Stacey Abrams!
It is amazing how frequently the mainstream media states that President Trump’s assertion that he won the 2020 election is a “lie.” It’s not a lie: he believes it, and there are some good reasons to believe it, though stating it as a fact is irresponsible, but you know: Trump. The widespread use of mail-in ballots automatically creates a rebuttable presumption of fraud: when someone other than the voter can fill out a ballot and the vote is still counted, then someone other than the voter WILL fill out a ballot; the only question is how many. Since Democrats tried one unethical route to getting Trump after another for four years, it’s completely reasonable for him to wonder if the election was fixed, with or without evidence.
But I digress. The point is that Trump’s insistence that the Presidency was stolen has been condemned roundly by Democrats and the news media, as well as many Republicans. And yet at a campaign rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Democratic candidate for Governor Terry McAuliffe was accompanied by unsuccessful Georgia gubernatorial Stacey Abrams and said that she “would be the governor of Georgia today had the governor of Georgia not disenfranchised 1.4 million Georgia voters before the election. That’s what happened to Stacey Abrams. They took the votes away.” Then Abrams repeated her claim that she has made since she lost in 2018: “I come from a state where I was not entitled to become the governor, but as an American citizen and a citizen of Georgia, I’m going to fight for every person who has the right to vote to be able to cast that vote” as McAuliffe nodded approvingly.
Has any mainstream media source called her statement, or McAuliffe’s, last week a lie? If Trump’s assertion is a lie, so is Abrams’. We know McAuliffe is lying because he opened his mouth, but how does Abrams claim that she won—she still hasn’t conceded—manage not to get the Trump treatment? Her organization Fair Fight’s website still makes unsubstantiated claims about the 2018 election, yet she is treated by the media as a voting rights icon. Major League Baseball even let her talk it into pulling the 2021 All-Star Game out of Atlanta, based on her false representations about the new Georgia voting law. (Then, after she realized that she had cost the state jobs and money, Abrams denied that she had done it, and actually criticized MLB’s decision.)
In 2018, PolitiFact and USA Today found “no proof” and “little empirical evidence” to back up Abrams’ claims, and none have shown up since. Never mind: those two reliably Democratic Party allies forgot the rules. If a black, female Democrat and Donald Trump say the exact same thing, the latter is a liar, and the former is an honorable victim.
Ethics Alarms 
Are there any other serious contenders?
You have to be kidding.
In the sense they come close to her…
But I guess that could just be my bias.
“If a black, female Democrat and Donald Trump say the exact same thing, the latter is a liar, and the former is an honorable victim.”
Exactly right. And she WILL be governor one day.
A tangentially related story in the Wall Street Journal: “Houston vs. Atlanta Is Rob Manfred’s Nightmare World Series”.
Basically, the two franchises that hate him the most right now: He’s lucky he doesn’t get detained at the airport and deported…
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Regarding the Houston scandal — one point raised in the story is that the Astros believe that this sort of cheating was widespread and Manfred used the Astros as a scapegoat to get the rest of MLB to clean up their act.
I’d not heard that spin before, don’t know if it’s true, and don’t know that it’s relevant. Cheating is still cheating, regardless of whether others do it, but they are probably also thinking of the steroids era.
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Also, I remember thinking during the ALCS that Boston is probably the one fan base that should be ethically estopped from booing the Astros over their cheating scandal.
1. Yup: it also highlights the stupidity and incompetence of the All-Star Game virtue-signalling.
2.That’s an Astros’ excuse that won’t fly. Sigh stealing is and always will be rampant. Using cameras and signals taking off from them is an outright violation of the rules, and the Astros version was flagrant.
3. No “probably” about it. I admire Cora as a manager, but he undermined two Championship teams, the Red Xos less egregiously. He should have been banned from baseball. The Sox certainly should not have hired him back. The “poor Alex, how he suffered” stories all season in Boston were nauseating.
5. Even A.J. Hinch is back in baseball? Amazing. Nothing to see here.
I’m still waiting for Shoeless Joe Jackson and Pete Rose to be admitted into the HOF now that MLB is all in on gambling. They could open a separate wing to honor all the great, historic bets.
