Helene
Nearly every person I have talked to in the last 24 hours knows someone who has been affected by the wrath of Helene. The pictures of the devastation put a knot in my stomach. The enormity of the path of destruction is mind boggling. My heart and my prayers go out to all who have been affected.
Tarik Skubal
Detroit Tiger pitcher, Tarik Skubal on Sunday officially won the AmericanLeague Triple Crown of pitching in 2024. Skubal led the league in wins (18), ERA (2.39) and strikeouts (228). He was also first by a wide margin in Wins Against Replacement. He was second in WHIP (Walk and Hits per Inning Pitched).
Skubal is the first American League pitcher to win the Triple Crown in a full season (excluding 2020) since Justin Verlander accomplished that in 2011.
Detroit Tigers
After clinching a playoff spot on Friday with their victory over the White Sox, it was enjoyable watching the Tiger players celebrate after the game both on the field and in the locker room. The raw joy and enthusiasm were contagious. While the nation was talking about the unbelievable run the Tigers went on since August 10, the players were acting like it was no big deal. This team with 11 rookies and an average age of 26, expected the run they went on. To them the only surprise was that Minnesota and Kansas City could not keep pace and allowed the Tigers to catch them.
For the first time in 10 years the Tigers are in the playoffs, and they have captured the hearts and minds of Tiger fans all over the place. See my Video of the Day.
Here are excerpts from the above NY Times Editorial Board on their choice for Kamala Harris as the next POTUS. For the full article, click on the above headline.
It is hard to imagine a candidate more unworthy to serve as president of the United States than Donald Trump. He has proved himself morally unfit for an office that asks its occupant to put the good of the nation above self-interest. He has proved himself temperamentally unfit for a role that requires the very qualities — wisdom, honesty, empathy, courage, restraint, humility, discipline — that he most lacks.
Those disqualifying characteristics are compounded by everything else that limits his ability to fulfill the duties of the president: his many criminal charges, his advancing age, his fundamental lack of interest in policy and his increasingly bizarre cast of associates.
This unequivocal, dispiriting truth — Donald Trump is not fit to be president — should be enough for any voter who cares about the health of our country and the stability of our democracy to deny him re-election.
For this reason, regardless of any political disagreements voters might have with her, Kamala Harris is the only patriotic choice for president.
Ms. Harris is more than a necessary alternative. There is also an optimistic case for elevating her, one that is rooted in her policies and borne out by her experience as vice president, a senator and a state attorney general.
Over the past 10 weeks, Ms. Harris has offered a shared future for all citizens, beyond hate and division. She has begun to describe a set of thoughtful plans to help American families.
While character is enormously important — in this election, pre-eminently so — policies matter. Many Americans remain deeply concerned about their prospects and their children’s in an unstable and unforgiving world. For them, Ms. Harris is clearly the better choice. She has committed to using the power of her office to help Americans better afford the things they need, to make it easier to own a home, to support small businesses and to help workers. Mr. Trump’s economic priorities are more tax cuts, which would benefit mostly the wealthy, and more tariffs, which will make prices even more unmanageable for the poor and middle class.
Beyond the economy, Ms. Harris promises to continue working to expand access to health care and reduce its cost. She has a long record of fighting to protect women’s health and reproductive freedom. Mr. Trump spent years trying to dismantle the Affordable Care Act and boasts of picking the Supreme Court justices who ended the constitutional right to an abortion…
Most dangerous for American democracy, Mr. Trump has transformed the Republican Party — an institution that once prided itself on principle and honored its obligations to the law and the Constitution — into little more than an instrument of his quest to regain power. The Republicans who support Ms. Harris recognize that this election is about something more fundamental than narrow partisan interest. It is about principles that go beyond party.
In 2020 this board made the strongest case it could against the re-election of Mr. Trump. Four years later, many Americans have put his excesses out of their minds. We urge them and those who may look back at that period with nostalgia or feel that their lives are not much better now than they were three years ago to recognize that his first term was a warning and that a second Trump term would be much more damaging and divisive than the first.
Kamala Harris is the only choice.
Project 2025: Mandate for Leadership, the Conservative Promise
Here are excerpts from the Forward to Project 2025 written by Heritage Foundation CEO, Kevin Robert, PhD.
Furthermore, the next conservative President must understand that using government alone to respond to symptoms of the family crisis is a dead end. Federal power must instead be wielded to reverse the crisis and rescue America’s kids from familial breakdown.
The Conservative Promise includes dozens of specific policies to accomplish this existential task. Some are obvious and long-standing goals like eliminating marriage penalties in federal welfare programs and the tax code and installing work requirements for food stamps. But we must go further. It’s time for policymakers to elevate family authority, formation, and cohesion as their top priority and even use government power, including through the tax code, to restore the American family. Today the Left is threatening the tax-exempt status of churches and charities that reject woke progressivism. They will soon turn to Christian schools and clubs with the same totalitarian intent.
The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.
Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.
In our schools, the question of parental authority over their children’s education is a simple one: Schools serve parents, not the other way around. That is, of course, the best argument for universal school choice—a goal all conservatives and all conservative Presidents must pursue. But even before we achieve that long-term goal, parents’ rights as their children’s primary educators should be non-negotiable in American schools. States, cities and counties, school boards, union bosses, principals, and teachers who disagree should be immediately cut off from federal funds.
The noxious tenets of “critical race theory” and “gender ideology” should be excised from curricula in every public school in the country. These theories poison our children, who are being taught on the one hand to affirm that the color of their skin fundamentally determines their identity and even their moral status while on the other they are taught to deny the very creatureliness that inheres in being human and consists in accepting the givenness of our nature as men or women.
Allowing parents or physicians to “reassign” the sex of a minor is child abuse and must end. For public institutions to use taxpayer dollars to declare the superiority or inferiority of certain races, sexes, and religions is a violation of the Constitution and civil rights law and cannot be tolerated by any government anywhere in the country. But the pro-family promises expressed in this book, and central to the next conservative President’s agenda, must go much further than the traditional, narrow definition of “family issues.” Every threat to family stability must be confronted.
Caution: Read the above carefully with an open mind about the intent of the author. The author’s view of America is not based on reality. It excludes those who do not look or act like him.
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Quote of the Day: “It is hard to imagine a candidate more unworthy to serve as president of the United States than Donald Trump. He has proved himself morally unfit for an office that asks its occupant to put the good of the nation above self-interest. He has proved himself temperamentally unfit for a role that requires the very qualities — wisdom, honesty, empathy, courage, restraint, humility, discipline — that he most lacks.” The NY Times Editorial Board
Orchid of the Day: The Detroit Tigers for making the playoffs, and Tarik Skubal for winning the pitching triple crown
Onion of the Day: Hurricane Helene, again
Question of the Day: Will the Tigers advance past the Houston Astros to the Divisional Series.
Video of the Day: The Tigers after clinching a playoff berth after Friday’s win.