PseudoSABR

Business owners (or investors) shouldn't be protected from market conditions any more than employees. Civil rights, like the outlawing of slavery (or child labor, or safety conditions etc.), imposes costs on business owners that they must either deal with, or make way for other businesses owners who can find ways of operating more efficiently, raise prices, or be willing to earn less profit. As long as there is demand for services and products, those business owners are just as replaceable as the employees. It's a real bummer for business owners to operate in a democracy; boo-hoo. Feel the trickle down economics. Wait for it. Wait for it.

Default wins over the unelectable. I don't like her, but I think she wins the willing-to-live-with-her majority by rather wide margins.

No it doesn't. You have no reason to presume that any of us are insensitive to the plights of those suffering far from our shores.

Relatively to what anyone else would do, Huckabee's idealized America is pretty scary. That there are some scarier people in underdeveloped countries shouldn't even be a point that needs to be made. This whole, "he's a nice guy, but a far cry from Jesus" or "he's a dumbass, but a far cry from Hitler" argument just needs to stop. It's a straw man. I can call Huckabee and Kim Davis extreme without the need for anyone to point out to me that there are more radical extremist elsewhere in the world and in history.

Encouraging a society to be watchful of religious extremism may accomplish just that. There's actually no one running on Sharia law, but Huckabee is still in race, promising to jettison the law in the name of his religion if elected to office.

Too bad for GOP that the election is not Sharia law vs. Republican values. They'd win for sure! That said, I don't think you ruffled any feathers any more than usual in these threads. Don't take the responses as an indication you shouldn't contribute. Even though we don't all agree on the issues, I certainly appreciate hearing from people who think and believe differently from I do.

A Muslim President could no more institute Sharia law than Kim Davis could refuse to certify gay marriage. We live in a secular system, where elected officials take oaths to preclude this kind of nonsense. As others have pointed out, this is fear-mongering nothing more. The danger for Christians is that if they use too broad of a brush trying to paint Islamic extremists, they may soon find themselves under the same bristles.

Okay. Look your premise is fundamentally faulty. The way our voting process is set up already places many obstacles that keep the working poor, the indigent, and the infirm from voting. Much of this, as regular internet users, we might take for granted--time, health, transportation, child-care, safety, etc. Pandering to these people does not make it any more easier for them to overcome these obstacles, much less ones that would have them go get a special ID, that they probably would have little notice that they would need, would take weeks to process, and probably ask for documents that are administratively difficult to obtain. The implication of your post is that these people are only worthy of democracy if they can overcome the bureaucratic gauntlet conservatives lay down in front of them. We all agree crime is bad, yet we do not empower the police to pull everyone over without cause and search them; we'd sure catch more criminals. Why don't we? Is it because we support criminals!? There are values in our constitution that protect our liberty. Liberty means the freedom to walk about in public and not be asked to prove that you are not a criminal or to show your papers so that you belong where you say you do. As much as conservative ideology supposedly rails against totalitarianism, and champions liberty, so much of their policy restricts the access of our society to their American neighbors.

Well if you say so...

I love the stathead analysis of the Twins. Not only do the Twins 1) not have the 'talent' to win, they've also 2) mismanaged that talent. At some point the fact that they continue to win should call into question at least one of the two propositions, and the methods for reaching those conclusions, at least as they apply to the how the Twins go about their business. To continue to assert that the Twins don't know to develop their players or utilize their assets is to miss the forest for the trees. I don't have a BP subscription, so I don't know, but I hope any analysis of the Twins not putting their best pitchers on the mound include the recent examples of Trevor May's and Kyle Gibson's initial failures in spite of dominating minor league numbers. In general I have no problem with sabermetrics as a tool for evaluation (in fact, I enjoy it); put it's just that, a tool, an imperfect tool. What rubs me the wrong way is the certitude sabermetric writers continue to have about their conclusions and predictions. That data-analysis somehow absolutely undercuts expertise derived from experience.

Mauer's run shouldn't count as much because he didn't train hard enough to earn it.

What? That Democrats prefer the government regulate industry rather than industry regulate itself has nothing to do with Conservative efforts to disenfranchise voting-eligible citizens who disagree with their policies. No one is in favor of larger bureaucracy or inefficiency. I wish the EPA could be privatized; or the banks knew better than to invest so heavily in speculation. The efforts of conservatives to make voting more difficult is unforgivable.

Obviously our current politicians are heavily invested in special interest to the detriment of society. But politicians would even be more beholden to the special interests of their non-political career. Very few individuals can afford to give up some of their best earning years to 'serve' in political office. We'd get a less diverse population running for political office.

