dissolve State Rather Than Let Democrats Have It

To paraphrase the most famous philosopher of my generation... "When 95 years old you reach, look as good, you may not...". He was hit twice enemy fire and had the battlefield equivalent of last writes administered to him by his men... a large shot of morphine and an 'M' written on his forehead. He has outlived over 99% of the men his age who survived the war. Edit: I'm not trying to give you a hard time for noting how he looked. He seemed considerably more frail than the last time he appeared in public to me as well. Just wanted to add a little context to the remarkable nature of his life, which came within minutes of ending over 70 years ago.

Have to admit it was tempting to retaliate by making an ugly generalization of my own, but I was taught to do neither. Coordinate that, Norman... http://aperiodical.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Image18-Android.png

Well done, Nevada. Not content to celebrate just gender diversity, though, Nevada also embraced the mortality-challenged by electing more dead pimps (1) to their assembly than any other state in the union. Free thinkers, those Nevadans. If AZ adopts "Meth lab of democracy" as its state motto, maybe Nevada can designate itself 'Democracy's opium den'.

And like I said, I wouldn't expect you to. But as gripping of a story as it made to portray the border patrol as mounted storm troopers riding through a densely populated Hispanic neighborhood with nets stretched between them, threatening to snatch up hapless would-be voters a la Planet of the Apes, it doesn't pass the smell test. First off, it takes only about 30 seconds' worth of search engine-ing and Mapquesting to see that the planned site of the cancelled event was in a virtually deserted area next to a rail yard and some non-retail commercial properties, not a bustling residential neighborhood: Worse, the reports that the exercise was to be deliberately set up between the Chihuahuita neighborhood and its polling place were just flat out wrong, since the nearest polling station sits within the neighborhood at its east end, while the exercise was to take place to the west and outside of it. It wouldn't even occur to me to ask anyone to believe Trump morally incapable of ordering voter suppression. But it seems hard to believe that his administration is capable of it on a logistical level, at least on such a granular level of choosing individual units, times, and places for shows of force designed to intimidate voters. And if that were the case, why only one in the entire nation? Same for an Abbott conspiracy; why order only one? That leaves the Rogue Trump Supporter theory... that a lone wolf Border Patrol commander took it on himself to scare a Hispanic neighborhood into not voting. But why would he or she risk an entire career by ordering an 'intimidation' exercise at a time of day where most people are at work, and in a place where very few people would even see it, let alone be intimidated by it? And why would they then back down at the first sign of trouble, despite knowing that they would probably still have to face the wrath of the chain of command? Voter suppression exists, it's wrong, and it needs to end, but that's probably not what this was. And if it was, it was fortunately a remarkably crude and ineffectual effort.

Feel free to not speculate if you're not comfortable with it, but could they have possibly been winter-only "snowbirds" who were expecting absentee ballots from their 'up north' state of official residence? That wouldn't make it acceptable, but if they were from differing northern states it would make it less likely a matter of selective vote suppression than some other, more benign explanation.

Cancelled. TX Sec. of State and El Paso native Rolando Pablos had already investigated the matter and determined that the intent of the exercise did not present an issue with regard to voting, but CBP rescheduled the exercise anyway. To save everyone the trouble of googling his party affiliation, yes, Pablos is a Republican, so feel free to disregard his assessment of the situation as more 'bad guys' chicanery.

Posted under general politics here in the TD sports bar forum. "If the discussion we are having now, is about voter turnout.... I think democrats have to get dirty. Republicans use fear? They need to use fear. Hammer use fear to motivate people to vote, and people to change sides. Obviously, that is a message democrats are terrible at. Get pundits on faux news that can put people in a box. Harp on corporations and big money controlling the gop. Call republicans Nazis as much as possible. without doing it too much. Show how weak Trump is. End citizens United." Bolding added by me. I'm leaving the name off because I'm not looking to rip individuals, and to the extent that I know him or her, I like the person who posted it. Your assumption that I'm being dishonest because I'm not a down-with-the-cause liberal is duly noted, however. And I hope you will forgive me for not taking the time to deconstruct far left editorials posted as fact.

Trump is the most egregious and harmful example, as I've agreed repeatedly. And yes, the BernieBro went on his homicidal anti-Republican rampage without any irresponsible trash talk from Sanders. All he had to go on was the insane hate rhetoric in an ocean of angry Democrats who posted in Facebook groups like "Terminate the Republican Party", along with the occasional wink from mass media fantasies about assassinating Trump, the most recent of which was published the day before the bomb scare in that bastion of rational non-violent progressivism, the New York Times. If you want to believe that a lifelong violent felon was suddenly made violent who went all Manchurian candidate simply by Trump egging on the "Lock her up" idiots, have at it. Personally I believe that his daily diet of hate sites that mirrored those which Hodgkinson frequented had much more to do with his crime. In any case, we're all personally responsible for our conduct, and to my way of thinking, at least, there's nothing that even a dolt like Trump can say that justifies a regular poster in this forum calling for Democrats to label ALL Republicans "Nazis" at every opportunity. That exhortation went unchallenged, btw. Don't give in.

