Even though Cole Hamels is back to being a killer again and Carlos Ruiz hit his second walk off homer, we have to hear about this:
Another idiot fan ran onto the field last night. But this fan ran onto the field at the worst possible moment — just as Hamels was about to throw his first pitch in the ninth inning with a shutout on the line.
Cardinals right-hander Adam Wainwright put it best: “That was tired, that was bad. You know what? The Phillies fans should be mad at that guy because he might’ve gotten in the way of Cole’s mojo he had going. That’s terrible timing. And if you don’t want to get Tased, don’t go on the field. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with getting Tased if you’re on the field.”
No, tasing isn’t necessary and thankfully this jerk wasn’t TASERed. (and fucking with my Phillies versus a NL rival pushes my liberalism as much as anything does). They are police officers, they should be trained along with security to tackle the idiots no need to use a technology that isn’t as safe as we are normally told. Prosecute the idiots, fine them, ban them from the stadium, but exposing them to a potentially lethal method of apprehention is not justified in my opinion. Heaven forbid an officer pulls out a gun accidentally and shoots at the trespasser. Unless its the playoffs…then they can call in a CIA drone and blow their ass up. (kidding. sort of)
we need power? You know what the GOP wants us to do!
Drill Baby Drill? Naw! 11 dead because of Spills Baby Spills!
Come on your wasting the energies of real Americans! Let’s clean it up and get back to Drill Baby Drill!
Five times more oil a day than previously believed is spewing into the Gulf of Mexico from a blown-out well of a sunken drilling rig, the Coast Guard said Wednesday, an estimate the oil company trying to contain the massive spill disputes. A new leak was discovered in the pipes a mile below the oceans surface. Coast Guard Rear Adm. Mary Landry said National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration experts now estimate that 5,000 barrels a day of oil are spilling into the gulf. Officials had estimated the leak for days at 1,000 barrels a day.The news came hours after crews tried a test burn on the massive spill to try to slow it from reaching the U.S. shoreline.
There is another group that has been around for a while but about which I have not written before – some elements of the right-to-life group. What is their connection to vaccines? – the false belief that vaccines contain cells from aborted fetuses.
Phillies first baseman Ryan Howard signed a 125 million, 5 year extension that will keep him in Philadelphia up until 2016. Many folks think Howard was overpaid based on past performance and age. I think they overpaid if we can’t keep Werth who is about the same age and is a right handed, power hitting pitch eater at the plate and a perfect fit behind Howard in the lineup.
What it really changes is the price tag attached to Albert Pujols. I am a Phillies fan, Ryan Howard is awesome to me and I am glad he will be here well into the 10’s. But Pujols is just better and Howard’s deal will be used as a starting point for Pujols because Pujols is just that much better of a hitter, fielder and base runner.
Some estimate if Howard is pegged at 25 million a year in his new deal, Pujols’ new deal would have to be 50 million per year. If that happens, who will be able to afford him and field a viable team? The only teams with higher payrolls than the Phillies $141 million plus total for 2010? The Yankees ($206m+), Red Sox ($162m+) and Cubs ($146m+).
Back to how it feels as a Philly fan, and yes there is a contingent of Howard haters (aka idiots), it feels great. Howard has worked and gotten better since he broke into the league. He has been in better shape, become a much better fielder and is still working on his plate discipline. An MVP who continues to work hard is fine with me.
“I think we’re blessed as an organization, especially at the Major League level, with guys who take a lot of pride in their craft,” [Phillies GM Ruben] Amaro said. “Ryan is one of those guys. He clearly has dedicated himself to being a very complete player. He’s worked on his defense. He’s worked on his body. He has a special attribute with his power and run production that not many in the history of this game have been able to accomplish. But yet he continues to work to be a better player.”
“It’s just a matter of going out there and doing what I’ve been doing the past couple years, which is just trying to stay ahead of my training,” Howard said. “Just making sure my body is staying good and staying healthy. I feel that what I’ve been doing over the past couple years, I feel pretty confident that down the road I’ll be right where I want to be.”
Joan Walsh further explains her rejection of the “left does it as much as the right” false equivalence that Joe Scarborough and other conservatives use to excuse over the top rhetoric from the right.
