AL Manager of the Year odds: Chad Tracy is gaining value after Red Sox’s miraculous turnaround
Source: New York Post · Bias: Right
Summary
Oh, what three weeks of a baseball season can do. In that span, the Red Sox have surged from being Craig Breslow’s farrago of failure to the game’s most exciting team. For interim manager Chad Tracy, he’s gone from an anonymous pawn to a trending Wikipedia search. The Red Sox’s franchise-tying 15-game win streak came...
AL Manager of the Year odds: Chad Tracy is gaining value after Red Sox’s miraculous turnaround
Right
Oh, what three weeks of a baseball season can do. In that span, the Red Sox have surged from being Craig Breslow’s farrago of failure to the game’s most exciting team. For interim manager Chad Tracy, he’s gone from an anonymous pawn to a trending Wikipedia search. The Red Sox’s franchise-tying 15-game win streak came...
Maine Democrats on Saturday overwhelmingly nominated Troy Jackson, a former state Senate president and logger by trade, as their party’s nominee to challenge longtime Republican incumbent Susan Collins in November’s high-stakes US Senate election.“Well, thank you, Maine,” Jackson, 58, said after securing the votes of 566 of 571 delegates during Saturday’s special Democratic convention at Cross Insurance Center in Bangor. “Today we turn the page, today this becomes a general election campaign, and today we win the work of defeating Susan Collins in November.”“For nearly 30 years, Collins has told Maine that she is ‘concerned’,” Jackson said, referring to the 73-year-old incumbent’s go-to word when President Donald Trump and Republicans attack rights and justice. “She was concerned while she rubber-stamped Trump’s Medicaid cuts and gutted our healthcare.”“She’s concerned when she cut taxes for corporations and the wealthy,” he continued. “Concerned when she confirmed justices who overturned Roe v. Wade. And really tragically, she was concerned when she gave [US Immigration and Customs Enforcement] billions to terrorize our neighbors and murder people in the streets with no accountability.”“But concern does not lower the costs of groceries or gas,” Jackson said. “Concern does not keep our monitoring wards of rural hospitals like down in Lincoln County open. Concern does not restore all the rights that she’s taken away. Maine does not need another six years of concern. We need someone with courage. We need a fighter, and we need a senator who remembers exactly who sent them to Washington.”“So if you’ve ever been ignored, underestimated, pushed around, or told that you have to wait your turn while the rich cut the line, I’m asking you to stand with us in this campaign,” he continued. “If you believe in your heart that healthcare is a right, stand with us. And if you believe that workers deserve power, stand with us. And if you believe our freedoms are worth defending, stand with us.”“And if you believe that Maine deserves a senator who will fight like hell for working-class people, well, stand with us,” Jackson added. “We have a party to unite, we have a movement to build, and we have a senator to defeat.”Jackson’s improbably rapid rise followed former Democratic nominee Graham Platner’s withdrawal from the race earlier this month amid allegations of sexual assault and abusive behavior. Supporters of Platner’s progressive platform warned at the time that they would not back a replacement candidate who did not share the same pro-worker, anti-war agenda.While Collins spokeswoman Blake Kernen called Jackson a “low-energy version” of Platner, Maine Democrats decided the fifth-generation lumberjack fit the bill.“The working class has been left behind and forgotten about,” Shelly Mountain, a former Aroostook County Democratic Committee chairwoman and Jackson delegate at the convention, told NBC News. “He is definitely working class and always—has always—been a champion for the working class.”Progressive politicians, advocacy groups, and labor organizations cheered Jackson’s nomination, with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) saying that “he’s ready to fight for working people and flip this seat.”International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) president Brian Bryant said Saturday that “Troy Jackson knows firsthand what it means to work hard for a living and fight for a better future for working families.”“Throughout his career, he has stood shoulder-to-shoulder with union members and working people, never backing down from a challenge when workers’ rights were on the line,” he added. “He represents the strength of a people-powered movement focused on fairness, opportunity, and economic justice. Troy has our full support as he heads to the general election.”
An iconic harbor restaurant In Orange County has promised to leave the recipe for its signature cocktail before they close their doors for good, as longtime fans mourn the upcoming closure.
