BASEBALL DIARY:
Tigers 10, Braves 4: yesterday was a good win, but overall it was a frustrating series over the weekend for Detroit in Atlanta, as on Friday and Saturday they lost two tight games--Saturday's game on an admittedly bad call by the home plate ump on what should have been ball 4 to Johnny Damon. But yesterday, the Tigers got a decent start from Justin Verlander, and another home run from impressive rookie Brennan Boesch, who now has 12 home runs. They trail the Twins by only half a game. And now they head to Minnesota. Can they find a way to beat this Twins team? The Tigers have always struggled with them. But here comes a new opportunity...
Rangers 10, Astros 1: the Rangers have now 13 of 14. They've won 8 consecutive series. What else can you say about Josh Hamilton--a 468-foot home run last night, and he's still hitting close to .500 in the month of June. Importantly, Tommie Hunter pitched a good game as well last night for Texas. Now they head to Anaheim for 3 games with the second-place Angels. Big series...
POLITICS DEPT:
Mark Steyn over the weekend points out an interesting pattern concerning President Obama: what seems to make the president most unhappy is when folks claim he's not with it, not up to date and informed on issues and policy. Problem is, it seems like an accurate assessment:
"Barack Obama is a thin-skinned man and, according to Britain’s Daily Telegraph, White House aides indicated that what angered the president most about the Rolling Stone piece was “a McChrystal aide saying that McChrystal had thought that Obama was not engaged when they first met last year.” If finding Obama “not engaged” is now a firing offense, who among us is safe?...Only the other day, Sen. George Lemieux of Florida attempted to rouse the president to jump-start America’s overpaid, over-manned, and oversleeping federal bureaucracy and get it to do something on the oil debacle. There are 2,000 oil skimmers in the United States: Weeks after the spill, only 20 of them are off the coast of Florida. Seventeen friendly nations with great expertise in the field have offered their own skimmers; the Dutch volunteered their “super-skimmers”: Obama turned them all down. Raising the problem, Senator Lemieux found the president unengaged and uninformed. “He doesn’t seem to know the situation about foreign skimmers and domestic skimmers,” reported the senator....He doesn’t seem to know, and he doesn’t seem to care that he doesn’t know, and he doesn’t seem to care that he doesn’t care. “It can seem that at the heart of Barack Obama’s foreign policy is no heart at all,” wrote Richard Cohen in the Washington Post last week. “For instance, it’s not clear that Obama is appalled by China’s appalling human rights record. He seems hardly stirred about continued repression in Russia. . . . The president seems to stand foursquare for nothing much."
And I think Mr. Obama has a hard time with all the criticism.
If Mr. Obama had had more of a sense of history, he wouldn't have been surprised by all of his critics. Every president faces them. Every president gets criticized. Even George Washington who, when his farewell address to the nation was published in the newspapers upon his decision to retire at the end of his 2nd term, faced all kinds of harsh words from opposition newspapers. One editorialist wrote that America had been "debauched" by Washington. Another roared "Would to God you had retired to a private station four years ago!"
Criticism comes with the job, Mr. Obama. Better get used to it. No one forced you into this gig, remember.
