Long threads: best baseball announcers, North Carolina angels, hopeful happenings, boys will be boys, and some really big things

Here are some long threads that I liked. 

This is a lengthy post because I am including many of the tweets from these threads -- a reader told me once that people who aren't on X anymore aren't allowed to read their posts now. 

So first up, with the baseball post-season underway, here is a long thread about great baseball moments as described by great baseball commentators - such masters at creating verbal pictures. And at the best in my time was, of course, Vin Scully.

Want to add an embedded version of this one, whose excellence @TylerKepner rightly flagged, so everyone can listen here: The whole ninth inning of Vin Scully calling Sandy Koufax's perfect game Sept. 9, 1965 is eight minutes of free-flowing, off-the-cuff poetry. Vin was magical. pic.twitter.com/QVbDLPbdkj

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) October 4, 2024

Today's Comment: Boomers "are the most coddled political constituency"

In his column tonight, Bribes (Between The Lines Of Age) The LPC's Correct Tactical Choice, Evan Scrimshaw is writing about the Liberal decision to vote against the Bloc motion to raise Old Age Security and he gives us this gem of a paragraph. 

I have seldom read anything clearer or more direct about how we boomers are distorting politics:

The old and the soon to be old are the most coddled political constituency. God Forbid we tell the boomers that their McMansions might see a triplex down the street, but the young had to sacrifice years of their lives to stop a virus that mostly didn’t affect them. Our benefit is a government that refuses to say they want lower house prices, because once again God forbid we dare anger the old. It’s nice to see the Liberals get that the old should be the ones to swallow an imperfect set of options for once.

He is, of course, correct -- boomers bought our first houses 50 years ago, and we paid less for them than what most cars cost today.  Now houses cost 10 times more, which freezes millions of young people out of the housing market. 

Scrimshaw continues to discuss how these younger voters might be turned back into Liberal voters:

...What the government needs to do from here is clear, at least to me. They need to lean into the framework of generational equity, they need to accept that many childless young are fucked right now, and use the fall to set up a 2025 budget that addresses their concerns.

...And this is at least a wedge issue where the Tories are on the wrong side and the Liberals are on the right one, and where the public actually believes it’s a live issue. The problem with the abortion rhetoric is that Canadians don’t think Poilievre would actually roll back rights. Here, we have a unanimous CPC vote we can use as proof.

Summing it up:

The Liberals refusing to vote for another wealth transfer to boomers is the smartest thing they’ve done in years

— Evan Scrimshaw (@EScrimshaw) October 3, 2024

And on a side note:

UNPRECEDENTED: Aging boomer retires to free up job for someone youngerhttps://t.co/q3re3QZbzD #biden #kamala pic.twitter.com/Gmf0povNLm

— The Beaverton (@TheBeaverton) July 21, 2024

If Kamala because the nominee this is the most Gen X way to do it with a supremely qualified Xer being kept at bay for years and then a boomer dropping the job on them with no warning.

— Cake or Death (@Johngcole) July 21, 2024

Busy busy busy! Here's some stuff about Trudeau, the Jack Smith report, the US election, the Russia-Ukraine War

I have a feeling that things are going to just be crazy for the next five weeks. 

Tonight I am reading about a whole bunch of things -- the pressure on Trudeau to do something something, the Jack Smith bombshell report, the dark underside of the US election, sane-washing Trump, the Russia-Ukraine war -- and it is, I have to say, impossible to pick just one thing to talk about. 

So here are some posts, some links and some commentary. 

Pressure on Trudeau to do something something 

Trudeau did an interesting interview on the podcast of MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith  

And Paul Wells has covered it in a substack post: "Delivering the absolute best future" Justin Trudeau wants an election about his values 

Here are some excerpts:

...what drives Justin Trudeau? “Understanding that we are in a moment in this world where everything is changing. The way we work, the way AI works, the way geopolitics happens, the pressures on everything: The world is in a massive pivot moment right now. And we don’t know what the biggest issue is going to be.”

Here Trudeau is arguing that good instincts are better, in a storm, than easy remedies. ... “We don’t know what crises are going to hit the world. We only know there are going to be [crises]. And the question [is]: who has the capacity to respond?”

...“I do tend to get wrapped up in the long term,” he volunteers. This makes him brood about “the danger of squandering that lead we have, over so many of our competitors around the world — whether it’s on the environment and the green economy, whether it’s on child care and a responsible safety net, whether it’s on all sorts of different things.” If Canadians did something to blow that — “like electing a Conservative government that wants to bring us back to some past that never actually existed” — they would be jeopardizing “everything that we have been able to build that’s going to make the future so good for so many.”

Today's News: "A damning non-answer"

WALZ: Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election? VANCE: Tim, I'm focused on the future WALZ: That's a damning non-answer

[image or embed]

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.bsky.social) October 1, 2024 at 8:41 PM

Wallace: JD Vance was still unable to say that Trump lost the election in 2020. And in that moment, I think everything that he did for 88 minutes was lost and wiped out by that inability to tell the truth pic.twitter.com/hgbbDDY9W9

— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) October 2, 2024

https://t.co/8G0fPr4Q3v

— Daily Trix (@DailyTrix) October 2, 2024

If anyone is wondering where J.D. Vance actually came from, check out Jamieson Foser's column tonight None of us should even know who JD Vance is How did this meritless husk of a man end up in a vice presidential debate?

...the guy is a deeply racist and sexist autocrat on the cusp of power — and he got here in large part because some of the most powerful and influential people in academia, news media, entertainment, and tech saw something in him they were desperate to promote. Merit didn’t have anything to do with it...

Lots of stuff here about where Vance came from and why the New York Times loved him. 

On a completely irrelevant side note:

I really 💕 how JD Vance matched his lipstick with his tie. pic.twitter.com/ypq8YRG59s

— Ana Navarro-Cárdenas (@ananavarro) October 2, 2024