Of course, that’s stupid. I didn’t name anyone not because I was stumped; it was because in my opinion, the violent rhetoric is coming from the right, not the left. It’s not Nancy Pelosi who’s telling her San Francisco constituents they need to be “armed and dangerous” to fight their political enemies; that’s Michele Bachmann. There isn’t anyone in liberal media as consistently vicious as Beck or Limbaugh. Now, the lads at Newsbusters are providing their own names, but I wouldn’t compare anyone they mention to the two right-wing titans of hate.
Not only do liberal, progressive and Democratic politicians not echo violent or demeaning rhetoric from the far left, no progressive politician had to kiss Keith Olbermann’s ring and apologize on a live broadcast for disagreeing with a an Olbermann special comment. When Bill Maher rambles into some psuedo-science anti-vaccine garbage, liberals are happy to vehemently disagree with him. Rachel Maddow’s wonky segments are not liberal talking points for the week. The Tea Baggers follow Glenn Beck, indeed he is their number one TV pundit.
Unlike George W. Bush’s cushy treatment from right wing media sources, the liberal media sources and blogo-sphere has been steadily critical of Barack Obama and his policies.
The Jamaican flags were all over University City this Saturday, and for good reason: Usain Bolt and Team Jamaica were running at the 116th Penn Relays. 54,310 people came to see just under 9 seconds of the fastest man in the world.
California Cronies…I guess Romney is literally distancing himself from his “socialist” health care plan in Massachusetts.
True, his hair was slicked back in signature style, but his rumpled cotton shirt looked nothing like the pressed suits he favored while governor of the Bay State. Tufts of gray hair poked above the open neck, and a bronze California glow replaced the pasty complexion normally found amid a New England winter.
Since losing his presidential bid in 2008, Romney has gone West Coast. It’s part of a personal and political repositioning as he looks to avoid campaign trouble spots and reorder his life ahead of a second White House campaign in 2012.
Romney not only sold his family home in Belmont, Mass., but he bought a house — for $12 million — in the northern San Diego community of La Jolla. He traded a snowy commute for early morning beach strolls amid the dog walkers. And he’s become a familiar face at California political events, addressing the state Republican convention last month and campaigning on behalf of his former Bain Capital protege, Meg Whitman, a candidate for governor.
The more you read, the more awful the Upper Big Branch story becomes…
Well before this month’s fatal explosion at Upper Big Branch, the country’s worst mine disaster in 40 years, the lack of proper ventilation had been a continuing concern among its miners. The fear of methane building while oxygen dropped preyed on their minds.
“I have had guys come to me and cry,” said the veteran foreman. “Grown men cried — because they are scared.”
But workers in the mine said they did not dare question the company’s safety practices, even when asked to perform a dubious task.
“It was all about production,” said Andrew Tyler, 22, an electrician who two years ago worked as a subcontractor on the wiring for the coal conveyer belt and other equipment at Upper Big Branch. “If you worked for them, you didn’t ask questions about whether some step like running a cable around the breaker was a smart idea. You just did it.”
GM was loaned money, restructured and payed back the money ahead of time.
General Motors Co. repaid $5.8 billion to the U.S. Treasury and Export Development Canada, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Ed Whitacre wrote in the Wall Street Journal.
The company is paying back the loans “in full, with interest, years ahead of schedule,” Whitacre said in an opinion article in the Wall Street Journal. The two governments hold a majority of the automaker’s equity, he said.
The repayment shows “our plan for building a new GM is working,” Whitacre said. GM is “leaner, stronger” and building new vehicles whose sales have allowed the company to invest more than $1.5 billion at 20 plants in the U.S. and Canada, he said.
Whitacre said that nobody, including taxpayers and the company itself, was happy that GM needed government loans.
GM has, in fact, outsold all other manufacturers in the large U.S. market for every single month of the recession. GM has finally been able to get its financial house in order and this bodes well for a strong future. The GM Equinox is selling so well that it is capacity-constrained, which means all the Equinoxes that are made are sold right away. This is why GM is going to build some in Oshawa. The body stampings and body welding of these vehicles will be done at the Ingersoll plant, and then the vehicles will be sent to Oshawa for paint and final assembly. This is a smart move to use the paint capacity in Oshawa as the paint shop is the most expensive investment with the longest lead time to build. Again, this is good news for our community.
