Irish Trojan in Tennessee

Everybody loves the BCS

By Brendan Loy

Well, everybody who matters, anyway.

Heh.

By Brendan Loy

Hmm... now, does this "humanize" Hillary, or make her an effete, out-of-touch elitist? We embed, you decide!

(In fairness, I have trouble with those things sometimes too.)

P.S. She's also never heard of Red Bull, and she hasn't pumped her own gas in years. Elitist!! ;)

On a more serious note, after the jump are the clips of Bill O'Reilly's interview with Hillary this morning in South Bend. Notre Dame fans should at least watch the first minute of the first clip -- there's a Fighting Irish reference!

Also, Buffalo-area readers may want to skip ahead to around 5:45 in the second clip, where he (briefly) takes her to task for not improving the Western New York economy. w00t!

Professors giving students bad grades: out. Professors suing students: in.

By Brendan Loy

I've seen not one, but two stories today about professors suing their students. The first one involves a writing instructor at Dartmouth who appears intent on sabotaging her own academic career on the basis of, apparently, personal pique. (More here, here, here, here and here.) Bizarre... absolutely bizarre. The second, perhaps slightly more serious case involves a Little Rock law professor who is suing for defamation arising out of a racially charged controversy at UALR. Fun.

Lesbians sue lesbians in battle over Lesbos

By Brendan Loy

Hot Lesbian (legal) action!

ATHENS, Greece (AP) - A Greek court has been asked to draw the line between the natives of the Aegean Sea island of Lesbos and the world's gay women.

Three islanders from Lesbos—home of the ancient poet Sappho, who praised love between women—have taken a gay rights group to court for using the word lesbian in its name.

One of the plaintiffs said Wednesday that the name of the association, Homosexual and Lesbian Community of Greece, "insults the identity" of the people of Lesbos, who are also known as Lesbians.

"My sister can't say she is a Lesbian," said Dimitris Lambrou. "Our geographical designation has been usurped by certain ladies who have no connection whatsoever with Lesbos," he said.

Tee hee. (Hat tip: Mark Steyn, who says "lawyers in Gay, Michigan will be watching the case with interest." Heh. Just wait until Dildo, Newfoundland and Intercourse, Pennsylvania get in on the action!)

P.S. Maybe Angela Keathley and Renee Thomas can file amicus briefs?

(Hat tip: A&A.)

Tennessee Chief Justice retires

By Brendan Loy

William M. Barker, the Chief Justice of the Tennessee Supreme Court*, is retiring.

*or is the proper title "Chief Justice of the State of Tennessee"? I'm not sure.

Trustee donates $15 million to NDLS

By Brendan Loy

More good news from Notre Dame Law School:

Robert F. Biolchini, a member of the University of Notre Dame Board of Trustees and partner in the Tulsa, Okla., law firm Stuart, Biolchini & Turner, and his wife, Frances, have made a $15 million gift to the University to help underwrite the renovation of the current Notre Dame Law School building. ...

After a comprehensive renovation of the existing law school building, which will be renamed Biolchini Hall, it will house an expanded Kresge Law Library. The renovation in Biolchini Hall also will include two 50-seat classrooms, new space for Notre Dame Law Review, and new offices and work space for admissions and career services. The exterior of the building, including masonry, windows and roofing, will be restored where necessary.

A covered archway will link Biolchini Hall to the adjacent Eck Hall of Law, a three-story, 85,000-square-foot building that is under construction on the site of the former campus post office. Eck Hall will be composed primarily of a new moot courtroom, classrooms and faculty offices. When it is completed in January 2009, law school operations will be moved out of the existing building and renovation work will begin.

“The combination of Biolchini and Eck Halls will give Notre Dame one of the outstanding law school facilities in the country,” said Patricia A. O’Hara, Joseph A. Matson Dean of Notre Dame Law School. “On behalf of all law school faculty, students and alumni, I want to offer my deepest thanks to Bob, Fran and their family.”

Hmm... Biolchini Hall and Eck Hall, connected by a covered archway. Hey, how much does it cost to build a covered archway? We should put together a blog fundraising campaign, and get it named the "Irish Trojan Archway." ;)

Obama rejects, denounces & disowns Wright

By Brendan Loy

I think the term "Sister Souljah Moment" may need to be renamed as "Jeremiah Wright Moment":

Obama basically said exactly what Andrew Sullivan said yesterday that he needed to say, so it's no surprise that Sullivan called Obama's remarks "a very impressive, clear and constructive re-framing of the core message of his candidacy. ... [T]oday, we found that he can fight back, and take a stand, without calculation and in what is clearly a great amount of personal difficulty and political pain. It's what anyone should want in a president." More reactions here, including this from Jonathan Chait:

His denunciation of Rev. Wright today seems to be pretty much a bullseye. Why did he let the story hang out there so long without a response? I don't know, but I do see a pattern here: Throughout the campaign, Obama has made very good tactical moves, but he's made them slowly. Hillary Clinton, by contrast, has made a lot of mistakes, but she does grasp the 24-hour news cycle and she acts very quickly.

That's my impression, too.

Glenn Reynolds, however, is unimpressed. I expect that most on the Right will react similarly. But I'm not sure what else they want Obama to say. They can say, as Glenn does, that he should have said it sooner. Fine. But that's a weak criticism. "Better late than never" is a common expression for a reason. And, look, can we take a big-picture view of this, please? Even if you have a completely cynical opinion on Obama's transformation vis a vis Wright -- even if you don't believe him for a second when he claims he didn't realize until now that Wright was so radical and disgusting -- let's take a look at where we are now, as opposed to where we were a month ago or three months ago or 20 years ago.

Right now, at this very moment, we have an African-American candidate for president who commands overwhelming support within the black community, who has just explicitly and firmly denounced the radical and hateful nonsense that is all too often accepted and repeated without question within that selfsame black community. That's a very good thing. Wright will undoubtedly dismiss Obama's comments as, in Al Sharpton's words, "grandstanding in front of white people," but the truth is that Obama is speaking to black people, too -- he's speaking to everyone -- and he is sending a very clear message: enough with the bulls**t. Haven't conservatives been waiting for a black leader to do that for, like, forever?

This is the promise of the Obama candidacy, encapsulated and made real. Obama is urging blacks to leave behind, once and for all, the politics of conspiratorial victimhood -- the politics of Jeremiah Wright and, although Obama can't afford politically to say so explicitly, of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton -- and embrace the politics of unity and hope and, ultimately, self-empowerment.

You can parse his words and question his timing, and you'll find plenty to criticize. But ultimately -- again, big picture, people -- he's doing the right thing, and it's a very important "right thing." Either his heart's in the right place, or, if you want to be all cynical about it, he's pretending that it is, and his overall message demands that he continue to do so, which is almost as good. Either way, the Barack Obama who spoke today is the natural ally of anyone who has ever despaired over the blame-whitey victimhood culture within the black community. No, he's not quite channeling Bill Cosby. He wouldn't be in this position if he were. No, he didn't throw Jeremiah Wright under the bus last fall. It's a delicate and difficult tightrope he's walking. He's not perfect. But no one is, and Obama is trying harder than anyone else has, on this stage, ever before. Be reasonable! 

