Hmmmmm.

Josh (à) Beckett
Schilling
Clement
Wakefield
Arroyo
Miller
(Wells?)
(Papelbon?)

That might work. I like this deal, although Mike Lowell is going to be terrible for two years, and he's very expensive. He's another one whose career stats took a real nose-dive when the threat of steroid testing came up........

...and shame, Jean Schmidt, shame.

Bravo, John Murtha. Bravo.

I remember early in the season, Ohio State's Jim Tressel was criticized for not getting the ball to their best player, Ted Ginn. See, e.g. Texas (two catches, nine yards) and Penn State (three catches, forty yards).

That's exactly what we need on Saturday! Come on Coach Tressel, keep the ball out of Ted Ginn's hands!

My dad correctly points out that all baseball fans really should thank Rafael Palmeiro. Because of him baseball finally has an actual drug policy. I'm not sure it would have come about without him. Thanks, Raffy!

Wow.

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/eticket/story?page=steroids&num=1

ESPN shows conclusively that baseball knew about steroids in 1991, Bud Selig's recent claims of ignorance notwithstanding. And wow, everyone really was using them.

I'd like to hereby declare my availability to John Henry and the Red Sox. Not my availability for General Manager. Instead my availability for Club President. Larry Lucchino has failed and I would like to be considered for his role. As my first action, I would re-hire Theo Epstein to be GM. The Sox appear to be in complete disarray, and I'm very discouraged with the prospect of exchanging a smart statistically based GM for some old 'baseball sort'.

Now this is interesting, on a couple of levels. First, of course, the truth about the Gulf of Tonkin, which is that it never happened. (Sidenote, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, passed by Congress, gave LBJ the authority to vastly increase US troops in Vietnam.) So Congress was given false information by the administration and based on that false information it approved the administration's decision to go to war. (In Vietnam)

Obviously, the previous sentence could have been written about the present war in Iraq. Which brings up the second level that this new information is interesting. The present administration seems like it's trying to bury the discovery of the 40 year old mistake because the parallels are so obvious that even the President's defenders cannot deny them.


2000 Americans have now died in Iraq. There will be more, unfortunately, many more, sacrificed in a bloody, unwinnable war on the other side of the world. I don't know how many, and I don't know how long it will take, but sooner or later we will pull out of Iraq and then we will wonder what exactly we were doing there in the first place. I have no doubt that in 40 years, the present war in Iraq will be viewed as a serious mistake, just as today the Vietnam War is rightly seen as a mistake. And our children will wonder how it was that America could have so completely failed to learn the lessons of Vietnam.