All Star Game and Such

Let’s just start off with the All-Star Game since we enjoyed it. A lot. And we couldn’t disagree more with Deadspin who found the game ‘boring’ and dull. Insert “Who wants to see me hit some dingers!” joke here.

It was a well played, fun, pitchers duel (though not sure how a game feature 983 pitchers could be called a duel, so maybe it’s a pitchers nine-hundred eighty third?). And then Michael Young warms the heart of the South Side… we know we get the Mets in Chicago on Oct. 21 instead of having to go to Queens.

Anyway, call us crazy, but we enjoyed the game. We got to see Kenny Rogers dive for that ball, Beltran get his ass down the line and almost pull a hammy (and steal third earlier in the game), and let’s not forget starting second baseman on “Johnny Gammons” Chase Utley leg out an infield single. So what if it’s an exhibition game… it was a good game and as far as we could tell, pretty much everyone played hard and sort of cared. And we thank Brad Penny for deciding to throw 98/99 mph just for shits and giggles. That set the tone of the game. After Ortiz was about two years late on that first pitch, he bucked down and got himself into that at bat. He then struck out, but who cares. It was fun to see Penny try a throw a ball 140 miles an hour. Therefore he gets our MVP award.

And not like we could love a man any more, but we found a way to love Vlad Guerrero even more. That home run he hit. R-I-D-I-C-L-O-U-S. Probably our favorite baseball player to watch play baseball.

Remember, the President is always right. I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP. Just awesome guys… so if he’s always right… oh fuck it… if you can’t see the problems with that statement, just fuck it. I give up. And pardon my French, sorry.

You don’t know us well enough if you don’t think we printed out all the Big Ten Blueribbon reports on ESPN.com yesterday. We’re not a little excited about college football… we’re beyond excited. And I can’t wait to see Notre Dame go 9-3 yet have Domers tell us that they should have been #1 since they lost to Michigan at home and Michigan almost beat Ohio State who almost beat Texas who almost best Okalahoma. (BTW, we have not clue if Okalahoma is going to be #1 at the end of the year, but I had to draw the “almost” line out).

We were duped into thinking this would be sort of interesting… you know Novak coming clean on the whole Valerie Plume stuff… well it wasn’t interesting. In fact, it was a total waste of time. Novak’s sources? He doesn’t give one of them, the second is Rove (no way!), and the third is the CIA PR guy or something like that. There I saved you some time of a man writing about himself and his sources. And yes, at this point it’s beyond obvious that the White House was pissed at Wilson for calling him lairs and therefore acted like a bunch of 3rd graders who didn’t get their way in a kickball game so they went and told the teacher. And it looks like no one got hurt this time around, which, I guess means, all’s well that ends well, but let’s make sure it doesn’t happen again. Okay Assholes down the street from me? Good.

You know, every time I watch “The Royal Tenenbaums” and get to the part where Richie Tenenbaum (Luke Wilson) decides that’s it’s time to take his life and “Needle in the Hay” by Elliott Smith is playing… well it freaks me out. A lot. I mean, don’t you think Wes Anderson and company should go back and change it now that Smith took his life? Is that one of those things where Anderson wakes up every morning and go, “I wish I had that one back...” And is it alright for me to assume that the Tenenbaums were Jewish? And if so, where does that place Richie Tenenbaum on the list of greatest Jewish athletes… he has to crack the top ten, probably top five right? In fact, I sort of want this to take flight just so he and Rocky Balboa can go on tour together as “Great Athletes that don’t exist but are taken on by a city/group of people.” You know since, Rocky is the greatest Philly athlete of all time (true fact) why can’t Richie being one of the greatest Jewish athletes of all time?

Good news for US soccer… Klinsmann won’t be coaching Germany any more which means the likely hood of him being the next coach of US soccer is pretty good. Klinsmann lives in California and took a lot of heat from the German media leading up to the World Cup. He made the media look like fools by taking Germany to the semis and turned them into the most entertaining team in the process. He’s the sort of coach the US needs at this point, someone who’s going to be able not only to develop and discover talent, but someone who can also handle a match tactically. Bruce Arena did a wonderful job with the US, but it’s time for some new blood with a little more experience on the World Stage. Klinsmann would be that sort of guy. He can live in Cali, not have to commute as far (last I checked, New York was closer to LA than Berlin; and a lot of the top US soccer facilities are in LA anyway) and he won’t be under as much pressure from the media. He’ll be allowed to grow with the team and hopefully can kick Landon Donovan in the arse and tell him to go to England or something… arrrrrrgggggg Landon…. Oh yeah, as always, we agree with That’s On Point.

And just when we think we hear some good news… this shit in Israel and the Middle East just keeps getting worse. Now we’ve got Israeli troops in Lebanon after two Israeli soldiers were seized by Hezbollah. Awesome. Really. This might be a classic, be careful what you wish for, situation. Sheron wasn’t loved by many outside of Israel, but now that he’s gone things have gone from shit to fucking shit over there. At some point you’d figure both sides would get sick of this crap, of the death and horror, fear and terror, but I guess they don’t. Yeah it’s a messed up situation, we’re not going to deny that. And it’s not easy to fix and it’s not something that one day everyone will say, “You know what, we were wrong, sorry!” But just what is each side trying to accomplish by trying to over react to the other sides over reaction? And of course this doesn’t even touch on Iraq… which at this point hearing that a hundred people died in attacks the day before has become common place. How sad.

But on to the good news. Bush and company blinked:
But the White House acknowledgment on Tuesday that a key clause of the Geneva Conventions applies to Qaeda detainees, as a recent Supreme Court ruling affirmed, is only the latest step in the gradual erosion of the administration’s aggressive legal stance.

The administration’s initial position emerged in 2002 only after a fierce internal legal debate, and it has been revised in the face of international opinion, Congressional curbs and Supreme Court rulings. Two central ideas of the war on terror — that the president could fight it exclusively on the basis of his constitutional powers and that terrorist suspects had few, if any, rights — have been modified repeatedly.

So there is some justice in the world. It took the White House long enough, but hopefully finally they’ll start treating the detainees a bit more like human beings. We here at VFLOAB are pretty sure that most of those guys are ‘bad guys’, but if that is the case, then is shouldn’t be too much trouble proving that they are ‘bad guys’. Once their convicted to being ‘bad guys’ then throw them in jail.

But more importantly, the Supreme Court did what it’s supposed to do, and that’s place a check on the White House. The White House was being extremely liberal (ha!) in it’s interpretation of the Constitution when they decided that Bush could, can, and did whatever he damn well pleased after 9/11. This led to some obvious abuses of power that not only hurt Americans, but also made the US look foolish around the world. While Bush preached the Word of Freedom, Liberty, and Democracy, he allowed things like the inhumane treatment of prisoners to go on at places like Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, often times with no hopes of a trial in sight.

Of course, this is probably too little too late, but at least we can sort of hope that we’ve turned a corner with all this. That now we don’t have to worry about mistreatment of prisoners, of detainees being held for years on end without any sort of charges being brought against them, and that they maybe be allowed a trial that isn’t a mockery.

And finally, how cool is this (also the picture you see up there on the top)?