Category — India

Yes–India still uses coal for locomotives! Here is a DHR Locomotive 791 with the afternoon ’school train’ to Kurseong. The locomotive is taking water at the Darjeeling water tank. 21th February 2005–Photographer - A.M.Hurrell

About a pack or two a day’s worth isn’t it? Why aren’t the green whining weenies over there screeching and sticking forks in their eyes?

The Democrat Party, that is. But first, conservatives are deluded if they believe, as Sean Hannity claims, that domestic drilling and “energy independence” are the path to less expensive gasoline. Crude oil is a commodity, subject to commodities speculation. Engine fuel prices that are lower than world market prices result from government controls, such as in Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, where you fill your tanks with a wink and smile.

Government control is the only conclusion one can draw from Hannity’s leap from domestic exploration to lower prices at the pump. Increased supply wouldn’t account for a large reduction in price with consumption growing in India, China and other developing countries. Government control is not a conservative viewpoint (If there’s something I’ve missed, I’d welcome a comment) There are other reasons to develop domestic energy sources.

It’s a complicated issue, nevertheless. THIS from Powerline illustrates the party divide on domestic energy development, but how much of the price increase is due to restrictions? I don’t know. Does anyone?

(A close friend, American, who lives in England and works in Europe, comes back here for all medical work, including dentistry. He says, “I wouldn’t take a chance in their health care system.”)

Privatisation’ of NHS hospitals faces backlash

Plans to allow private companies to run failing NHS hospitals have prompted a major backlash from doctors, patients’ groups and unions.

Ministers have outlined proposals to monitor hospitals and primary care trusts against a set of standards and if no improvement is seen the whole board of managers will be sacked and a new team brought in from elsewhere in the NHS or from private firms.

But there seemed little interest from private sector companies that are already providing care to NHS patients citing the major risks involved with taking on a failing trust.

Why should any private company take on this mess? The government cannot run the health care; they want some one to assume command so they have a punching bag when it fails.
All this has another name: Hillarycare.

[snip]
Other private hospitals that already treat NHS patients have privately expressed concerns and stated they would not be bidding for the contracts.
[snip]
“There is an immense amount of talent within the NHS - in leadership and management - and this should be nurtured, grown and developed to ensure NHS Trusts do not find themselves in a position of failure in the first place.”
[snip]

Righto, chaps this is why those who can afford to, travel to India or the U.S. for surgical procedures.

We do not have a health care problem here. We have a government caused insurance problem. States will not allow persons to buy basic policies from low cost insurers. Mandated coverage such as acupuncture and aromatherapy to grift special interest businesses add to costs. Community rating and preferred insurers jack up the premiums, a non-smoker pays the same premium as some 3-pack-a-day hacker for the same policy. That makes insurance premiums socially acceptable but out of reach for lower income people.

 How is this different from today’s taggers gaily altering public space in the modern world. What would the archaeologists of 2230 say about the current trash spray painted on various surfaces by so-called artists du jour.

One man’s art is another’s graffiti.

Thousands of prehistoric rock carvings and paintings of bighorn sheep and other wildlife, hunters wielding spears, and warriors engaged in hand-to-hand combat.

Now, a dramatic increase in natural gas drilling is proposed on the plateau above the canyon, and preservationists fear trucks will kick up dust that will cover the images. They also worry that one proposed solution, a chemical dust suppressant, could make things worse by corroding the rock.

“They’re irreplaceable,” said Steve Tanner, a member of the Nine Mile Canyon Coalition, which wants industrial traffic to be funneled away from the canyon to protect the art on the sandstone walls. “When they’re gone, they’re gone.”

The more than 10,000 petroglyphs have been a source of fascination and speculation since their discovery in the late 1800s. The art is thought to be the work of the Fremont people, who lived in present-day Utah, Idaho, Colorado and Nevada from 700 to 1300 A.D., and the ancestors of modern-day Ute Indians. [snip]

This graffiti lauds war, animal torture and defaces public property. These antisocial individuals hacked and scraped soft stone, permanently transforming the natural beauty of the area.

Don’t you prefer your sandstone outcrops unfettered by bad childish art?

Barack Obama has been adopted by a family of typical red Indians on a Crow Indian Reservation.  They’ve named him Barack Black Eagle after the surname of the adopting family parents Sunny and Mary Black Eagle.  His honorary tribal name is Awe Kooda Bilaxpak Kuuxshish, which means: “one who helps people throughout the land”.

