Right around a year ago, right now, I crawled up the stairs, leaving a trail of blood behind me. I crawled into my bed and laid down, and a short time later I dropped my phone to the ground. To the best of my knowledge, it was about 10:30am. I simply laid there and waited. For what? I wasn’t capable of knowing. Everything after that is blurry and disjointed. My mind was gone. If I had been left there a bit longer, it might have been a wait for my own ending.
I’m grateful to so many people, from close friends to surprisingly close friends who stepped up in those days and since, and have played an amazing role in my recovery. If I am to be honest, in the hellscape of a world we’re in right now, so many of you have restored my faith in people. From the family that sat by me in the ICU, to the friends that visited me in the hospital and at rehab, I could not have done it without you. I love you all, and since I don’t usually get the chance to tell you, let me do it now. Every visit, every text, every message- you were all amazing.
Now here’s the dark side of it- it’s a living hell. For all of the amazing support I received, the reality of this shit is that you suffer mostly alone, no matter what. Every time there’s a set back, or that you realize you’ve lost a bit of your step from being stuck in bed, you deal with it alone. In real time I fought like hell to live, but every kind of dark moment that comes around, you think to yourself whether it was worth it. There’s no manual for this. One day you think you’re a healthy adult. Then you wake up in the ICU and part of your foot is gone. Is it fair? No, it’s not. But life isn’t fair, and I’m the last person that would tell you that you deserve for it to be. When I went into the hospital for the second time back in May, I thought to myself that maybe this is just my fate now. A constant battle for a little bit more. I’ll never quite win it, but I won’t lose it until the game’s over for me. In other words, I’ll never see the victory.
There is a bright side though. What do I fear now? Nothing. I survived the first brush with death. If you want to do something bad to me, top that. You do feel invincible after that. I appreciate a lot of things I didn’t give a shit about before. I notice a lot of things I didn’t before too. I’ll be honest, all I care about is getting up each day and petting my dog. After that I don’t care what else happens.
So here’s about as political as I’ll get- the affordable care act that I worked on for OFA years ago, and St. Luke’s Anderson Campus, saved my life. I have a lot of opinions about President Obama, good and bad, but his signature achievement saved me from ruin a year ago. I’m financially down quite a bit from that day, but it could have been so, so much worse for me. Any attempt to deny people the opportunity to receive care should be treated as an affront to everyone. I’ll leave that there, because there can be no equivocation on that.
And now, the totally non-political part- I have no clue the politics of any of the doctors, nurses, case workers, techs, EMTs, and other folks who took care of me. Unless they looked me up, they didn’t know mine either. They do the work of saints, for people in way worse shape than me. I salute them all.
Sometimes you’re good. Sometimes you’re lucky. Occasionally you’re both. Happy one year to me.
So this was sent along to me from a woman via e-mail Wednesday. I’m not friends with Bob Brooks on Facebook, but nothing looks inauthentic about it. I also got the sense from the proton mail email address that this person is in opposition research. The woman who sent it to me noted that the folks who posted this are 3%’ers, far right nuts. Sheriff Bieber is definitely a pro-Trump character. I see that last night it got out, so I might as well comment on this.
I’d be fine with prayer in schools if these nut bags didn’t mean their kinda prayers, but our founding fathers were very clear about opposing the establishment of a state religion. I don’t know what Bob Brooks thinks this meme meant about guns, but it meant “no gun control at all.” Zero. If he wants to run as the NRA’s candidate for Congress, I guess he’s welcome to do that. I guess a Ten Commandments in every public building and an AR-15 in every home is the path forward.
I’m sure his handlers will fill him up with the right things to say, that’s their job, but all of this suggests a very “Make America Great Again” world view. As if there was some past time where prayer in schools and a good whooping at home made sure kids grew up right, to be decent Americans. This suggests that our changing society is to blame for our ailments. I guess we could go back to pre-2008, 1972, 1863, 1960, 1954, 1919, or whatever year he’d like. Look, I think the Democratic Party has gone absolutely batshit on plenty of social issues, but I’m really not longing for the backlash of conservatives who long for “yesterday.” All this shows is that the non-candidate Brooks was wildly out of step with Democratic Primary Voters, and this run for Congress is a bait-and-switch.
