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By Brendan Loy
Pat Forde was the Stanford Tree for a day during the Cardinal's game against Washington last week. Heh.
Although I must say, if he was sober at the time, I'm not sure he really got the true Stanford Tree experience.
By Brendan Loy
A new set of Survey USA 50-state polls on McCain-Obama and McCain-Clinton general election matchups show McCain losing narrowly to either candidate (280-258 to Obama, 276-262 to Clinton), but on the basis of very different electoral maps.
Survey USA has Obama winning nine states that Hillary doesn't: Washington, Oregon, Nevada, Colorado, North Dakota, Iowa, Michigan, Virginia, and New Hampshire. They also say he'll win two of Nebraska's three congressional districts, but lose the state.
Meanwhile, they show Clinton winning five states that Obama doesn't: Arkansas, Florida, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey.
By Brendan Loy
The movement toward a "re-vote" in Michigan and Florida -- which would not actually be a "re-" anything, but rather the first legitimate primaries they've held, as I'll keep stubbornly pointing out -- appears to be steadily gaining momentum.
The Obama campaign now says it will "support whatever the DNC rules are, including a fair remedy to this problem." And the aforeblogged Hillary pivot toward accepting "re-votes," raised first by Terry McAuliffe and then by Ted Strickland, continued today as prominent Clinton supporter Ben Nelson added his voice to the "re-vote" chorus, and Clinton adviser Howard Wolfson signaled a possible opennness toward such a scenario: "Given how well we did in those states, were there to be a primary, we would have a good opportunity to do well again."
Wolfson then reiterated the campaign's official line: "Our position is that the voters of Michigan and Florida have spoken." But that position is entirely untenable once the "re-vote" option comes to be seen as a viable alternative, which appears to be happening.
Continue reading "Inching toward legitimate votes in MI, FL" »
By CNN
Seven people slain by two terrorists at Jewish seminary at entrance of Jerusalem, police tell AP. Terrorists also dead.
By Brendan Loy
I think Jonathan Alter is right:
I've asked several prominent uncommitted superdelegates if there's any chance they would reverse the will of Democratic voters. They all say no. It would shatter young people and destroy the party.
Clinton's only hope lies in the popular vote—a yardstick on which she now trails Obama by about 600,000 votes. Should she end the primary season in June with a lead in popular votes, she could get a hearing from uncommitted superdelegates for all the other arguments that she would make a stronger nominee (wins the big states, etc.). If she loses both the pledged delegate count and the popular vote, no argument will cause the superdelegates to disenfranchise millions of Democratic voters. It will be over.
Of course, a big question is, which popular vote? The Clinton campaign is currently quoting the popular vote including the January "primaries" in Michigan and Florida, but that's absurd -- at least with regard to Michigan, where Obama wasn't on the ballot. Moreover, Clinton herself said, months before Michigan voted, that "it's clear this election they're having isn't going to count for anything."
By Brendan Loy
Peter Baker and Anne E. Kornblut have a fascinating story in today's Washington Post about the ongoing turmoil within the Clinton campaign, with a heavy focus on how everybody hates Mark Penn.
A lot of focus will inevitably fall on the portion of the article that quotes Clinton aides shouting the f-word at one another, but I actually think the buried lede is this:
[The campaign] essentially did not compete in smaller states holding caucuses [on Super Tuesday]. Clinton, feeling burned by Iowa, had become allergic to caucuses, deeming them unfair.
Ickes and political director Guy Cecil argued that such states were important because even if she lost, she would pick up delegates with a strong showing. That would soon become clear. Clinton racked up big wins in California, New Jersey and even Kennedy's Massachusetts. But she lost the caucus states, and because of the party's proportional rules, it cost her.
"That was one of the biggest blunders we had," a senior official said.
We already knew that the decision to "skip" the caucuses was a huge blunder, but the general assumption up until now has been that it was a sign of arrogance on the campaign's part -- they skipped the caucuses because they made a fatally flawed calculation that they didn't need 'em, they could win without 'em. In contrast to that CW, this article makes it sound like it was not really a strategic decision by the campaign at all, but rather a fit of personal pique by Hillary herself, who "deemed "caucuses "unfair" because she lost one.
And thus it emerges that the Clinton campaign's strategy of marginalizing the caucus states -- to the
point of twisting the results in a way that totally disenfranchises the voters of caucus states, arguing that merely that caucuses should count for less than primaries, but that they shouldn't count at all -- is not so much a spinmeister's gambit as a position based on Hillary's actual, deeply held beliefs. I'm not sure which is worse!
