Cup of Coffee: February 19, 2026

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

The union has a new Executive Director, the press is already in the tank for the owners, the Pentagon declares war on woke law schools, if hating ICE is wrong I don't wanna be right, if AI is so great the AI companies wouldn't have to threaten us to use it and, hey, U2 has some new music.

The Daily Briefing

Bruce Meyer elected new Executive Director of the Players Union

Bruce Meyer was unanimously elected as the new Executive Director of the Major League Baseball Players Association yesterday. Meyer, who had been Tony Clark's deputy and the lead negotiator for the players since 2018, becomes the sixth executive director in the union’s history.

Meyer, 64, will reportedly take the job as an interim appointee, but he is expected to hold the position through the negotiations of the next Collective Bargaining Agreement. If the outcome is a good one for the players the job will almost certainly be his on a permanent basis. If the negotiations are fraught or deemed unsuccessful from the players' perspective, well, at least everyone has an out. It all makes sense given the rather gonzo circumstances that brought us to this point.

Meyer is an experienced litigator who came to the MLBPA from the National Hockey League Players’ Association in 2018, where he worked under former MLBPA leader Donald Fehr. He took that job after Clark received considerable criticism for his handling of negotiations leading up to the 2017-2021 CBA. Meyer, who was seen by many as a much harder-nosed negotiator than Clark was, achieved much improved results, both in the negotiations for the current CBA and in the unexpectedly rancorous negotiations which led to the restart of the 2020 season following the pandemic shutdown. Results which seemed to validate his choice as the MLBPA's top man in the conference room.

Not that everything has been smooth sailing for Meyer. In 2024 there was a coup attempt against both him and Clark led by Harry Marino, the former player/lawyer/labor organizer who rose to fame by getting the MLBPA to agree to represent minor leaguers. The beef that Marino and the players who backed him had with Meyer was rather nebulous, at least to the public, but whatever the specific complaints were, the effort fizzled out. My personal view on that is that the players have liked having a former player leading the union for some time and didn't necessarily take too well to a lawyer who does not have "diplomacy" at the top of his job description in the role. But in that Meyer is much more like Marvin Miller and Don Fehr who, while not making tons of friends, were always effective advocates for the union. Whatever the case, the players seem to be over it. If they weren't, I don't think Meyer would've been unanimously elected yesterday.

Personally, I think Meyer was the only logical choice to replace Clark. He's been there for several years. He's been the key man in the room for several years. He knows the union's membership and they know him. He knows MLB's negotiation team and its tactics and the ins and outs of the issues that will be on the table as 2026 progresses and December 1 nears. It'd have been folly to bring in someone new at this point and, to their credit, the players seem to understand that.

Apparently only the players are responsible for work stoppages

It takes two to tango, they say, but in the mind of ESPN's Jeff Passan, only the players are responsible for avoiding a work-stoppage when the CBA expires in December. At least that's what I took from his latest column, which was published several hours before Bruce Meyer's election as the new MLBPA Executive Director:

Amid one of the lowest moments in more than half a century since its formation, the MLBPA can use [Tony] Clark's stunning resignation to help save the 2027 season.

Whoever ascends to the MLBPA's vacated executive director position, which the union expects to fill as early as Wednesday, will inherit an organization facing its greatest challenge in a generation: MLB owners are intent on securing a salary cap upon the expiration of the current collective bargaining agreement Dec. 1. Players are primed to fight it. For the fight to be effective, though, they must acknowledge that the greatest priority is to ensure no games are missed following the league's expected lockout. And that is where the players themselves must hold their new leadership more accountable than they did their previous one.

Passan goes on to assume the owners' position, with no attempt to acknowledge the nuance of the issues at play. He assumes that baseball's economic system is broken. He assumes that payroll disparity is the biggest issue facing the game. He assumes that the stars need to be cut down to size and that the middle class of players must be catered too. Some of that may be true, but not all of it. And even the parts that are true are not as simple as he makes them out to be. Indeed, what Passan pretty clearly seems to be doing in his column is starting from the position that the owners are right about most things and putting it on the players to figure out how to appease them.

