Milking It

Commentary has to hand it to the ‘Stros. They sure know how to milk it. I am talking about giving away World Series replica rings for the third time this season. The first time was back in April on a weekend for the first 10,000 fans when the Padres were in town. The second time was last Wednesday against the Rays and all of the 43,000 SRO and change who showed up got a ring. Well guess what? The ‘Stros announced yesterday that the Wednesday, July 11 game against the A’s will also be a World Series replica ring giveaway night with all fans getting a ring. The ‘Stros also decided to kick in dynamic ticket pricing. What did you expect?  The secondary ticket market is also into the dynamic ticket pricing thing for the July 11 game.  Ouch!

From the Wishful Thinking Dept:

Matthew Dowd‏Verified account @matthewjdowd

If a hateful person makes you hate, they win. If a bully makes you bully, they win. If a vulgar person makes you vulgar, they win. Let us meet hate with love. Let us meet bullying with an embrace. Let us meet vulgarity with civility. This is how our country and world win.

And this:

Arne Duncan‏Verified account @arneduncan

My personal opinion: No matter how much we dislike or disagree with someone, we should not deny them the chance to have a meal. The history in our country of denying people access to restaurants, to water fountains and even bathrooms is too raw, too real. We can’t keep dividing.

Here is the headline of a piece that Commentary likes:

We have a crisis of democracy, not manners

What happened with Donald Trump’s mouthpiece being asked to leave a restaurant, with the Miller fella who works for him who was shouted at in a restaurant, with the Florida GOP AG getting yelled at outside of a movie theater, and with the Homeland Security Secretary getting a verbal once over in a Mexican restaurant wasn’t planned, organized, or part of some grand strategy. It happened because folks are pi__ed off – period.

 

The NY Times has a piece about some of the national Dem leaders are worrying about how folks are going after and confronting key Trump supporters. Get out of the way then. What is happening out there is a response that some folks think is long overdue.  They are not waiting for national Dem leaders to give them their marching orders, nor should they.

Thousands of Brown children are being traumatized and emotionally scarred before our eyes.   And they know who is to blame.  What do you expect folks to do?

The grassroots folks throughout the country certainly don’t need national Dem leaders to tell them how to resist. They are not interested in operating with the national Dem leaders’ talking points.

National Dem leaders would be wise to start paying attention to how grassroots folks are handling business and learn a thing or three. Don’t mess with something that is starting at the grassroots level.

Here is the NY Times piece by Jonathan Martin

June 25, 2018

WASHINGTON — For more than two years, Democrats have struggled with how aggressively to confront Donald J. Trump, a political opponent unlike any other: Should they attack him over his hard-line policies; his inflammatory, norm-breaking conduct; or some combination of both?

In recent days, as institutional Democrats wring their hands, those deliberations have started to give way to furious liberal activists and citizens who have taken matters into their own hands beyond the corridors of power.

Progressives have heckled the homeland security secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, and the White House aide Stephen Miller at Washington restaurants; they have ejected the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, from a Lexington, Va., eatery; and they have screamed at one of Mr. Trump’s leading cable news surrogates, Florida’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, at a Tampa movie theater.

“Let’s make sure we show up wherever we have to show up,” Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California, said Saturday at a rally in Los Angeles. “And if you see anybody from that cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them. And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”

The attempts at shaming have delighted many on the left, particularly in the aftermath of Mr. Trump’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents, and many progressives feel that the president’s incendiary messaging and actions must be met with something far stronger than another round of news releases from politicians.

But the confrontations have opened a rift in the party over whether stoking anti-Trump outrage is helping or undermining their prospects in the coming midterm elections. Many younger Democrats believe that conventional politics are insufficient to the threat posed by a would-be authoritarian — and that their millennial and nonwhite base must be assured that the party is doing all it can to halt Mr. Trump.

Older and more establishment-aligned party officials fear the attempts at public humiliation are a political gift to Republicans eager to portray the opposition as inflaming rather than cooling passions in the nation’s capital.

“Trump’s daily lack of civility has provoked responses that are predictable but unacceptable,” Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House Democratic leader, said Monday, rebuking Ms. Waters, a veteran flamethrower who is enjoying something of a renaissance in the Trump era.

This sort of talk infuriates the new guard of liberal leaders, who warn that Washington Democrats risk dampening enthusiasm among anti-Trump activists if they continue denouncing direct action.

“It’s completely tone deaf to discourage this type of activity,” said Quentin James, 30, a founder of the Collective PAC, an organization dedicated to electing more African-American people. “They’re acting as accomplices.”

Mr. Trump did appear to relish the decision by a Virginia restaurant owner to ask Ms. Sanders to leave her establishment, the Red Hen, over the weekend.

“The Red Hen Restaurant should focus more on cleaning its filthy canopies, doors and windows (badly needs a paint job) rather than refusing to serve a fine person like Sarah Huckabee Sanders,” he taunted on Twitter.

Nor did he let Ms. Waters’s broadside go unanswered.

Ms. Sanders used the moment to put Mr. Trump forward as an exemplar of civility against the braying hordes of Democratic activists, whose “calls for harassment” are “unacceptable.”

“America is a great country, and our ability to find solutions despite the disagreements is what makes us unique. That is exactly what President Trump has done for all Americans,” she said.

But it was not just the White House that was tut-tutting the public shaming.

“I think civil disobedience has had an important role in the sweep of history, but when it is done well, it has always been done strategically and with the high ground,” said Senator Brian Schatz, Democrat of Hawaii, who has used his Twitter account to urge activists to stay focused on the policy issues that he think move voters. “We have to be careful not to pick every battle in every place, both literally and figuratively.”

We lost last night and there is no MLB question today.