The 'career politician' is an easy target, and should not be preferable to the steady stream of former politician who now works for the special interest group s/he advocated for, echoing what Jim said. I think we'd end up getting WORSE politicians if there isn't a career track for these people, they'd have to find their future within something other than public service, which would take affect before they ever run for office.

I tend to agree with Jim and Ashbury about the unintended consequences of imposing term limits. In fact, I think the House would be better served by longer terms in general. Two-year terms create a perpetual campaign cycle which allows for non-effective politicians to run on public fervor. Reducing the number of Representatives would also help weed out the crazies. I don't know who thinks having 435 people trying to reach a consensus is a good idea. Reducing the number and having a mathematical geographical proportionment (instead of gerrymandering), would help immensely.

Reputation seems like the key ingredient, which Rosario doesn't have--yet.

TR would have kept him in AA all season! Oh wait...

69 - 63 Good organizational leaders can overcome their errors and mistakes. They plan for them and they mitigate them when they arise.

It is fair to suggest that aggressiveness may have contributed to BS signing Sano; that said, it's also fair to suggest that Sano was such a special talent that it would have overcome TR's conservative tendency. What rubs me the wrong way is that certitude that people have about something completely speculative. .

Awesome analysis, per usual.

No one's saying that. People are saying, maybe the Front Office has some valid reasons for their behavior. It's fine to be critical of this move, but using the delayed promotion of Berrios (like people did with Gibson and May) to characterize TR has some foolish cheapskate is dishonest (and very annoying to read again and again). Too many posters are frothing at the bit to find transactions they can use to smear the front office. ("See, I told you the Twins were thestupid!")

I just don't have a basis to doubt Ryan here. Sano's talent was widely coveted, and I think the deal was probably brokered by a combination of an international scout and others in the Front Office. I think TR would be swayed by his scouts and the opportunity to sign such a talent was unique to his experience. TR's penchant pre-Target Field for gaming service time, avoiding expensive free-agents, and not extending superstars in their thirties don't seem applicable. I really wish the whole TR-is-the-cheapest-GM-ever! meme would just die, because I think it's pretty baseless at this point.

I will never ceased to be amazed by Twins fans capacity to invent criticism of Terry Ryan. The credit for the Sano signing probably belongs to people other than Bill Smith, and I imagine those same people were with the Twins both before Bill Smith was GM and after his tenure. There's reasonable criticism of Terry Ryan, his speculative non-signing of Sano, is not one of them.

Why can't there be any legitimacy to the notion that Ryan and his staff have valid reasons for believing that a promotion not only would hinder the team but would hurt Berrios' development? You can't just ignore the aggressive promotion of other prospects and cast Ryan with characteristics that are inconsistent with that behavior. He's just 'uncreative' in regards to Berrios? I don't buy it. I think the Twins are genuinely concerned the effects of fatigue (and, speculatively, everything else that contributes to ineffectiveness and stunted growth when a prospect is hastily promoted). If the Twins behaved like you suggest, I don't think we see Buxton batting ninth, or Sano (this dude is a dude) when we were seemingly non-competitive earlier this month. I think it's possible, even very likely, for talented players to have minor league success, but show signs of obvious flaws that would be exposed in short order at the major league level.

It's not creative to call up your top pitching prospect; it's obvious, and repeated ad naseam. The Twins actually have recent experience with promoting their best pitching prospects in the second half. Those incidences not only did not work out well, they worked out horribly in the short term. (I love you now, Gibby, and May. But I'm glad you took your lumps when we were losing!) The argument then, was that the Twins should have promoted them sooner... It wasn't clear that Berrios would adjust when exposed to ML pitching, his first starts in AAA did not go well. That said, dude has been lights out since then, and might be the best pitcher in the minor leagues (Awesome!). I'd like him up soon too because of statistical dreaminess, but I don't want him to end like Dylan Bundy or Marcus Stroman either. The notion that the Twins prefer cheapness to winning flies in the face of their minor league promotion record this season. Rosario is up; Sano is up; Buxton is up. It's fine that you disagree with their decision on Berrios, but that hardly substantiates that they lack situational awareness or creativity. The Twins are conservative with their pitching prospects. And for good reason. Why the Twins would choose not to promote Berrios are probably found in the details inaccessible to us fans (which sucks); I think there's real reason to believe that Berrios is nearing fatigue (many of these mentioned in the Bollinger article) which could hurt not only ML effectiveness, but development. I'm not sure any of this is the case. But I can't cavalierly preclude it, either. I just don't know better.