In a dilute bit of Clintonian pain-sharing, Obama devoted  12 minutes of appreciatin’ to the name-givin’.  The desolate, government cinderblock, needle-park wastelands of Honolulu and Harvard Square came rushing back to Obama,

Senator Obama…told the Native American crowd of nearly 2000 that he knows what it’s like to be an outsider - that his struggles being an African-American are similar to theirs.

“I was growing up in Hawaii at the time, and where I was growing up there weren’t a lot of black families and so sometimes I was looked at as sort of an outsider and so I know what it’s like to be on the outside.  I know what it’s like to not always have been respected or to have been ignored and I know what it’s like to struggle and that’s how I think many of you understand what’s happened here on the reservation, and that a lot of times you have been forgotten just like African-Americans have been forgotten or other groups in this country have been forgotten”.

Forget Bill Clinton.  This is Kerryesque, without coherence, and seasoned with dense Freudianism, rancid populism, and puerile narcissism.   This clown is calibrating a moral and emotional  equivalence between his upbringing and the disasters inflicted (some of them self-inflicted) on Native Americans.

Read to the end of the link.  The subject of “wives” arises, which Obama thinks is humorous.   Luckily for the Crows, they aren’t Mormons or Branch Davidians. 

An orgy of feel good activity here in Congress and among the garden variety eco-idiots produced the following:

Food price escalation transversing the globe

[snip]
From subsistence farmers eating rice in Ecuador to gourmets feasting on escargot in France, consumers worldwide face rising food prices in what analysts call a perfect storm of conditions. Freak weather is a factor. But so are dramatic changes in the global economy, including higher oil prices, lower food reserves and growing consumer demand in China and India.[snip]

Among the driving forces are petroleum prices, which increase the cost of everything from fertilizers to transport to food processing. Rising demand for meat and dairy in rapidly developing countries such as China and India is sending up the cost of grain, used for cattle feed, as is the demand for raw materials to make biofuels.[snip]

Meanwhile, record oil prices have boosted the cost of fertilizer and freight for bulk commodities — up 80 percent in 2007 over 2006. The oil spike has also turned up the pressure for countries to switch to biofuels, which the FAO says will drive up the cost of corn, sugar and soybeans “for many more years to come.”

In Japan, the ethanol boom is hitting the country in mayonnaise and miso, two important culinary ingredients, as biofuels production pushes up the price of cooking oil and soybeans. [snip]

In decades past, farm subsidies and support programs allowed major grain exporting countries to hold large surpluses, which could be tapped during food shortages to keep prices down. But new trade policies have made agricultural production much more responsive to market demands — putting global food reserves at their lowest in a quarter century.

Without reserves, bad weather and poor harvests have a bigger impact on prices.

“The market is extremely nervous. With the slightest news about bad weather, the market reacts,” said economist Abbassian. [snip]

But attempts to control prices in one country often have dire effects elsewhere. China’s restrictions on wheat flour exports resulted in a price spike in Indonesia this year, according to the FAO. Ukraine and Russia imposed export restrictions on wheat, causing tight supplies and higher prices for importing countries. Partly because of the cost of imported wheat, Peru’s military has begun eating bread made from potato flour, a native crop.(emphasis added)

“We need a response on a large scale, either the regional or international level,” said Brian Halweil of the environmental research organization Worldwatch Institute. “All countries are tied enough to the world food markets that this is a global crisis.”

Try a couple choruses of Kumbaya, which has more effect than giving the UN any food or money. Unless of course, the idea is to fatten up a collection of UN approved dictators.
Let us see the the idiot greenies undo this problem.

That one needs to even ask these questions should tell of the dismal conditions of today’s institutions.

Questions to Ask Before You Send Your Child to College.

Before you take out a second mortgage or otherwise deplete your savings in order to pay for your child’s college education, you might want to ask the colleges to which your child is applying some questions.