I'm not saying how we got here is entirely unimportant, but I think recognizing where we are now is vastly more important. And I think it would be a shame if Obama is now effectively crucified by both sides: the political right (and its newfound ally, Hillary Clinton), for not saying this sooner; and radical elements of the liberal-black community, for saying it at all. Rightly or wrongly, the takeaway lesson, if such a two-front assault destroys him, would be that a black politician cannot succeed on the national stage, at least until the baby boomers die off. Conservatives ought not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. (That's liberals' job!) Obama is doing the right thing here, and if he's a little late to the party, slap him on the wrist and then defend him against the coming Wright/Sharpton/etc. onslaught. And then beat him in November on security issues or whatever. But he's on the right side of this issue, and if he loses because of it, it will be a shame for everyone -- principled conservatives included.

P.S. My dad writes: "It's now expected that Wright ... will come back and further Diss the apostate. / This will be Good. Instead of Hillary & McCain running for President against Jeremiah Wright, Wright will be perceived as running against Obama. Excellent."

My dad, incidentally, says Wright is "evidently jealous" of Obama, but I think Cornhuskers may have hit closer to the mark when he said that Wright's ramblings confirmed a longstanding fear that the old-guard "civil rights leaders would fear that they are going to lose that 'white man behind the curtain keeping black people down' trump card" and would consequently go after Obama, knowing that "it's hard to preach this when the person sitting in the big chair at 1600 Penn is a black man." Further support for this theory: now Al Sharpton is coming after Obama, too.

This is good, as my dad said. If Obama is running against Al Sharpton and Jeremiah Wright, he'll win in a landslide.

Indiana is everything

By Brendan Loy

Thesis: between Jeremiah Wright's latest ramblings, Hillary Clinton's continued domination of the media spin game, the high-profile AP/Ipsos poll showing Hillary doing significantly better than Obama in November, the numerical fudge factor provided by the Michigan and Florida wild cards, and the incredibly unfavorable geography of the upcoming calendar for Obama (West Virginia and Kentucky will, in consecutive weeks, provide Hillary with her biggest non-Arkansas margins of victory in the entire campaign, and Puerto Rico may not be much better), events are now conspiring against Barack Obama such that Hillary may actually have a chance -- and Obama's only real opportunity to reliably stop her from seizing that chance is to win in Indiana on Tuesday. If he loses, then heaven help us, she might just be the nominee.

Discuss.

I'm not sure whether I believe this "thesis," but I am worried about the possibility that it might be right. And I'm apparently not alone, judging by Hillary's Intrade surge.

One key aspect of my thesis is a recognition of the fact that the media refuses to contextualize the primary calendar in any meaningful way. Hillary got waaaaaay too much credit for winning Pennsylvania, which was almost a can't-lose state for her, just as Obama got waaaaaay too much credit for most of his post-Super Tuesday victories in February, which were generally in "gimme" states for him. So, given this history, I assume that Hillary will again get waaaaaay too much credit for her inevitable blowout wins in West Virginia and Kentucky. (It's especially devastating for Obama that West Virginia has a whole week all to itself! And I suspect Kentucky will totally overshadow Oregon the following week, especially given what I assume will be her much larger margin there.)

Of course, Hillary knows all this, which is why I doubt she'll drop out even after an Indiana loss. But at least an Obama victory in Indiana -- coupled with a North Carolina win, of course -- would stop the bleeding and reset the storyline heading into WV and KY. In addition, it might cause her fundraising to dry up. But if Hillary earns a "split" on May 6, the money will continue flowing, and the media storyline will continue to be completely in her favor... and Obama will have no opportunity for a "firewall" victory until, well, ever. (I don't think anybody is going to care about Montana and South Dakota.) And then we're all left scratching our heads and wondering if the superdelegates will buy the HRC/MSM line on electability, popular vote, working-class whites, etc., or if they'll see through the smoke & mirrors and realize that, despite it all, Obama is still clearly the better choice for the party, all things considered.

I still think Obama wins, in the end, if only because of the superdelegates' fear of repercussions in the black community if they deny him the nomination that he will be perceived (at least among blacks) as having earned. Hillary's electability case would have to be completely overwhelming, to the point of being undeniably right, to overcome this hurdle, I think. As long as the electability question is debatable, I don't see her wrenching this thing away from him. But making assumptions about the psychology of superdelegates is a risky business, and I can increasingly see a path to her at least having a plausible road to a floor fight at the convention over Michigan and Florida. Which would just about guarantee a McCain win in November.

Bottom line: Obama really, really, really needs to win Indiana.

P.S. When I say "the HRC/MSM line," I don't mean to imply that the media wants Hillary to win. On the contrary. However, for a whole constellation of reasons that I don't feel like getting into right now, the media environment is incredibly friendly to Hillary at the moment, despite most journalists' general preference for Obama, and the environment is unlikely to change without an Obama win in Indiana.

UPDATE: In comments, eagleye writes, "I don't think the superdelegates will let this go to a floor fight at the convention. There is going to be a lot of pressure on them to act sooner than later." Ah, but this is a misunderstanding of the process. The superdelegates do not have the power to prevent a floor fight! They have the power to get Obama to the "magic number" before the convention, yes. But that doesn't necessarily prevent a floor fight. Only you can prevent forest fires, and only Hillary Clinton can prevent a floor fight.

If she doesn't drop out, then the fight keeps going. The mere fact of Obama reaching the "magic number" in the media's delegate counts in June (which I assume he will, because I assume most of the superdelegates will heed Howard Dean's call to announce their intentions) doesn't necessarily mean that Hillary won't keep fighting all the way to the convention.

I explain why after the jump, and then I attempt to clarify my race-related comment above.

Obama loses the Duke vote

By Brendan Loy

Barack Obama shot some hoops with the North Carolina Tar Heels yesterday. "You guys are leaving the next president of the United States wide open," Roy Williams jokingly yelled at his players at one point.

No word on whether Williams was wearing a Hillary sticker at the time. ;)

Alan Keyes loses, again

By Brendan Loy

Eternally entertaining wingnut Alan Keyes, who finished ninth in the Republican presidential race -- behind McCain, Huckabee, Romney, Paul, Giuliani, Thompson, Hunter and Uncommitted (but ahead of Tancredo!) -- left the GOP earlier this month and decided to seek the Constitution Party nomination for president instead. Well, over the weekend, Keyes lost the CP nomination to anti-war radio host Chuck Baldwin. Reason's Jesse Walker calls it "a small but satisfying victory for two noble though possibly lost causes: the movement to end the occupation of Iraq and the transideological coalition to get Alan Keyes to shut up." Heh. (Hat tip: Sully.)

Um... open thread?

By Brendan Loy

Sorry for the lack of blog posts today. Becky says my readers are going to be worried that I'm dead. :) Don't worry, I'm alive. I've just been busy. But I haven't been reading too many news articles, or blogs, today. So I guess I'll just open the floor for discussion of whatever y'all want. The Voter ID case? Jeremiah Wright? Miley Cyrus? Whatever. Go nuts.

P.S. On Reverend Wright, quoth Andrew Sullivan:

Wright's cooptation of Obama for his own agenda - his assertion that Obama's distancing from him is insincere - requires, in fact demands a response from Obama.

Obama needs not just to distance himself from Wright's views; he needs to disown him at this point. Wright himself, it seems to me, has become part of what Obama is fighting against: the boomer, Vietnam era's obsession with its red-blue, white-black, pro and anti-America fixations. That is not what this election needs to be about; and Wright's massive, racially divisive and, yes, bitter provocation requires a proportionate response.

We need a speech or statement from Obama in which he utterly repudiates this poison, however personally difficult that may be, however damaging the impact will be. The statement today will not do it. This is no longer about cynics trying to associate one man's politics with another. It is now about Wright attempting to associate himself and some of his noxious, stupid, rancid views with the likely Democratic nominee. Wright has given Obama no choice - and he has also given him another opportunity. [Obama] needs to seize it.

