It would be easy to assume that Omar Minaya has been totally immersed in the Tony Bernazard incident and his ill-advised handling to be involved in any trade talks. But its likely that highly regraded assistant Jon Ricco has been ably making inquiries on the club’s behalf. It was Ricco whom made the inquiry with his Braves counterpart that brought Jeff Francouer to the Mets. The one time Braves phenom seemes to be retooling in a new environment with the help of Howard Johnson.

At any rate, the Mets need not be sellers unless its a player whom has no future with the club. That can easily be accomplished over the waiver wire in August. The most practical way to look at the Mets fortunes are to see that they will be acquiring some significant talent over the next few weeks. Their own. When Jose Reyes, Carlos Beltran, Carlos Delgado and Billy Wagner return.

No realistic assessment of the club can be made until the their talent is on the field. The removal of Tony Bernazard is a weight of significance of the shoulders off the entire organization that will be felt even at the major league level. One only need to look to the confrontation that occurred between Bernazard and K-Rod on the bus to see what kind drag Bernazard’s presence had been on the big club. My own sense is that K-Rod took on the bully for the team. It would have to be a player of his stature to do so.

I don’t think the Mets will be affected by the questionable status of Minaya. Liked and respected by players and coaches, Minaya also will not burden them with his problems. I would imagine that Minaya frequently may have had to play good cop to the volatile Bernazard with some players.

Still one club’s efforts over these next few hours are worth following as there is a match. The Tampa Bay Rays are reportedly be willing to deal Carlos Pena, Carl Crawford and Steve Kazmir to move some salary to possibly acquire Victor Martinez and Cliff Lee. Any or all three make sense and its conceivable that the Mets would get involved in a three-way deal.

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Some good news. And and indication that the Mets are doing somthing right came last night during the SNY broadcast in the aftermath of the bizzare press conference dealing with the firing of Omar Minaya. The networks team of Gary Cohen, Keith Hernandez and Ron Darling pulled no punches in their criticism of the manner in which Minaya conducted himself.

At a time when the ballclub needs to demonstrate to fans its doing something well, its handpicked broadcast team demonstrated their independence. In no way did the team seemed measured in their response. Most importantly they showed that ownership puts any constaints on the three reporting to fans. The Cohen-Hernandez-Darling team continues to show that it one of the very best.

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The Mets did one thing right yesterday. Well, two if you count beating the Rockies. The other was firing Tony Bernazard. Beyond those, everything else could not have been more wrong and sickeningly more revealing.

Not having access to the SNY feed of Omar Minya’s press conference yesterday, I linked onto Matt Artus’ excellent blog, Always Amazin’. He was going to be live blogging with an active comments section.

I followed along with moderate interest until Minaya clearly called out Adam Rubin as a source with an agenda. Minaya went straight to an innuendo that Rubin sought Benazard’s ouster to get his job.

I quickly leaped to incredulous and found myself commenting in Artus’s comments as “Coach”. Bobby Ojeda made the remark on SNY that he hadn’t felt that uncomfortable since Darryl went after Keith before that spring training picture. I agree with Bobby O and found yesterday’s press conference equally surreal to that spring training day.

Yeterday was one of the most revealing moments in the history of the franchise and it showed just how very small it is. And not in size, but in stature. Any organization that allows and indeed condones the conduct of a man like Tony Bernazard is one without class. Omar Minaya’s childish shoot the messenger spin yesterday served to confirm it.

Minaya both hid behind and dismissed his own organizations Human Resources report. Minaya said he was shocked by some of the findings. He seemed to indicate that some of it might be innacurate, but any chance at a follow-up was denied when he made his astonsihing accusation that Adam Rubin sought to get Bernazard fired. Writing in NY Newsday today, Wallace Mathews said it best:

The Mets are the only organization in professional sports that can call a news conference to announce it has killed the Wicked Witch – and wind up running over Toto instead.

So in Minaya’s world, Bernazard never would have been fired if Rubin hadn’t been reporting on the later’s clear misconduct.

Essentially this means that Minaya and Jeff Wilpon supported Bernazrad’s thuggery around the organization. They let a man of Bernazard’s stature – both as a team VP and a 10 year major league veteran – run around the entire place treating people with vulgar contempt. No reasonable person can believe that Minaya and the Wilpon’s didn’t know about the way Bernazard conducted himself. Thus a reasonable conclusion is that he did so with their blessings.

Tony Bernazard was a cancer that everyone on the planet recognized except for the Wilpons and Omar Minaya. Allowing an employee with such power treat people that worked under him in an abusive manner does not speak well of the people who sign the checks.

All of this is in conflict with my own personal feelings and impressions about the Wilpons. Their love for the game, the team and the city are and always have been genuine. But it is perhaps their own naivete that everyone in the game is like them in that they see a team as family and a family thats working together to the common good. Were they seduced by a Rasputin like character in Bernazard whom knew how to suck up to the boss?