This is what happens when the DCCC just keeps recruiting more primary candidates, not vetting them, and then wondering why they have massive flaws. They’re already lowering expectations on him, from initially promising the Governor would ask everyone to drop out of the race, endorse him, and raise him money, to he will raise like “$175-200k” in this quarter, and then miraculously every outside group will run here to fund him. By next week they’ll be like Jeb Bush asking you to clap. This is such a bad idea.
I used to live in Vegas. The only betting I did was on sports (If only Pete Rose had said this from the start…). If you ever played the table games in a casino though, you understand the idea of going “all in.” Yesterday, Lamont McClure did that in the PA-7 race. He has a good poll and a lot of advantages in this race, but his fundraising numbers finished third last quarter. So, he loaned himself $200,000 for the campaign. This isn’t money carried over from his County Executive races or anything like that. It’s personal money.
Let’s start with the obvious here- I don’t think $200k assures victory, or anything like that. The reality is that while many of the candidates in this race are struggling to raise cash, someone will spend a lot more than $200k, possibly in this quarter alone. Rumors are that Ryan Crosswell will raise another $350k, almost entirely from outside of Pennsylvania, let alone the district. The truth is that with every additional candidate the DCCC recruits into this race, it’s more and more likely that Crosswell’s out of town Republican donors buy this primary. They don’t care, they’re fine running a Republican as a Democrat, I guess. In fact, they’re claiming their new guy will raise $175-200k, and that will bring in some outside fantasy money. The truth is they’ve not delivered a single promise to this date associated with this candidate, so why should we believe it?
Here’s what $200k does do though. $200k will pay for roughly six pieces of district-wide mail. When you’re the candidate in the lead, and you have the most name recognition, that eases any fall from grace caused by other candidates out spending you. If you’re polling 40% in Northampton County now, it means you probably hold most of that- and that’s about 18% of the total vote. What this means, in moron proof terms, is that there is no physical path to victory for a second Northampton County, labor backed candidate who currently basically polls at zero. You can scream and yell about all the fictional general election polls, all the fictional endorsements from statewide figures, and how your personal negatives actually won’t hurt you- none of that matters. If the existing front-runner spends $200k on paid communications, that’s probably not going to win the race- but I guarantee you, the other person trying to run on the same lane on the track will lose. This isn’t opinion. It’s math. I’m not sure what personal gain some people have with pushing this charade, but they’re not giving honest, decent, good advice.
Ok, I’ve seen enough. Enough posts about how average to below average QB’s are better than Jalen Hurts. Enough posts from the cockroaches Giants fans about how Jaxson Dart looks great in practice. Enough posts about absolutely nothing. It’s time to weigh in with my pre-season NFL QB power rankings.
Bob Brooks will finally enter the PA-7 race for Congress on Friday, and supposedly this time it *will* happen. One would think that would have nothing to do with the timeline of the biggest union in America endorsing a candidate for Congress in PA-7. According to one labor member in the Lehigh Valley though, that may not be the case.
The four existing candidates recently, and somewhat suddenly, were asked to do an interview with local SEIU leaders. Now, it’s important to understand that the SEIU local and state structure is fairly complex, but usually there’s no separation on endorsements. The reason the candidates were hastily asked to do an endorsement meeting, at least according to one person, was that the endorsement needed to be ready for Bob Brooks entry into the race. The Brooks campaign will seek to portray early momentum and inevitability. This is supposed to be a part of that.
Given the overlap of a public sector union doing their endorsement and a public sector union president entering, one could be suspicious. This doesn’t seem like something SEIU would do though. It doesn’t seem like it fits their politics, or recent past endorsement processes. Color me skeptical.
The counter point is pretty clear though- if they are standing with Brooks at a launch on Friday, the process was basically a sham. In fact, if they announce an endorsement in the next couple of weeks, or even before the end of this fundraising quarter, it appears that it was a coordinated hit from the start. I don’t really have a problem with unions knowing who they want on day one and foregoing a formal process to get there, but I do think it’s shitty to make the other candidates march in for a process that was never real.
