Colon beats Boston 3-1. Seattle defeated Anaheim 5-1, so the wild card lead is now a puny ½-game. The Yankees took two from Tampa Bay and are 5½ up in the East. Burkett/Buehrle at 2pm. … I didn't watch last night's game, so I missed this: "Chicago left fielder Carlos Lee leaped at the scoreboard in the seventh inning to rob Bill Mueller of a hit -- and never came down. The back of Lee's shirt got caught on a scoreboard bolt, leaving him dangling. "I looked at Carl [Everett] and said, 'Can you please come over here?'" … MLB did not allow the Expos any September callups because they'd already exceeded payroll costs by adding Todd Zeile. ... Petroskey Shames Hall by Eric Enders.

Update at 2:15: Nomar is out of Sunday's lineup (he had flu-like symptoms yesterday). So what does Grady do? He slots Mueller in at #2, drops Walker to #3, and has the rest of the lineup continue as usual: "Ramirez, Ortiz, Millar ..." Why is Todd &*%$# Walker batting 3rd? 3rd?!?! And against Buehrle to boot, when he's "hitting" .240/.286/.384 against lefties this year. 15 games left in the season, wild card lead down to ½-game and Grady's still pulling this idiotic shit. ... How much can this team achieve with Gump the 2-Ton Millstone around its neck?

Off the Field: "Britain and the United States have decided to delay the publication of a full report on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction after inspectors found no evidence that any such weapons exist in the country … [the final report] may not necessarily even be published." Well, that’s very interesting! More on David Kay, the man heading the "search." ... Among the Top 25 Censored Media Stories of 2002-2003: "US Illegally Removes Pages from Iraq U.N. Report"; "Rumsfeld's Plan to Provoke Terrorists"; and "US Implicated in Taliban Massacre." ... I'm surprised that I'm still surprised: "The US is demanding Japan send its troops to Iraq … Japanese government sources … quoted a US Defense Department official as asking Japan, 'Why don't you shape up?'"

Required reading from Michael Meacher and Robert Fisk. Joe Conason writes that "homeland-security spending will fall short of minimum requirements by more than $98 billion over the next several years." ... Support the Troops?: "After a grenade exploded inside his Humvee in Iraq, Marine Staff Sgt. Bill Murwin was treated at a military hospital in Germany and spent four weeks at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md. Part of his left foot was amputated. His medical care was free, but the government billed him $243 for the food." … "[M]ore than 6,000 American servicemen have been evacuated for medical reasons since the beginning of the [Iraq] war, including more than 1,500 American soldiers who have been wounded, many seriously. … [Why are figures quoted in the US media so much lower?] It is military police policy to announce that a soldier has been wounded only if they were involved in an incident that involved a death."

Kristin Breitweiser reviews "DC9/11": "It is understandable that so little time is actually devoted to the president's true actions on the morning of 9/11. Because to show the entire 23 minutes from 9:03 to 9:25 a.m., when President Bush, in reality, remained seated and listening to "second grade story-hour" while people like my husband were burning alive inside the World Trade Center towers, would run counter to Karl Rove's art direction and grand vision." ... Breitweiser joins Mindy Kleinberg, Patty Casazza and Lori Van Auken here (also, an excellent cartoon from Ward Sutton); Frank Rich called DC9/11 "propaganda so untroubled by reality that it's best viewed as a fitting memorial to Leni Riefenstahl."