Mark A. Kilmer (the weblog)

Perhaps our uptight friends on the left slide of the ‘gosphere need a Joe Torre to help them lighten up a bit. From Jim Baumbach at Yankees spring training:

Position players had to report to the main field at 11:08 to “run the bases” in a drill run by Joe Torre, which should have been their first clue (Torre usually oversees drills). Anyway, Torre told them they were running races from home to second, with one player running the first-base line and the other player sprinting up the third-base line.

The first two contestants were Doug Mientkiewicz and speedy youngster Brett Gardner. But once they took off, the rest of the players headed toward the dugout laughing. By the time Gardner and Mientkiewicz reached second, they turned back and saw no one at home plate, and they immediately realized they were fooled. As they walked off the field, there was laughter coming from the players at the dugout.

I even heard Larry Bowa yell, “You got punked!”

Then again, Joe Torre is “dead man managing,” the same tired line every hour on the hour. So is Markos.

According to formerly detained terrorist Marwan Jabour, the United States tortured him in secret prisons in Europe and Southeast Asia.

Jabour began to receive better food, including pizza and Snickers and Kit-Kat bars.

Prisoners had their own library, “stocked with books in Arabic, Urdu and English.”

He was eventually handed over to the “Zionist entity,” where he was further tortured. (And renditioned, I assume.)

“Good luck,” one of them said to Jabour as he crossed into Gaza, where his parents awaited.

Marwan says he wasn’t a terrorist. He was only buying medical supplies from al Qaeda after their women and children were slaughtered by the United States. I’m not kidding.

And the Washington Post corroborated little of this. They claim anonymous intelligence officials who claim to be anonymously “familiar with” something similar, which adds up to possible nonsense.

I don’t know what our government did to these prisoners, but I’d need more proof than would your average WashPost journalist before I asserted anything. And when dealing with terrorists, the lines must be drawn differently because that’s how the battle goes.

Why the retro rock-n-roll rag Rolling Stone has discovered: The Most Honest Man in News. The subhead reads: “Keith Olbermann is mad as hell — and unlike Rush Limbaugh, he’s not faking it.”

Let us be clear on something. Keith Olbermann has a show. Keith Olbermann has a shtick. Keith Olbermann’s shtick is his show. Among cable news shows, Olbermann’s show regularly comes in 4th out of six shows, and the only reason he is on the air is his anti-Bush vitriol. The put on his obvious, or it should be to anyone but a stoned music writer who doesn’t even read his own crap.

Audience response [to an Olbermann test-rant] was positive, so Olbermann began hitting the Bush administration even harder. Scathing

It’s a game to Olbermann. Throw out a few intellectually lazy bits of non sequitur and collect a paycheck. It pays the bills, and he cannot go back to ESPN.

Keith Olbermann is a spineless simp sucking success from worthwhile others: Bill O’Reilly and President Bush, to name two. His entire existence is based on other people. He is truly a worthless man.

But who in that audience has enough brain cells left to care, anyway?

Condi Rice indicates that the U.S. will talk, with Iraq, to Iran and Syria.

Carl Levin wants to “take action on all fronts including Syria and any other source of weapons coming in, obviously Iran.”

Figure it out yourselves.

Can I pretty please blame Musharraf for this?

At least 11 people were killed and more than 100 people injured by sharpened kite strings, stray bullets and other accidents at an annual kite-flying festival in eastern Pakistan, officials said Monday.

The two-day Basant festival is regularly marred by casualties caused by sharpened kite strings or celebratory gunshots fired into the air. Kite flyers often use strings made of wire or coated with ground glass to try to damage a rival’s kite, often after betting on the outcome.

Authorities had banned kite flying following a string of deaths at the festival last year, but temporarily lifted it before this year’s event. Officials said the ban was re-imposed following the latest deaths.

And it does not even suprise me. I wonder if this was followed by rioting?

This morning, I was listening to Erik Mikael Karlsson’s Night of Enchantment when I was struck with a thought:

What is this crap, and why I am listening to it?

If it were vinyl, I’d shatter it.

Genius is what we seek, and here is the late Glenn Gould playing the first Contrapunctus from J.S. Bach’s The Art of the Fugue. Gould was a near-genius and Bach transcended all mortal that went before and has come since.

Stop? Hammer time.

I mention the guy on my blog, a politics blog, and he is instantly injured. Jim Baumbach of Newsday writes at his On the Yankees Beat blog:

Bobby Abreu strained an oblique muscle in batting practice today and is expected to be shut down from all baseball related activities for a few weeks. If you ask me, Opening Day is in question. The Yankees sent him for more tests.