Some good news for the US and Canadian taxpayers who hold a 60% equity stake in GM as a result of the remaining $43 billion in aid. Thankfully, we are past the days when uncertainty drove the main stream press to ask Hewitt and Limbaugh their “expert” opinion on this matter.
Complicating matters, the bailout is triggering a harsh reaction from the conservative end of the political spectrum, with some high-profile pundits calling for an outright boycott of what many are calling “Government Motors.”
Among the most vocal is Hugh Hewitt, who has frequently called for a boycott to protest the “Obamaization of the American car business,” both on his syndicated radio show and on his blog.
Hewitt insists that “individual Americans” must resist buying the automaker’s products because, as he wrote in one blog entry, “every dollar spent with GM is a dollar spent against free enterprise.”
Powerful radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh also has been associated with the movement but said he has not encouraged any boycott.
“I think it is media childishness when people start urging boycotts,” he said on his show this month, according to a transcript posted on his Web site.
He did say he has heard from listeners who do not intend to buy another GM or Chrysler car.
“The reasons I got from people who just sent me e-mails was they don’t want to support Obama’s socialism,” Limbaugh said. “They don’t want to support the notion of government running the car companies, and they don’t want to patronize companies that have been bailed out.”
In a sane world, the run-up in household leverage would have been universally greeted as a somewhat alarming trend. In the real world, however, the political right’s zeal to wave this issue away led most right-of-center folks to embrace the theory that consumption was all that mattered, so growing indebtedness was good. I think it’s wrong to say that we had the crash “because” of stagnating incomes, but the stagnation and the unwillingness of political elites to confront it was a key backdrop of the political economy of the crisis. It made it unthinkable and impossible for the people running the country to see what should have been an obviously problematic situation.
“We had a president that couldn’t get there on time a lot, Bill Clinton,” Jerry said, addressing Dez Bryant’s punctuality problems in bizarre fashion. “Seriously.
“But boy, when he got there, he brought the wood.”
I hate that the Cowboys have Bryant. With Jasen Witten, Miles Austin, Patrick Crayton and now Bryant, I don’t count Roy Williams…he is bad by choice, they have 4 big play-making receivers that are just physically imposing. They will be tough for Eagles to defend. Couple that with a backfield with Felix Jones, Tashard Choice and Marion Barber its just a lot of weapons for a defensive coordinator to scheme against.
Philadelphia Eagles last pick by trade, but first pick by chronology is former first round pick linebacker Ernie Sims. The rest is up to Andy Reid and GM Howie Roseman. Trading McNabb to the Redskins means division title or bust. Considering the leadership drain of losing veterans like McNabb, Brian Dawkins, John Runyan, Tra Thomas and Brian Westbrook the Eagles 2010 draft is the most important since Andy’s first draft as Eagles head coach.
I hope they get a top flight safety, another running back and some offensive lineman.
UPDATE: If the redskins get Okung or Trent Williams I am going to throw up.
UPDATE: Mike Mayock on the NFLN is my favorite draft analyst, but Mike Irvin is testing my patience.
Adam Weinstein pre-empts the chicken hawk criticism that will be irresponsibly directed at Obama Administration’s Pentagon after the US Army’s withdrawal from the outpost in Korengal Valley.
That’s all well and good, being the opinion of someone—like yours truly—who has the luxury of unfettered Web access, warm dinners, and big opinions. It’s also diametrically opposed to the opinion of at least one soldier who fought at the outpost, losing half his platoon. “It confuses me, why it took so long for them to realize that we weren’t making progress up there,” he told the New York Times.
Let’s hope the right wing won’t join forces with Taliban yokels in second-guessing the generals over this business. As the Journal story made clear, our Army is now led by generals who do enough second-guessing for all of us, in terms that sometimes sound eerily similar to those the antiwar movement has used for eight years:
Asked about moving out of the valley after losing so many men here, Gen. McChrystal said: “I care deeply about everyone who’s been hurt here. But I can’t do anything about that. I can do something about people hurt in the future.”