Can one obtain a Bachelor of Arts degree at your college without having read a single Shakespeare play, one Federalist Paper or one book of the Bible?
If so, why attend such a college?
Does the college allow military recruiters on its campus?
Before being threatened by Congress with a cutoff of federal funds, many colleges denied military recruiters access to their campus. They did so either because of their hostility to military in general or specific hostility to the war in Iraq, or because of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy regarding gays. If you believe, as reason and history argue, that the American military has done more to preserve liberty on earth than all the professors in all the universities combined, you might not want to send your child to a university that is hostile to the military.
In the political science, English, sociology, anthropology and history departments — or any other liberal arts department — what is the ratio of Democrats to Republicans among the professors?
Over 10 years ago, the Rocky Mountain News reported that registered Democrats on the faculty of the University of Colorado at Boulder outnumbered registered Republicans 31-1. If such a ratio exists in the social science departments of your child’s prospective college, why would you want your child to attend such an institution?
What are the names of the speakers invited and paid with college funds to speak last year at the college?
Just ask to see the previous year’s speakers list. Colleges set aside funds for visiting speakers. One would assume that a good college seeks to encourage thinking and to that end invites speakers throughout the political spectrum. If your prospective college has a speakers list that is balanced 10 to one in favor of speakers from the political left, that will help you decide whether indoctrination rather than exposure to great ideas is the university’s real agenda.
Can my child live in a same-sex dorm and are the bathrooms co-ed?
One generation ago and for all of American history, the university acted in loco parentis, in the place of the parent. You could send your daughter to college more or less assured that the college would act on behalf of her welfare as you would — meaning, for example, that boys had to leave girls dorms by a certain hour. Now, most colleges have no boys or girls dorms and do everything they can to enable boys and girls to fraternize in each other’s rooms at any hour of the night and even share bathrooms.
Is Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States the most widely assigned American history book?
If the answer is yes, you should consider sending your son or daughter to another university or at least be aware that you will be paying a lot of hard-earned money for your child to be manipulated into believing that America is a bad country, certainly no better than others, as he or she reads what is essentially a proctologist’s view of American history. Zinn believes, as he told me in an interview on my radio show, that America has done “probably more harm than good in its history.”
Would a typical graduate of your university be able to say anything intelligent about Josef Stalin, Louis Armstrong, Pope John XXIII or Pope John Paul II, differences between Protestantism and Catholicism, Cain and Abel, the Gulag Archipelago, Franz Josef Haydn, Pol Pot, Martin Luther, Darfur, how interest rates affect the dollar, dark matter, and “Crime and Punishment”; explain what the Korean War was about and when it was fought; identify India on a map; and know the difference between the United Nations General Assembly and the Security Council?
How could someone be considered in any way educated and not be able to intelligently answer all or nearly all of those questions? If they don’t know about such essential and basic things, what do they know? Movies? The supposed dangers of global warming? The importance of race, gender and class? The meaning of menage a trois (or “threesomes”)? Great gay writers?

Unfortunately, the chances are that if you receive any response at all to these questions, it will be a discouraging one. Outside of the natural sciences, colleges are either more interested in liberal indoctrination than in a liberal arts education, or they enable students to take courses that are so narrowly focused that your child graduate will likely graduate as a cultural and historical illiterate. Why so many Americans go into debt paying so much money to such failed institutions is one of the riddles of the universe.

It is time to demand that universities teach. Forcing them to answer the above seven questions is a good way to begin. Because granting a Bachelor of Arts degree on someone who never heard of Cain and Abel and never heard a Haydn symphony is a fraud.

I do not believe in drunk driving. I don’t like smoky places either. However, I’m not about to tell one never indulge. You make your own choices, and live with them.

Regional agency head suspended after DUI arrest in Martin County

PALM CITY — The leader of a Treasure Coast-wide agency established to provide classes for people convicted of driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs was suspended from her job Wednesday in the wake of her DUI arrest Monday.

The Comprehensive Offender Rehabilitation and Education program will continue to operate normally despite the arrest and suspension of its executive director, Margot “Peggy” Cioffi, 59, of Palm City, program officials said.

The nonprofit agency serves about 5,000 clients per year in Martin, St. Lucie, Indian River and Okeechobee counties, providing educational services to people on probation for DUI and other misdemeanors, among other programs.

“I feel bad for Peggy because this is very out of character for her,” said State Attorney Bruce Colton, the president of CORE’s board of directors. “It’s bad for her and it’s bad for the public perception of the program. [snip]

Cioffi, whose blood alcohol level was measured in a breath test at 0.336, could not immediately be reached for comment. The legal driving limit in Florida is 0.08 percent. [snip]

“She grew that organization from just a DUI school into a four-county program that was not only educational, but also handled probation services,” Caudell said. “She has done a lot of good for the community over the years.”