Good news from Comcast

By Brendan Loy

In light of the revelation that they were, essentially, stealing our cable, Comcast has agreed to refund our April cable bill. So that's good. They've now done right by me, as far as my particular situation is concerned, so I'm pleased about that. My broader concerns expressed in the previous post remain in force.

See the nice fishies

By Brendan Loy

We went to the Aquarium of the Smokies in Gaitlinburg this afternoon. It was suprisingly awesome, and Loyette was totally fascinated by the fishies, including this jellyfish.

Congo capital gripped by penis panic

By Brendan Loy

Posted without comment:

Police in Congo have arrested 13 suspected sorcerers accused of using black magic to steal or shrink men's penises after a wave of panic and attempted lynchings triggered by the alleged witchcraft. ...

Purported victims, 14 of whom were also detained by police, claimed that sorcerers simply touched them to make their genitals shrink or disappear, in what some residents said was an attempt to extort cash with the promise of a cure. ...

Police arrested the accused sorcerers and their victims in an effort to avoid the sort of bloodshed seen in Ghana a decade ago, when 12 suspected penis snatchers were beaten to death by angry mobs. ...

Kinshasa's police chief, Jean-Dieudonne Oleko, told Reuters..., "When you try to tell the victims that their penises are still there, they tell you that it's become tiny or that they've become impotent. To that I tell them, 'How do you know if you haven't gone home and tried it'?"

(Hat tip: Becky.)

Comcast was stealing our cable!

By Brendan Loy

Well, the good news is, our high-speed Internet woes are -- apparently -- finally over. The fourth time was the charm, as Thursday's visit from Comcast techs fixed the problem. We have a newly installed coaxial line running from the cable source to our apartment, and as a result, our downstream speed is now faster than ever, our upstream speed is back to normal, and we've had no more intermittent connectivity outages.

The bad news is, we finally know what was causing our issue in the first place -- and the explanation is pretty outrageous.

As it turns out, our previous cable line, which is supposed to run from the "lockbox" (where we have our own individual cable outlet, labeled with our apartment number) directly into our apartment, was instead being run through two separate splitters in the attic above our building, with each splitter taking a portion of our cable signal -- that we pay for -- and feeding it into someone else's apartment!! Thus, the signal that actually reached our apartment was severely diluted, and the resulting decreased signal strength (roughly an 8 dB dropoff) was apparently the culprit in all of our Internet woes.

Mind you, this wasn't the result of our neighbors stealing our cable. They don't have access to the locked attic. According to the Comcast techs who explained it to me, this was the result of Comcast splitting off our cable line to feed a signal into these other apartments!! The cable company was stealing our cable!!

More details after the jump.

Marching for babies

By Brendan Loy

Loyette, Becky, Casey (visiting for the weekend from Rochester) and I went on the March for Babies this morning on UT's campus. It was fun!

That's Becky pushing Loyette's stroller above, and Casey next to her. Here's a photo of Loyette and me, relaxing after the walk:

My t-shirt, if you're wondering, says, "Fatherhood: the toughest job you'll ever love."

Anyway, thanks again to everybody who sponsored us! We ended up exceeding our goal, with $620 in donations!

If you didn't sponsor us, but would still like to donate to the March of Dimes, why not sponsor the Neudorffs? They'll be marching next weekend in Rochester.

After the jump, some more photos of today's march here in Knoxville.

UPDATE: Welcome, No Silence Here readers! If you didn't know, "Loyette" is our baby's blog nickname, not her actual name. :)

Ah, the tabloids

By Brendan Loy

Well, at least it's equal opportunity scandal-mongering. And hey, maybe ABC can have another debate and ask the candidates about these crucial issues. :)

Thanks!!

By Brendan Loy

A big thank you to everyone who has donated to our March of Dimes "March for Babies" fund! As you can see at right, we've reached our goal of $500. A blog reader's donation of $65 this evening put us over the top. Woohoo! All that money will go toward research to help sick babies. Good work, everybody!

The march is tomorrow. I'll try to get a cute picture or two for the blog. :)

And a Trojan shall lead them

By Brendan Loy

Fellow "Irish Trojan" Katherine Kirkpatrick, who, like me, attended USC for undergrad (she's even a Daily Trojan alum), and who is now a rising 3L at Notre Dame, was elected NDLS's new SBA president in a runoff election last week. She will be inaugurated on Sunday.

A Trojan at the helm of the Notre Dame Law School student body: I love it!! Finally, Operation: Trojan Horse can proceed as planned! ;) Just kidding. Seriously, congratulations, Katherine!

In addition, an anonymous tipster informed me that A.J. Bellia and Lloyd Mayer -- the latter being my former Election Law professor and adviser for my Electoral College paper, the former being one half of the school's recent professorial retention coup -- finished tied in the initial balloting for NDLS Professor of the Year. That led to a run-off, which Professor Bellia narrowly won. Congrats to him, and to Professor Mayer for his close second-place finish; they're both great professors, and well deserving of the recognition.

A question for Tennessee radio listeners

By Brendan Loy

I'm traveling to Denver from May 4-6, and will be landing at the Nashville Airport (Southwest doesn't fly into Knoxville) at 8:25 PM on Tuesday the 6th. By that time, of course, results from the Indiana and North Carolina primaries will be coming in; indeed, winners may well have been declared before I land. Alas, I didn't think about this when I scheduled the trip.

Anyway, during my drive back to Knoxville, I'd like to listen to live coverage of election-related news on the radio. Hence, my question for Tennessee radio listeners: Are there any radio stations (presumably AM) in the Nashville area that would have this? What about in the no man's land between Nashville and Knoxville? And for that matter, what about in the Knoxville area? I almost never listen to the radio for this kind of thing, so I don't know.

So which team are you going to root for now, Brendan??

By David K.

The Connecticut legislature reached a compromise with UConn that will allow the university's football team to schedule a six-year series against Notre Dame, even though none of the games will be played in Connecticut. The Irish balked at playing at the Huskies' 40,000-seat home stadium, Rentschler Field in East Hartford, insisting instead that UConn's "home" games played in larger stadiums elsewhere, most likely in Massachusetts, New Jersey, and/or New York. However, Connecticut lawmakers were unimpressed with the idea of UConn outsourcing its home games to other states. In the words of State Rep. Michael Christ, D-East Hartford, who proposed an earlier bill that would have required UConn to play all its home games at Rentschler, "Many of us felt we already had a beautiful facility in Connecticut and it was built for UConn."

The newly announced deal requires UConn to play six home games at Rentschler Field each year, "as long as the NCAA rules permit a 12-game season and permits a team to use one Football Championship Subdivision win per season as a bowl-eligible win." It also reduces the length of the series between UConn and Notre Dame from ten years to six. "I believe we have crafted a reasonable solution," said Christ, who added that he hopes UConn can persuade the Irish to play at Rentschler Field in the future. (Ha! Fat chance.)

The series will start in the 2011 season and go through 2017.  The three home games for the Irish will, of course, be played at Notre Dame Stadium.  The deal still needs to be approved by Notre Dame and venue officials.  Connecticut and Notre Dame already have a separate deal to play next season in South Bend.

UPDATE BY BRENDAN:  Rep. Christ wrote a scathing op-ed about this topic last week in the Hartford Courant. My dad suggested the headline, "Christ to Notre Dame: Screw you." Heh.

Anyway, here's an excerpt:

Loyal Husky fans flock with family and friends to Rentschler for every home game, rain or shine, in support of their beloved team. There are hundreds of stadium workers who depend on a game day payday from parking cars, working concessions and post-game clean-up. Many local school bands and clubs as well as charities also use games to bolster fundraising. Should all those benefits move to Massachusetts? I say no!