To get more specific about it: why must the players "acknowledge that the greatest priority is to ensure no games are missed following the league's expected lockout?" Are they not supposed to prioritize their own goals in the upcoming negotiations? Passan grants that the owners can do that, flatly stating that their desire for a salary cap is the default position that is, apparently, above examination. The players, however, have to subordinate their interests and make the playing of games their guiding star, thereby depriving themselves of any negotiating leverage. It's an even more galling position for Passan to take given that he acknowledges that the owners will be the ones initiating the work-stoppage with a lockout in December. Why isn't the side who has vowed to shut down the industry accountable for missing games? Why is it on the workers who will be locked out?

This reminds me of how so many political commentators hold Democrats responsible for everything that happens even when they are out of power. It's the Democrats' fault that the government isn't funded even though Republicans control all three branches of government. It's the Democrats who are expected to make big concessions in the face of Trump's insanity as opposed to Trump being expected to be less insane. One side is tasked with being responsible and caving for the greater good while there are no expectations placed on the side actually initiating the chaos with their radical demands and their full control of the levers of power.

The fact of the matter is that the 2027 season can be played even if there is not a new Collective Bargaining Agreement in place. The sides can just carry on under the terms of the previous agreement while they continue to negotiate. They've done it before on multiple occasions. Except these days the owners have adopted a hard-and-fast rule about locking players out the moment the CBA expires. If you're Jeff Passan, however, that doesn't matter. The players must do whatever they can and give up whatever they must to keep the owners from stopping games from being played.

I have been writing about baseball labor matters in one place or another for over 25 years now. In that time I've gotten used to the fact that the media will invariably side with the league and the owners while casting the players as the responsible party for whatever bad things happen. Normally the press does a better job of trying to hide that bias. Maybe Passan is just out of practice when it comes to the subtle art of shilling for Rob Manfred.

The Red Sox uniforms need a redo

The Boston Red Sox are getting a quickie uniform redesign after their refreshed home whites, debuted at media day earlier this week, ended up looking really dumb, leading to fan complaints. The problem: the lettering of “Red Sox” comes too close to the piping that runs along the buttons, with the D and the S actually bumping into the piping:

After the fan complaints the Sox announced yesterday that Fanatics will fix it.

For what it's worth, the Sox said it was their own fault, not the fault of Fanatics, because they asked for the lettering to be that way. That doesn't make a ton of sense to me given that, even if they asked for it, the manufacturer would've been in the best position to say "hey, this looks bad" and apparently didn't. What I suspect happened is that the Sox wanted the words "Red" and "Sox" to be closer together than they've been in the past few years on those janky uniforms Nike and Fanatics came out with before the 2024 season. I further suspect that the problem stemmed from the Sox assuming that the piping would be returned to the older, more narrow alignment, but Fanatics kept the janky, wider alignment, leading to this crowded look.

If that was what happened, I'd say that's just as much on Fanatics as the Red Sox, but if Boston wants to take responsibility for this screwup I won't stop them.

Other Stuff

Throw 'em in The Tower!

I read a lot of books about royals being thrown into the Tower of London, but they're usually covering history from the 15th or 16th century. Well, move over Henry VI, because there's a new royal inmate: his name is Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, who until a couple of months ago was known as Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, the Earl of Inverness, and Baron Killyleagh.

[Editor: You're making that last one up]

No, I swear. Royals are no better than Chalkboard Mom when it comes to styles and titles.

Anyhoo, the second son and third-born child of Her Deader-Than-Vaudeville Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, brother of Chucky Trey, and eighth in line to the literal got-damn Throne of England is in the hoosegow, having been arrested yesterday morning on suspicion of misconduct in public office. As the bulldog goes to press searches are being carried out at his homes in Berkshire and Norfolk. Sucks to suck, I guess.

The official statement from the Bobbies:

"As part of the investigation, we have today (19/2) arrested a man in his sixties from Norfolk on suspicion of misconduct in public office and are carrying out searches at addresses in Berkshire and Norfolk.

