I’m a Boston Red Sox fan, have been all my life. I have a visceral, and probably irrational dislike of the New York Yankees, I guess mostly because of what’s perceived as a perennial sense of entitlement and hubris on the part of Yankees fans.

There is a certain cachet associated with NY that doesn’t exist in Boston. People wear the team hat as a fashion statement, not necessarily as a sign of loyalty.

It’s been a classic rivalry for a long time, has made for some good baseball and some great stories. A couple of passionate fan bases. But I keep coming back to this sense of entitlement, that the right and proper place for a World Series victor is in New York— where it belongs… Oh, please.

There must be a lot of pressure on ownership and other management in the Yankees organization. Right now, there is great clamor and frustration over the drought that has beset the Bronx Bombers for the past 17 years. No WS victory since 2009? Oh, the humanity! But this is the expectation.

I saw a news report that said the team means a lot to the local fan base. Well, of course it does! What team doesn’t mean a lot to its local fan base? Maybe the new reality is that all the money in the world and a storied past don’t necessarily translate to reaching the pinnacle. Look at Milwaukee, or Tampa Bay. Maybe we are seeing a certain parity develop, which may allow other fan bases to have their moment in the sun. Or maybe what happened in Milwaukee was the perfect mix of talent and ownership and managerial prowess and timing.

In any event, if one lives or dies by the fortunes of any sports team, then maybe it’s time to expand one’s horizons.

Collateral damage in the form of neglect.

Just saw a headline that revealed the White House is planning an aggressive defense against investigations promised by Democrats. So, two more years of wasted time and dereliction of duty and distractions and next to nothing being done to address genuine needs. How can we go on like this?

If this is going to be the case, then the blue wave will peter out well before 2028 and someone like JD Vance might have a shot at driving the final stake, finishing the job.

Imagine your reason for being is only to “win” at any cost, to obstruct and destroy, to render us weak and incapable of mounting a defense, to create a level of confusion so confounding that one doesn’t know who or what to believe anymore. Imagine this as what passes for making America great again.

I’d like to think that putting a stop to this had as much or more to do with the blue wave than the war in Iran or the cost of living did. Imagine a group of so-called patriotic Americans pushing this agenda and declaring it to be what must be pursued at all costs.

We don’t have to imagine. It’s what’s been happening since January 2017. Find a copy of Project 2025 and read as much of it as you can, until the lightbulbs reveal the depth and breadth of skullduggery and the revulsion reaches fever pitch.

Despite everything people say about Donald Trump, I get this sinking feeling that he and maybe more so the players around him are always three or four moves ahead of the rest of us. They appear to have this uncanny ability to anticipate reactions and outcomes, and their bag of tricks appears bottomless.

It’s difficult to know if the choices of Miller and Jordan were reactive or planned. Either way, the Republicans are poised to do more battle or at least to stonewall and muddy the water and keep anything constructive from being accomplished. What’s sick about this is that they also appear to care very little about doing the work people elected them to do.

It’s been an unfunny joke from Day 1. Intentionally!! They want to make us poor and dumb and needy, and they are trying to position themselves to be the only ones we can turn to for sustenance. This is where they want to head. It is most certainly sick and hateful, and we can’t let it happen.

They are treating the Blue Wave as mere window dressing. In some ways, it’s just another bump in the road, because they are playing a longer game than most of us care to envision.

While Maddow and the rest are over the moon with their assessments of what happened last week, reality has dished up evidence that Trump, at the behest of the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 creators, might have let this happen, or at least didn’t really care that it did.

Now that the euphoria has subsided a bit, such an observation starts to feel more like an accurate read. Think about it—the administration knew people were suffering economically, they knew the Iran war was unpopular and that the Epstein files still loomed, yet there was no attempt at passing any legislation or addressing the concerns of the public.

Sure, Trump traipsed around the country supposedly stumping for candidates, most likely saying that everything is great. But those rallies always ended up being about Trump and the word “dumb” and laced with random streams of consciousness.

There are some who warn that we as a country have this simplistic causal understanding of voting and outcomes, as in we made a statement in the voting booth and now things are going to change for the better. What this misses is the deep-rooted nature of the opposition.

The November 3 results indeed say something about where the voting public currently stands, but even such weighted results don’t mean the nightmarish philosophy of governance behind MAGA magically disappears. We’ve already caught glimpses of what at least the next 8 weeks are going to be like, with Stephen Miller and Jim Jordan emerging to fill key positions. And Trump is offering up the familiar refrain about questionable election results.

The bottom line is that we hold on to the hope of a Blue Congress, but we also remain vigilant and realistic about the forces on the other side of the aisle, because they are far from giving up.

Well, the threat of ICE agents at polling places never materialized, from what I can tell. There were observers, poll watchers who were ostensibly present to make sure everything was on the up-and-up.

It appears the elections went off largely without a hitch, though it remains to be seen if Trump and company will put up a stink and call “rigged” or “hoax” or whatever the hell is the gripe of the day.

The bottom line is that people took Donald at his word and considered him on the ballot, which, of course, he was—even as he now claims he wasn’t because if he was the results would have been different…

He is such a child. And we get to watch as he self-immolates in the last weeks of a Republican Congress. It’s liable to get ugly, especially now that his boy Stephen will be let loose.