For Bobby Valentine, charity can be all-consuming | Boston.com

It's hard not to root for a guy like this. Or someone with enough intelligence to do this:

"[Bobby Valentine] would eventually learn 2,042 kanji characters out of an instructional book, practicing them in the dirt with the toe of his cleats during practice, and by the time he made his tearful goodbye speech to the team’s fans in 2009, he did so in Japanese."

More on the Mets and they NYPD/FDNY/PAPD caps.

Thanks to my friend Neil Parekh for pointing out this blog post by Keith Olbermann at MLB.com. Keith gets hammered for being a partisan political talking head but don't forget he did start out as a sportscaster and was one of the faces of ESPN in its early days. One point he made in response to a tweet he received really drives the point home on why the Mets should have worn those hats:

"As an aside, I should note that I actually got a tweet from an idiot who wondered why I thought wearing the NYPD/NYFD/PAPD/EMS caps was somehow “patriotic.” It never crossed my mind. It has nothing to do with patriotism. 343 firefighters and paramedics died that day. 23 New York policemen did. And 47 from the Port Authority Police. This is about remembering them – and acknowledging what all those who survived did for this city and the wounds they still have. For me, as the grandson of a New York fireman, and the descendant of several others, and many NYPD and regional PD, this is something deeper than patriotism."

Selig: Mets never threatened over cap flap - NYPOST.com

Here's more proof that Bud Selig is, and always will be, way in over his head as the commissioner of Major League Baseball. The fact that he could be so clueless as to the importance of the Mets wearing the first responder hats like they did in 2001 is pathetic and sad. Ken Rosenthal of Fox Sports, Matthew Cerrone of Metsblog, Adam Rubin of ESPN, John Harper of The New York Daily News, and George Willis of The New York Post agree that the Mets should have been wearing the NYPD, FDNY, and PAPD hats for 9/11.

Names on WTC memorial arranged by algorithm - CNET News

This is a very interesting post on how they arranged the names on the 9/11 Memorial. The site for the memorial is also pretty good in that it allows you to search for a name and print a map of where it is located on the memorial.

Leading on 9/11 and Beyond: New York City Fire Department's Joseph Pfeifer - Knowledge@Wharton

Great interview with the fire commander in the World Trade Center on the morning of 9/11. One thing that's not mentioned is this is the same fire chief that was featured in the documentary six months later on March 11, 2002. The one thing I remember from that documentary was Chief Pfeifer's brother was one of the firemen killed on 9/11 and the documentary captured that last moment the two Pfeifer brothers saw each other alive.

Friedman: The Bin Laden Decade - NYTimes.com

Thomas L. Friedman, right on point today in The New York Times:

"Washington basically gave the Arab dictators a free pass to tighten their vise grip on their people — as long as these Arab leaders arrested, interrogated and held the Islamic militants in their societies and eliminated them as a threat to us.

It wasn’t meant as a free pass, and we really did have a security problem with jihadists, and we really didn’t mean to give up on our freedom agenda — but Arab leaders, like Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, sensed where our priorities were. That is why Mubarak actually arrested the one Egyptian who dared to run against him for president in his last election, and he and the other Arab autocrats moved to install their sons as successors."

Furthermore...

"President George W. Bush used the post-9/11 economic dip to push through a second tax cut we could not afford. He followed that with a Medicare prescription drug entitlement we cannot afford and started two wars in the wake of 9/11 without raising taxes to pay for them — all at a time when we should have been saving money in anticipation of the baby boomers’ imminent retirement. As such, our nation’s fiscal hole is deeper than ever and Republicans and Democrats — rather than coming together and generating the political authority needed for us to take our castor oil to compensate for our binge — are just demonizing one another."

"Justice has been done."

Video of the President's statement on the death of Osama bin Laden:

NFL schedule could put Giants at Jets on 9/11 - NYPOST.com

Interesting: NFL schedule could put Giants at Jets on 9/11 - NYPOST.com