If Rentschler Field is too confining for the Leprechaun army the Fighting Irish deploy each week, how come the similar capacity stadium of the Boston College Eagles (formerly of the Big East) is not too small? That series alternates between South Bend and Chestnut Hill, Mass. ...

There is no question Notre Dame will remain the "Wal-Mart" of college football as long as it is able to keep its national television network deal. However, UConn officials can come out of this looking like heroes both here in Connecticut and nationally by saying "no thanks." They could brag that no one, not even the legendary Notre Dame, can tell Connecticut where to play its home games. Even if the Fighting Leprechauns, after a few more years of two-win seasons, do eventually find their television revenue dried up and are forced to finally join a conference, it is very possible that the Irish will abandon their pseudo Big East affiliation and join the Big 10 anyway.

Ahem. It was a three-win season, thank you very much.

Incidentally, to answer the question posed by the title, I will, of course, root for Notre Dame, my alma mater. But as I said in comments, "if I had to pick one game (other than USC) for ND to lose, it would be the UConn game. Imagine what a huge win that would be for the Huskies program."

That said: Gooooo Irish! Beeeeeat Huskies! :)

A rueful I-told-you-so post

By Brendan Loy

TNR's Michael Crowley makes two excellent points. First:

With about 95 percent counted around midnight [Tuesday] night, Hillary was leading by 10 points. But now, with 99.44 percent counted, the Pennsylvania Secretary of State shows her winning 54.6 to 45.4. That's only 9.2 points--less than her 10.3 margin in Ohio, and less than the 10.5 bar that all-powerful CW-arbiter Mark Halperin had set for her.   

Yet no one cares. The storyline is clearly that Hillary had a decisive victory which keeps her campaign alive.

Why isn't the reality of single digits a bigger problem for her? One reason is that the final margin often matters less than the presumed margin when people like Russert go to bed.

That's absolutely true, and is something that I anticipated on Monday: "I maintain that a double-digit win is necessary for Clinton to really claim an unalloyed 'victory' ... Though, the state of the race at around 10:00 or 11:00 PM Eastern time probably matters at least as much as the actual final numbers, since the media usually decides its transitory 'winners' and 'losers' before bedtime on the East Coast."

And, speaking of things that make me say I told you so:

Another reason--one an Obama aide was just grumbling to me about--is the weird havoc exit polls play with the media's primary-night storylines. Yesterday's early exit polls had suggested a nail-biter that suggested Hillary might be finished. Yet, much like Super Tuesday, Hillary made a "comeback" over the course of the night, as her vote margin gradually widened. Why, it was almost as though Obama had Hillary on the ropes and she fought him off with pure grit and determination. Impressive! She's back!

If I were a Machiavellian Obama operative, next time I might consider leaking some phony exits showing misleading strength for Hillary.

As I said repeatedly before this completely predictable occurrence happened, there's absolutely no excuse for the media to be fooled by that exit poll nonsense anymore, because Obama always does better in the leaked exit polls than he does in the final results. ALWAYS!! It's happened over and over and over again: New Hampshire, Super Tuesday, Texas & Ohio, and now Pennsylvania. Will these idiots never learn?

Karl Rove reads Barack Obama's mind!

By Brendan Loy

It turns out Karl Rove isn't just an evil strategic genius. He's an evil telepathic strategic genius, as he demonstrates in an Obama-bashing WSJ column today:

Mr. Obama has not been a leader on big causes in Congress. He has been manifestly unwilling to expend his political capital on urgent issues. He has been only an observer, watching the action from a distance, thinking wry and sardonic and cynical thoughts to himself about his colleagues, mildly amused at their to-ing and fro-ing.

He knows how to deceive the electorate, debase public discourse, win elections, and read minds. Is there anything Karl Rove can't do?

P.S. If you're looking for a less mendacious take on the Clinton-Obama race, Time's Joe Klein has a comprehensive -- and depressing -- look at what Pennsylvania hath wrought.

Reality check

By Brendan Loy

Josh Marshall:

I think I've said this a hundred times, as have many others.  But this article in Thursday's Times is a good moment to revisit the point. As Patrick Healy explains, it is simply a fallacy to claim that winning a state's Democratic primary means you're more likely to win that state in the general election or that your opponent can't win it. ...

That's not to say there isn't a difference between the two as general election candidates -- at least in their current incarnations. There is. It's just not this big state nonsense.

Indeed.

Megan Fox named world's sexiest woman

By Brendan Loy

FHM has named Megan Fox the sexiest woman in the world. (Hat tip: Jen Featherston.)

In other news, I'm stopping at Borders after work and buying the new issue of FHM. :)

Comcast, me, and the long arm of Jeff Jarvis

By Brendan Loy

I figure I owe y'all an update on my Comcast Internet saga (previous posts here, here, here and here). What? You don't care? Well, I owe it to posterity, then. Or something.

Thanks to the intervention of Comcast corporate in Philadelphia, it appears our long national apartmental nightmare may soon be over. (Knock on wood!) A team of cable techs is scheduled to come over at around 3:00 PM today to replace the entire series of tubes wires that runs from the cable "tap," over to the "lockbox," up to the attic, and down into our apartment, nothin' but net. (Er, scratch that last part. There's been very little "net" to speak of in recent weeks!)

There are no guarantees, but the hope is that this re-wiring will fix our long-standing, worsening, intermittent connectivity problems (about which, details after the jump). And, crucially, they're doing it free of charge -- contrary to the company's ridiculous standard policy of holding apartment dwellers financially responsible for necessary repairs to the wiring outside the four walls of their apartments. (More on that, too, after the jump.)

I mentioned the "corporate intervention" angle, and that's probably the most interesting aspect of this saga. It all started with my offhanded expression of bloggy frustration on April 3, after the cable guy never showed up for an appointment that I'd left work early for. (The phone rep had written down my area code wrong, so the tech couldn't reach me by phone to confirm that I was home, so he never came.) That post triggered an e-mail from Frank Eliason in Philly (Comcast's corporate home base), who filed a "corporate complaint" on my behalf. (Frank also commented on a later blog post.) Frank's complaint, in turn, spurred a full-court press by the local Knoxville office to get my problem fixed, which culminated in today's appointment.

What's interesting is, Frank's intervention isn't an isolated incident. It's part of a broad Comcast initiative, of which Frank is the point man, to improve the company's image by reaching out to bloggers, Twitterers, and others who use their online platforms to say nasty things about Comcast. The Philadelphia Inquirer had a front-page story about this effort in Saturday's paper, which revealed:

Under siege for customer-service woes detailed on Comcastmustdie.com and other blogs, the Philadelphia cable giant has gone on the offensive, trawling the Internet for Comcast chatter. Eliason's assignment is very specific: If someone has a Comcast problem and is talking about it online, he contacts that person and offers help.

If Eliason thinks it's an emergency that could spiral into unpleasantness, like an expletive-loaded blog bomb, he gets on the phone and cuts through the corporate red tape. ...

Eliason's blog spotting is part public relations and part acknowledgment that the Internet is playing a broader role in defining company brands. Technology companies woke up to this fact after "Dell Hell" postings by blogger Jeff Jarvis in 2005.

Ha! The arm of Sauron Jeff Jarvis is long!

Of course, it goes without saying that one shouldn't have to pose a P.R. threat in order to get good help from a company that one pays upwards of $100/month to. Nevertheless, this is a smart thing Comcast is doing.

