“Of course, we won’t mind if you look around,” you’ll say. “It’s only twenty dollars per person.” They’ll pass over the money without even thinking about it. For it is money they have and peace they lack.”– Terrance Mann

At 5 PM EST on March 1st, the commissioner announced that six games would be purged from the baseball season. It is the second time Rob Manfred has been unable to salvage games in a season. He could blame 2020 on the pandemic and the pandemic certainly takes most of the blame, but he effectively botched any chance of playing 100 or 120 games because of his inability to make a deal.

Any baseball fan worth their salt knows exactly where the quote from above comes from. Any baseball fan worth their salt can rattle off the most famous numbers or relive the greatest moments in the game’s history. When you are a commissioner of the sport you first and foremost must love the sport. Loving the sport enables you to take all of the stakeholders and force them to negotiate in good faith. It also prevents you from succumbing to hairbrained schemes that alter the game for the worst.

Rob Manfred must resign as commissioner. He must resign not because he couldn’t broker an agreement between owners and players. He must resign not because of the ghost runner at second rule, the Astros cheating scandal that was really a league wide cheating scandal, or because he absolutely fumbled the pandemic negotiations. Those are all just symptoms of the disease. He must resign because he clearly doesn’t love baseball. He doesn’t understand baseball at its core. Therefore, he doesn’t understand when he makes the moves he makes how that eats away at the sport itself.

The offseason has a certain arc to it. There are owner’s meetings. There are general manager’s meetings. There are winter meetings. Free agency opens in November and has multiple waves of activity. Teams and players exchange arbitration numbers and have hearings. There is a Rule V draft and trades that boggle the imagination. More importantly, there is the excitement from fans that weaves its way through all of that. They call it the hot stove league. Fans were robbed of it this year.

Owners locked out the players in December. Keep in mind that many of the issues the two sides are currently debating have been known since the labor strife of 2020. They predicted this then. When asked why he waited until February to start negotiating, Manfred simply fumbled about and talked about the last ten days of negotiation. Yup Rob, that was the point of the question. YOU HAD 80 DAYS PRIOR TO THAT AND YOU DID NOTHING.

This is not one of those “make me commissioner” kind of pleas. I’m not qualified for the job, but I do have one qualification that Rob does not have. I love baseball. Of course, I’m not the only one. I’m not even going to try to argue that my love for the sport is superior to anyone else’s. It is superior to Manfred’s and that is clear with the way he talks about the game. It’s clear with the decisions he’s made to make the game shorter. People who love baseball aren’t desperate to have less of it.

The job of commissioner is difficult, but it is also easy to explain. The commissioner is a shepherd of sorts. They marry the interests of owners, players, and fans together to grow the sport and make it profitable for all. If one of those groups distrusts the commissioner he can’t effectively do his job. If more than one group distrusts the commissioner then the entire sport will sink. Don’t mind us now, but the sport is sinking.

That didn’t take long. From the NY Times:

Texas officials have begun investigating parents of transgender adolescents for possible child abuse, according to a lawsuit filed on Tuesday, after Gov. Greg Abbott directed them last week to handle certain medical treatments as possible crimes.

Among the first to be investigated was an employee of the state protective services agency who has a 16-year-old transgender child.

My Texas trans child is 15.

According to the lawsuit, the state’s investigator told the parents that the only allegation against them was that their transgender daughter might have been provided with gender-affirming health care and was “currently transitioning from male to female.”

As Mr. Abbott described in his letter, the order would mean that “all licensed professionals who have direct contact with children” would be required to report to state authorities those that they believe are receiving gender-affirming treatment, or face criminal penalties.

This puts me in a precarious position. The mama bear in me wants to hop in the car with some poster board and sharpies and head right on down to the Attorney Generals’ office and protest. I want to pick up my son and take him AWAY from here. But here is our home. Our friends, our family, our community – and it’s a great community. These people don’t want the government taking perfectly healthy, happy kids away from their parents.

Abbott wants “all licensed professionals who have direct contact with children” to report ME to child protective services. For all I know, my kid’s dentist, doctors, teachers, school administration, music teachers, even his therapist – may believe they are mandated by law to make this call. He is at school right now. I have assurance from one teacher that they would never, ever make that call. That leaves about a dozen other people who could.

When will they come to my door, demanding my son’s medical records?

What do I do, then? What if I refuse to cooperate and they take my son?

The U. S. House of Representatives has voted on bills to make lynching a federal hate crime over 200 times in the last 122 years. Today, for the only the second time, they’ve passed one. The first was passed in 2020, but didn’t pass the Senate.

The Emmett Till Antilynching Act passed almost unanimously. 422-3 was the final vote, with only three Republican senators – all white men from the south – voting nay.

Of course, one of the racist nincompoops calls himself a Texan. Chip Roy, former Chief of Staff to Senator Ted Cruz, stayed “true to form” and made sure that southern white men could have as many loopholes as possible to get away with any murder of a black person. By rope. Anywhere in the country.