Perhaps my conclusions now are an effort to walk back my own initial impressions here about all this. Maybe kind of like Omar should have done yesterday when he tried to deflect the heat onto an honest reporter. I hate to think that decent people like the Wilpons would give approval to abusing people that work for them. I have great affection for organization I was once part of as it was the place I spent formulative adult years, and do not like watching them lose. But I take it in a strange personal way on days like yesterday that I have a hard time understanding myself.

This one’s not going to go away, and it probably really shouldn’t until the Wilpons do some serious self assessments. I hope that both of them start making some trips around their organization to do some damage control. Look their people in the eye and tell them how much they appreciate all they do for the organization. I believe a gesture as this best reflects the kind of people they are. Otherwise the harsh narrative that Wally Mathews advanced today will become the reality.

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Tom Romano told me two years ago about his bizzare confrontation in the Lakewood, New Jersey visiting clubhouse with Tony Bernazard. The events he described are as Adam Rubin described in his Sunday NY Daily News story. He contacted in me in 2006 after I started blogging about a subject we are both still passionate about – the late 1980s Mets. Tom was one of the young men whom worked in the Mets clubhouse and served as a batboy. We struck up a friendship after all these years because Tom became a teacher as I did.

Tom Romano earned a degree in History and a Masters in Education after his innocent days at Shea Stadium. He wanted to teach kids about history and coach baseball. He met his wife while at school in New Jersey and they have a 2 year old daughter. They’ve been together 12 years now.

Tom ran into Tony Bernazard by no choice of his own. He scored a summer job working fpr the local South Atlantic League club’s visting clubhouse when while protecting the kids and space he’d been hired to do went nose to nose with Bernazard. What’s happened since is more bizzrare than anything I’ve encountered in both baseball and the private sector.

Today Omar Minaya called out the man who broke a story about an incident involving Bernazrd in the AA Binghampton clubhouse. The incident involving Romano happened three seasons ago. Why Omar Minaya chose to shoot the messanger in Adam Rubin who covered the both stories begs more questions than it answers.

First, why did Minaya accept the Mets HR report as factual then hold Rubin accountable by accussing Rubin of wanting a job in baseball and putting a knike in Bernazard’s back? Were the Mets PR folks lying? And if they were why did Minaya feel he had to fire Bernazard?

Minaya said he was “surprised” by some of the relevations in the Mets HR report. Does that mean he didn’t know about accusations of Bernazards previous behavior and if not does he find them no big deal? If he has no trouble with Bernazard and his actions, why did he fire him then? He said it was his decision?

More questions are certainly unanswered. But its clear that Minaya’s heart wasn’t into Bernazrad’s ouster. So why did he? And why was in Adam Rubin’s fault?

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More than you think.

His refusal to change his plan, which is at the base of the opposition to it, is forcing his poll numbers down, and in the process, giving the American public the very clear impression of a man obsessed with spending trillions of dollars, in as short a time as possible

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Took cash from the gulags. Damn those DEM intellectuals are so smart.

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Cover here for Jewish NY DEMS

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Sorry, old friends.

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Nope. Read Donald Kent Douglas at Pajamas Media

Yet, here’s the thing: Actually, the tea parties have hardly lost steam. Indeed, the country witnessed some of the most substantial anti-Obama rallies at exactly the same time of Weigel’s writing. Tea partiers mounted two separate days of large demonstrations this month. On Independence Day, patriots from around the country took time away from family, friends, and food to attend anti-tax demonstrations. Turnout was substantial. In Tulare, California, 15,000 demonstrators attended a massive tea party rally in the Central Valley heartland. And in Texas, as Michelle Malkin reported, a truly phenomenal 37,000 protesters attended a “ten-gallon tea party” in Dallas.

Protesters mobilized again on July 17th. According to Altlanta’s WXIA-TV, the “‘Tea Party Patriots,’ as they call themselves, staged 254 similar protests across the nation, 37 in Georgia.” Oh sure, none of these events reached “ten-gallon” proportions. But the opposition is increasingly focused. And with good turnout of upwards of 250 protesters at some events, the day’s activities were another big success for the movement.

But the July 17 demonstrations were noteworthy beyond their numbers. Protesters rallied against the Democratic “public option” health care reform that’s been dubbed “ObamaCare.” Event organizers held demonstrations at congressional offices, and thus real constituency pressure was brought to bear (in contrast to the earlier less-targeted attacks on the Obama administration as “socialist”). The response from Democratic officials ranged from unsympathetic to outright hostile. Most notoriously, staffers for Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill reportedly flipped protesters the bird while locking the doors, pulling the blinds, and calling the police. Indeed, demonstrators were ultimately forced off public property while rallying at the office of their representative to the United States Senate!

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Florida Congressman Adam Putnam writes in the St. Petersburg Times:

And we can preserve and improve competition by establishing small business health plans. These plans would extend the benefits currently enjoyed by large corporations and labor unions to every small business in America. Under such a system, individual restaurants could join together to have the bargaining power of McDonald’s. Or independent businesspeople like real estate agents could work together to have the bargaining power of a Fortune 100 company.

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