“Now historically, the sideways breaking curveball has been a bad pitch as opposed to the downer curveball.”

Words of wisdom from me, in this piece.  https://zingyskywaylunch.wordpress.com/2018/10/29/rich-hill-can-really-crack-off-a-deuce-and-thinks-trump-should-stay-in-his-lane/

See, this thing from Berrios is all horizontal but its not a slider because it has no fractal point where it switches lanes.  Its just the frisbiest sweeping curveball you’d ever see.  Batter commits thinking its inner half and it ends off the plate in a spot you cant actually put the bat on.

As a pitcher you have to be able to impart hard, undiluted side english on the ball to make that all happen.

https://twitter.com/ParkerHageman/status/1111378466656550918

The day in Billikens

Michael Avenatti, of the famous "Avenatti model", is a Billiken.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Avenatti

CSI Afton: Sentence in the Diggins road rage ticket

I’ve followed this, and made the comment before that it would cost the guy $20k to defend himself over this cuz it was Diggins.

http://www.startribune.com/driver-has-most-counts-dropped-is-fined-for-road-rage-incident-with-olympic-champ-diggins/507721402/

Now that’s obviously not true… the cost of lawyerly help here, given the amount of the final fine, was I imagine say very low four figures.

You come to find that the guy’s Freudian motivations for harassing roller bladers on a country road was…. he had the formative experience of being shown that’s ok because Washington County deputies harassed him as a kid when he skateboarded on said roads.

http://www.startribune.com/charges-filed-against-driver-in-alleged-road-rage-incident-with-olympic-gold-medalist-jessie-diggins/499661351/

There’s a perverse logic there that is actually almost completely understandable….

Witch hunt bags no witches, ends

There’s going to be a sad writer over at WWP today.

I’m mindful that ‘no collusion’ doesn’t mean something funky didn’t go on with Russian contact…

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/03/mueller-report-barr-summary-obstruction-conspiracy-close-reading.html but I think the safer bet is Trump’s cast of campaign doofuses really weren’t complicit in the illegal electronic break-in and dissemination of DNC emails.

The hottest Chait thing on the topic: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/03/if-trump-obstructed-justice-he-cant-be-exonerated.html Well, Chait is getting trolled here. All the people who say Trump is not ‘exonerated’ are right, but thing is ‘exonerated’ is Trump hyperbole… treat it as a Trump lie if you want, but ‘exoneration’ isn’t part of the Mueller process. Its a distraction.

As far as ‘obstruction’….

https://twitter.com/DamonLinker/status/1109922979847331840

Couple things:

Mueller in the report ostensibly provided Barr with a list of Trump’s recalcitrances towards the investigation. If this is ‘obstruction’, and could be prosecuted, then it not being prosecuted by Barr is no different than Loretta Lynch and James Comey backstopping Hillary Clinton. And ya know, it may come off that I’m expressing that as some sort of ‘whataboutism’, but fact is for whoever you are in the highest echelon of the DOJ… Lynch, Barr… the main insurmountable dynamic is probably not what it would take to go against your party apparatus, but rather what it would take to set off the institutional neutron chaos bomb that seeks to prosecute a Secretary of State (and near President) and then an actual President. See, a process violation isn’t enough in terms of the stakes.

In terms of a sensibility I see this as very akin to John Roberts not setting off the institutional chaos bomb that would have been if Obamacare would have been found unconstitutional.

I do think that no collusion does mean no obstruction though, cuz there was no predicate crime to obstruct the investigation of…. And I do think its persuasive that the Mueller investigation coming from the Steele Dossier was a Hillary / DNC / Fusion dirty trick. Lambo favorite Matt Taibbi thinks so also https://taibbi.substack.com/p/russiagate-is-wmd-times-a-million

So where are we? Stormy stuff is absolutely true and the President is ambiently corrupt in most aspects of his life…. and I think he’ll probably be reelected.

Wut? Ya mean Carter Page wasnt a Russian asset?

