Stayed out until 7:30 am Saturday morning. Watched the sun come up at the Outlook. Lyfted home and slept until 3. But I bet $3 across the board on Always Dreaming and Looking At Lee. Then spent the evening at my man friend’s restaurant getting his staff a little tipsy. It was a very, very, very good Derby despite the rain and cold.
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There was also an interesting story the other day – wish I’d saved a link – about how the immigration situation is weighing on horse racing.
A lot of racehorse trainers depend on immigrant labor – exercise riders, grooms, hotwalkers, people who bathe the horses etc. Some of these people are here illegally, and are on pins and needles.
These jobs don’t pay much, and are not very attractive to many US citizens. And the backside workers often migrate from town to town throughout the year to follow the racing schedule of individual tracks, which further complicates things.
The article quoted a couple top trainers who had applied for visas and were facing long waits and tight quotas. Dale Romans, who has trained many top horses, said the industry really depends on immigrant labor.
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Always Dreaming, who won Saturday, was coming off a dramatic win in April in the Florida Derby, which is held in my local track Gulfstream Park in South Florida. So it was nice to root in the hometown hero.
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No, their platform is the problem and it’s 100% Bernie or nothing at this point, he just said so. It’s a huge problem.
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Sounds like a winner! Love the Outlook, haven’t been there in years, have to drop in sometime.
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Local news did a half way decent job talking about that this year.
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Obama: It takes courage to champion “the vulnerable, and the sick and the infirm.”
But what do you do when the vulnerable, the sick and the infirm give you no credit for championing them? When you risk you career to win benefits for them, and they respond, in a righteous rage, by wiping you out as a national party?
Joe Manchin said about Medicaid expansion beneficiaries in WV – overwhelmingly Trump voters – who would lose coverage if AHCA is signed into law: “They may not know who gave them their insurance, but they will know who took it away.”
Maybe it’s time for them to learn that you get what you vote for.
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Are you in the Louisville area, or near Keeneland in Lexington?
People must have short memories. Obama saved the auto industry but the Dems lost Michigan, Ohio and Indiana, which have lots of auto industry jobs.
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You champion them any way, because it’s the right and only thing to do.
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It was like taking a breath of fresh air after months of a poisonous smog hanging over me.
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Louisville
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I imagine this time of year there are a lot of local stories about horses, ranging from coverage of the Derby activities and parties to the economic impact of the breeding business.
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That’s the best part about watching it on TV, all the back stories on jockeys, trainers, folks who do the hard dirty work on the backside and everything else you can think of.
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Both of us are, and I’m fairly certain we live within a mile or two of each other. Then again, what in Louisville isn’t?
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I used to work at Gulfstream Park, from the 2001 through the 2010 racing seasons. Back in 2008, I wanted Gulfstream Park to emulate the week-long festival that Churchill Downs and other top tracks conduct to promote their big races.
I reached out to the folks at Pimlico, a sister facility which holds the Preakness Stakes – the second leg of the Triple Crown – and got some notes on their schedule of activities. A lot of the events are held by outside community organizations, and I began reaching out to local interests to gauge support for a parade, sponsorships and other events to get local buy-in and support for the big race. I got a lot of local support, but the marketing director, a consultant who did not understand racing, wanted instead to hold a fashion show in the paddock to promote some shops that were under construction. The estimated bill for the fashion show topped $250K, and needless to say the management was not supportive.
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That makes sense if health insurance is the only issue in the world. Then you work for expanding coverage, even if the beneficiaries give you no credit for it.
But there are other important issues too, like women’s right to choose, climate change, gay and transgender rights… Are you willing to put Roe v. Wade in danger by fighting to give Medicaid to people who will vote you out of office for it?
In the recent bipartisan spending bill, Democrats fought to preserve health care funding for coal miners, as they have done for years. (This time, Mitch McConnell joined them.) That probably came at the cost of other Democratic priorities, yet it will never win them any coal miner votes. How long are they going to continue doing this?
No, it makes sense because it’s the right thing to do.
It doesn’t mean that other issues get ignored.
It just means that you did the right thing in that situation—we’re supposed to do that without being told.
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As long as necessary. If they’re at all smart, they’re not doing it for votes—that would make them Republicans.
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