Baseball should be riding high. Instead the salary cap debate has it gearing up for war | Howard Bryant
Source: US news | The Guardian · Bias: Center Left
Summary
As a potential 2027 stoppage looms, MLB owners argue a wage cap is vital for parity. In truth, it’s just another way to boost their assets and fleece fansBaseball should be on a high. Spring training has begun and a record-breaking winter makes the games especially welcome – baseball means the good weather is coming soon. Injuries marred the NBA playoffs and the Super Bowl was a dud, but no sport settled its championship last year better than baseball, as the Los Angeles Dodgers barely and thrillingly defeated the Toronto Blue Jays in a seven-game epic that ranks among the greatest World Series ever played.Instead of basking in the afterglow, however, the game is spending this abundance of capital preparing for war: a 2027 work stoppage portends to be the most catastrophic since the summer of 1994, when the players went on strike and the owners responded by cancelling the World Series for the first time in 90 years. Continue reading...
Baseball should be riding high. Instead the salary cap debate has it gearing up for war | Howard Bryant
Center Left
As a potential 2027 stoppage looms, MLB owners argue a wage cap is vital for parity. In truth, it’s just another way to boost their assets and fleece fansBaseball should be on a high. Spring training has begun and a record-breaking winter makes the games especially welcome – baseball means the good weather is coming soon. Injuries marred the NBA playoffs and the Super Bowl was a dud, but no sport settled its championship last year better than baseball, as the Los Angeles Dodgers barely and thrillingly defeated the Toronto Blue Jays in a seven-game epic that ranks among the greatest World Series ever played.Instead of basking in the afterglow, however, the game is spending this abundance of capital preparing for war: a 2027 work stoppage portends to be the most catastrophic since the summer of 1994, when the players went on strike and the owners responded by cancelling the World Series for the first time in 90 years. Continue reading...
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) committed to block House floor proceedings unless House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) inserts the SAVE Act into a must-pass piece of legislation, Punchbowl News reported on Friday.Luna has pressed for the SAVE America Act – a bill that mandates voter ID and citizenship checks while adding new restrictions on mail-in ballots – to be folded into the annual defense policy bill."We should be doing all of the above," Luna told Punchbowl News for its report published Friday. "Why not try? It's crazy."Luna has already disrupted leadership's plans once – she helped defeat a rule that would have inserted SAVE Act language directly into the defense bill, despite House GOP leaders having spent three years working to keep unrelated amendments out of it.Meanwhile, Senate Republicans have grown frustrated with inter-party disputes. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) told Punchbowl that Republicans "need to be very careful" about how they message the standoff, arguing that Democrats – not Republicans – are the ones blocking the SAVE Act's passage.“The message we need to convey to our supporters – it’s not Republicans that are preventing the SAVE America Act from being passed. It’s Democrats,” Johnson told Punchbowl News.
The country's theocracy hopes to see millions flood the streets of the capital beginning Saturday in scenes reminiscent to the burial of the late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989.
A crowd of people gathered at the Great American State Fair on Thursday stopped to gaze up at the sky as several fighter jets streaked over the National Mall. Blake Boggs crouched down to his young son’s stroller and pointed up. “You don’t get to see the Thunderbirds anywhere,” he told The Hill. Despite the…
A conservative writer scolded Democrats on Thursday for not focusing on President Donald Trump’s unprecedented corruption in the months leading up to the November mid-terms.“For all intents and purposes, nobody cares,” The Dispatch’s Nick Catoggio wrote. He described Trump’s blatant profiteering from being in office, which is without any analogous example in modern American history. Agreeing with a source in the Senate who said that the indifference to Trump’s corruption means “we’re just screwed,” he argued that “any explanation of why we’re screwed begins with the promiscuous civic delinquency of the American right, but we’ve been over that many times and don’t need to belabor it here.”He denounced Republicans who give Trump a pass on his grift by saying that “depending upon what sort of Republican you are, you’re either an enthusiastic member of a fascist personality cult, a brain-damaged hyperpartisan willing to excuse anything to keep the left out of power, or so embarrassed by where Trumpism has led that it’s easier psychologically to pretend its abuses aren’t happening than to confront them.”Yet in addition to Trump’s own party, Catoggio criticized Democrats — especially those on the left — since “few on the left seem to care very much about the president’s corruption either.” Instead they seem more interested in opposing Israel and trying to purge the party of its centrist leaders.He adds that this is a great missed political opportunity.“If ever there were a moment when you might expect anger at Trump’s financial corruption to break big among voters, this is it,” Catoggio said. “In the middle of an affordability crisis, with huge numbers of Americans exasperated by the cost of living, evidence that the president is profiting lasciviously from his office is everywhere you look.” His financial disclosure forms reveal that he earned $2.2 billion in 2025, almost quadrupling his income from 2024, of which roughly $1.4 billion “came from businesses related to cryptocurrency, an industry his administration regulates (sort of?) and for which he’s a key policymaker.”He added, “Trump did suspiciously well in 2025 with conventional securities, too. At least three times last year, he purchased shares of Nvidia shortly before major announcements that boosted the company’s value. He also made hundreds of stock purchases the day before announcing that he was ‘pausing’ his ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs, which sent markets soaring. All told, according to the Financial Times, he engaged in more than 22,000 stock transactions during his first 11 months back in office. Over four years as president, Joe Biden engaged in 13.”Refraining from discussing Trump’s conflicts of interest, “petty graft like kickbacks” and selling pardons, “we’d be here all day.” The bottom line is that, as presidential historian Douglas Brinkely told NBC News, “What strikes me as remarkable is how many pies Trump has his fingers in. There is no precedent to compare it with. No president in the 20th or 21st century has had something that’s vaguely comparable.”Instead of exploiting this opportunity to win elections on a populist theme, Catoggio suggested that left-wing populists are relatively indifferent to those issues compared with others that rile up their base. By doing this, though, they are normalizing Trump’s unprecedented corruption and making it easier for both him and future perpetrators to get away with it.Indeed, Catoggio said Democrats’ failure to adequately bring up and emphasize Trump’s corruption has made it easier for Republicans to obscure that what Trump is doing far and away exceeds the actions of any of his predecessors.“Someone should run a poll asking whether corruption was worse under the last two Democratic administrations or under the criminal syndicate that runs the government now,” Catoggio said. “I’ll be surprised if opinion deviates wildly from the usual party lines. That’s the sort of ignorance and moronic tribalism that a Democratic strategist looking to galvanize voters this fall would be banging his or head against by flogging the issue of Trump’s unethical behavior.”If this attitude continues into the 2028 election, it could be disastrous — and Catoggio suspects that is exactly what will happen.“Some left-wing strategists will ask themselves this: If attempting a coup wasn’t corrupt enough to stop Americans from reelecting Trump himself in 2024, why would the president’s insider trading and crypto scams dissuade them from reelecting some entirely different Republican in 2028?” Catoggio wrote. “If voters were willing once before to lay aside all ethical considerations about national leadership in order to vote their wallets, why wouldn’t they do so again?”He concluded, “‘We’re just screwed’ is anathema to anyone who cares about politics, an endeavor based on the devout conviction that we’re not screwed as long as the faction one supports gets to be in charge.
Under Germany’s former policy, workers were allowed to take up to six weeks of paid leave for an illness. That's on top of the six weeks of vacation time that most employees get.