Moreover, I give credit where credit is due: in contrast to my dismal experiences* with Comcast's customer service last spring, almost everyone I've dealt with this time around -- not just the corporate people, but the techs and phone reps, too -- has been professional, courteous, and competent (wrong-area-code lady being an obvious exception). That, too, is apparently symptomatic of a broader effort by Comcast to, well, stop sucking at life, basically.

More on that effort -- and on my issue -- after the jump.

*The linked post, incidentally, was Instalanched, but triggered no response whatsoever from Comcast corporate. That was last June. So they're clearly getting better at the rapid-blog-response thing.

Phoenix UFOs were elaborate prank

By Brendan Loy

Heh:

A Phoenix man says he caused the red light display that mystified thousands of people as it floated across the north Phoenix sky Monday night.

The man, who did not want to be identified, said he used fishing line to attach road flares to helium-filled balloons, then lit the flares and launched them a minute apart from his back yard. He said he believed turbulence created by a passing jet caused the balloons to move around.

Best! Prank! Ever!

P.S. But what about the Florida UFOs? Was this a coordinated, two-state prank?

UPDATE: Apparently the Florida lights were caused by sky lanterns released from an Asian wedding.

Or, you know, aliens. One or the other.

Obama: the next Samuel Tilden?

By Brendan Loy

A crazy thought occurred to me this evening. And what are blogs for, if not for airing crazy thoughts?

In November, Barack Obama will most likely spur unprecedented turnout in urban areas like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, due to his appeal to African-American voters. The result of this high turnout will be to build larger-than-usual popular-vote edges for the Dems in several "blue" states -- totally meaningless for Electoral College purposes. Obama also seems likely to reduce, but not overcome, the GOP's advantage in a number of southern and western "red" states. Again, this is electorally meaningless, but it will reduce the GOP's popular-vote cushion.

At the same time, it appears that Obama may be vulnerable to possible narrow defeats at the hands of John McCain in key swing states like Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania. While I don't want to lend credence to Hillary Clinton's mostly bogus "big states" argument, there is some legitimate reason to worry about Obama's ability to carry these states.

Put it all together, and Obama starts to sound like a prime candidate for another inversion between the electoral and popular votes, like in 2000. But that's not the crazy thought. The crazy thought is this: is it possible Obama could lose an electoral-vote squeaker to McCain despite winning the popular vote by a meaningful margin -- like, 2 or 3 percent, as opposed to Al Gore's half-percent -- and become the first candidate since Samuel Tilden in 1876 to lose the presidency despite winning a majority of the popular vote?

P.S. From the Irish Trojan Assignment Desk: somebody look at the 2004 state-by-state margins, adjust them as needed, and construct a plausible scenario where this occurs. :)

Procedure is destiny

By Brendan Loy

Washington Monthly's Josiah Lee Auspitz provides a detailed (and entertaining) look at the degree to which both parties' nomination contests have been fundamentally shaped by the arcana of party delegate-selection rules. I love it.

A mini-backlash?

By Brendan Loy

Hey, maybe there was a backlash, after all! John Judis writes:

Clinton seriously damaged her own cause by going negative on Obama during the April 16 debate--and probably, too, by her subsequent ads. ABC moderators George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson had already done sufficient damage without Clinton piling on. According to the exit polls, 68 percent of Pennsylvania Democrats thought Clinton attacked Obama unfairly, and they backed Obama by 55 to 45 percent. It's hard to know for sure, but these tactics probably cost her among white college-educated voters who don't like to think of elections as prize fights.

Maybe if Hillary hadn't gone so negative, she actually would have won by double digits, instead of a mere 9.2 percent. :)

P.S. Let the record show that I'm actually rather skeptical of Judis's conclusion. Given the final numbers, I doubt there was much of a meaningful, measurable backlash. On the other hand, it doesn't seem like Clinton's negative ads hurt Obama very much, given that her margin was actually smaller than in Ohio, and she lost ground with key demographics. Bottom line, I don't think the negativity had much effect at all, in either direction (or whatever effects it had cancelled each other out).

I for one welcome our Hoosier overlords

By Brendan Loy

For the next two weeks, Indiana is officially the center of the political universe: "With a demographic landscape that's well-suited to both Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, Indiana is shaping up as the most consequential battleground of the remaining states."

Argh. Why couldn't this have happened last year, when I was living there?? [Um, because they don't have presidential elections in odd years? -ed. Shh.]

Hillary Clinton proves her contempt for democracy once and for all

By Brendan Loy

Or, if you prefer a lengthier, more complete headline: "Clinton falsely claims popular vote lead, disenfranchising all voters in Iowa, Nevada, Maine, Washington, and all Michigan voters who preferred her opponent."

This "spin" is, of course, entirely predictable -- indeed, they've made a related argument before -- but it's still absolutely infuriating. Hillary claims:

After last night's decisive victory in Pennsylvania, more people have voted for Hillary than any other candidate, including Sen. Obama.

Estimates vary slightly, but according to Real Clear Politics, Hillary has received 15,095,663 votes to Sen. Obama's 14,973,720, a margin of more than 120,000 votes. ... This count includes certified vote totals in Florida and Michigan.

Kos responds:

[T]he Clinton campaign ... [has] taken the roughly 215,000 net votes Clinton gained in Pennsylvania, and added them to the popular vote count that includes the unsanctioned contests in Michigan and Florida, and excludes caucuses in four states [Iowa, Nevada, Maine and Washington, whose caucuses do not report popular-vote totals, and Clinton is choosing not to estimate them]. How's that for inclusiveness?

It gets worse. That Michigan vote [tally]? Obama wasn't on the ballot. If you count the "uncommitted" votes for Obama -- all of them anti-Hillary votes, remember -- that would add 237,762 votes to Obama's total.

Which means that in Clinton and Jerome [Armstrong]'s world, Clinton is ahead in the popular vote only IF you exclude four caucus states, IF you include two unsanctioned states, and IF you "disenfranchise" every voter in Michigan who voted against Hillary Clinton.

That takes a new and particularly audacious level of chutzpah.

(Hat tip: yea.)

Kos is missing an additional aspect of the audaciousness, though. As I pointed out previously, "after signing a pledge to the voters of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada not to campaign in Florida and Michigan, she is now arguing that Iowa and Nevada don't matter, while Florida and Michigan do."

Say what you will about the more arcane procedural debates, re: what is the proper metric for "victory," what should happen with Michigan & Florida, what is the intended role of superdelegates, what it means to be a "pledged" delegate, etc. I firmly believe Hillary is wrong on those issues, too, but I concede that, at least to some extent, they are debatable.

However, there is no debate about this. There is no possible counterargument. It is completely and utterly indefensible for Hillary Clinton to make a blanket claim that "more people have voted for Hillary than any other candidate" while literally ignoring duly held elections in four whole states!! And, similarly, it is totally dishonest for her to advance a "popular vote" legitimacy argument that depends on her Soviet-style "victory" of 328,309 to zero in Michigan.

Food hoarding? Oh, good.

By Brendan Loy

Although I'm stereotypically the news junkie of our household, Becky has sometimes been getting out ahead of me recently in recognizing developing major news stories, in part because her playlist of things to listen to on her iPod while feeding Loyette includes some good newsy podcasts. Anyway, she's been talking about food hoarding for some time. Now that story has appeared on my radar screen, via Drudge:

Farmers and food executives appealed fruitlessly to federal officials yesterday for regulatory steps to limit speculative buying that is helping to drive food prices higher. Meanwhile, some Americans are stocking up on staples such as rice, flour and oil in anticipation of high prices and shortages spreading from overseas.

