- Who’d
have thought this wouldn’t work out? The Miami Marlins were one of the
biggest disappointments in baseball from the outset of the season and their
ineptitude cost manager Mike Redmond his job in mid-May. At that point, rather
than looking for a qualified, actual manager with legitimate experience, the
Marlins installed general manager Dan Jennings in the managerial position and
hoped for the best. The best, as it turns out, is 54-79 and 19½ games back in
the National League East. With those results in mind and definitive proof that
someone who never played or coached at the major or minor league levels before,
the Marlins now plan to ask Jennings to return to his previous role as general
manager and seek an actual manager once the season ends. Jennings was the first
major league skipper with no experience as a manager or big league player since
Braves owner Ted Turner managed a mere one game in 1977, but his tenure was
longer and even less inspiring than Turner’s brief reign in the dugout. There
is no decision on how the front office might look going forward and one
possibility is Jennings’ return to the front office -- although not necessarily
as GM. Whoever takes over for him will become the Marlins' seventh new manager
since June 2010 and this time, expect the search to be longer and almost by
default more successful than the last one, when no other candidates had been
considered before Jennings took the helm. He’s been with the Marlins since 2002
and ascended from vice president of player personnel to the general manager
position after the 2013 season, but this is clearly his weirdest year on the
job so far………..
- There
are professors with a disturbing amount of job security on account of being
tenured and therefore all but un-fireable, so it’s nice when one of the
briefcase-carrying academics who never actually seem to be in their office
during office hours gets their comeuppance. In this case, the academic under
the gun is William C. Bradford, who resigned from
the U.S. Military Academy earlier this week after he took heat for writing an
article calling some legal scholars treasonous and “lawful targets” in the war
on terror. Details are few due to privacy and legal constraints, but Bradford
made the comments in an article for the National Security Law Journal earlier this year.
In the piece, he said legal scholars who criticize U.S. tactics in the war on
terror are helping ISIS undermine America and argued that those people should
be considered enemy combatants and charged with treason. Yes, because
intolerance of others’ views to the point of convicting them of crimes
punishable by death is such an American way to go. The article itself isn't
exactly from a Pulitzer Prize-winning publication, but rather one that is edited by students at George Mason
University in Virginia. Kudos to anyone who actually tortured themselves by
reading all of Bradford's 95-page article, which says that liberals dominate
legal academia and use their position to undermine public support of U.S.
military efforts to combat ISIS. There may be a lot of liberals in legal
academia, but dubbing them “Islamist sympathizers and propagandists" just
because they don’t support torture and anything else the federal government
deems necessary to stop terrorism just feels like a bit of a reach. "The
views in the article are solely those of Dr. Bradford and do not reflect those
of the Department of Defense, the United States Army, or the United States
Military Academy," Lt. Col. Chris Kasker, a West Point spokesman, said in
a prepared statement following the professor’s resignation. Here’s hoping
not……….
- The
Bourne crew is forming up nicely and with the much awaited fifth - technically,
it’s the fourth one because we’re all agreeing that “The Bourne Legacy Without
Jason Bourne In It” doesn’t actually count as a Bourne movie - installment in
the action franchise set for release next year, those hunting and fighting Matt
Damon’s character are taking their places on the cast. Director Paul Greengrass
is assembling a nice mix, with Damon, Julia Stiles
and Tommy Lee Jones already in the fold. Add “Black Swan” actor Vincent Cassel
to the mix playing a villain in the as-of-yet-untitled flick, which will mark
the return of Damon's Jason Bourne after nearly a decade away from the screen. Damon
last held down the Bourne role in 2007's “The Bourne Ultimatum” before rejecting “Bourne Legacy” because
Greengrass wasn’t a part of it. He left the leading role to Jeremy Renner, the
movie performed relatively poorly at the box office and the world knew the
entire project was a farce. This time, for the first time, , Greengrass and
Damon have written the screenplay themselves, alongside Christopher Rouse, who
served as editor on the second and third Bourne
films. Cassel will play an assassin tracking
Bourne and given the plot trajectory for Bourne’s previous foes, this won’t end
well for Cassel. “Ex Machina” actress
Alicia Vikander is also on board in an unknown role and Jones will be in a
supporting capacity. "Without giving too much of it away, it's Bourne
through an austerity-riddled Europe and in a post-Snowden world,” Damon
recently said of the movie, which started shooting in Greece this week. The
first three films in the series were set largely in Europe, including Germany,
Spain and France, with jaunts to Russia and New York City. The fifth Bourne
movie will hit theaters next July………
- Riot
Watch! Riot Watch! Europe is in the midst of a full-fledged migrant crisis and
nowhere is the heat hotter than Hungary, where hordes of angry migrants chanted defiant slogans outside Budapest's main
international railway station as Hungarian police blocked them for a second day
from seeking a "What we want? Peace! What we need? Peace!" It was a
grammatically stunted scene outside Keleti station, the new focal point for
continent-wide tensions over the continuous flow of migrants from the Middle
East, Asia and Africa fleeing war, persecution and poverty. Hungarian police
reinforced their positions outside the Keleti terminal as the volume of
migrants arriving from Serbia swelled and they’re working hand in hand with law
enforcement from Austria, Germany and Slovakia in the search for migrants
traveling illegally on other Hungarian trains. An estimated 3,000 migrants are
camped out around Keleti station even as French authorities said cross-Channel
Eurostar train services were returning to normal following serious overnight
disruptions triggered by reports of migrants running on the tracks and trying
to climb atop trains. The idea of these people going action hero in their
effort to illegally find a new home is mildly impressive, but the push to
control, curtail and protect migrants in Europe is only getting more intense by
the minute. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban met with EU chiefs to discuss
his country's handling of its insurgence of more than 150,000 migrants, chiefly
from Syria and other conflict zones. Germany alone expects to receive 800,000
migrants this year, quadruple last year's figure, but most of Europe is adamant
about not committing to housing more asylum seekers. It’s an ugly,
dirty, smelly and contentious scene that has no clear answer and no expiration
date………
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