Joe Biden Is Scrappy and Hungry and a Deal Maker
And the Celtics are not throwing away their shot!
Oh, there was big news late Saturday night, the important intermediate resolution of a historic face-off with global significance.
Meaning, of course, this:
MIAMI (AP) — The Boston Celtics were a tenth of a second away from elimination. The Miami Heat were a tenth of a second from the NBA Finals.
Derrick White owned that final moment.
White scored on a putback as time expired and the Boston Celtics moved to the brink of the greatest comeback in NBA playoffs history, holding off the Miami Heat 104-103 on Saturday night to force a Game 7 in the Eastern Conference finals.
“Derrick White, like a flash of lightning, just came out of nowhere and saved the day, man,” Boston’s Jaylen Brown said. “An incredible play.”
White knew it was good. Referees reviewed it, but it didn’t take long to give the official word.
Elation for Boston. Devastation for Miami.
“Ball came to me,” White said. “I made the shot.”
Perhaps Boston will call it The Shot.
White became the second player in NBA history to hit a buzzer-beater with his team trailing and facing elimination — Michael Jordan’s “The Shot” for Chicago against Cleveland in 1989 being the other….
Jayson Tatum scored 31 points, Brown scored 26 and Marcus Smart added 21 for the Celtics, who became only the fourth NBA team to erase a 3-0 deficit in a best-of-seven series and force a deciding game. The others in that club — the 1951 New York Knicks in the NBA Finals, the 1994 Denver Nuggets in the second round and the 2003 Portland Trail Blazers in the first round — all lost Game 7, all on the road.
Boston, however, is going home for its shot at history. Game 7 is Monday night on the Celtics’ floor, a matchup that’ll decide who meets the Western Conference champion Denver Nuggets in a title series that will start Thursday.
[Emphasis enthusiastically added, with trepidation.]
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Also Saturday night, there was a debt ceiling/budget deal between the White House and the Speaker’s office.
Joe Biden and Kevin McCarthy are already out in public with statements strongly supporting the agreement and urging their respective House flocks to pass it.
If a House majority is mustered, the Senate is a 95% probability to follow suit, so the whole game is the House now.
And, there, I am putting down an 85% chance of House passage this week.
Here are the points you need to know:
1. There is still no public text of a deal.
2. During the 72 hours the public text is out there for member, media, and interest group review, those on the far left and the far right who want to scuttle the pact will get more fodder, for sure.
3. Per the Associated Press, “White House officials will brief House Democrats on a Sunday video call.”
4. There is plenty in the deal that Team McCarthy can tout as representing concessions that the Rs won.
5. There is plenty NOT in the deal that Team Biden can tout as representing concessions that the Ds won.
6. The final House tally will more likely than not include a majority of the majority and just enough Democratic “ayes” to put it over the top, with as many members as possible on both sides of the aisle given passes to oppose, while still just winning, baby.
7. Because of the asymmetrical dynamics within and between the two parties, this agreement will help Biden politically with the public but hurt him with his party on Capitol Hill; McCarthy will paradoxically be helped within his party (despite some Freedom Caucus types voting “no”) but hurt with the public (because Biden will be helped and it remains a zero-sum game there).
8. There will be pisco sour and sangria toasts all around the big Gang of 500 table at Lauriol Plaza this morning, saluting the deal as a sensible, centrist economy saver.
9. Joe Biden came to office with more experience on how to cut realistic, what-the-traffic-will-bear Capitol Hill deals than any incoming president in American history – and it shows.
10. My spideysense at this writing is that Donald Trump will not whip heavily against this bill; also, let’s see what Ron DeSantis says.
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Saturday-into-Sunday was another intense, nonstop, and mentally exhausting day of Twitter fighting between the Trump and DeSantis social media warriors.
I can’t even begin to catalogue all of the “issues” that animated the skirmishes.
One subplot involved a teenager fighting with Team DeSantis and vice versa. Another involved Pete Buttigieg. There was a lot.
Eye on the prize and the North Star, folks, please.
As John Ellis explains in/on his essential reading (always) Substack:
No longer competitive in national surveys of GOP primary voters and caucus-attenders (he trails Trump by an average of ~33 percentage points), DeSantis finds himself at the mercy of the calendar. Specifically, he needs to win or come close (single digits) in Iowa and/or New Hampshire to have any hope of continuing on as a viable presidential candidate.
If DeSantis loses Iowa by 20 points, and New Hampshire by 15, that’s not progress, that’s it; game over, Trump wins. (See Mark Halperin’s note for more on this). There is no comeback trail in South Carolina, which follows New Hampshire on the calendar. Tim Scott, the Palmetto State’s other GOP Senator, is the best not-Trump option there.
Sen. Scott’s candidacy is more attractive than what DeSantis is currently offering. Scott is upbeat, optimistic, well-liked, glad to see you. You want him to succeed because it would be great if he did. DeSantis is grim, annoyed, not glad to see you….
The DeSantis campaign says that none of this matters; that GOP voters are looking for a viable alternative, someone who can beat Biden, someone ready to advance a populist agenda successfully, someone who will slay the woke dragons. The problem is, at the moment anyway, most GOP primary voters and caucus attenders don’t see any pressing need for a “viable alternative.” Trump remains their “murder weapon” of choice….
In a companion piece, the New York Times writes about how the larger-than-it-might-have-been Republican field hurts DeSantis’ chances overall, and/but in particular notes the prospect that essential early-voting-state wins might be tough for the Sunshine State topper because of the combatants who likely will focus attention in each:
Mr. Pence and Mr. Scott have made plain their plans to vie for influential evangelical voters in Iowa. In New Hampshire, both Mr. Christie, who focused his campaign on the state in 2016, and the state’s sitting governor, Chris Sununu, a moderate who has left the door open to a run, threaten to siphon votes from Mr. DeSantis. And in South Carolina, he will be sandwiched between two home-state candidates, the former governor Ms. Haley and Mr. Scott.
This is why DeSantis’ trip this week to the #fitn states is so very important.
Before too long, whether the Florida governor is convincing Those Paying Attention that the national contest is a two-person race won’t matter as much as whether he can convince TPA that Iowa and New Hampshire are two-person races.
The latter challenge is both more and less difficult than the former one.
As for a general election rematch, by the way, Ellis says this:
At the moment, Trump is either a 50-50 or 60-40 bet to win the presidency in 2024 if he’s running against Biden. The underlying reason is straightforward. As Osama bin Laden put it once: “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse.” Biden, not Trump, is the weak horse.
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This item is for only about a dozen of you in my neighborhood, but, well, it is important, via the Wall Street Journal:
Bored at his job as a stockbroker in the early 1970s, Nicholas Gray was open to alternatives. He spotted a Papaya King shop selling hot dogs and papaya juice in Manhattan and was impressed with the throngs lining up for service.
After a few days of research involving counting customers there, he signed up for a Papaya King franchise in 1973. Two years later, Gray opened his own independent shop, Gray’s Papaya, at the same location, near the corner of Broadway and 72nd Street in Manhattan. He cut the hot dog price from 75 cents to 50 cents and kept it there until 1999. In 1982, Gray introduced his Recession Special: Two hot dogs and a tropical drink for $1.95.
A sign over the door proclaimed: “When You’re Hungry, or Broke, or Just in a Hurry!” Low prices helped create a bond with customers, and it pained Gray later when he had to raise them. Rather than doing so in the usual stealth fashion, he hung up banners apologizing for higher prices.
“We are getting killed by galloping inflation in food costs,” one sign said. “Unlike politicians we cannot raise our debt ceiling and are forced to raise our very reasonable prices. Please don’t hate us.”