Since the launch of GiantBomb.com, I see no reason to ever visit this site again; there's nothing left for me here. My GameSpot subscription has officially been cancelled.

My Giant Bomb profile is located here.

My new, official blog is located here.

Goodbye GameSpot, you were good to me over the years.

"Huge news. Hanley Ramirez and the Marlins are on the verge of finalizing a six-year, $70 million contract extension, the largest commitment in franchise history. The deal is pending a physical and an official announcement might not come until early next week.

The Marlins are believed to have initiated talks during spring training. Ramirez, who is making $439,000 this season, would have been eligible for arbitration after this season. Ramirez is taking a huge home discount as this deal buys out his first three years of free agent eligibility."

http://blogs.sun-sentinel.com/sports_baseball_marlins/

YES!

The stadium deal is already producing some financial breathing room. This is great news!! Go Fish!

From Germany in the 1930s to China in the 80s and 90s, all dictators or would-be dictators target newspapers and their journalists. They threaten and harass them in more open societies that they are seeking to close, and they arrest them and worse in societies that have been closed already. The Committee to Protect Journalists says arrests of US journalists are at an all-time high: Josh Wolf, a blogger in San Francisco, has been put in jail for a year for refusing to turn over video of an anti-war demonstration; Homeland Security brought a criminal complaint against reporter Greg Palast, claiming he threatened "critical infrastructure" when he and a TV producer were filming victims of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. Palast had written a bestseller critical of the Bush administration.

Prosecution and job loss are nothing, though, compared with how the US is treating journalists seeking to cover the conflict in Iraq in an unbiased way. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented multiple accounts of the US military in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon independent reporters and camera operators from organizations ranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC.

Over time in closing societies, real news is supplanted by fake news and false documents. Pinochet showed Chilean citizens falsified documents to back up his claim that terrorists had been about to attack the nation. The yellowcake charge, too, was based on forged papers.

We won't have a shutdown of news in modern America because it's just not possible. But we can have a steady stream of lies polluting the news well. What we already have is a White House directing a stream of false information that is so relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort out truth from untruth. In a fascist system, it's not the lies that count but the muddying. When citizens can't tell real news from fake, they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit.

~Mike Pelletier