He asked Joe if this meant that Bernie could sneak in, and Torre said: “No.” (Torre should be replaced, though not for a bland remark.) If Bobby’s out for opening day, call Melky.

And if whats-his-name stays hurt, as he probably will, Brian can snag Chacon back from the Pirates or put Gator back out there. I’m almost serious. Sure, he’s probably lost a few hours off his fastball, but he can still no doubt throw faster than, say, Wakefield.

No, this is not a Yankees blog. It’s not a sports blog. If you want politics, I posted this one at RedState this morning: Despite LAT protest to the contrary, Schwarzenegger backs Bush on Iraq

I don’t know that he’s a peach, per se. He’s a right fielder.

I posted this at RedState Sports, which is again viewable using IE7 (’t was designed primarily for FireFox).
—–

On his spring training blog, Middletown Times Herald-Record columnist Michael Geffner announces that he’s fallen in love with Yankees’ RF Bobby Abreu, to whom he refers as a “gentle, beautiful, loveable soul.” (I had been led to believe that such a description should belong to Sal Fasano, but my information is notoriously faulty and Fasano left the roster as a free agent.)

He puts together a good column from an Abreu interview:

You heard he couldn’t run anymore. You heard he couldn’t play good defense. You heard that his bat speed was fading and he couldn’t lift the ball anymore, at least not enough to hit homers and be considered a power hitter at this point.

Nah. At the time, Baseball Crank said he was a great pickup for the Yanks and a future Hall-of-Famer. Of course, Dan is not the notorious New York sports press. Geffner essentially is part of that:

Read More….

(more…)

Just like the script reads: Al Gore won his Academy Award, and now he just might run for President.

Jimmy Carter backs Al Gore, and that’s before the world knew Gore’s horror hyperbole had won the award.

I found this reply over at CBS.com, on the FTN page. (As there are no smart links for individual comments, it’s the first one on the list.)

It looks like good found poetry to me. Witness:

Who cares about Elections?

The Elite will get
whoever they want into
office.

It’s that
simple.

You can spend
years
trying to change the system
but the ONLY solution is
REVOLUTION.

It was signed “facistusa,” whom I’ve just converted into the next Tristan Tzara.

Some soldiers go to war as others come home. War is always a bad thing, and I abhor the worse things which make war necessary.

And I’d like metaphorically to shake those who’d make this war a political game, and by that, I mean playing politics with it, not the souls who attempt rhetorically to countermand this.

Sunday, February 25, 2007

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin led off NBC’s Meet the Press, declaring that he opposed any bid to cut funding from our troops in Iraq as “wrong morally” and because it would be a victory for the President, giving him something to use against Dems. He wants to modify the resolution authorizing the use of force to limit our troops to a supporting role in Iraq, getting them out by March of next year with a token force remaining to fight al Qaeda.

I didn’t stick around for the Mo Dowd vs. Byron York panel discussion of Hillary vs. Obama.

Secretary of State Condoleezza told Chris Wallace on FOX News Sunday that we’d be happy for now with just a behavior modification from Iraq where they’d stop enriching Uranium and join the international community. Next on FNS, Texas Governor Rick Perry, a Republican, proved conclusively that he has better hair than Mitt and wants to forcibly vaccinate teenage girls for cervical cancer. Pennsylvania Governor Fast Eddie, a Democrat, said that the parents should make that decision and that Pennsylvania is still relevant because it has the 19th largest economy in the world. Neither governor wants to be veep, though Perry could help Giuliani by countering Mitt’s hair.

Oh, never mind.

On TW, Jimmy Carter again proved clueless. He said that he is not an Anti-Semite because most Jews agree with him. (Steph didn’t ask about the term “apartheid.”) He added later that he supports Al Gore for President.

Later on TW, Secretary Rice stressed the necessity of the Commander-in-Chief to be able to work, uninterrupted by those with livers of lily, with his commanders in the ground. They don’t need Joe Biden and Carl Levin, Nancy Pelosi or Jack Murtha, stepping in the middle with notions of micromanagement.

On FTN, California Governor Schwarzenegger channeled Frank Capra, announcing that everyone in politics should work together, get along, and always be happy. He favors a timetable in Iraq, lest the war become another “Korea or Vietnam.” He also thinks that Congress should either cut the funds or let the President run the war.

John Edwards, next on FTN, to host Bob Schieffer that he’s for “transformational change” and that he has no idea how anyone’s Iraq plans will turn out. (To be fair, who does?) He said that he wants to restore honesty and decency to the White House.