Morris Katz, the Democratic strategist who helped recruit Graham Platner to run for the U.S. Senate in Maine, reflected on the string of controversies that led up to Platner’s decision to exit the race. In a podcast interview with The New York Times’s Ezra Klein released Friday, Katz addressed resurfaced Reddit posts the Democratic candidate…
President Donald Trump picked Michael Jordan over LeBron James on Friday when asked to weigh in on the debate over the greatest player in NBA history. Fox News correspondent Peter Doocy raised the question after James agreed to a two-year, $8 million contract with the Philadelphia 76ers on Friday. Donald Trump picked Michael Jordan over...
President Donald Trump has already made it clear he plans on rigging the 2026 midterm elections. From trying to implement a multitude of voter suppression measures (like purging voter roles, demanding voter ID, sending troops to the polls, seizing ballot boxes and interfering with mail-in voting) to refusing to give a whit about public opinion, Trump is obviously worried that if the American people have a say, they will put Democrats in control of one or both chambers of Congress.Yet he is not merely doing this to maintain his own personal hold on power. Trump is a man with a plan — the same plan, not coincidentally, that America’s rich and powerful have worked on for more than a century. To better understand this agenda, AlterNet had an in-depth interview with historian Thom Hartmann, whose new book Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told addresses these very topics. While he has plenty of rough words for Trump, Who Killed the American Dream? is far more than just another anti-MAGA book. In great detail, Hartmann lays out how the fascist plutocracy that Trump is trying to make into a literal dictatorship has its roots all the way back in the 19th century.This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and context.MATTHEW ROZSA: First, your book focuses on Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, and argues that from this case all the way through Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, there has been an anti-democratic pattern of the Supreme Court acting like corporations have the same rights as people. Can you elaborate, in layperson's terms, why this jurisprudential assumption has been so toxic?THOM HARTMANN: Sure.For the first, basically, 100 years of the Republic, everybody understood that there were two kinds of persons: natural persons and artificial persons. Natural persons are you and me, human beings — we have protections in the Constitution, and we even have rights specified in the Constitution through the Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment. Artificial persons were corporations and nonprofits and churches and other kinds of entities that were not human, but had to have some sort of personhood status in order to pay taxes, sign contracts, sue or be sued, open checking accounts, things like that. And that distinction was always quite clear. In 1886, the railroads tried to argue that they were being unfairly taxed between two different counties in California because the tax rates were different, and that this was not equal protection under the law, which is what the 14th Amendment says all persons are entitled to.The court did not rule in their favor, at least with regard to that argument in that case. But the clerk of the court and one of the Supreme Court justices conspired to assert that it had. And that assertion, which was in the headnote of the 1886 decision, kind of lay around like a hand grenade until it was picked up by Lewis Powell in 1978 with the Bellotti v. Baird decision, and then really set off with the Reagan Revolution — John Roberts, the Reagan Justice Department, and then the Supreme Court. I think Citizens United in 2010 is probably the most classic example of it. Now, to more directly answer your question: the reason a corporation can pour money into a politician or a political campaign to get a politician elected who will do their bidding is because the Supreme Court has since ruled that corporations have rights under the First Amendment, and those rights include the right to free speech.But because a corporation doesn't have a mouth, they did this workaround, saying, "Well, its money is the same thing as its mouth, so it can speak with its money." There's another example, under the Fourth Amendment. The Fourth Amendment says the government cannot invade your privacy unless somebody swears before a judge that there's reason to believe you committed a crime. Well, Dow Chemical was illegally venting benzene into the air over one of their chemical factories, and the EPA found out about it and flew an airplane over the factory to photograph it and use it as evidence to stop them. Dow Chemical sued and took it all the way to the Supreme Court, and the court ruled that under the Fourth Amendment, Dow Chemical has privacy rights. So now it's almost impossible for the federal government, or state governments for that matter, to do surprise inspections of factories and polluting facilities, et cetera.Corporations have also claimed rights under the Fifth Amendment, which says you cannot be forced to testify against yourself and that the government can't take your assets without due process of law — that they don't have to admit to crimes in court, they don't have to testify in ways that could hurt them, and that the government can't take their property if they commit crimes.