With a snoot full this large, it is a wonder she’s alive to comment. In the U.S. of Nanny America, it is fun to see the preachers hung out to dry. The paper did a story on these classes up here called CRASH. The individuals holding these courses are believers that sinning through demon rum is automatic damnation. No camp meeting fire-breathing preacher ever out did them.

I wonder if they made the three bozos clean the chopper? Kerry served in Vietnam; don’t know how much time he put in the birds.

Senators in Emergency Landing

WASHINGTON (AP) - Helicopters carrying three senior U.S. senators made emergency landings Thursday in the mountains of Afghanistan because of a snowstorm.   Sens. John Kerry, Joseph Biden and Chuck Hagel were aboard the aircraft. No one was injured, according a statement from Kerry’s office. The senators and their delegation returned to Bagram Air Base in a motor convoy, and have left for Turkey.

A small forced march with the troops would have worked wonders for these junketeering clowns.

“After several hours, the senators were evacuated by American troops and returned overland to Bagram Air Base, and left for their next scheduled stop in Ankara, Turkey,” the Kerry statement said. “Sen Kerry thanks the American troops, who were terrific as always and who continue to do an incredible job in Afghanistan.”

GAK! Kerry is shameless.

The lawmakers were on a trip this week that included stops in India, Turkey and Pakistan, where they observed the elections earlier this week.

Kerry and Biden are Democrats from Massachusetts and Delaware, respectively, and the Republican Hagel is from Nebraska.

Hagel, the RINO, isn’t running again, so why is he wasting our money flitting around the third world?

Enough of the candidates “creating jobs” or “bringing back jobs” or talk of full employment tripe, if they were any good at what they purport to do, they would be in the private sector, being useful and accomplishing good in the world.

Skills Deficit Makes ‘Creating Jobs’ a Pipe Dream

[snip]
That might seem strange at a time when the economy is teetering on the brink of recession, and has eclipsed Iraq as the No. 1 issue on many voters’ minds.

Here’s my reason: Other than during the depths of the Great Depression, the government doesn’t “create jobs.” (World War II created most of the jobs then anyway, and I’m not sure that’s the direction we should go.) Instead, a sensible government should help to create a skilled workforce and a decent business climate. If it does that, the jobs will take care of themselves.

Skills Gone South

To appreciate this distinction, consider two thought experiments. Here’s the first one:

1. How many different jobs could you find in the next six or eight months if you had to? Not perfect jobs, but places where you could get hired and earn a salary reasonably close to what you’re earning now.

I suspect this answer is going to vary widely among the people reading this column. For a star pediatric heart surgeon, the answer might be 10; every major children’s hospital would love to have him or her on staff. For an unemployed autoworker in Michigan, the answer is zero — or else he wouldn’t be unemployed.

The crucial point is that unemployment and low wages are not a function of too few jobs, as most politicians would have you believe. They’re a function of too few skills.

Joblessness in Context

We’re used to hearing about the unemployment rate, which climbed to 5 percent in December. Even that figure is somewhat misleading, though, because there’s extraordinary variance by education level. According to the most recent data from the Department of Labor, the unemployment rate is:

• 8.2 percent for high school dropouts.

• 4.7 percent for high school graduates with no college.

• 3.7 percent for workers with an associate’s degree or some college.

• 2 percent for workers with a bachelor’s degree and higher.

See the pattern?

Not Everybody’s an A-Rod

Here’s the second thought experiment, which gets at the heart of trade, outsourcing, and related causes of employment anxiety:

2. In December, the New York Yankees signed Alex Rodriguez to a 10-year, $275 million contract with a $30 million bonus if he breaks the all-time home run record. Why didn’t the Yankees hire a Chinese or Indian worker who would take the job for $500 a year, with a free moped for breaking the home run record? [snip]

A Clear DistinctionThat’s why I find it both puzzling and frustrating to hear politicians talk so much more about jobs than skills. The sad fact is that if a modern automobile plant came to Flint, Mich., most of the unemployed workers there wouldn’t have the right skills to get hired. [snip]

Skillful Questions

So here are three things the presidential candidates (and any other politician) should be talking more about:

• Preschool education

• The high school completion rate for African Americans and Hispanics

• A plateau in the proportion of Americans getting a college degree

Getting the colleges out of the business of remediation for high school students by insisting the students in K-12 actually learn instead of feeling good. Discipline, study and a strict requirement for graduation will go a long way to clearing up the current malaise.