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/03/robert-mueller-probe-ends-without-indictments-trump-jr-kushner-ivanka.html

The day in non-problems: foodstamp millionaires

KSTP is giving the MAGA people a dopamine hit. Jay Kolls the reporter is kind of a likely suspect in this

https://kstp.com/news/minnesota-millionaire-receives-food-stamps-lawmaker-tries-to-close-loophole/5286428/?cat=1

I could be hopelessly naive, but I don’t think this is a thing… I don’t think non-poor old people bother with applying for food stamps. So its a waste of time, legislatively.

And ya know, as a practical matter ya figure the criteria as it allows an elderly person with say a $1m farm that’s non productive to receive foodstamps, and that this potentiality is a positive good.

What’s interesting: it is a welfare story that can’t by definition be anti-minority.

I was counting on this…

http://www.startribune.com/twin-cities-housing-market-gets-even-tighter-as-new-listings-lag/507376542/

We live in a small house, but… I like it and I don’t want to make the financial commitment to a bigger house. But we needed more space. Started a remodel last fall. There’s a few sensibilities in action with this project, but the numerical argument for remodeling rather than moving was going to be made more true by metro starter homes running past $250k and going to maybe $300k.

So as a short term forecast on ‘what’s going to happen’ like I do….. good, I wasn’t wrong.

Cities needs more $200k single family homes. You know what? There’s a lot of middlemen / rent seeking in development.

3% econ growth d/n seem to be asking for much

But we’ve probably got relative consumption stability on alot of things.

https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/03/remember-3-growth-its-now-down-the-memory-hole/

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/03/trump-economists-admit-3-growth-promise-wont-happen.html

A shitton of 3rd world immigration would goose the economy! For real.

Its not going to be Beto…

I’ll tell ya…. I turned 50 in November, and I think one of the cultural changes that happened during my immediate, bookended, high school era (84-87), is Tracy Flick future chamber of commerce types stopped winning student council elections, succumbing to whimsical, alternative culture types. At my high school, Denis McDonough’s older brother was one of these types… him and his friends won the Pony council slate there I think in their senior year, 85-86. Their speech campaign was this cute Sinatra send up thing.

Beto is a creature of this GenX ambience and era. He was born in 72. I don’t know if he ever ran for student council, but this is the type of guy he is…whimsical, kooky.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/style/wp/2019/03/19/feature/are-amy-and-beto-orourke-the-future-of-politics/?

https://theweek.com/speedreads/830103/beto-orourke-played-some-downright-disgusting-pranks-wife-amy

Barrack Obama say in his younger life and environs does not really remind me of stoic Horatio Alger bootstrappers of yore in their climb to the top. But he’s got to be about 6 orders of magnitude more personally formidable than a guy like Beto. Sheesh. That’s my marker that I lay down on Beto… this guy doesn’t have the gonadal gravity pull to make it down the road of this process and get the nomination.

Guy is also a complete trustifarian… his ‘jobs’ weren’t ‘jobs’, alright……. electing this guy would be electing a guy who never had a real career, and I doubt the universe allows for that. I know, I know… DJT. I don’t think that’s the same.

Laying down another marker: Buttigieg will be on the ticket. Maybe Harris / Buttigieg, Sanders / Buttigieg… Buttigieg / Harris. A thing is, there’s a to the bold go the spoils thing that happens with formidable enough personalities… think Obama. Think Trump, as far as it goes…. Buttigieg may have that.

Deutsch Bank / DJT story

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/18/business/trump-deutsche-bank.html

couple few things:

– This reporting is worth committing to the historical record.

– I’m not seeing illegality. At that point the reporting is asserting that the mundane is the malevolent.

– Point that is not expressed coherently enough is the odd matter of a private banking arm funding real estate projects.

– Whats obviously true about the Trumps is, if they didn’t have a multiple $100 – 300M line of credit going for a building project, they’d have no way to pay for their $50M annual lifestyle (or whatever the number might be). The lifestyle money is skimmed from project operations, the completed projects themselves seem to have no history of being sustaining entities that accrete to the base of their wealth, the completed projects are always things they need to extricate themselves from.

– Reporting would seem to rebut the notion that many of Trumps recent years projects – Doral, Turnberry – were funded by the Russians