The Frankish Reich

The case for Biden is not all that compelling. OK, we got that. But one of the main criticisms of Biden is the one we see in these threads. He's old! Who is really running this country? And at least when compared to Trump, the answer is: someone with at least a modicum of sound judgement and policy experience. In other words, if he's a bit too hands-off, that's a feature, not a bug. With Trump, we had a chaotic administration. Remember "my generals?" All fired or departed in frustration. Including one who called his boss "an idiot." Remember Rex Tillerson, Exxon CEO turned Secretary of State? Departed, calling his boss "a moron." (If I remember correctly, the offensive old scale had "idiot" below "moron," so I guess that was actually praise. Relative praise.) Honestly, we can go on and on. Just awful, dysfunctional, chaos. If the Republican primaries somehow magically give me Tim Scott or Nikki Haley, well, then we'll have a real choice.

And what I'm saying is this: your personal experience doesn't matter. Neither does mine. Or anyone else's. We do not assess public health measures based on anecdote.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-05-25/flight-of-affluent-taxpayers-catches-up-with-new-york?sref=htOHjx5Y tl;dr Federal tax revenues up about 15% in the last couple years. NY State tax revenues down 17% People do vote with their feet. (Not sure if this belongs here or in one of the NYS threads, but there was some discussion here about New Yorkers leaving for Florida ...)

Anecdata rules!

https://www.wsj.com/articles/wagner-chiefs-feud-with-russian-military-cracks-putins-image-of-control-488ac37 This is a dangerous time for Putin, and a dangerous time for the world. Given the ineptitude and lack of morale in the regular Russian military, Putin outsourced the hard work to a thoroughly corrupt mercenary group, Wagner. He's created a monster that he can't control now. Is Prigozhin gunning for his job as dictator of Russia? Or just trying to make Putin his puppet? It doesn't seem to be a feud orchestrated for foreign observers since there would be no apparent benefit to Putin by exposing him as weak and ineffective. And what does Prigozhin think the remedy is? About 4 years of a North Korea style dictatorship. Can't make this crap up. The attack on Ukraine has accomplished two things: - it has revealed (just like the events of the collapse of the Soviet Union 32 years ago) how dysfunctional the Russian state really is, including their much-feared military prowess. Finland, Poland, the Baltics: all of them may rest assured that the chances of being overrun by Russian land forces are basically nil. - it has also revealed that Putin's stranglehold on Russian institutions may not be as strong as we thought. That's paradoxically dangerous in the short term: he could be willing to escalate with nuclear weapons in a desperate attempt to hold onto power, or some even more corrupt and insane Prigozhin type could either take over or begin to exert political as well as military power.

Demanding a trade to the Rams in 3, 2, 1 ...

Hey, they're called optional OTAs, and Dion decided to come even though he'd be showing off his bad offseason body. He doesn't have a history of being a Marcel Dareus or Kelvin Benjamin. Again, it's May, and I have no reason to doubt he'll be in good football shape in 100 days.

Yep, PFF loves Damien. They had him rated in the high 80s (that's pro bowl caliber) and even 90 ("elite") in a couple seasons. They like Singletary, but more as a mid-70s guy (kind of generic NFL starter quality). As for PFF, I've said it before: yes, take it with a boulder of salt. But Beane's free agent acquisitions have always gone in one direction: dumping a PFF lower-rated player in favor of a PFF higher-rated one. So either the Bills' internal scouting is sympatico with PFF, or they're using PFF analysis themselves. Sometimes it doesn't work so well (was Saffold an upgrade over anyone last year?), but the pattern is there.

Agreed. To his credit, flat-out lying doesn't come naturally to him, which puts him at a disadvantage. If you go back to his initial congressional campaigns, he really wasn't distinguishable from, say, Marco Rubio policy-wise; not as far to the conservative side as Cruz, but with some elements of that too. Which is probably an advantage in a general election, but first you gotta make it through the primaries, and that will be a challenge.

We don't really need another DeSantis topic. But since we have one ... ... his problem, the entire Republican Party's problem, is Trump. He's allowed Trump (and his amibition) to push him into positions that make him a far less appealing candidate on the national stage. Trolling the libs gets you attention in the new Republican echo chamber. It doesn't help you win the states you'd need to win to actually become President. I like the resume. I think he's smart. I don't mind that he isn't a glad-hander -- we've had a few of those recently (Bush 43, Trump, Biden), and I don't see any of them going down in history as great Presidents. I'm fine with a more introverted, cerebral candidate. But I'm not sure that a more introverted, cerebral candidate pretending to be something he's not is electable.

Except that season when he came in too skinny after COVID. This is what OTAs and training camp are for. I suspect he'll be in good LT shape by the second weekend in September.

My favorite was when the newly-minted Antonin Scalia School of Law (ASSOL) finally said that acronym out loud.

And it's not like Trump is in his prime. Remember: - Maybe we can put the light inside you to kill the COVID virus - Identifying his accuser as his ex-wife, Marla, when shown a photo in his deposition - Saying things as absolutely delusional as "Beau died in Iraq" like this: COLLINS: Well, we wanted to give you a chance to acknowledge the results. TRUMP: We have elections that were horrible. If you look at what happened in Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, if you look at what happened in Detroit, Michigan, if you look at what happened in Atlanta, millions of votes, and all you have to do is take a look at government cameras. You will see them, people going to 28 different voting booths to vote, to put in seven ballots apiece. I mean, and they’re all on camera. There is absolutely no support for this "people going to 28 different voting booths to vote" thing. It is a figment of his imagination. People tend to give Trump too much credit here: "he's lying, because if you repeat a lie enough times, people will believe it." Or my favorite excuse: it might not be literally true (there is no government camera video of someone visiting 28 different voting booths), but it is true in a general sense that some people probably voted multiple times. This is the old line "take him seriously but not literally." Or it could be that America's King Lear really has lost it, and really has convinced himself that he's seen video showing someone go to 28 different polling stations and submitted 7 ballots at each one. You could apply those excuses to Biden too - there's probably a lot of Democratic voters who think Beau died in Iraq because he's said it, with such apparent emotion, so many times. Both senile? Both cunning liars? Both ... both of the above?