The relevance is that it's irrelevant. Individual crazies aren't the product of "their" parties, as much as you want to hold one, and only one, responsible for producing them. I'm ecstatic and relieved that they caught this idiot, whose history of violence predates his or Trump's involvement in politics by decades. I hope that his arrest serves as a deterrent to anyone who would consider a copycat crime or any others. But if you believe that one party has a "monopoly on political extremism" while the other continues to be co-chaired by a man who has endorsed multiple hate groups throughout his career, then I think we're done here. Have a good weekend.

It would help if everyone would tone things down, but yes, absolutely starting with Trump. I'm hoping that his staff will talk him into doing so.

I guess you were in a hurry and skipped the part where I condemned Trump, or maybe it was insufficiently disparaging for your taste. But PLEASE don't play the "false equivalency" card as if it either explains away a disturbing disparity in the partisan nature of the media coverage of the two events, or much, much worse, makes one party accountable for its crazies but absolves the other for theirs entirely. Political extremism is NOT a zero sum danger, and to suggest otherwise can be taken as a passive form of extremism in itself. Edit: The more that comes out about this guy, the easier it will be to remember that the defining characteristic of all violent political crazies is the crazy part, not the political part. Sayoc was a male stripper before starting two businesses purporting to have something to do with being "Native American". His mile-long rap sheet of prior crimes predates the Trump campaign and presidency by nearly two decades.

He's a nut job who gravitated to politics, just like mentally ill Bernie Bro campaign worker and "progressive" James Hodgkinson, who shot Steve Scalise along with other Republicans and two DC police. Hogdkinson left a social media trail a mile wide through Facebook groups like "Terminate the Republican party" and "Donald Trump is not my president", had a Republican hit list on his person at the time of the shooting, and was screaming about health care during the commission of an attempted mass murder, and yet the media insisted for days that there was "no apparent political motive". Crazy people do crazy, contemptible things for crazy "reasons", and politics has always been one of them. Trump's rhetoric was overheated and irresponsible before this act of terrorism, and will probably continue to be afterward, unfortunately. But he will still be a dire symptom in my book, rather than the disease itself.

I'd prefer to see them get snowed out a week or two into October, but that might be expecting a little too much from Rocco the Rookie.

Maybe three if a couple of games get snowed out?

Yup. Sid will call him "Rocky Colavito".

Guilty as charged. But I only did that to the repeat "customers". And not on a school night, because there's a pretty good chance that when the pizza doesn't show up in half an hour, they'll make the same mis-dial when they call to complain.

Yup, and even more improbable, my mother was a Pfaffenbach!

Well, that brings back fond college memories of answering midnight phone calls for delivery pizza to the Dominos that had a nearly identical phone number.

Looks like a good hire to me, for these reasons in descending order of seriousness.... 1. If the Rays liked his analytical ability enough to let him shape their use of statistics in the field, that's good enough for me. At the very least, we know he's not an anti-cybermetrics crackpot, and probably closer to the opposite. 2. Baldelli the player was a very talented kid whose career went off the rails due to health issues. The Twins' immediate future hinges on getting Buxton and Sano back on the rails. Hoping his personal experiences will aid and inform his efforts to get them going again. 3. He's a bass player. In most bands that would mean his role would be to keep the prima donna vocalist and lead guitarist from strangling each other, keep the drummer from jumping out of moving vehicles, and get everyone where they need to be on time. So pretty much the same job as a baseball manager. 4. His name is Rocco. Even if you're a loose cannon type of player, how much crap are you gonna give a manager whose name is "Rocco"? It is my desperately irrational hope that he hires a coach whose last name ends in 'ski'. Then on the off chance a real problem child needs straightening out, Levine can finish a disciplinary conversation with "Rocco. Ski. Take Mr. Xxxx outside and make sure he understands".

It's been a sad, scary day, so I'm not going to make it worse by going further down that path. And I agree with your addendum that the more extremely left or right a candidate is, the more likely it seems that their non-partisan negative characteristics get overlooked by their most fervent supporters. With respect to the Gillum/Desantis race, which I have very little personal stake in, I'll just say 3 things: yes, of course Desantis needs to be held accountable for any ties to racist groups; Gillum has wrongly attempted to conflate a call for accountability over ethics with racism; and most of all... if I were still a Florida voter, I'd sure be wishing there were a really strong Independent in the race about now.

His style isn't my cup o' tea, but I'm rooting for Fleck and will withhold judgement for another year. That being said, he seems to be on track to follow the recent U of M tradition of hiring a coach whose only job is to make us retroactively appreciate the guy he replaced.

He lied about it repeatedly, which is probably the bigger concern to most people. But you can definitely run with the idea that every act of Dem misconduct is fine, because Trump! It seems counter-productive to the future of political integrity in America, however. In the mean time, just answer one question for you. Based on how many people in the Democratic party, the FBI, and the media loathe Trump... do you seriously believe that your idea of investigating him hasn't at least had the tires kicked by now?