Cain is able

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The Bleacher Report:

If there is a pitcher on the Giants’ staff that has always seemed born for playoff baseball, it is Cain. He has been San Francisco’s most consistent pitcher all season but had his worst outing of the year last Saturday against San Diego.

Cain has a 2-2 career record with a 4.03 ERA against the Braves.

He is usually as stoic as can be on the mound. It doesn’t ever seem like anything bothers him. Tonight will be the night to find out for sure.

On lots of teams Cain would be the ace but in San Francisco he’s only second best. At 6’3″ he’s not even the tallest starting pitcher on the staff – that honor goes to 6’4″ lefty Madison Bumgarner.

This 26 year-old corn-fed country boy from Tennessee throws right-handed and features a fastball, curveball, slider, and changeup. His fastball is thrown from 93 to 98 mph.

Game 2 of the NLDS between the Giants and the Braves starts at 6:37 PM Pacific time. The Giants lead the series 1-0

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WTF Friday – Squishy Goo-Goo Edition

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I knew I could count on poetry major Chris Bowers over at Cheetoville to bring WTF Week to a big finish:

As the election approaches, the buzz in Democratic activist circles is the need for GOTV. If we can turn out the vote, and get the composition of the electorate back to what it was in 2008, then Democrats will win.

[…]

Here at Daily Kos, we are going to engage in very different, but still very important, form of election activism. It’s a type of activism no one else is working on, and it is well-suited to our medium as a blog. It’s a grassroots-based search engine optimization campaign, which I call Grassroots SEO for short.

[…]

The goal of Grassroots SEO is to get as many undecided voters as possible to read the most damaging news article about the Republican candidate for Congress in their district. It is based on two simple premises:

1. One of the most common political activities people take online is to use search engines, mainly Google, to find information on candidates. (For more information, see the Pew Internet and American Life Project’s report on 2008 online political engagement.)

2. These results of these searches are always in flux based upon hyperlinks anyone posts anywhere on the Internet, including message board comments and social networking sites (but not email).

As a result of this, not only is it possible for us to use our hyperlinks to impact what people find when they search for information on candidates, but we would be foolish not to do so in a way that benefited our preferred candidates. We are already impacting search engine rankings whenever we post any hyperlink anywhere, so we need to make sure the way we use hyperlinks helps result in our preferred political outcomes.

IOW – “Hey kids! We’re gonna Google-bomb ’em!”

Who thought this shit up, Bill Ayers?

If you extend this line of thought out, what Mr. Squishy Goo-Goo is saying is that after winning back control of Congress in 2006 and capturing the White House in 2008, the Democrats have done such an historic job of running the country that the only way they can win on November 2nd is by trashing the Republicans.

I guess John Cole forgot to tell Chris that Obama was the most successful Democratic President in his lifetime.

Chris didn’t talk to Steve Benen either:

I don’t expect the public to have an extensive knowledge of federal policymaking history, but I at least hoped Americans would realize the scope of recent accomplishments. We are, after all, talking about a two-year span in which Congress passed and the president signed the Affordable Care Act, the Recovery Act, Wall Street reform, student loan reform, Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, new regulation of the credit card industry, new regulation of the tobacco industry, a national service bill, expanded stem-cell research, the Hate Crimes Prevention Act, the most sweeping land-protection act in 15 years, etc. Policymakers might yet add to this list in the lame-duck session.

If Chris had talked to John and Steve and Greg Sargent and Jonathan Chait and the rest of the cheerleaders over in the Kool-aid Kingdom he would know we’re living in a progressive paradise.

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What does Obama’s 2008 campaign manager think will happen 3 1/2 weeks from now?

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Trying to reshape expectations for the midterm elections, David Plouffe said Thursday that the Republicans should be expected to make a full sweep of Congress – and key gubernatorial races – given the environmental advantages they have. Anything less, he said, should be seen as a disgrace.

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Hopenchange motherf**kers! Hopenchange!

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Our tax dollars at work

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Chicago Breaking News:

An elderly couple says Cook County sheriff’s police on a drug raid smashed into their Southwest Side house late Thursday night, terrorizing them before admitting they had the wrong house.

With her husband already asleep, 84-year-old Anna Jakymek was just turning out the lights when she heard loud noises at the back and front doors about 11:30 p.m.

Her initial thought was that her 89-year old husband had fallen out of bed, but she realized something else was happening when she looked into the front room.

“I see maybe 20 guys come in and see the door knocked open,” she said.

The intruders were members of the Cook County sheriff’s police gang crimes narcotics unit executing a search warrant at the home on the 5600 block of South Kilbourn Avenue.

The search warrant cited suspected crystal meth, cocaine, guns and money. It also named a 23-year-old suspect whom the Jakymeks say they have never heard of.

“They show me a sheet with a woman and man who complained we have that. We don’t,” Anna Jakymek said. “They broke two doors and a garage window. Then they say, ‘C’mon, c’mon–go, go, go, stay by your husband. He said someone complained we had all these drugs.”
[…]

“When I arrived the officer explained they had misinformation, but said his job was over, and he was leaving. They left a copy of the warrant, but he absolved himself of any responsibility for the raid or the damage,” Andrew Jakymec said.

He estimated the damage to broken doors, locks and windows at up to $3,000.

“Everything was violently opened. Cabinets were ripped open, clothes and sheets were everywhere, and pieces of wood where the doors were rammed were all over the place,” he said.

“My parents are refugees from the Soviet Union. They are naturalized citizens. They have relatives there who were abused for political reasons. You might expect it there, but not here,” Jakymec said.

The warrant said police were looking for a 23-year-old man, described as Hispanic who lived in the ranch home. Records show a judge last month ruled the man forfeited bond in a drug-possession case. The address listed for the man in court records did not match that of the Jakymeks.

Anna added: “I didn’t believe it was the police. They broke everything. I told them they should have rung the bell.”

Cook County sheriff’s police spokeswoman Liane Jackson had no immediate explanation or comment, saying police are checking into the situation.

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I feel soooo much safer knowing cops like these ones in Chicago are protecting me from drugs. The Jakymeks must have been terrified but they’re better off than Kathryn Johnston. The Atlanta cops shot and killed the 92 year-old woman in a botched drug raid, then planted evidence to cover-up their fuck-up.

Oh well, shit happens.

From Threat Level:

A California student got a visit from the FBI this week after he found a secret GPS tracking device on his car, and a friend posted photos of it online. The post prompted wide speculation about whether the device was real, whether the young Arab-American was being targeted in a terrorism investigation and what the authorities would do.

It took just 48 hours to find out: The device was real, the student was being secretly tracked and the FBI wanted their expensive device back, the student told Wired.com in an interview Wednesday.

The answer came when half-a-dozen FBI agents and police officers appeared at Yasir Afifi’s apartment complex in Santa Clara, California, on Tuesday demanding he return the device.

Afifi, a 20-year-old U.S.-born citizen, cooperated willingly and said he’d done nothing to merit attention from authorities. Comments the agents made during their visit suggested he’d been under FBI surveillance for three to six months.

Mr. Afifi is lucky he didn’t win an all-expenses paid (by us) trip to the Richard B. Cheney Waterboard Park in lovely Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. But if I was him I’d keep worrying about killer drones sent by President Barack “I can assassinate anyone I want to” Obama.

That’s how a Nobel Prize winning POTUS rolls.

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