Their pleas did not find a sympathetic audience at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), where regulators said high prices are mostly the result of soaring world demand for grains combined with high fuel prices and drought-induced shortages in many countries.

The regulatory clash came amid evidence that a rash of headlines in recent weeks about food riots around the world has prompted some in the United States to stock up on staples.

Costco and other grocery stores in California reported a run on rice, which has forced them to set limits on how many sacks of rice each customer can buy. Filipinos in Canada are scooping up all the rice they can find and shipping it to relatives in the Philippines, which is suffering a severe shortage that is leaving many people hungry.

My expert analysis is that, uh, this isn't a good thing.

Incidentally, I've created a separated blog category called "The Economy & Finance." With all the bad news about those topics lately, it was time.

Odds and ends

By Brendan Loy

Correction: Hillary Clinton may not have won by double digits, after all. Her actual margin rounds to either 8%, 9%,or 10%, depending on whom you believe. (Mark Halperin and Josh Marshall have more.)

Meanwhile, TNR's Jonathan Cohn argues that the general-election polling indicates there is "no reason to panic." He also speculates that 45% may be McCain's "ceiling."

Also at TNR, Josh Patashnik rebuts the idea that "Obama's likely nomination is somehow illegitimate unless he wins over Hillary's demographic groups--even if his coalition is a narrow majority" with a basketball analogy (my apologies in advance to Jay):

If a basketball team has held a lead of, say, six or seven points for the entire second half, the fact that the lead isn't getting any bigger as the clock ticks below a minute left doesn't mean that the team is any less likely to win. On the contrary, it makes the "frontrunner's" small lead nearly insurmountable, absent some dreadful foul shooting. Then again, those urging Hillary to drop out might want to ask John Calipari what he thinks of the idea.

Heh.

Elsewhere on the Internets, the Huffington Post's Sam Stein points out that Obama actually did cut into Hillary's demographics -- just not enough. Of course, that's according to the exit polls, and I think Mickey Kaus has a point when he writes, "If the exit polls are this unreliable for press' result-predicting purposes, why aren't they also unreliable for all the scholarly purposes they are supposedly put to? Garbage is garbage, no?" I suppose the answer is that they're retroactively "weighted" once the real results are known, but that has to be a somewhat imprecise process. I'm skeptical.

Kevin Drum says Hillary "seems to have won by roughly the same margin she would have won by even if she and Barack Obama hadn't just spent $40 million there. In other words, the campaign was not only pointless, but pointless and wildly expensive.  On to North Carolina!"

Mark Ambinder notes that Clinton winning the pledged delegate count is now "more than next to impossible." It's well and truly impossible. Dick Morris says that means last night's victory is "too little, too late" for Hillary: "The Democratic superdelegates aren't about to risk a massive and sanguinary civil war by taking the nomination away from the candidate who won more elected delegates. If they ever tried it, we'd see a repeat of the demonstrations that smashed the 1968 Chicago convention and ruined Hubert Humphrey's chances of victory."

John Cole says "Hillary's vanity campaign will continue on, trailing in delegates, trailing in the popular vote, trailing in enthusiasm and money, but not lacking in the firm resolve that only Hillary can save us all from our selves." (Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan.)

Speaking of Sullivan, he writes:

It's worth recalling what this primary came to be about, because of a self-conscious decision by the Clintons to adopt the tactics and politics of the people who persecuted and hounded them in the 1990s. It was indeed in the end about smearing and labeling Obama as a far-left, atheist, elite, pansy Godless snob fraud. That was almost all it came to be about. It was the Clintons' core message and core belief. And if anywhere would have proved its salience, it would surely have been beleaguered and depressed central and western Pennsylvania; and it would surely have worked with white ethnic voters over 50.

It did work, it seems to me. It will work, to some extent. It's valid in the sense that Rove is not stupid. But it works less and less the younger the vote is; and it is obviously losing some of its divisive salience even among the older generation. It is fading as a tool. Used by Democrats, legitimized by Democrats, embraced by Democrats, the Rove-Atwater gambits have been paid the highest compliment by the Clintons these past few weeks. But a single digit win against a young black man in a polarized race suggests that this compliment was past its sell-by date. It was an act of desperation, and one last grab back to the past. It didn't quite do what it was supposed to do. Nearly, but not quite.

And the New York Times, which endorsed Clinton back in the day, echoes Sully by lambasting her for taking the "low road to victory" in Pennsylvania: "It is past time for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to acknowledge that the negativity, for which she is mostly responsible, does nothing but harm to her, her opponent, her party and the 2008 election."

Last but not least, Ron Paul lives! Say it with me, Paultards: "WE'RE #2! WE'RE #2!" ;)

Change? We don't need no stinkin' change

By Brendan Loy

So, Hillary won by about 10 points. Yawn.

Josh Marshall:

Lots of spin coming from both campaigns tonight. I'd say the real story is that this leaves us basically where we were. It was a decisive win for Hillary but that was the expectation. ... There's a lot of crowing from Hillary's campaign tonight about a shift in momentum and doubts about Obama. Tomorrow there will be a lot of chatter from Obama's campaign that none of that really matters because of the reality of the delegate numbers which won't change much.

Like I said, I think that means we're basically right where we were.

I'm not sure how following up a 10-point win in Ohio with a 10-point win in Pennsylvania demonstrates "momentum" for Hillary. If Wrightgate, Bittergate, Debategate, etc., had damaged Obama among Democratic voters, you'd think Hillary would have been able to build on her Ohio margin. But she didn't. On the other hand, if there was going to be a significant backlash against Hillary's kitchen-sink strategy, you'd think Obama would have been able to cut her lead to single digits. But he didn't. He did "rally" from his initial 20-point deficit in PA opinion polls, but I'm not sure that means anything. So we're basically stuck on the status quo, like Marshall says. Nothing has changed. And that includes the fact that the Obama Effect struck again with the exit polls.

In fact, it's not clear that much of anything has changed since Super Tuesday, or even earlier. For all the talk of shifting momentum, I think this contest will ultimately be viewed by historians almost purely through the prism of regional and demographic trends. You don't need to look at the calendar to understand how things have unfolded. Geography and demography alone (and caucuses vs. primaries) explain the results. Obama's February "winning streak" was a coincidence of friendly states stacked up one after another on the calendar; same with Clinton's recent trifecta of Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania. She hasn't really "halted" his "momentum," so much as the calendar has simply shifted in her favor, geographically and demographically speaking. And likewise, when he wins North Carolina, he won't be "halting" her "momentum." He'll just be winning another Obama-friendly state, just like she's winning the Clinton-friendly states. For all its moving parts, this race is really quite static. It's more helpfully viewed on a map rather than on a timeline.

Apropos of which, now we move on to a pair of election days that seem quite likely, based on these rather rigid geographic/demographic trends, to be split decisions: May 6 (Indiana for Clinton, North Carolina for Obama) and May 20 (Kentucky for Clinton, Oregon for Obama). Watch out, though, for the primary that's in between those two, West Virginia on May 13. It's all by itself on the calendar, and it's certain to be a Clinton blowout, given her consistent success in Appalachia, which came through for her again yesterday. (Hat tip: InstaPundit.) It'll be an accomplishment for Obama if he can hold his margin of defeat under 20% there. West Virginia could be her South Carolina. That could really get the talking heads' tongues wagging about Hillary's "momentum." Expect a full-throttle "expectations game" effort by Team Obama to try and convince the media they're writing off the Mountaineer State.

