Background info: This comic is from March of 1915.

You may know Joseph Jackson as "Shoeless" Joe.

Mr. McInnis is probably "Stuffy" McInnis.

Eddie Collins was a successful 2nd Baseman.

John J. Evers is the Evers in "Tinker to Evers to Chance".

Lawrence Doyle was about to enjoy a season in which he would win the Batting Crown.

Henry Zimmerman, affectionately called "Heinie", won the Triple Crown in 1912 and never played baseball again after 1919 where he was accused of fixing games.

Oh yeah? Well, here's Matty!

Sixteen thoughts on an averted shutdown. The subhed? "A bitter pill that Schumer is correct to swallow"

Point the twelveth:

I really want to emphasize that even if you disagree with me about this, if your reaction to these events is to get mad at Chuck Schumer, you are to a large extent getting played. Lots of people are engaging in cheap position taking in favor of a “no” vote on cloture, but neither House Democrats nor the people voting “no” in the Senate nor the people getting mad on Twitter have an actual strategy for getting what the base wants out of this, which is some kind of act of Congress saying that Trump and Musk need to conduct the government differently.

He has tweeted in his own defense:

A shutdown would give Donald Trump the keys to the city, state, and country.

Musk has said he wants a shutdown, and reporting has shown he is already making plans to use the shutdown to expedite his destruction of key government programs and services.

They're being led by Schumer, though. The Republicans have been playing clips of Schumer talking about the shutdown threat all throughout Biden's term.

Additionally, one of the main things that Elon is doing is pointing out that Government is a scam and we don't need 80% of it. A shutdown actively *HELPS* him.

That's kind of the downside of fighting DOGE with weeks of "GOVERNMENT SERVICES ARE THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN THE WORLD AND EACH DOLLAR SAVES A MILLION LIVES".

The whole Epstein thing continues. Kash Patel had a couple of celebratory tweets talking about how the FBI is arresting members of the Tren de Aragua social club and a Director at Customs and Border Protection being arrested for FEMA fraud and the lion's share of the responses were not "good one, nice collar!" but "WHERE IN THE HELL IS THE LIST".

Pam Bondi had a couple of tweets about swearing in a new Assistant Attorney General and praising the K-9 working dogs of law enforcement. The lion's share of the responses were not "good one, nice collar!" but "WHERE IN THE HELL IS THE LIST".

They can't talk about the list. They can't talk about why they can't talk about the list. They can't talk about why they can't talk about why they can't talk about the list.

Oh yeah! That's the one where she had Beyonce speak!!!

I remember that.

Hey, the mistake there was not "doing it", it was asking Beyonce to speak.

When was the last 50 state presidential campaign?

Trump campaigned in New York, New Jersey, and California.

For what that's worth.

I agree 100% that the House is too small.

Imagine a candidate asking "Why aren't I 50 points ahead?"

But, like, really asking this. Like, they're actually interested in an answer.

There's a bunch of House Dems all tweeting out the following (word-for-word):

House Democrats stand united for a four-week funding extension that stops harmful cuts, keeps government open, and allows Congress to reach a bipartisan funding agreement.

This is followed by an opportunity to freestyle. "Let's get it done." "I am ready to vote today!" "Period."

It could be worse, I suppose.

What does the future of the Democratic Party look like?

Is it skilled members of the Professional Managerial Class who demonstrate the best ability to act like a Project Manager able to herd the cats of all of the bureaucrats?

Is it a firebrand capable of whipping up the masses?

Is it Kamala Harris? I understand that she made zero mistakes in her last campaign for president (outside of the "nobody's perfect" level nitpicks that are inevitable) and the only problem was that she didn't have enough runway and Trump has demonstrated that you can win an election after losing one.

In 2012, Romney was a pretty good candidate and might have been a perfect candidate if you could drop him in the middle of 1996.

But all of the names listed above strike me as having a similar problem. Newsom would have been perfect in 2016! Pritzker? Perfect in 2016! Buttigieg doesn't strike me as presidential quite yet... He might make a perfect VP, though. (Of course, maybe he's paper-thin and would just be a gay Dan Quayle... at least he'd have the press on his side.)

The big problem the dems have is that they're trying to go through their bench and find the guy best suited to win in 2016 and not the best guy for 2028.

But Pritzker, out of all of those, strikes me as the most capable of taking on Vance.

Does "obey laws" cover civil statutes?

That chick should be fired *SO* fast.

Eh, my definitions of "good" and "evil" are less common than I'd like (though there is a lot of overlap on pragmatic issues when it comes to my local community).

I'm not sure that discussions of morality will get you to the destination you want to go... not with the Omnicause the way it is.

"In my defense, in 68 years there's going to be a movie about pants like this."

Sure. I don't see any reason for the Democrats to change anything.

I mean... are you gonna vote for Vance? You a big Vance fan? You gonna turn your back on BIPOC, AAPI, and LatinX solidarity in order to vote for Tax Cuts?

Here's a page where you can donate to Columbia University.

According to the Jewish Virtual Library, Harris got 66% of the Jewish vote.

Biden got 68% in 2020.
Clinton got 71% in 2016.
Obama got 69% in 2012 and 78% in 2008.
Kerry got 76% in 2004.
Gore got 79% in 2000.

You have to go back to Dukakis in 1988 to get a number lower than Harris got: 64%.

I honestly don't know.

I just know the timeline that starts with Jerry Brown and ends up somewhere around where the engineers explained that it still can't do it on schedule.

This guy explains that the 2008 plan that got approved was pretty much unattainable pie-in-the-sky stuff:

The 2008 high-speed rail plan approved by California voters required the train to travel from San Francisco to Los Angeles in no more than 2 hours and 40 minutes. At the same time, the project promised to serve the downtown of every major and not-so-major city in between, including Merced, Madera, Fresno, and Bakersfield in the San Joaquin Valley and the high desert city of Palmdale.

Those travel time promises, combined with that route map, meant that California High-Speed Rail would have to reach speeds of 220 miles per hour. In 2008, only a couple of trains in the world reached that speed, and it’s still the fastest any high-speed trains currently travel. Add in California’s mountainous, earthquake-prone topography, and you’ve set yourself up for one of the most difficult engineering projects ever attempted. All of this had to be accomplished by an agency, the California High-Speed Rail Authority, that had never built a single mile of track.

In other words, the project was set up for failure.

The conclusion talks about how plain bagels are better than no bagels after enough failed promises of everything bagels.

I don't know what would have been possible if California did it smarter instead of how they did it. But it seems like doing it dumber might have worked too.

Layout was, apparently, used the same way that we use "stash" today.

Yossele was the name given to the Golem of Prague.

Huh.

Was that all it'd take?

How tough would that be to set up in NYC?

I admit that I'm primarily thinking about Merced to Bakersfield.

It has? I'm asking skeptically because I have not heard about any particular increase in policing disproportionately targeting people athletic enough to jump stiles.

There's also a bit of a crime problem that nobody wants to talk about.

Ride on Bart? Maybe you have to deal with unpleasantness. The worst thing you have to deal with in your car is a bad DJ.

Do intelligence agencies even work with evidence? What do they do other than get fashion models to sleep with scientists and get them to admit stuff on camera?

That's not even science.