So the issue isn’t that Trump is questioning the results of the election. The issue is just that he’s wrong, according to the media. The media is not, in principle, against anyone questioning the results of an election. In practice though, only Democrats are allowed to question results. Duly noted.
Dad and I narrowly missed having our dream Series – he being a life-long Red Sox fan and me being a Braves fan since the Murphy/Horner/Butler days – but hahahahaha at Stacey Abrams. Try to force the World Series out of Atlanta…see how that works for you!!!
As a lifelong Astros fan, it is weird to be playing the Braves in the World Series.
So many times in the postseason, the Braves were the Astros nemesis. It seemed like forever before we were able to advance past the Braves and then ultimately get to the World Series in 2005. Never dreamed we’d meet the Braves in the Series.
And, speaking of odd twists, the Astros first round opponent this year, in the divisional series, was the Chicago White Sox. The White Sox was the team the Astros faced in the World Series in 2005 (and got swept). So we finally beat the White Sox and now we’re playing the Braves in the World Series.
You can’t make this stuff up.
I’ve just about concluded that periodically switching teams between the leagues is a good idea, as long as you don’t mess with the few long-time rivalries, Sox-Yankees, Cards-Cubs, Dodgers-Giants. It gives teams a chance to forge a new chapter, and maybe ditch old habits in a new culture.
That’s an interesting idea, but I’m skeptical that MLB could pull it off.
As I recall, MLB basically had to blackmail Jim Crane to get him to agree to the move. Reports were that they made it a condition of approving his purchase of the team. I do not believe it was a popular move in Houston — for one thing, it severed the traditional rivalries the Astros had built up with teams like Milwaukee, Chicago, and St. Louis. Granted they were only 50 years old or less, but it was what we were used to.
One other thing I imagine they’d have to change to make swapping teams practical is to standardize the DH rules — which in practice would mean adding the DH to the National League. They’re already talking about that but it would be rough for a team to move from the AL to NL right now.
I’ve always appreciated the NL rules and the strategies that it engenders, but at the same time I think it gives the AL team a bit of an advantage in the World Series.
So, baseball purist that I am, I reckon I’m not opposed to your idea in theory but skeptical of its practicality. Now, if they agreed to jettison that Little League rule of a zombie runner in extra innings, I’d likely be all in.
Stacey may have been the belle of the ball at the Virginia rally, but her star has lost some of its luster in Georgia after the All-Star Game fiasco. Outside the Atlanta-area enclaves of dependable racialist voting, her only other strength in 2020 was in areas where folks have been voting Democrat “since great-granddaddy fit the Yankees” (The Union army, not the baseball team.) She carried only 30 of Georgia’s 159 counties. Especially in the Atlanta area (the ten metro counties), people I talk to -even the Democrats- have not forgotten the loss of the All-Star Game and they hold her responsible, not the Commissioner or the craven honchos of MLB. Repeating the “rightful governor of Georgia” lie is basically her only trick. By making herself (with media assistance) a national figure, she now has part ownership in the Democrat party’s universal piss-poor performance across the nation under the Biden administration and the Pelosi/Schumer socialist progressive Congress.
Georgia is moving ahead with measures to reduce fraudulent votes. She won’t find the path to the governor’s mansion strewn with rose petals next time out.
I know I have this eccentricity where I say “I don’t understand why X” before explaining why X is a thing. I usually understand the base issues even if I can’t personalize them, but I truly do not understand Stacey Abram’s popularity within the party.
She’s a black woman in a party full of black women, so she’s not just a diversity checkbox, her main claim to fame is losing a gubernatorial election and then “bravely” asserting that she didn’t lose. Since then, and particularly after the 2020 election, she’s dead weight with the specter of never having conceded her 2018 gubernatorial loss…. Why do Democrats have such a hard time letting loser candidates fade away? It was a similar thing with Hillary.
And it’s awful for America. Democrats want to vote Democrat, they don’t want to vote Republican, a significant number of them will hold their nose and vote for these genuinely bad candidates because the other guy is worse…. Why not just feild a candidate people might be excited to vote for?