On Late Edition, Iraqi National Security Advisor Mowaffak al Rubaie said that his intelligence tells him that the Iranians have recently stopped funding militants in Iraq and have agreed not to interfere in Iraqi sovereignty. That’s a bombshell of a sort.

Hank Kissinger and Maddy Albright were up next with Wolf on CNN, and Hank seemed to blame Democrats (”domestic issues”) for the failures in Iraq. Maddy asserted that she had predicted that Iraq would be a larger foreign policy blunder than Vietnam long before Joe Biden did. (In a clip Blitzer had played of Biden from Friday, he used almost identical language to that used by Maddy last July.)

And on LE, Presidential hopeful Sam Brownback of Kansas scoffed at the Romney campaign’s recent noise about Brownback’s alleged “abortion conversion.” He also suggested for Iraq a plan which sounded similar to Leslie Gelb’s plan to partition Iraq into Sunni-Shi’ite-Kurd, the one claimed by Joe Biden.

Read the show-by-show details at RedState.com.

From Peter Abraham at the LoHud Yankees Blog:

There was a small crowd at Legends Field today, maybe 1,000 people, and the music was softer than it usually is.

So it was easy to hear when some joker yelled out, “Hey, A-Rod, you suck!” as Alex Rodriguez was leaving the batting cage after taking a few swings against Kei Igawa.

Even Rodriguez turned and look at the guy, who was wearing a Dartmouth t-shirt. It sort of made you wince because you knew everybody had heard it. A few people turned and told the guy to shut up.

When it was Rodriguez’s turn again, the crowd gave him a nice ovation with some fans standing and shouting encouragement. He cracked a ball into right field and the cheers got even louder.

What does this all mean? Hard to say. But I get the sense that most Yankee fans want to cut the guy a break and are pulling for him.

It also means that Red Sox fans are sore losers.

Today wasn’t a blogging day for me, as my wife and I visited my father, went grocery shopping, and etc. (There, I used etc. as a noun, meaning “etc.” In that, I’ve given it life independent of and beyond the Latin for which it is an abbreviation.)

I tell you this, dear readers… no reason, but I received a strangely high volume of hits today to thi s blog today, people googling: THIS. It took them to THIS POST, which made no sound point.

Neither does this, apparantly:

It all stinks
like yesterday’s Nashville.
where a thousand old cowboys stunk
up the place
a thousand times and years before.

when I calculate: too old for an obscurity’s anger
living with the rust, peeling off the sad wrap
the glad wrap
find your place in the mosh pit

anger doesn’t bleed
don’t tell me or let them tell you
that it does
think instead that blood is life
and anger, like anything, is dead

eating little monkeys
and catching the disease
trapped in the meter of the cowboys
as they retrace your steps
holding tight to your bannister

on the bannister stands a cannister
of psychotic memories of people
who are probably all dead
like the babe on Match Game
who never called you back.
let it ring for hours.

I feel for you!
the passion of my fingers empties
onto the screen, the condom is used.
abuse defused.
the population will thank us
when we remind them with electric charge.

But we all know what we think of poets.

For Sunday, February 25, 2007

Meet the Press (NBC): Host Tim Russert will talk to Carl Levin. That’s all, just that one, lone, miserable Senator from Michigan, Carl Levin. (Debbie Stabenow is not as dour.)

FOX News Sunday (FNS): Host Chris Wallace talks to the circumnavigating Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Next, Chris speaks with two governors: Republican Rick Perry of Texas and Fast Eddie Rendell, Democrat of Pennsylvania.

Face the Nation (CBS): Host Bob Schieffer talks to another governor, more interesting than either Perry for Fast Eddie: Ahnold. Then, shucks-darn-it, he talks to John-boy Edwards.

This Week (ABC): Host George Stephanopoulos talks to Jimmy Carter, Nobel Peace Prize winning Anti-Semite and validator of South American dictators.

Late Edition (CNN): Host Wolf Blitzer talks to Sam Browback, Jane Harman, Duncan Hunter, and Iraqi National Security Advisor Dr. Mowaffak al-Rubaie. He also talks to Hank Kissinger and that insufferable frump Madeline Albright.
—–

The list is a little negative this week, but what are we going to do with Levin, Two-Americas, Jimmy What, and Fast Eddie? I don’t know where Joe Biden is.

I’ve had a beautiful thought, though: What of the octogenerian Carter used the tremendous platform of the ABC show to intone that he is dissatisfied with every candidate currently seeking the Dem Presidential nomination and thus will be launching his second bid for reelection. Unlike in 1980, he could argue, he’ll make them count every vote this time.

Visit RedState.com tomorrow afternoon for the preview.