P.S. A secondary "buried lede": the Clinton campaign spent $7 million in South Carolina... and only $300,000 in Wisconsin!!
By Brendan Loy
A small improvised explosive device exploded in Times Square this morning, blowing a hole through the door of the Army recruiting station there, but causing no injuries, thank goodness. Excerpt:
Members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force, the large Police Department and F.B.I. unit that investigates terrorism, were at the scene of the blast, supporting the Police Department’s Bomb Squad, which along with other police detectives likely will take the lead role in investigating the incident, an F.B.I. official said. The official said that in today’s attack, a man in a gray hooded sweatshirt was seen leaving the scene on a bicycle.
The authorities were looking into whether the explosion was connected to two earlier blasts that were similar in method and timing, the official said. At about 3:40 a.m. on Oct. 26, 2007, two dummy hand grenades that had been fashioned into crude bombs exploded outside the Mexican Consulate at 27 East 39th Street in Murray Hill, shattering windows. The building was not occupied and no one was hurt. At 3:55 a.m. on May 5, 2005, two crude but powerful explosive devices detonated outside the British Consulate at 845 Third Avenue in East Midtown, shattering windows and damaging a planter.
Confederate Yankee has pictures, and says, "This was an act of domestic terrorism." He adds:
I do not, however, feel comfortable blaming any specific anti-war group for this act, or even pinning this as an anti-war act at this point in time.
Anti-war groups, in general, are non-violent in nature, and those that lean towards the anarchist fringe that are violence prone tend towards vandalism, and generally, don't have the technical expertise to manufacture even such a simple device.
Whoever built this bomb may have sympathies towards the anti-war movement and/or anti-military feelings, but I would be surprised to find them affiliated officially with any specific anti-war or anti-military group, and would be even more surprised if anyone inside one of these groups had advance knowledge of the attack.
(Hat tip: InstaPundit.)
By Brendan Loy
Today is the tenth anniversary of the Newington lottery shootings -- a.k.a. the "lottery massacre," or as I called it in The Living Room Times the next day, the "Alumni Road massacre." Disgruntled state lottery employee Matthew Beck shot and killed four co-workers, then himself, at the Connecticut lottery headquarters on the road behind the high school's athletic fields, with the last two deaths literally occurring in the NHS football parking lot.
There was a moment of silence at 8:45 this morning in memory of the slain employees: state lotto director Otho Brown; chief financial officer and former New Britain mayor Linda Mlynarczyk (formerly Blogoslawski); vice president of operations Rick Rubelmann; and information systems director Michael Logan. Governor Jodi Rell, who was lieutenant governor on March 6, 1998, issued the following statement:
On that horrible morning, four devoted public servants were killed and the lives of their colleagues were forever altered. Sadly, Connecticut has all too often seen state employees such as highway workers and state police officers killed in the line of duty. Yet the events of March 6, 1998, are etched in our memory with particular shock. I ask that state residents pause with me on Thursday morning to pray for the victims, their fellow lottery employees and their families.
Amen.
I was out sick from school that day, and slept till sometime after noon. When I woke up, I found several messages on the answering machine from my parents, telling me there'd been a shooting at lottery headquarters, near the high school. (If I remember correctly, they'd heard about it because the shooter had been a member of their union.) I quickly turned on CNN, to find live coverage of the tragedy in my hometown. Helicopters were hovering overhead; satellite trucks were everywhere. While I'd been sleeping, Newington had become the center of the nation's attention. I logged on to AOL and saw an article beginning with words I never thought I'd read: "NEWINGTON, Conn. (AP)." The article went on to describe Newington as a "small, sleepy town" -- my hometown was a cliché for a day.
This was during my junior year, only a few months after the deaths of Bob and Jen. Those tragedies had hit the NHS community harder, of course, since they were more personal and specific to the high school, rather than being a mere matter of traumatic proximity. Still, the lottery massacre certainly contributed to the overall sense of 1997-98 being a rather hellish year at Newington High School. It also came at a time when school shootings were becoming major news items: the Pearl and Peducah tragedies had occurred a few months earlier, and the Jonesboro massacre would take place 2 1/2 weeks later. (Columbine was over a year away.) Although the lottery shootings were not actually at the school, they were close enough that I'd say they definitely reinforced a general feeling of edginess about such things.