Anyway... on to Indiana and North Carolina! YAAAARRH!!!

P.S. Here's Hillary's speech, and here's Obama's speech.

P.P.S. On the geographic/demographic point: name one state that's been a true "upset" in retrospect, a contest that one candidate won where you'd have expected the other to prevail. Obama's win in Missouri? Maybe, but it borders Illinois, so maybe not. Obama's win in Connecticut? Superficially, perhaps, but I think if you know a little more about the Nutmeg State electorate -- and its maverick streak in primaries -- that was pretty predictable. Hillary's win in New Hampshire? Yes. And that, IMHO, is actually still the only true upset of this entire campaign. (And it only happened because the contest was still a three-way race at that point. if Edwards isn't in the race, Obama beats Hillary there, too, just as you'd expect.)

Pennsylvania open thread #2

By Brendan Loy

That's all from me, kiddies. I gotta go to work early tomorrow, so I'm turning off the TV, shutting down the computer, and getting ready for bed. Thanks for all the traffic, and by all means, feel free to keep commenting as the candidates make their speeches, and as the results -- and the spin -- continue to roll in.

The next question

By Brendan Loy

With the race now moving on to Indiana and North Carolina on May 6 -- and probably West Virginia (May 13) and Oregon and Kentucky (May 20) -- here's my question: will Clinton and/or Obama attend the Kentucky Derby? It's on May 3.

I posed this question to Becky yesterday, and she responded with an even better question: "Where would they sit?" Hmm... perhaps the "elitist" Obama would sit in the grandstand, sipping a mint julep (with Michelle wearing one of those giant hats), while Clinton would mingle with the bitter, clingy, drunken plebians on the infield! :)

And then there would be the question of which horse they would each pick. Whose favorite would do better? It would take the concept of the political "horse race" to a whole new level!

In similarly silly election-related commentary, don't miss the debate about puppies in the open thread.

On a more serious note -- well, sort of -- Josh Marshall writes, "I'm not sure I've ever heard a higher proportion of hypothetical spin on both sides in the absence of voting numbers. At the moment Tim Russert is going back and forth making each campaign's arguments based on various hypothetical vote spread." Heh.

Meanwhile, InstaPundit links to the drunkblogging Stephen Green, who notes, "If the Democrats ran a winner-take-all system like the Republicans and the Electoral College do, she’d have this thing clinched — and Obama would look like a regional candidate who can’t win much outside the South and his home state of Illinois." Well, yes, but no. If the Democrats ran a winner-take-all system, both candidates would have had vastly different strategies. Obama would have spent less time, energy and money in caucus states where he knew he could rack up big delegate margins, and focused more on the "big states." Among other things, it's entirely possible he would have won Texas (since he would have been paying zero attention to Ohio or Rhode Island under this scenario).

You can't divorce the results from the process. And anyway, the process is what it is. The Democrats don't have a winner-take-all system like the Republicans and the Electoral College do. They have a proportional system, because they decided to have a proportional system. You don't change the rules in the middle of the game -- or spin them into some alternate reality. They are what they are. And Obama's gonna win.

CNN Breaking News

By CNN

Sen. Hillary Clinton will win the Pennsylvania Democratic primary, CNN projects.

Fox, NBC call it for Hillary

By Brendan Loy

Per Talking Points Memo.

No call yet on CNN, which is what I'm watching. Can't get enough of Wolfie doin' a heckvua job. :)

As an aside, this may be my last chance to watch Wolf Blitzer "call" a race -- complete with his (as I've put it before) rambling run-on sentences, senseless repetition of people's names and other random words, redundant recitation of the same facts over and over again, odd choices of verbal emphasis, constant talk about everything being "important" and "historic," endless self-referential comments, unnecessary references to "right now," "standing by," etc., etc. -- until November, because Becky and I are thinking about canceling our cable due to a budget crunch and our Comcast problems (and the fact that, during the interregnum between college basketball and college football seasons, we really don't need it).

UPDATE: CNN calls it! Hillary Clinton, Hillary Clinton, is the winner right now in the very important state of Pennsylvania right now, according to our exit polls, right now. Hillary Clinton will win, will win, Pennsylvania, right now. (Not a direct quote.)

Now: Spin! Spin!

UPDATE 2: Is this Rush Limbaugh's doing?

Bill Schneider: Hillary "leading"

By Brendan Loy

CNN analyst Bill Schneider just slipped when talked about Hillary Clinton's 60% support among seniors (which is less than her 72% support in Ohio), and basically admitted -- catching himself too late -- that she's "leading" overall (according to his interpretation of the exit polls) in what the network is officially calling a "competitive" race with Obama:

"She's not doing as well among seniors, but there are a lot more of them in Pennsylvania, and that's why she's still lead-- er, very competitive."

I'll finish the sentence for you, Bill: "That's why she's still leading."

Meanwhile, the earliest of early returns are trickling in, and so far, predictions of Obama jumping out to an early lead are not materializing.

The polls are closed

By Brendan Loy

But, unsurprisingly, no "call" yet from Wolf Blitzer, Wolf Blitzer. He says, "We can characterize this race right now as very competitive. We cannot project a winner based on the exit poll numbers alone." I'm shocked, shocked.

Remember, folks: the fact that it's "competitive based on the exit polls" doesn't mean it'll actually be close in the end. It's probably fair to say that it won't be a mega-blowout (like, 15 points or more), but beyond that, this alleged "competitiveness" means very little. CNN initially characterized Ohio as "competitive," too, based on the exit polls.

P.S. More meaningful than leaked exit poll numbers or CNN projections of "competitiveness": my wardrobe choice! I'm wearing my lucky Obama shirt tonight. I've worn it on every election night from Super Tuesday on, except March 4, when I forgot to wear it. So, if the shirt's luck holds, maybe those leaked numbers are right, after all! :)

Incidentally, in a brilliant bit of strategery :), I've positioned myself so that, no matter what happens tonight, I predicted it! If Hillary performs up to expectations or better, I was right with my widely linked "don't trust the exit polls" posts. On the other hand, if Obama exceeds expectations, I was right with my Sullylanched "backlash" post! I can't lose! Heh.

Pennsylvania open thread

By Brendan Loy

The polls close in an hour. Go nuts.

UPDATE: Holy cow. I leave work, drive home, eat dinner, put the baby to bed, and by the time I finally get to my computer at just before 7:30 PM (this post was created in advance and published automatically at 7:00), I've had almost 7,500 hits in an hour-and-a-half, thanks to link-love for my "don't trust the exit polls" post from Real Clear Politics, the Huffington Post, the National Review, the New Republic, Mickey Kaus, Daily Kos, Free Republic and Democratic Underground, among others. (Talk about a motley ideological crew!)

Craziness!! Admittedly, I did link-whore the post to a bunch of people before leaving work, but I never expected this kind of success. :) Anyway, welcome, new readers! I'll be live-blogging the election results tonight, so stay tuned!

And so it begins...

By Brendan Loy

As expected:

Deep breaths, people. Deep breaths. Repeat after me: Obama always does well in the leaked, unweighted exit polls. He then does worse in the actual results than in the exit polls. This has happened over and over and over again. We should no longer be surprised by it. These numbers are therefore completely meaningless. They ought not alter the "expectations game" one iota. If Hillary wins by around 10 points, it will not be a "comeback." It will not be a "surprise." It will be the expected result. These numbers do not change that fact. At. All.

Are you listening, media punditry? Or will you fall into the same trap you did on Super Tuesday (when exit polls had Obama winning New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Arizona -- all of which he lost handily -- and in a dead heat in California) and on March 4 (when exit polls had Obama winning Texas and Ohio), of giving Hillary Clinton undue credit for fully-expected victories?

