Goodness me. There is a push on to have Tony Blair impeached over his handling of the Iraq/WMD issue, invoking some obscure laws not used since 1848 and never repealed.

Read these:

• The Guardian: MPs plan to impeach Blair over Iraq war record
• The Guardian: Now for the politics of last resort - impeach Tony Blair (Adam Price, Plaid Cymru MP)
• The Telegraph: Isn’t it time to impeach Blair over Iraq? (Boris Johnson, MP for Henley and Editor, The Spectator)

There are strong cases for having Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld etc impeached. Hopefully the people will decide in their own way on November 2. But if Bush is re-elected, it’s hard to see any move for his impeachment getting off the ground unless some extremely compelling evidence was put forward.

Australia doesn’t have impeachments. Pity. But then we have an election coming soon too.

If there’s anything that makes me immensely patriotic, it’s the way we Australians place our imprint on the world stage. It doesn’t matter whether it’s David Wenham being Faramir, Jimmy Little doing U2 covers, Steve Waugh snubbing GW Bush, or the Puppetry of the Penis simply existing. And then there’s the Australian baseballers beating the Japanese Dream Team.

Australia will play in Thursday night’s Olympic baseball gold medal game after beating Japan 1-0 in the semi-final. A team of part-timers and US minor leaguers (and occasional major leaguer) against a squad made up entirely of Japanese league professionals. All that could top this would be Huey (or maybe Kylie Kwong or Bill Grainger) being a victorious “Iron Chef Australian”.

It was a Brendan Kingman RBI in the top of the sixth that made the difference, with Chris Oxspring the winning pitcher. Jeff Williams, who replaced Oxspring late in the 7th inning, made the save. Here is the play-by-play of the game, and this is how the Sydney Morning Herald report.

In the other semi, Canada were leading 3-2 at the middle of the eighth. Then Cuba scored six runs. It was a double-RBI single by Ariel Pestano that put the Cubans in front. Final score, 8-5. Here’s the play-by-play and CBC’s match report.

The ONS summary of semi-final day:

Gold and bronze medal games highlight the last day of competition
ATHENS, 24 August - Canada will play Japan for the bronze medal and Cuba will play Australia for the gold in the final day of the Olympic Baseball Tournament. The bronze game will start at 11:30 and the gold medal matchup will begin at 20:00.

JPN v CAN

Both teams had golden expectations going into the tournament with Japan bringing its ‘Dream Team’ of all-stars from the Japan professional league and Canada going undefeated in a pre-Olympic tuneup in Rome.

Now, both will play for the bronze medal. Japan was defeated by Australia in one of the biggest upsets in Olympic baseball history. Despite a dominating performance by Daisuke MATSUZAKA, Japan could not solve Australian pitchers Chris OXSPRING and Jeff WILLIAMS, losing in a 1-0 squeaker.

Canada squandered a 3-2 lead in the bottom of the eighth inning against Cuba, but almost tied the game in the ninth after a Kevin NICHOLSON (CAN) blast barely stayed in the park for the final out.

CUB v AUS

In an unlikely final, perennial gold medal favourite Cuba takes on Australia. Despite looking shaky early on in the tournament with a close game against seventh place Greece and a loss to Japan, Cuba has rebounded to find itself in a familiar position. Slugging catcher Ariel PESTANO leads the ‘Big Red Machine’ which has a strong and balanced lineup.

Australia is making its first appearance in the gold medal game. Things are coming together at the right time for the Aussies as their pitching and hitting have kept enough runs off the scoreboard, while putting plenty on it.

Starting pitchers have not yet been announced.

ONS jc/nkl

Erki Nool failed to retain his Olympic decathlon crown on Tuesday. That was expected. He did, however, go one better than Sydney in having two discus throws judged legal instead of just one. The Erki Nool fan website doesn’t appear to have been updated since April 2003 in Estonian, or September 2001 in English. Decathlon2000 covers the Estonian and world decathlon scene quite well however, and is up to date.

Congratulations to the Czech Republic’s Roman ? ebrle, who won the gold medal with 8893 points. Bryan Clay (no, not him) was second with 8820, and Dmitriy Karpov of Kazakhstan third with 8725.

Kenya did the trifecta in the 3000 steeplechase with Ezekiel Kemboi taking the gold. Here is how the East African Standard reported the race.

An extraordinary men’s handball quarter-final saw Germany beat Spain 32-30 in a penalty shootout after the teams were tied at 30-30 with two periods of extra time. Here is Frankfurter Rundschau’s report of the match (in German), and El Mundo’s report (in Spanish). Here are the match stats. The semi-final match-ups on Friday: Croatia v Hungary and Germany v Russia. Current markets with Centrebet: Croatia 2.15, Germany 3.25, Russia 4.00, Hungary 10.00.

Comparing Serbia and Montenegro to Yugoslavia is like comparing Russia to the USSR, but that hasn’t stopped the “worst ever” tag being applied to the current SCG (to give their ISO3166-1 Alpha-3 code) men’s basketball team. They finished 11th of 12 in the Olympic tournament with two wins and four losses, pushing Angola in last spot with an 85-62 win in their classification game.

Greece rolled defending champions Australia in the semi-final of the women’s water polo 6-2. And weren’t they happy. Here’s the Sydney Morning Herald report.

And surprise surprise, the US softball team claimed NBC’s Kleenex Moment of the Day for day ten. (And a belated congratulations to Mardy Fish for winning the day seven NBCKMOTD.)

Baseball, beach volleyball and hockey covered separately, but finally, Iraq lost to Paraguay 2-1 in the men’s soccer semi-final and will meet Italy for bronze on Friday. And who better to tell an Iraq good-news story than the Fox “News” Channel?