1. Clean-up on the baseball aisle! Last April, I wrote a post urging Baltimore Orioles first-sacker Chris Davis to retire and save his desperate team some money, since it is clear that he can no longer play at a major league level despite being paid 23 million dollars in 2019, with a similar amount due him through 2022. At the time, Davis Davis was 0-for-23 with 13 strikeouts and  hitless in 44 at-bats since the previous season, when Davis batted .168, the worst in major league history for a regular, with a horrible .539 OPS (On base percentage plus slugging percentage), and a -2.5 WAR, meaning that the Orioles would have won 2.5 more games with a borderline major leaguer from the minors playing in his place.

Several readers have emailed me asking how things turned out for Davis, who did eventually get a hit, and who was still in the starting line-up frequently enough to hurt the team. The answer is that Davis was better than he was in 2018, but he was still horrible. He batted only .179, with a -1 WAR, and an OPS of  .601. He earned more than $418,000 per hit.

He’s earned almost 119 million dollars in his career, yet appears willing to continue to embarrass himself and hurt his team and team mates for three more sure-to-be-ugly seasons in order to collect another 69 million.

Yechhhh.

2. More on Joy Behar’s terrible, no good, very bad week: The highlight of Donald Trump Jr.’s visit to “The View” came after Behar recited the typical and overly-familiar talking points about Trump Sr.: “[President Trump] called some Mexicans rapists [Correction: He referred to illegal immigrants from Mexico as rapists who were rapists] , he attacked the handicapped, [No, Joy, he mocked a single handicapped reporter, and there is some evidence that he didn’t even do that], he bragged about it” [Huh?], and “We heard the ‘Access’ tape, where he bragged about grabbing women by their genitalia.” [No, he never said that he had personally grabbed any women “by the pussy.” Boy, am I sick of THIS narrative..] Rather than quibble with her, DJT Jr, had come armed and ready, and replied, “We’ve all done things that we regret, I mean, if we’re talking about bringing a discourse down, Joy, you’ve worn blackface.”

Forced between the choice of babbling, “Hominahominahomina” Ralph Kramden-style, Behar just lied.

“No, I have not!” she sputtered. But she had, as Junior later proved with a tweet and a link:

Why would she deny it? I’d say it’s because Behar’s a despicable lowlife who lacks courage, integrity and honesty, but I’m just guessing. Her lie also tricked Whoopi Goldberg into setting up some great gotcha  punchlines, as the Queen of The View said, “I know blackface when I see it and that was not blackface.” You should know blackface, Whoopi: you talked your then boyfriend Ted Danson into humiliating himself with a blackface routine at her Friar’s Club Roast. Best line I’ve seen online: “Whoopi says it wasn’t blackface blackface,” recalling Goldberg’s infamous excuse for Roman Polanski’s child rape, “It wasn’t rape rape.”

I am so far from being a Donald Trump Jr. fan that he could live on Jupiter, but he justified his existence with this episode.

3. The fact that Kamala Harris is blaming her stumbling campaign on racism is just more proof of the real reason why it’s tanking. Harris is a fake. She lacks the character to be President, the skills, and any evident leadership qualities. Her campaign so far has been dishonest, insulting, and incompetent. How dare she say the voters are “not ready for a woman of color”? No, you despicable fool, they aren’t ready for you.

Here’s Reason’s Shihka Dalmia critique in part, listing Harris’s failings in the eyes of Democrats, progressives and libertarians:

…If the country is not ready for a “woman of color,” it is even less so for an openly gay man with a husband. Yet Mayor Buttigieg is surging….Harris is crashing not among general election voters but among the more progressive ones in the Democratic primaries. …Here’s the real reason she’s falling: The more voters learn about Harris’ decade-and-a-half record, first as a San Francisco prosecutor and then as California’s attorney general, the more they recoil. And rightly so…. “She repeatedly fought for more aggressive prosecution not just of violent criminals but of people who committed misdemeanor and ‘quality of life’ crimes,” Reason‘s Elizabeth Nolan Brown noted in an exhaustive look at Harris’ record…. Panhandling, prostitution, graffiti, loitering, driving under the influence, and living in an unapproved homeless encampment….Of all people, Harris should have understood that, especially since she was railing against mass incarceration and its disparate impact on poor and black communities at Yale University in 2006, when she was launching her “quality of life” crackdown….

…On the theory that high school dropouts are more likely to become criminals, Harris personally championed a 2011 state law that made it a criminal misdemeanor for parents to let kids in kindergarten through eighth grade miss more than 10 percent of school days without a valid excuse….she also persuaded the state legislature to back the law with such harsh penalties as a minimum of $2,500 in fines and a one-year jail sentence. To prevent criminality in the future, she criminalized parents here and now….hundreds of parents have been booked under her law, the vast majority poor minorities juggling several jobs and struggling to keep their heads above water. …And then there is Harris’ duplicity on three-strike laws. Such laws, along with mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes, came into vogue in the 1990s and decimated minority communities in inner cities. Harris campaigned against California’s law, which threw third-time offenders in jail for 25 years. She pledged to invoke it only in rare cases of very serious and violent crimes. What she didn’t say was that she counted sex crimes and the possession of an unauthorized firearm as “serious” crimes, even though the penal code did not define them as such….Harris threw 1,500 people in jail for minor marijuana violations and… argued against commuting jail sentences. She also pushed to increase the cash required to obtain bail. All of these issues have a disparate impact on people of color far more unfortunate than Harris…

The writer concludes that Harris’s failure is based on her “massive miscalculation born of an inner lack of convictions, and it is backfiring spectacularly. Instead of pointing fingers at voters, Harris ought to do a little soul searching. Looking past her skin color at her actual record is one thing America is doing right.”

Exactly.

Yet none of these factors exaept the last are among the reasons why I concluded Harris was a terrible and unethical candidate, as here, where Ethics Alarms noted her ridiculous claim that she would ban guns by executive order; or here, where she endorsed the totalitarian  and Orwellian approach to government, or the fact that  this aspiring leader of the party of #MeToo advanced her career by sleeping with her boss.

Then there was Harris’s embarrassing answer to the question of whether she would use Trump-style, tarriffs as a negotiating tool when she  became President:

“I would consider as President reading a briefing book. I would consider surrounding myself with experts. I would consider listening to the voices of the people who are going to be most at risk…”

I wrote in June, “That is pretty close to a disqualifying statement for an aspiring President. It’s something I could imagine President Warren G. Harding saying, for he was completely in thrall to his handlers, advisers, and “experts,” a nice guy and serviceable Senator who was clueless in the White House. The statement is devoid of leadership instincts, or even an understanding of what leadership entails, but Harris manages to shoehorn in the obligatory nod to the “woke”—never mind serving  the national interest, it’s the “vulnerable” who wag the dog. Her answer is an admission of incompetence, the motto of a follower….it’s as if Harris thinks being a woman “of color” gives her a right to the nomination without showing any Presidential traits at all.”

She’s dimwitted, wishy-washy, addicted to pandering and an incompetent candidate, and would still be if she were pansexual and green.