In fact, Roy has been very clear that he is pro-lynching. “There’s old sayings in Texas about ‘find all the rope in Texas and get a tall oak tree,’” Roy said. “You know, we take justice very seriously, and we ought to do that. Round up the bad guys. That’s what we believe.” He isn’t wrong. There are over 600 documented lynchings in Texas history, and those are just the ones we know about.

Please take some time to visit Lynching In Texas. Then, send the link to Chip Roy at chip.roy@mail.house.gov, reminding him he’s making $174,000 a year and needs to stop playing stupid games because Texas does not need any more stupid prizes. We’re full.

Roy, as a Texas lawmaker, knows that vigilante justice is against the law. Unless it’s done by a white person? I guess? Yay for vigilantes!

But wait! When a black man in Minneapolis was convicted of arson during a protest about the injustice of George Floyd’s death, Roy was really upset that the man wasn’t given the maximum sentence. Some people are saying that the man was just out seeking justice. Still, Roy objected. “This is a man that clearly has no respect for our laws,” he said. Well, now I’m confused. Does he care for justice or not?

As usual, Roy is full of bullpoop. Roy is a disgusting white supremacist and, as we say here at the salon, full of gleeful cruelty and dickishness.

The bill will advance to the Senate, where Republicans will once again do whatever they can to kill it.

Today marks 0 days that Texas Republicans have not made a fool of themselves.

Yesterday was an interesting day in the World Geography class I support. See, the district made a huge deal about the teaching of controversial topics. It isn’t even so much that we aren’t supposed to do it, but we have to be so careful as to not interject our own opinion into these things. Then, the teacher found a worksheet that described health care costs in the United States and nine other industrialized nations.

The teacher gave me the worksheet and asked me to look at the first question. It looked a little loaded and so we pivoted a little and hedged our bets. We looked more carefully at the whole sheet (including the graph) and there was no way to spin it. All of the questions were loaded. It presented facts that could not be disputed and yet framed the discussion in such a negative way that you wanted to call the policy fight before one side got killed.

See, according to the graph, the United States spends more than 15 percent of its GDP on health care. Naturally, you’d have to read the fine print to know exactly what that all entails. We could naturally assume they are talking both health insurance premiums and out of pocket expenses. The other nine industrialized nations all hovered around ten percent. Sweden was the lowest at 9.3 percent.

We include the usual caveats in a conversation like this. Why did those that make the graph pick those specific countries? Wouldn’t we need to also see what people are getting for that care? The worksheet even asked a question of what we would expect to see in terms of quality of care.

We avoid teaching these things because we are under the impression that we have to show both sides. We are under the impression that both sides actually have equal merit. This is where we’ve landed in terms of political correctness and bending over backwards not to appear to have a liberal agenda. A worksheet clearly shows we are spending too much on health care and we have to somehow tiptoe around that.

There used to be a day when we could all agree on the facts before us. If information presented itself that we spent more on health care per capita then any country in the world then we could all agree we are spending too much on health care. We could all agree that you don’t pal around with white supremacists or sing Vladimir Putin’s praises.

Politics used to be about accepting reality and then suggesting ways to make it better. If we want to stop a Russian mad man do we simply clamp down on him with more sanctions or do we actually physically intervene? We acknowledge that racism exists. We acknowledge that there are cases of racial bias in the judicial system and other systems. We endeavor to find ways to remove those biases.

In terms of health care, we acknowledge we are spending too much and too many families are financially ruined because someone got sick. Of course, acknowledging that also forces us to acknowledge our own greed. We would acknowledge that we are the only industrialized nation without universal coverage. We would have to acknowledge that drug prices are higher here and insurance companies make a bigger profit here.

We used to acknowledge that mad men shouldn’t have access to automatic weapons that can kill people by the dozens. We used to acknowledge that consumers deserved basic protections from predatory lenders or those that would swindle them. The debate came in how we protect people. It came in how we best serve their interests. It came in just how involved the government needed to be in providing these solutions. No one ever argued that these were good things. At least they didn’t until now.

The dictionary provides two definitions for integrity and both of them are really revealing. The first talks about honesty and strong moral principles. The second is the state of being whole and undivided. I’m sure the second refers to structural integrity such as the structural integrity of a bridge. However, the concept of being whole and undivided is fascinating as it pertains to human integrity.

In 1984, Greg Abbott was paralyzed when a tree struck him. He was jogging through the neighborhood. The event is obviously the most significant event in his life. It is hard to put a price on such things. How does one put a price on their ability to walk, run, or get around? How does one put a price on the happiness they cannot have due to permanent injury?

The facts are that Abbott availed himself of the system to compensate him following his accident. On some level, it is a completely understandable response and one no one would begrudge him. Except, Abbott would. Abbott spent most of his early political career working to limit others from benefitting from the system the way he did.

