Baseball & politics

(Not baseball and politics together, you understand... Of course, there is this, which isn't baseball but is certainly sports-related!)

Anyway, the Astros have fired their manager, was what I was actually getting at. I'm not at all sure that the Astros' woes were really his fault, but I had a feeling it was coming all the same. Although I thought they'd give him until the end of the month, for some reason. Like the trade deadline, I guess.


A couple of political pieces:

On the red & blue divide - from the Christian Science Monitor (with map)

Bush's affair with abstinence - a BBC article on the strings attached to the US's new $15 billion in AIDS funding.


And John Scalzi is putting the cards on the table.

On Bush:

If re-elected, will go down as the worst president in 100 years, if only because Warren Harding had the decency to die in his first term.

and on Kerry:

The fact that John Kerry is opposed to verifiably the worst president in eight decades and is still neck-in-neck in the polls at this point is absolutely shameful, and opens up the argument of who is more incompetent: An incompetent president or the man who loses an election to him.

While I think that he's a little hard on Kerry - plus it might be nice to wait until after they steal the election again to declare him the loser - if you read down in the comments Patrick Nielsen Hayden has a nice defense of Kerry down there.