gehringer_2

well, war is hell. We have journals that my dad wrote in WWII in the pacific that he didn't send because of the censors that shed a little light on why there weren't some Japanese POWs taken in that war.....

>national treasure? yeah - I don't always agree with Kareem but he is an honest an perceptive thinker. if he had a piece of sheepskin from an Ivy instead of NBA championship rings maybe we'd be able to listen to him instead half of the gas bags like Sharpton the media normally goes to for racial commentary. Of course I have no idea if Kareem cares about having a higher commentary profile. He definitely has always marched to his own drum.

second reference I've seen to the Russians leaving their dead behind. I bet that does wonders for Morale. Then again, since the poor conscripts may actually trust the Ukrainians to have more respect than their own commanders.....

Rosemary Wood's ghost still haunts the White House!

I think as of this moment the job is Victor's to lose, which he could still do, but so far he has shown a little more patience and has hit the ball hard in the air, and that is what they wanted from him.

this was good:

well, that's kind of fun.

Panetta? Did they have to get him out of cryo-storage for the quote?

would have loved a blood sample on Smith. If you watch the clip he was having a good time laughing 10 seconds before he went ape. Mood instability/impulse control etc. Reasonable markers for some kind of impairment...

actually, sanctuary for Putin is somewhere the Chinese might be able to make themselves useful. It seems doubtful Putin would go, but that's probably based more on the image he projects for himself than his reality. In the end most of these guys don't actually have the personal courage to stand their ground till death.

yeah - that was about as far as I've seen a ball hit to right at Lakeland.

Do they? Guys like Kronwall, Mantha and Anathasiou and Glendening were limited but did provide some kind of talent floor. in Glendening's and Kronwalls cases esp there were getting old so they were getting worse but they still haven't been replace by players better than they were before they aged out. DeKeyser is terrible but he wasn't before he was hurt. You've get Sieder, Bert, Vrana, Larkin. The whole rest of the roster is still minor league unless the two new guys start to show something different.

It's funny that for all these years the diamond has not been square. It's a pretty small difference in the overall scheme of things, but the diamond should be square and now it isn't. The biggest diff will be 1st to 2nd on a steal where your cutting down the distance by half the bag? That is significant. When the batter is rounding the bases bringing the base in will probably be of more marginal value because the sharper turn has the counter balance of slowing you down.

My favorite part was that supposedly Denzel told Smith afterward "It's when you're on top, the Devil comes for you" LOL - Denzel should be somebody's grandmother.

and just to expand on the last point, it's actually wonderful that the US is self-critical, the only issue I have is that too often we are self-critical about silly things "The President told the truth! Reactions at 11:00" and not critical enough about important things - for instance the way so much of the US journalism fell in behind the invasion of Iraq. ( or even 'Gulf of Tonkin' in its day FTM )

just for grins, if Merkel had said this out loud about Trump, what do we think the reactions from various quarters would be? Probably along the same lines as we have now? In Europe: "Of course!", the GOP: "c'est Terrible!", Dems: "Another person roasted for telling the truth by accident" and so on.... ...The difference would be that unlike the NYT and WaPO, Die Welt would all be: "You go girl!" .

It wasn't a gaffe in the sense of having misspoken - he said exactly what he meant to say. The question you really want to know the answer to is whether he was 'off script', but that's always an odd question to ask about a President because it's his script. Reagan was 'off-script' with Gorbachev as well. The consultant class around an executive like to promulgate the idea that they 'manage' their target, but that's a self-serving mirror image representation. It's presidents who allow their handlers too much veto power (Jimmy Carter a good example) who often fail because of it - it's usually their authentic instincts that made them successful in the first place. You know I've posted already that I think personalizing things with Putin may be questionable strategy so I'm not arguing I think it was any kind of great move - simply the idea that these guys don't spend a lot of time not knowing what they are doing. In that moment Biden made a calculation that he wanted to say that enough that it would be worth whatever message massaging would come later. He's the guy that got the votes and that gives him the right to do that. How far in advance it was or wasn't planned or whether he circulated a memo to his staff about it isn't that interesting to me. And that's the parallel to Trump. And really, isn't kind of silly to ask whether 'regime change' is the 'officlal' policy of the US gov when we are leading a huge international effort to produce a major battlefield defeat of a leader that almost certainly cannot survive it? Pretty hard to imagine what more the US could be doing to crush Putin personally by making the policy 'official'.

Well, Nick won't have to worry so much about it with the Phillies, that pitching staff should have the fans tuning out Phillies broadcasts by June anyway..... 😱

Of course as Trump so well perfected, you can say something deliberately to make a point with one audience, and then backfill to smooth the ruffles with another. Or Biden may have spoken with full intent knowing his 'people' were going to disagree and backfill as needed. I doubt there are many scenarios you can dream up that haven't been gamed out by media analysts so trying to guess what was 'on purpose', accidental, or 'accidental on purpose' is probably a futile exercise.

I've seen this referenced in a couple of places but I guess I don't know the context? Broadcasters talk over what is going on in preseason games (let alone regular season games!) all the time. What made this notable? EDIT: ok - looked it up - basically a lightning strikes twice story....

If it's last year, you might speculate they want to keep Hill playing everyday at Toledo so that any further upside with the bat would have more chance to develop, but he and Reyes have both reached an age where it's doubtful a JD Martinez offensive transformation is still likely.

finding 'someone' isn't the objective though is it? Blashill is 'someone'. You want 'the' guy. Maybe Yzerman's rep is enough to bring him here even with the team still miles away.

Cade puts up some weird stat lines - 37 minutes and zero rebounds? Almost as weird as his games with zero FTAs.

Probably would be hard to attract an established coach to a team with such thin talent. That could well buy Blash another season.

I guess I'm glad I watched UM for today's hockey fix.