To date, it is perhaps the most comprehensive example of the fact that Abbott doesn’t have the integrity to lead. There are others. In 2015, a group of idiots became convinced that the military were going to kidnap citizens and stash them away in Wal-Marts in Texas. That was their explanation for military exercises that became known as Jade Helm.

Abbott’s response was telling as it usually is. He could have ignored it. He could have come out and eased tensions and simply told people there was nothing to worry about. He could have called them out as a bunch of paranoid kooks. Instead he asked the Texas State Guard to monitor the military. At the end of the day it didn’t really interfere with the exercises, so what exactly is the harm?

The harm is that it gave credence to the crackpots. It was a signal to them that the governor heard them and was on their side. Abbott knew it was all nuts, but couldn’t bring himself to say so. After all, he needed their vote. He knows the ex-president was full of crap as well. He knew the whole notion of a border wall was a bunch of window dressing. It didn’t stop him from leaning into that whole line of crap.

Finally, we see him threatening transsexual teens and their parents. We see him question green energy and blame it for the debacle last winter. Yet, we know Abbott was okay with the energy companies profiting from disaster. Thus, we finally see the real reason why Abbott is dangerous and a poor fit for the position of dog catcher, much less governor.

He isn’t a danger because he’s a conservative. True conservatives aren’t inherently dangerous. He’s a danger because he isn’t truly conservative. He isn’t truly anything. Greg Abbott’s only true constituency is Greg Abbott. He will do anything, say anything, and believe anything he needs to get ahead. If one believes in nothing they will eventually fall for anything. We’ve already seen it in Abbott’s case.

I don’t have to recount the thousands of times that all but a tiny handful of GOP politicians have praised, looked the other way, made excuses for or lied about the despicable and illegal conduct of TFG.  Goofballs, weirdos and Fox News talking heads called sensible public health policy “tyranny”, comparing wearing masks and getting vaccines to the Nazi run gas chambers during the holocaust.  Said goofballs also did the bidding of TFG  and attacked the US Capitol to stop the lawful certification of the presidential election.  Since the attack, every conservative talking head and politician have twisted themselves into pretzels downplaying the insurrection or trying to justify it because of the tyranny of a free and fair election that their guy lost.

Then comes the guy TFG loves, Vlad Putin.  Doing what TFG only dreams of, Putin completely controls the levers of power in Russia and its zone of influence, having destroyed the constitution that Boris Yeltsin pushed through to make Russia a democracy.  He decided that Ukraine, which has been an independent democracy since 1991 when the Soviet Union finally collapsed, was actually his in his fever dream of rebuilding the Soviet Union.  Violating a whole book full of international laws, Putin launched a full scale invasion of Ukraine last week, expecting the same tepid response of 2014 when he annexed Crimea and succeeded while Europe looked the other way and the US responded with limited sanctions (that Trump undid as one of his first acts in office).  TFG stayed in character this last week lavishing praise on Putin, followed by sycophants at Fox Noise, and the TFG wing of the GOP.

And then, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky stood up, took off his suit, donned olive drab, declared he was not surrendering, and started rallying his people. When offered an evacuation by the US, he declined, saying, “I need ammunition, not a ride.”  Following his lead, thousands of Ukrainians have volunteered to defend their homeland, and even expat Ukrainians are returning to fight.  They’ve built barricades, made Molotov cocktails, taken up arms, and have steadfastly resisted the onslaught.

After witnessing Zelensky’s courage and the response of his people, the international community has responded in a way unseen since 911.  The EU banned Russian aircraft in their airspace; the US, with cooperation of allies, implemented sanctions on Putin and his henchmen, even including denying some Russian banks access to the SWIFT international payments system, which I believe hasn’t been done before and threatens to cripple the Russian economy.  Hundreds of thousands of Russians in large cities around the country, risking arrest and detention, publicly protested against Putin.  The EU offered to finance weapons into Ukraine, and then Fedex and UPS announced that they were halting all shipments into and out of Russia. Shortly after, BP announced that it was exiting its 20%, $14 billion position in Rosneft, the Russian national oil company.  Boom. In less than a week, Putin was isolated and now a pariah in global political and industry circles with few exceptions.  Even Putin ass-kisser Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has announced that he is “neutral” about the attack on Ukraine.

The pressure on Putin is now so great that, after putting his nuclear assets on alert, he asked for talks with Ukraine through the president of Belarus.  So far the talks are said to be arranged on the border between Ukraine and Belarus, a Russian satellite state.  There are no real hopes for progress, but with Putin raising the specter of nuclear war, he is clearly on his heels.

This is how you deal with a despot.  When they threaten unlawful actions, you don’t appease.  You kick them in the groin and poke them in the eye.  This is not only how you deal with Putin, you do the same thing with shitbags like TFG, Bolsanaro, Kim Jong Un, and other despots around the world.  They rule with fear; they’re bullies.  When overpowered, they run.

There is a lesson being taught the world by the people of Ukraine.  I’m just hoping that many people, including TFG appeasers, are learning it.