Again, I’m skeptical this is what’s up. I guess we’re doing full disclosure here though.
The Teamsters under Sean O’Brien are going bipartisan. O’Brien is politically lost. As Trump’s GOP tries to kill labor unions of all kinds, the Teamsters President is aiding him. Somewhere under the Meadowlands, Jimmy Hoffa is not smiling.
According to Politico, the Teamsters are handing out cash to the Republican Party:
For the second year in a row, the labor union’s political arm donated to the Republicans’ House campaign arm after nearly two decades of mostly backing Democrats. The labor union’s D.R.I.V.E political action committee — Democrat, Republican, Independent Voter Education — gave the National Republican Congressional Committee $5,000 in the second quarter.
First off, the Teamsters are broke. They gave the NRCC and DCCC $20,000 combined. They are probably hurting, which makes sense, given that professionals in other trades unions will tell you their leadership has no idea what they’re doing. That union is in trouble. This should be a political earthquake of a story on it’s own, but it’s just overshadowed in the bizarre world we live in.
Second off, the Teamsters love themselves PA Republicans. Check out their list:
In addition to giving to the NRCC, Teamsters doled out a combined $62,000 in contributions to nearly two-dozen GOP congressional candidates, including in significant battleground districts:
Rob Bresnahan, Mike Kelly and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania
Pete Stauber and Tom Emmer of Minnesota
Nicole Malliotakis, Andrew Garbarino, Nick LaLota and Mike Lawler of New York
Jefferson Shreve of Indiana
Dave Taylor, Bob Latta, Michael Rulli and Dave Joyce of Ohio
Jeff Van Drew and Chris Smith of New Jersey
David Rouzer of North Carolina
Tom Barrett of Michigan
Blake Moore of Utah
Darin LaHood and Mike Bost of Illinois
Troy Nehls of Texas
Vern Buchanan of Florida
The group also gave this year to GOP Sens. Deb Fischer of Nebraska, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Jon Husted of Ohio, and Dave McCormick of Pennsylvania.
McCormick, Bresnahan, Fitzpatrick, and Kelly are Republicans who to varying degrees have to stay awake around elections. The two glaring omissions? Scotty “Insurrectionist” Perry and Ryan Mackenzie. It seems kind of obvious that even a poorly run labor union wouldn’t give to Perry. Mackenzie? Well let’s be honest, he’s just not moderate at all on labor issues. He not only opposes the right to organize and protections for labor, he opposes forward thinking solutions on automation and the rise of AI. The omission is glaring here.
Happy Monday! There’s about 45 MLB baseball games left. Time to bust out the old power rankings for the first time and give you my take on how MLB’s best stack up. Here’s this week’s #1-30 list.
The Milwaukee Brewers
The Houston Astros
The Philadelphia Phillies
The Los Angeles Dodgers
The Detroit Tigers
The San Diego Padres
The Toronto Blue Jays
The Chicago Cubs
The Seattle Mariners
The Boston Red Sox
The New York Mets
The Cincinnati Reds
The Cleveland Guardians
The Texas Rangers
The New York Yankees
The San Francisco Giants
The Miami Marlins
The St. Louis Cardinals
The Arizona Diamondbacks
The Tampa Bay Rays
The Kansas City Royals
The Atlanta Braves
The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim
The Oakland Athletics
The Baltimore Orioles
The Minnesota Twins
The Chicago White Sox
The Washington Nationals
The Pittsburgh Pirates
The Colorado Rockies
The Brewers are, and have been, the best team in the league for a few months, just now the record reflects that. The next five teams join them in having a chance to win this October. From #7 to #15 there is still a chance to displace some of those teams, but for varying reasons it seems less likely. From #16 to #24 there are some reasons to still be watching at this stage. From #25 to #27 there’s reasons to maybe watch a few nights a week. The next two don’t really even have any sort of direction or idea of what they want to do next. As for #30, God bless your soul, what have you done?
Apocalypse Vibes 