We don’t need college grads, we need educated high school students.

How to always be right, uh left, which is liberal right, on the left. Right? Understand?

It is axiomatic with the Dakota Indians that “If you are riding a dead horse the best thing to do is dismount.” Always pragmatic, our Amerind fellows, are they not?

In Vermont’s political environment, the progressives and slow learning democrats incorporate planning for such contingencies. No sense being fuddled like FEMA.
Because of the heavy investment factor in always being right, they approved a methodology for dealing with such a condition; it follows:

• Fund a committee to study the horse
• Fund another committee to reanimate the horse
• Declare that the dead horse is more cost effective
• Create a new protected group for horses called living impaired
• Pass hate crime laws prohibiting disparagement of the horse
• Arrange junkets to see how others ride dead horses
• Provide additional funding to increase horse’s performance
• Empanel experts to see if lighter riders would improve performance
• Harness several dead horses together for increased speed and efficiency
• Rewrite the laws governing performance requirements for horses
• Appoint an Blue Ribbon Panel to investigate correlation between dead horses and climate change (global warming)
• Raise taxes on dead horses
• Enlarge the bureaucracy for riding the dead horse, creating a training session to increase the riders load share

If the problem still exists:

• Have the zampolit “chat” with the riders
• Show the riders the photos of their “dacha” in the camp of strict regime
• Purge riders
• Classify the horse as a capitalist tool

Finally if all else fails: Have the horse run for US Office.

If they filled the air with the CLU awards (Chartered Life Underwriters), the excitement monitor still flatlines. The divisional Nosebleed Contest rates high on my wanna see shows. Other award programs are available containing more unexpected choices and dark horse winners.

Tonight, from Dirtpoour, India and Raveledburka, Pakistan are the finalists in the International Martinizing Cleanoff. A jbella lot of fun for viewers and contestants alike, the loser gets a round to the head for causing loss of national pride

It’s official: No actors will show up

SAG president Alan Rosenberg has announced that not one of the more than 70 actors nominated for a Golden Globe will attend the Jan. 13 ceremonies because of the WGA’s plans to picket the event.
The Globes have been thrown into turmoil and uncertainty due to the WGA’s refusal to grant a strike waiver to struck Globes producer Dick Clark Prods., which offered to accept the same terms as David Letterman’s Worldwide Pants banner. Instead, the guild has said it will picket the Globes, skedded to air on NBC, which has become a prime target of the WGA’s strike campaign in the past few weeks. [snip]

This strike has improved TV viewing pleasure immensely. Everyone is now free to get some real friends.

Without a smidgen of concern, one can avoid wondering if the reruns sucked as horribly as when they first disgraced the screen. Here, given with professional authority, the show did, does and will until TV’s are forever declared an environmental hazard by Algore.

Only Fox reported on the “Gun Free Zone”

Media Coverage of Mall Shooting Fails to Reveal Mall’s Gun-Free-Zone Status

The horrible tragedy at the Westroads Mall in Omaha, Neb. received a lot of attention Wednesday and Thursday. It should have. Eight people were killed, and five were wounded.

A Google news search using the phrase “Omaha Mall Shooting” finds an incredible 2,794 news stories worldwide for the last day. From India and Taiwan to Britain and Austria, there are probably few people in the world who haven’t heard about this tragedy.

But despite the massive news coverage, none of the media coverage, at least by 10 a.m. Thursday, mentioned this central fact: Yet another attack occurred in a gun-free zone.

Surely, with all the reporters who appear at these crime scenes and seemingly interview virtually everyone there, why didn’t one simply mention the signs that ban guns from the premises?

Now that the arm waving is over, perhaps we should look at the principle of the “Gun Free Zone” from a legal position. Manifestly, only law-abiding persons obey this stricture. If a business, in a public or private space, chooses to abridge the lawful right to carry, do they not have a parallel responsibility to protect the individuals they stripped of their right to self-defense.

Conspicuously, the Westroads Mall did not deliver a gun free zone any more than schools or post offices; even Brady Headquarters cannot provide this assurance for it is unachievable.

An attitude adjustment is obligatory; a multi-million dollar lawsuit will provide it. Pouring hot coffee into your crotch produces large rewards for non-life threatening self-inflicted injury. By corporate policy compromising your assured safety, their corporate bottom line must pay far more to the victims. Not for the shooting, that is a medical recompense. The lawsuit would seek damages for not ensuring compliance with their stated policy.