Long term, the shootings led to a new gun control law in Connecticut, which has since been used to confiscate more than 1,200 guns from "people who are considered a serious danger to themselves or others." Also, the Hartford Courant won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the shootings.
By Brendan Loy
One week ago, when Navy beat American to take over first place in the Patriot League, it looked like the Midshipmen were en route to their first regular-season conference title since 2000 -- and, more importantly, guaranteed home-court advantage throughout the league tournament, putting them in the driver's seat for their first NCAA Tournament berth in a decade.
But then on Saturday, Navy lost to Colgate, American won over Lafayette, and suddenly the Eagles were the conference's #1 seed, despite having been swept by the Middies in the season series. Still, the #2-seeded Midshipmen just needed three wins in the conference tournament, and all that would be forgotten.
They couldn't even get one.
Last night, playing at home against #7-seed Bucknell -- the team that wowed the college-basketball world four years ago with a win over Kansas that I predicted :) -- mighty Navy lost in about the most heartbreaking fashion imaginable, blowing a 17-point second-half lead and ultimately losing in triple overtime on a desperation half-court heave at the buzzer:
[After taking the inbounds pass with 2 seconds left, down 86-84, Bucknell senior John] Griffin got just across halfcourt before heaving a 40-footer. The ball banked off the backboard and swished through the nets, giving the seventh-seeded Bison an 87-86 3OT win over second-seeded Navy that was every bit as improbable as that 2004 NCAA Tournament win against the Jayhawks.
"Thank goodness the Navy backboards are soft," Griffin said. "Whatever it takes at this point, that's what every team is saying at this point -- do whatever it takes to play another day." ...
"It's sort of like a dream that replays in your mind," Griffin said. "Everyone who's played basketball has envisioned himself in that environment."
The official Bucknell site is calling it a "miracle" shot, and "one of the most improbable finishes in Bucknell basketball annals":
Griffin's game-winning shot was the last in a flurry of clutch plays from both teams in the final seconds. Only a minute earlier Griffin hit a 3-pointer from the top of the key that tied the game at 81. Chris Harris answered with his own 3-pointer to put Navy ahead 84-81 with 58 seconds left, but Bison freshman G.W. Boon hit the shot of his life, a tying 3-pointer with 41 seconds left. Harris tried to win it with a three for Navy, but T.J. Topercer put back his miss with three seconds left to give Navy an 86-84 lead.
Justin Castleberry then inbounded to Griffin on the run, and Griffin juked around one defender before letting fly from just inside the "N" logo at center court. The ball hit the center of the box on the backboard and banked in, setting off a wild celebration from the Bucknell bench.
Wow. It sounds like Quinnipiac's win over CCSU, except it happened in a single-elimination, win-or-go-home conference tournament. Anybody know where I can find a video?
Although it was the most dramatic, Bucknell's stunner over Navy wasn't the only upset in yesterday's Championship Week action. Also in the Patriot League, #5 Army topped #4 Lehigh, 64-61 in OT -- so, improbably enough, Army (6-8 in conference play) is still alive for an NCAA bid, while the season is over for archrival Navy (9-5). I'm sure this fact is lost on no one at either academy.
Also pulling an upset yesterday were the Troy Trojans, the worst team in the Sun Belt, knocking off homestanding Louisiana-Lafayette in a 12-over-5 shocker. Everything else went according to form in the Sun Belt, Patriot League and Atlantic Sun, the three conferences with tournament action yesterday.
So, what's on tap today? Well, we've got two more Atlantic Sun quarterfinals (the #1 and #2 seeds play the day before the #3 and #4 seeds, I guess to give them a day's rest as a reward for their regular season success), the Big South semifinals (featuring the top 4 seeds -- #1 UNC Asheville vs. #4 Liberty, #2 Winthrop vs. #3 High Point), the NEC quarters (including #6 Central Connecticut State at #3 Sacred Heart, 7:00 PM), and first-round action the Missouri Valley (#7 Missouri State vs. #10 Evansville, #8 Indiana State vs. #9 Wichita State). Complete schedule here.
Oh, and if you're wondering what's next for Bucknell, Army, and the rest of the Patriot League: the semifinals are Sunday (#5 Army at #1 American, #7 Bucknell at #3 Colgate) and the championship game is next Friday, March 14.
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