Don't be so sure. I was a "hold my nose and vote for Biden" guy in 2020, so there's no enthusiasm there. I would never, ever vote for Trump. The whole January 6 ploy - not just the raid on the Capitol, but the whole cynical ploy to essentially ignore the certified electoral college votes and throw things back to the states - was indefensible. It was dangerous, it came close to working (Mike Pence saved us?), and it would have forever destroyed the American tradition of the peaceful, orderly transfer of power. I have no idea what would have happened if it had worked, but it could certainly have resulted in a real fracturing of the United States. This is not something to play with. It is something I honor. DeSantis would have to tack hard to the center in a general election to win my trust. Before he got started on the whole trolling the libs thing, my impression of him was generally favorable. Trump is in his head now, and he's got to get back to the guy he used to be.

So ... to be serious for a bit. Here's the case I see (as a guy who has voted for Republicans in Presidential elections) for DeSantis. A little free political consultant advice (and I predict he WILL do this before too long, after firing his current campaign leaders). - he's young. Trump is old, Biden is older. So accentuate that. Have him doing active things. Not riding a golf cart. Doing whatever it is he does. He played baseball, right? Get him out there with kids playing baseball or something. He's lost weight. He'd look remarkably young and fit compared to his ancient competitors. Whatever. Not Twitter audio only. That actually negates his strengths. It didn't work for technical reasons, but it was a stupid thing to do anyway because it doesn't play to his strengths. - his wife is attractive, media savvy. The kids are cute. Play the old JFK card. Your family humanizes you (since you are often ridiculed as a kind of Republican Al Gore, too robotic to make personal connections). Relaunch the campaign with the family onstage. Don't use them to troll (that horrible ad with the kid building a wall out of blocks), use them to humanize. Your kids aren't Hunter and Don Jr. getting sloppy seconds with Gavin Newsom's monstrous ex. They are ... likable. - that whole trolling Disney, scooping up migrants in someone else's state and moving them north at Florida expense ... yeah, that's reacting to Trump, trying to outflank him on the outrageous meter. You will never win a fight with Trump by trying to be more outrageous than him. You have a success story to tell with Florida. All that stuff may be fun, but it detracts from telling your story. Stick to it. - Play up the military background. Trump likes to act like a tough guy. We know he didn't serve. You did. Admirably. As a JAG officer assigned to some very sensitive national security work. You wouldn't be so cavalier with our nation's security. Play that up. Always and everywhere. You are also smart. There's a weird anti-intellectualism in the Republican Party now, or at least you've been convinced that there is. I'm guessing most people would prefer that the President be smart. Trump is a marketing genius, but he's not smart. Biden has always been ... challenged, and now he's really old. Don't dumb things down. Play to your strengths. So far DeSantis is all reaction, no action. Put Trump on the defensive. Give me a reason to vote FOR you, not just against Trump. Don't be the NFL coach who's so worried about game planning to negate your opponent's strength that you forget to focus on your own strengths. You're welcome, Ronnie.

There's about a dozen Republican would-be presidents (Cruz, Rubio, Walker, Christie, Carson, Pence .... we can go on and on) who learned the hard way: not hitting back at Trump is the surest path to irrelevance. DeSantis needs to grow a pair. Right now the only case he's making for himself is "I'm Trump Jr." There's already a Trump Jr. He's smart, he has a pretty appealing resume (at least in the abstract, until he turned himself into the Troll of the Everglades), he shouldn't be so frightened.

I agree. This one is just weird. He's convinced himself that Iraq burn pits caused his son's death, so much so that he states it like Bible truth. A combination of old age and heartbreak.

Yeah, I'm not sure Florida has any bragging rights on the "We're Not Trashy" index.

True, but in the Republican primaries it was kind of the opposite. Trump never built the campaign infrastructure in the key primary states, whereas the Ted Cruz types had been doing that for at least 4 years. It didn't matter.

For decades we've heard that the old Rose Garden strategy will never work. You gotta get out there and campaign. But then Biden 2020 changed that old wisdom. For decades we've also heard that you need the ground game, the "retail" level politics, that it's not good enough to dominate national media if you want to win. But then the Trump 2016 campaign changed that old wisdom.

On that we agree. The game of politics is weird and fascinating. We'll see how this all plays out.

Correct. The general standard is whether the use of a trade name would cause confusion in consumers. There is really no good case that football viewing consumers would be confused about whether they are watching a professional football contest between the Washington Commanders and the New York Giants as opposed to a service academy annual game between the Air Force Academy and the Naval Academy. And certainly no confusion between that and whatever some trademark squatter tried (successfully?) registered in the last couple years. Getting official trademark recognition is valuable for the team (they can sue others for infringing on it), but it certainly isn't required. If the Commanders want to keep that name (not exactly the greatest name ever), I'm quite sure their new $5 billion owners will prevail.

OK, you made me look this one up. I mean, it had to be a parody site, right? Oh. I guess not. The Round Earth Conspiracy. I guess the Catholic Church was right to persecute Galileo after all.

Some Meatball Heads are getting just a wee bit defensive here 😜

None. Don't you get it? PEOPLE ARE LAUGHING. They aren't angry.