The man remains in police custody at this time.

We will not be naming the arrested man, as per national guidance. Please also remember that this case is now active so care should be taken with any publication to avoid being in contempt of court."

The British are so adorable. They won't name criminal suspects even if they descend directly from John of Gaunt and have spent seven decades in the public eye, with many of those years pretty clearly spent raping children. That's nice, but if they want to be a truly advanced and sophisticated country they should immunize all rich and powerful people from legal process altogether, even if they've committed the most heinous of crimes. That's how we do it here, in the Greatest Country in the World,™ the United Frickin' States of America, jack.

Anyway: off with his 'ead.

The Pentagon declares war on woke law schools

Pete Hegseth emerged from his default state of blackout drunkenness the other day to issue a memo telling active-duty service members that over 30 law schools are now considered “moderate to high risk,” ideologically speaking, because of their alleged liberal bias and are therefore ineligible for Department of Defense tuition assistance programs.

The website Above The Law obtained a copy of the memo the DoD sent out listing the private law schools that are now on the blacklist. A list of public law schools is expected to follow. The screencap is a bit hard to read, but here are the private ones:

As Above The Law notes, this list contains all but one of the consensus top 14 law schools in the country, with only the University of Chicago and the top three public law schools – Michigan, Berkeley, and Virginia – not being named. Presumably all three of those state schools will be named when the public list comes out. It's worth noting at this point that Columbia and Northwestern were not spared despite the fact that both of those schools debased themselves and caved in the face of Trump's ridiculous shakedowns last year. Lotta good that did 'em. Never give in to a bully, folks. There's no percentage in it.

So yeah, the list is pretty comprehensive. It's too comprehensive, actually, because several of the listed universities – Brown, Princeton, Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Tufts, Johns Hopkins, FIT, and Hawaii Pacific –  don't even have law schools. The London School of Economics does have a law school but given that it's not, you know, in the United States, it's probably not super useful to an American military officer who wants to join the JAG corps.

My eyes, of course, immediately fell upon my alma mater, George Washington University. That's certainly an interesting inclusion. It's interesting on one level because I don't think anyone who knows anything about anything would consider that place to be infused with the woke mind virus. Indeed, its most famous law professor is one of the most shameless Trump Regime apologists to walk the Earth and he has spent a decade now violating any sane code of legal ethics lying about what the law is in order to give Trump political cover.

Putting GW on that list also creates a practical problem for the Pentagon and the Trump Regime at large because GW is, and always has been, the biggest single source of JD degrees for active duty military officers and currently-serving government employees going.

GW is walking distance from the State Department and the White House. It's three Metro stops from the Pentagon. It also has a massive night program which allows people with full-time jobs to be full-time law students. Maybe that's changed in the past couple of decades, but when I went there you would see scads of in-uniform military officers and other federal employees streaming up the front steps of Lerner Hall as the day student civilians would be streaming out. If those folks couldn't go to law school at GW, they couldn't, practically speaking, go anywhere.

Well, maybe they could go the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason across the river in Arlington, but I suppose we'll have to wait for the public school blacklist to see if it's spared. You'd assume so based on its name, but then again, I'd never guess that Harvard and Princeton would be on the blacklist either given that Pete Hegseth attended both of them.

A list I'd be proud to be on

Back on February 4 I wrote about a chilling case in which a retiree was the subject of a Department of Homeland Security administrative subpoena sent to Google for all of his digital information. That happened simply because he sent an email to a U.S. attorney imploring him not to deport a refugee who faced certain death if he was sent back to Afghanistan. Now DHS is topping that, and at scale:

The Department of Homeland Security is expanding its efforts to identify Americans who oppose Immigration and Customs Enforcement by sending tech companies legal requests for the names, email addresses, telephone numbers and other identifying data behind social media accounts that track or criticize the agency.

