WASHINGTON -- For the sixth year running, Democrats beat their Republican colleagues in the annual Roll Call Congressional Baseball Game for Charity.

Although Republicans had high hopes going into the game with their change in coaching staff, Democrats easily bested them 15-6 Wednesday evening at Nationals Park.

The Democrats held a strong lead even early on, scoring three runs in the first inning and then again in the second. The Republicans seemed poised to make a comeback, though, as they brought the score to 6-3 by the end of the third and began playing stronger defense.

A few critical errors by pitcher Rep. Patrick Meehan (R-Pa.) in the fifth, combined with strong hits by Reps. Tim Ryan (Ohio) and Raul Ruiz (Calif.) for the Democrats, led to eight runs in one inning. Rep. Linda Sánchez (D-Calif.) impressed the crowd as well, getting the audience on their feet to cheer for the only female player in the game and hitting a line drive to get on first. At the end of the fifth, the score was 14-4, dashing any hopes for a Republican victory.

The five black and Latino men, who were then teens, were convicted in 1989 of raping a 28-year-old woman in Central Park. But DNA evidence and a confession by a serial rapist later cleared Antron McCray, Korey Wise, Kevin Richardson, Yusuf Salaa and Raymond Santana in 2002, after the five had spent as long as 13 years in prison.

In an op-ed published in the New York Daily News on Saturday, Trump calls the settlement a "disgrace."

My opinion on the settlement of the Central Park Jogger case is that it’s a disgrace. A detective close to the case, and who has followed it since 1989, calls it “the heist of the century.”

Settling doesn’t mean innocence, but it indicates incompetence on several levels. This case has not been dormant, and many people have asked why it took so long to settle? It is politics at its lowest and worst form.

The five black and Latino men, who were then teens, were convicted in 1989 of raping a 28-year-old woman in Central Park. But DNA evidence and a confession by a serial rapist later cleared Antron McCray, Korey Wise, Kevin Richardson, Yusuf Salaa and Raymond Santana in 2002, after the five had spent as long as 13 years in prison.

In an op-ed published in the New York Daily News on Saturday, Trump calls the settlement a "disgrace."

My opinion on the settlement of the Central Park Jogger case is that it’s a disgrace. A detective close to the case, and who has followed it since 1989, calls it “the heist of the century.”

Settling doesn’t mean innocence, but it indicates incompetence on several levels. This case has not been dormant, and many people have asked why it took so long to settle? It is politics at its lowest and worst form.

1. They talk a lot about slavery.

When people hear "reparations," they automatically think that what's being discussed is reparations for slavery. Coates does talk about slavery in the piece — in particular, he notes the story of a formerly enslaved woman named Bellinda Royal who sued her former owner for recompense for her labors. But much of his focus falls on American housing policy from nearly a century later, events that have happened within living (and even recent) memory.

In the years following World War II, the economy was booming. Suburbs were popping up, thanks to a new federal highway system and millions of Americans availing themselves of government-backed home loans. World War II vets used their GI Bill benefits to pay for college or start their lives. The government was essentially subsidizing the creation of America's huge middle class.

Unless you were black. Coates outlines a constellation of ways that African-Americans were thoroughly shut out of that expansion of wealth. He spends much more time on the events of the 20th and 21st centuries than he does on the antebellum period. To Coates, one needn't go back as far as slavery to see officially sanctioned (and occasionally violent) opposition to black wealth creation.

Glenn Beck's natives are getting very restless, and many of them are now taking their frustrations out on him.

The organizers of last Friday's "Operation American Spring" (OAS) had claimed their massive Washington D.C. protest, "calling for the removal of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Harry Reid, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Nancy Pelosi, and Eric Holder as a start toward constitutional restoration," was likely to draw 10 million to 30 million fed-up American patriots to the nation's capital.

To the weekend-long bemusement of Democrats and progressives, the number of attendees at the rally was closer to 10 people than to 30 million. As even the rightwing Washington Times reported, attendance fell "woefully below expectations," with turnout claims varying from a few hundred to a few thousand. "Hundreds is more like it," said one of the attendees quoted by the Times.

Progressives were predictably entertained by the dismal failure of the umpteenth rally to save our nation from the "outlaws" or "commies" or "Muslims" or "Constitution haters" who have now taken it over the government — through peaceful elections. But once the King of the American Patriots himself, Glenn Beck, and his online "news" outlet The Blaze, appeared to join in to mock the event, the real patriots could no longer hold their tongues.