Basically, the costs did not justify the reward and US commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal believes that leaving this outpost will not make or break US efforts in Afghanistan. The area is a rural one, with a rare regional language being spoken and a generally anti-foreigner cultural orientation. McChrystal seeks to focus the forces around urban population centers. Al Jazeera reports on the Taliban movement on to this base:
Sebastion Junger, a former embedded reporter in Afghanistan, let’s us in on how some of the soldiers who fought at this outpost for years feel about this strategic decision.
In that sense, the Korengal was literally sacred ground. Every man in Battle Company lost a good friend there, and every man was nearly killed there. These soldiers did not require “strategic importance” or “national interest” to give the place value — it already had that in spades.
Outpost Restrepo was named after Juan Restrepo, a platoon medic who was killed on July 22, 2007. He was one of the best-liked men in the platoon, and his death was devastating. The men took enormous pride in the outpost they built, and they can now go online and watch videotape of it being blown up by an American demolition team. It is a painful experience for many of them, and in recent days, e-mail messages have flown back and forth as the men have tried to come to terms with it. One man became increasingly overwrought from watching the video over and over again, wondering what all the sacrifice had been for. Another soldier finally intervened.
“They might have pulled out but they can’t take away what we accomplished and how hard we fought there,” he wrote to his distraught comrade. “The base is a base, we all knew it would sooner or later come down. But what Battle Company did there cannot be blown up, ripped down or burned down. Remember that.”
Months ago, there were news reports of two detainees at Bagram who said they were abused in a secret “black jail” facility to which the International Committee of the Red Cross has been denied access. Last week, a BBC reporter said she had spoken to nine former detainees who corroborated both the existence of the facility and the allegation that detainees are abused there
President Barack Obama kisses Dr. Dorothy Height during a meeting on Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. President Obama met with a group of African American seniors and their grandchildren on the legacy of the civil rights movement January 18, 2010. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
Dr. Dorothy Height pioneer for women’s rights and civil rights died at the age of 98. Melissa Harris-Lacewell remembers Height at The Nation
For decades, Height led the National Council of Negro Women. She used her voice to advocate for African American women’s inclusion in higher education, corporate America, world politics and community leadership. She had the ear of American presidents and she used her role to speak for those whose voices and interests mostly went unheard. As president of Delta Sigma Theta, a national, historic, women’s service organization Height encouraged young women to follow her lead as organizers and servants of their communities.
Dorothy Height’s legacy was visible on the night Barack Obama was elected to the United States presidency. On that night he concluded his speech by discussing Ann Cooper, a 106-year old black woman whose life bore witness to the exceptional changes wrought in our country during the last century. Though her story, President Obama asked us to reconsider the American story through the eyes of black women and thereby challenged us to find a new American narrative that might emerge if we tell the story on their terms.
Charles Blow went to a Tea Bagger rally where there was an expo of non-white tea baggers.
I found the imagery surreal and a bit sad: the minorities trying desperately to prove that they were “one of the good ones”; the organizers trying desperately to resolve any racial guilt among the crowd. The message was clear: How could we be intolerant if these multicolored faces feel the same way we do?
It was a farce. This Tea Party wanted to project a mainstream image of a group that is anything but. A New York Times/CBS News poll released on Wednesday found that only 1 percent of Tea Party supporters are black and only 1 percent are Hispanic. It’s almost all white.
And even when compared to other whites, their views are extreme and marginal. For instance, white Tea Party supporters are twice as likely as white independents and eight times as likely as white Democrats to believe that Barack Obama was born in another country.
Furthermore, they were more than eight times as likely as white independents and six times as likely as white Democrats to think that the Obama administration favors blacks over whites.
Thursday night I saw a political minstrel show devised for the entertainment of those on the rim of obliviousness and for those engaged in the subterfuge of intolerance. I was not amused.
Note: Blow’s use of word minstrelsy is being seen by some as Blow intimating that their political views negate their blackness. I don’t see it that way at all. I think Blow is saying these people of color are in a movement that publicly manifests itself with messages of xenophobic and racist hatred. You can believe in no gun laws, tax cuts to the bone, no stimulus and no health care reform and not run out on stage on behalf of a bunch of people who condone and/or promote ethnic hatred while supporting these views.
Minstrelsy depicted blacks happy to be slaves, the individuals Blow saw on stage are happy to depict tea bagging as a politically focused phenomena regardless of racial slurs and appeals to anti-government violence that regularly appear at Tea Bagger rallies.