DHS has sent out hundreds of these administrative subpoenas to Google, Meta, Reddit, and Discord in recent months, targeting accounts that criticize ICE or note where its agents are operating. Google, Meta, and Reddit all confirmed that they have all turned over at least some user data. Discord did not comment when asked by the New York Times.

As I noted earlier this month, these administrative subpoenas do not have to be approved by a judge or go through any other sort of approval process. Stephen Miller or Kristi Noem or one of their underlings can just send one out – or dozens out – if they or the anti-dissent AI protocols they're running don't like what you're posting on the Internet. It's a process that, at least with respect to the tech companies, used to be reserved for serious crimes like child trafficking. Now it's being aimed at people posting neighborhood watch alerts or simply talking about how ICE is the American Gestapo and that each and every one of the people who work for it or give them their marching orders should be locked and prison until they rot like a sack of mealy apples.

Oh, was that something I should not have said? Is that something that is going to get me in trouble with DHS? Good. You should always judge a man by the quality of his enemies.

"Buy our product . . . or die!"

From The Guardian:

The judges would've also accepted the following:

• "Countries that do not embrace soda could be left behind, says Coca-Cola executive";
• "Countries that do not embrace Chevy Silverados could be left behind, says General Motors executive"; or
• "Countries that do not embrace adjustable air-supported sleep systems could be left behind, says Sleep Number Beds executive."

We see stuff like this almost every day. As well as "oh no, liberals are going to be left behind politically if they don't do what right wingers have done and embrace AI" stuff. All of which is bad enough substantively given what we know about AI. But the whole idea of product cheerleaders – or, as in the case of the Guardian article, executives with a direct vested interest in the product in question – giving us ultimatums like this gives the whole game away.

If this stuff was useful for most people that usefulness would either be manifest or would lend itself to a straightforward sales pitch in which the virtues of the product were clearly stated and the benefits to the consumer were made clear. Instead we get AI products being shoehorned against our will into programs and applications that have long functioned just fine without them and which serve to degrade them. Instead we get flat-out lies and deception in an effort to make AI seem more viable than it is. Instead we get threats and warnings, like the one mentioned above. It's the sort of sales pitch that, until recently, one never saw outside of commercials in which the CEO of Corncob TV tells Spectrum "I'll Kill You!" if they stop showing "Coffin Flop."

AI companies are losing money hand over fist. While there are some useful applications for AI products those applications (a) are not in the form of generalized consumer products; and (b) are nowhere near lucrative enough to sustain the current burn, especially if one were to price-in the economic, utility grid, and environmental damage they are inflicting. So now the handful of big AI companies out there are desperately trying to portray an AI-dominated future as inevitable and anyone who doesn't buy into that as a rube or a dead man walking.

Sorry. It’s not our job to "embrace AI" under pain of ruin. Make something that is useful and the externalities of which do not vastly outweigh the benefits and we'll all be happy. Short of that, let me worry about whether or not I'm "missing out." If you want me to believe that my life is bereft without AI, show me how that's the case. Don't insult my fucking intelligence and dignity by trying to threaten me into joining your pyramid scheme.

U2: "American Obituary"

It's been a minute since U2 put out new material, but what's going on in America and the world right now has inspired them. They dropped a whole damn six-song EP yesterday, entitled "Days of Ash." It includes today's outro song, "American Obituary," the lyrics of which talk about Renée Good's murder by Border Patrol agents and remind us that what they can't kill can't die.

"Days of Ash" also features songs about the war in Ukraine, including a song featuring both Ed Sheeran and Ukranian singer Taras Topolia. There's a song about Iranian schoolgirl Sarina Esmailzadeh and about Palestinian father and "No Other Land" documentary consultant Awdah Hathaleen. There's also a poem by Yehuda Amichai set to U2's music.

Like a lot of of-the-moment music – and, let's be honest, like a lot of U2 music in general – there are a few clunky lyrics here and there. But the boys sound more engaged here than they have in years and it's always good when U2 is engaged.

"The power of the people is so much stronger than the people in power." Damn straight. Welcome back, fellas.

Have a great day everyone.