Maybe then the MSM will take note of where these incidents take place, namely in “Gun Free Zones.” They don’t now.

Quack…..wheeeeeze….cough….Quack!  He’s back!

When Don Imus was brought to ground by a few liberal jackals, race-profiteers and media hounds a while back, his removal from WFAN was a mercy killing.  With the comic motility of a Maine potato, Imus was painfully lodged at the lowest regions of nasty talk radio.  Now, he’s about to stage a comeback, by displacing  Guardian Angel Curtis Sliwa and the old William Koenstler associate, Ron Kuby at WABC.

That Imus would have lasted beyond 1989 is itself, improbable.   True, he’d walked the standard reformative path admired in the liberal media - re-hab for drugs and alcohol, an irreligious book demonstrating his ability to concentrate and willingness to villify the defenseless, but that wasn’t enough.  Along the way he also became a humanitarian, with the Imus Ranch for Kids With Cancer.   That punched his ticket.

With the Imus Ranch came two essential, and several unfortunate, things.  The first essential was that some children with dreaded disease were helped.  The second essential was the approval of liberals, who poured into the show through the chute provided by Westwood One Entertainment.  David Gregory, Howard Feinneman, Chris Matthews, Kerry, Dodd, Lieberman, Frank Rich, a list too long for this post.  

The unfortunate things attributable to the ranch were Imus’s very young, insufferable twit of a wife, the unknowable and uninteresting spawn Wyatt Imus, the maundering brother with his obliterating stupidity, and the product line, which stretched to the New Mexico horizon and was just as interesting.  

The Imus in The Morning Show on WFAN was a sustained and relentless commercial for the Imus family and its marketing wing.  Maybe it’s just me, but the true iconoclast, the indignant rebel doesn’t shill for cowboy hats, baseball caps, denim shirts and salsa.  What Imus is, in addition to everything else, is a phony, a charlatan.

Up against these concerns for children with cancer, was the bizarre counterpoint of a show so nasty, vile, vindictive, slanderous and gratuitously vulgar that the people involved seemed oblivious to the infected popular culture they created for the same kids they were helping in New Mexico.  Were they just cynical about their charitable pursuits, or just craven in their pursuit of wealth through shock radio, or both?  Or neither?  

I don’t know.  The existence of some things seems to reduce or expand the likelihood of other things.   Real goodness has a way of spreading through the person who’s trying to be good, which always made me wonder how the supposedly religious Charles McCord could be so obsequious to Imus, and how he could write such clever but vulgar routines.  

Imus himself, so misanthropic and awful in his judgements,  seems unfastened from the human qualities necessary to manage  a ranch for children.   That’s a question about the soul and the mainspring of human effort.  I’d like an answer, even though I don’t deserve one. 

I obviously used to listen to the show, though it became clear years ago that hearing one edition means you’ve already heard the others.  So I stopped listening, and suggest to Imus that his new format do/not do the following.

1. No Bo Dietel, all the time

2. No mention of “my friend Kinky Friedman”

3. No mention of Lobster Newburgh.

4. Stop saying “what a nightmare”

5. Let Delbert McClinton slip into obscurity

6. Stop saying “get Lupaca on the phone”.

7. Talk for three minutes without saying the proper name “Imus”

8. Take your own advice, and “Get Out!”

The baseball playoffs have been very entertaining.  And that’s not just because I’m a pumped up Indians fan after knocking off the “evil empire”.  The Tribe is proof that you can build a contending team through your farm system.  The Indians organization has certainly done a great job identifying and developing talent.  It’s no mean feat to defeat teams that are outspending you 3 or 4 to 1.

As far as the upcoming series, I give a slight edge to the Red Sox in lineups and closer.  Big Papi and Manny definitely form a better combo in the heart of the lineup.  And Papelbon is hands down a better closer than Borowsky.  But, I like the Tribe’s starting rotation better.  Sabathia and Carmona form a better 1 2 starting combo than Beckett and take your choice of Boston pitcher.  The bullpens are even to slight Indians edge as Tribe relief has been lights out so far. 

If the Tribe can win one of the first 2 in Boston, the series could be interesting.  It wouldn’t surprise me to see the series go 7.  Go Tribe!