Red Sox Release Mirabelli

http://www.boston.com/sports/baseball/redsox/extras/extra_bases/2008/03/cash_era.html

 About time.  Yeah, so he can catch the knuckleball.  His negative OPS and incredibly egotistical attitude will not be missed.

Projected Red Sox Lineup

Here’s what the Sox lineup is looking like for this coming season:

1. Jacoby Ellsbury, CF
2. Dustin Pedroia, 2B
3. David Ortiz, DH
4. Manny Ramirez, LF
5. Mike Lowell, 3B
6. Kevin Youkilis, 1B
7. JD Drew, RF
8. Jason Varitek, C
9. Julio Lugo, SS

Looks pretty good to me.

In other Sox news, Colon is scheduled to get the start today.  He’s been doing well so far by all accounts; it will be interesting to see what kind of velocity he can still get on his fastball.

No Link Between Saddam and bin Laden (we knew that already)

Further evidence that the Bush administration lied and manipulated us into the war in Iraq:

 A Pentagon-sponsored study of 600,000 Iraqi documents captured after the 2003 invasion shows that no direct operation link existed between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network.

The Bush administration claimed such a relationship to support its arguments for invading Iraq, though the U.S. intelligence community had conflicting evidence on the issue.

NPR

Geraldine Resigns… but will she apologize?

Reuters

A high-profile supporter quit Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign on Wednesday after a remark about black Democratic rival Barack Obama was interpreted as racist.

Geraldine Ferraro, the only woman to run on a major U.S. party’s White House ticket, had said Obama was leading Clinton in the race for the Democratic party nomination for November’s presidential election because he was black.

Ferraro, the trailblazing 1984 Democratic vice presidential candidate, was a member of Clinton’s finance committee and raised funds for the New York senator and former first lady before stepping down, a campaign spokesman said.

Even though she has stepped down, she has yet to apologize.  In fact, Geraldine maintains her insulting demeanor as recently as yesterday:

Ferraro defended her comments on Wednesday in a round of television appearances and rejected what she called attempts by Obama’s campaign to paint her remark as racist.

“For his campaign to take that and spin it and attack Hillary and me as being racist, I tell you, it is just appalling,” Ferraro told CBS’s “The Early Show.” 

Yup, it is appalling.  What you said, Geraldine is what is appalling. It gets even worse:

“If anybody is going to apologize, they should apologize to me for calling me a racist,” she said.

Hillary, for her part did offer some contrition:

“I said yesterday that I rejected what she said and I certainly do repudiate it,” Clinton said at a meeting of black newspaper publishers in Washington. “Obviously, she doesn’t speak for the campaign, she doesn’t speak for any of my positions and she has resigned from being a member of my very large finance committee.”

But are those crocodile tears on Hillary’s behalf?  We know what we were getting in Geraldine… look at her comments about Jesse Jackson in 1988 for further evidence of how this woman thinks.  And Hillary was more than happy to keep her in her campaign until public backlash finally was enough to make Geraldine resign (note, she wasn’t fired or dismissed by Clinton, as far as we know).

Obama, characteristically continues to take the high road, not letting this become a racial issue:

Obama, who would be the first black U.S. president, denounced Ferraro’s comments as he made a campaign appearance in Chicago on Wednesday but said he did not think they were intended to be racist.

“I think that her comments were ridiculous. I think they were wrong-headed,” Obama told a news conference after being endorsed by a group of high-ranking retired military officers.

“The notion that it is of great advantage to me to be an African American named Barack Obama and pursue the presidency, I think, is not a view that has been commonly shared by the general public,” he said.