The Mets are six games back in the lost column from the wild card frontrunner. Pelfrey had his best start in two months last time out. Santana was the best guy on the field this week. Dickey’s been that way all year. Niese is really good and it’s clearly a good idea not to have traded him. Sure we need a fifth starter, but maybe Pat Misch will provide that and we can leave Takie in the bullpen.

Beltran’s back and had the key hit in the game last night. His return has essentially served to be a mid-season acquisition of a big bat for the middle of the line-up. It could turn out not letting go of Frenchy will turn out ok if we leave him or whomever plays RF in the 7 hole.

Jerry’s gotta stay with Tejeda at 2nd though. Our record is too good with him in there. He’d be guilty of over managing if he tries to keep Castillo happy at this point.

Yes, K-Rod’s a loose cannon. The assault of anyone in the family room in front of children reveals someone who needs help. Bobby Ojeda was right. What role he’ll be able to play the rest of the season is in doubt and remains the biggest question mark.

All the nonsense aside, there’s still evidence that something can still happen.

I’m just sayin’.

All of this was obvious long ago, and it was evident as well that, if there were a real crisis, he would check out. This is what he did when Major Nidal Malik Hassan gunned down thirteen Americans at Fort Hood. This is what he did when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab nearly brought down a jetliner at Christmas time. And this is what he did when Faisal Shahzad was found to have planted a bomb in Times Square. All three cases revealed an egregious failure of our intelligence apparatus. In all three cases, the danger had its source in developments within Islam And, in the face of all of this, the President of the United States signaled that he could hardly bear to take a few minutes off from his vacation at the beach in Hawaii, cancel a party or two, or give up his golf game to acknowledge and address the failures of his administration, and at no time has he been willing to level with us about the source of our peril.

And why Obama CAN be held accountable for the oil spill:

The oil spill that began in the Gulf of Mexico on 20 April is the latest example. Some say that President Obama is no more responsible for the spill than President Bush was for Hurricane Katrina. This claim is, in fact, untrue. Bush had nothing to do with Katrina. Barack Obama, as President, was responsible for insuring that the regulatory agencies overseeing the drilling operations did their job properly. While campaigning for the presidency, he charged that the Bush administration had, in effect, allowed the oil industry to regulate itself, and he promised that, if he were elected, he would set things right. During that campaign, he took a wad of cash from folks at BP (more than they had ever given any other candidate); and, when the time came to reform the Minerals Management Service, as Tim Dickinson has shown in fine detail in the latest issue of Rolling Stone, the new administration’s appointees did nothing of the sort.

How many times has a pundit or Democrat gushed over Obama’s “brilliant” mind? As conservatives pointed out to the swooners on the left, there was very little evidence of it — no inventive Third Wave philosophy of governance in his pre-presidential career, no significant legislative or intellectual achievement — other than writing a self-promoting and somewhat fictional account of himself — and actually very poor people skills (Maureen Dowd has only now figured out that he is thin-skinned and emotionally robotic). But it was heresy to suggest that he was a conventional liberal thinker, less interesting than Bill Clinton and less rigorous than Ronald Reagan

Rubin brings up the point that both Democrats and the media will be held accountable by voters for Obama presidency. The continued rise of Fox News and the Tea Party movement are clear signals that people are starting to realize they’ve been had.

Holly fraudulance, Bat Man!

Here’s Kelly’s platform:

1.To not participate in the lucrative congressional pension plan.
2.To legislate congressional term limits to 3 terms.
3.To oppose bailouts of any kind.
4.To never vote for a tax raise of any kind

You can follow Kelly on Twitter.

Does that disconnect and utter lack of support and genuine honest cooperation and cohesion matter? I would submit it does.

My contacts with GOP candidates can be described as spotty at best. Some have been better than others. E-mail inquiries are not always answered. I’m on every candidates mailing list yet have never recieved any campaign literature. Perhaps this is as a result of the size of the campaigns as I receive stuff from the Rubio, Crist, McCollum and Scott campaigns. And this is just talking about email, a medium that almost so five years ago.

Reihl provides the one example that illustrates the failure of the GOP from top down to get their message out from a surprising admission by Karl Rove.

Karl Rove is allegedly something of a genius when it comes to Republican political strategy. Yet, after leaving the White House, he said his worst political mistake was in not pushing back against the anti-war Left over the Iraq War.

Did anyone from the Right push back? Yes, as a matter of fact. An entire cottage industry of blogging sprung up, first to support the wars after 9/11, and then to push back hard every day against the anti-war Left during the Bush administration because they, not Karl Rove, realized how critical it was. This is both well known and well documented. But evidently, no one in the GOP establishment, including Karl Rove, was listening

I was one of those bloggers who pushed back, but we weren’t receiving any help. The failure of the President and his party to recognize the problem and subsequently take action turned out to be monumental. They conceded the narrative to the Democrats and their media allies. Historians won’t be kind. This crucial error helped build momentum for the Obama presidency.

Reihl’s piece sadly shows that there’s little reason to hope that the GOP has changed.

“[R]egular citizens can upload video or audio they’ve captured at pubic campaign events, and they can upload event information for upcoming campaign appearances by Republican candidates so others can attend and hold Republicans accountable of they don’t tell the truth.,” a DNC official said. “Unlike YouTube where you can only upload video, … users can download high quality videos from the site for clipping and using for their own projects (web videos, a

Well, well. No wonder all those cameras are out there. The Dems are looking for You-Tube ammo.

H/T: Mary Katherine Hamm

The blogosphere is already starting to get the word out — Powerline, Volokh Conspiracy, AmSpec, Gateway Pundit, and Patterico have all written dispatches on the story — but the more important question is whether the Senate Judiciary Committee will confront Kagan with the charges.

Will they?

From attorney KrisAnne Hall:

We cant be distracted by Kagan’s strict stance on following the law,
make no mistake she will follow the law but it will be according to her interpretations
of the law based upon her beliefs. WE MUST KNOW her beliefs.

Hall was the Florida State’s Attorney wom was fired for speaking at Tea Party rallies.

Mr. Obama’s approval numbers may mask the real peril Democrats face because his job rating among blacks is an overwhelmingly positive 91%. As Michael Barone of “The Almanac of American Politics” points out, those readings imply that his job approval rating among whites is likely only about 39%.

That’s especially significant because most of the 70 competitive House races polled by NPR (as well as most of the states with the closest Senate races) have below-average populations of black voters. Racial gerrymandering justified by dubious interpretations of the Voting Rights Act has concentrated blacks into mostly safe Democratic districts, meaning now that most competitive seats are more white than average. These districts are more likely to be hostile to President Obama’s agenda, and thus more likely to be treacherous political terrain for Democrats. No wonder party strategists are so worried about this fall.

Florida #2 is part of the NPR data.

H/T: Lucianne