THESE NUMBERS MEAN NOTHING.

UPDATE: National Review's Campaign Spot has Obama ahead by 5 points, 52-47.

Again: meaningless! The only reasonable assumption, based on past experience, is still that Hillary will win by a wide margin.

Also remember Politico's Pennsylvania-specific cautionary note about the actual results, once those start trickling in: "Don’t be fooled by early results. The cities and suburbs usually report their returns first, which gives the candidate favored in those areas a quick –- and sometimes fleeting –- lead. The conservative-leaning small towns through the center of the state usually filter in much later in the evening. ... So Obama could show a lead in the early results, but it might be short-lived."

Again, deep breaths, people.

Predictions?

By Brendan Loy

1. What will tonight's Pennsylvania percentages be?

2. On what date will Hillary Clinton drop out of the race?

After the jump, some important dates that might influence people's answers to question #2.

Hillary's financial woes

By Brendan Loy

Will Hillary Clinton be forced to drop out due to a lack of money if she doesn't win big -- nay, huge -- tonight? I'm not hopeful, but apparently her financial situation is somewhat dire. More here.

Obama, Clinton join the know-nothing brigades on autism-vaccine "link"

By Brendan Loy

Turn out Barack Obama is just as indefensibly ignorant as John McCain of the science surrounding vaccines and autism. Ugh. He should read Mike's comment from a few weeks back. Or, you know, anything written by anyone with the remotest idea of what they're talking about -- which would not include Jenny McCarthy, CNN's unfortunate editorial judgment to the contrary.

P.S. I sympathize with McCarthy's parental plight, and I'm sure she genuinely believes the provably false (indeed, proven false) things that she says. The same is probably true, in most cases, of 9/11 Truthers, Flat Earth Society members, etc. But genuine emotional grief and honest-but-discredited beliefs are no excuse for using a national platform to ignorantly spout nonsense.

And as for Obama and McCain? They have even less of an excuse.

UPDATE: Clinton, too!

(Hat tip: Aaron, who quips, "all tremble before the mighty Israel gun union defense autism lobby." Indeed. *sigh*)

Other things Barack Obama isn't ready for

By Brendan Loy

As I mentioned earlier, Hillary Clinton released a TV ad yesterday implying that Barack Obama isn't "ready" to deal with such unpredictable events as a stock market crash, a world war, a cold war, a gas shortage crisis, the fall of the Berlin Wall (wait, wasn't that a good thing?), or a devastating hurricane, nor to contend with such unsavory characters as Fidel Castro and Osama bin Laden.

It's an interesting argument, but Senator Clinton is clearly leaving some things out. For instance, as I wrote this morning, the appearance of unexplained light formations over Florida and Arizona obviously leaves Obama vulnerable to the charge that he's not ready to protect Americans from UFOs. (Alas, if only Kucinich were still in the race! This could be his moment!)

But that's not all. Jimmy Kimmel, apparently taking a brief break from f***ing Ben Affleck, helpfully points out some other possible calamities that could befall America:

Is Barack Obama READY to protect Cleveland from Bigfoot???

UFOs attack Arizona, Florida

By Brendan Loy

I, for one, welcome our new unexplained light formation overlords. (See also here.)

As does Matt Drudge, apparently:

Heh. EVERYBODY PANIC!!!

P.S. Suggested new Hillary Clinton attack ad: "Is Barack Obama READY to protect us from UFOs???"

Don't trust the unweighted exit polls!

By Brendan Loy

[UPDATE, 8:12 PM: Welcome, new readers! The scenario I predicted in this post is now happening. Some leaked exit poll numbers show Obama winning, others Clinton leading by a slight margin. Regardless, it's all meaningless. Likewise, CNN's statement that the race is "competitive based on the exit polls" should be not taken as predictive of the final outcome. CNN initially said Ohio was "competitive," too.

Anyway, I'm liveblogging the results on my homepage.]

Following up on a point I made yesterday -- in a post that just got Instalanched -- as we political junkies giddily await the first hints of what's happening in Pennsylvania today (finally, another primary!! election results tonight!! exit polls!!! colorful maps!!! whee!!!!), it's very important for us, and even moreso the media, to remember that Obama almost always does well in the leaked, unweighted exit polls, and almost always does less well in the final results. For instance:

• In New Hampshire, the "first wave" showed Obama leading by 4; he lost by 3.


• On Super Tuesday, the "first wave" had Obama winning New Mexico by 6 (he lost by 1) and losing California by just 3 (actual margin: 8). The "second wave" wasn't any more accurate: it had Obama winning Georgia by 50 (actual margin: 35), Illinois by 40 (actual margin: 32), Alabama by 22 (actual margin: 14), Delaware by 14 (actual margin: 9), Connecticut by 7 (actual margin: 4), Arizona by 6 (lost by 8), New Jersey by 5 (lost by 10), Missouri by 4 (actual margin: 1), Massachusetts by 2 (lost by 15), and losing Tennessee by 10 (actual margin: 13), New York by 14 (actual margin: 17), Oklahoma by 30 (actual margin: 23) and Arkansas by 46 (actual margin: 44). So Oklahoma and Arkansas were the only states on Super Tuesday where Obama did better than the leaked, unweighted exit polls suggested.


• On March 4, the "second wave" showed Obama winning Vermont by 34 (actual margin: 21), Texas by 2 (lost by 4), Ohio by 2 (lost by 10), and tied in Rhode Island (lost by 18).

Averaging all those numbers together -- and I recognize that this is very unscientific -- you get an average discrepancy of 7 to 8 points. That is to say, Obama generally does 7-8 points worse in the actual results than he did in the leaked, unweighted exit polls.

This is crucially important, because it has the potential to significantly affect the post-primary "spin." That's exactly what happened on Super Tuesday, when Clinton was able to initially spin a "victory" out of her lukewarm performance, largely because the media was expecting Obama to win some "big states" based on those early, favorable numbers. Likewise on March 4, Hillary was able to claim "success" for her Texas and Ohio "firewall," even though she really needed much larger margins to make meaningful delegate progress, in part because the leaked exit polls again conned the punditry into expecting better showings by Obama, possibly including a win in one or both states.

It'll be a travesty and a farce if that happens again. Hillary Clinton needs to win big -- like, double digits big -- and make significant delegate gains in order to claim any kind of a meaningful victory in Pennsylvania tonight. That basic fact will not change one iota if Drudge and The Corner and Talking Points Memo and the Huffington Post (and, er, the Irish Trojan) publish initial, meaningless numbers this afternoon that show a "OMG A DEAD HEAT IN PENNSYLVANIA!!1!" and then Hillary "pulls away" and wins by 6 or 8 points or whatever.

It's important to remember that these leaked exit polls do not actually represent any version of reality; they are not something that a candidate can "come back" from. In those instances where they differ from the actual numbers, they are, and always were, simply wrong. The exit-poll-fueled "seven-hour presidency of John Kerry," for instance, was always an illusion; Kerry was never "ahead," and Bush never mounted a "comeback." That's all pure perception, and has nothing whatsoever to do with reality. Same thing here. If Hillary, yet again, does substantially better than the exit polls suggest, nobody should be surprised, and still less should she get favorable, "expectations"-based spin as a result. Obama's early "lead," in that event, will have been (again) a complete chimera. So please, for heaven's sake, let's not get all excited if history repeats itself again.

As I said yesterday: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me 21 times, shame on me.

P.S. Politico adds an additional cautionary note, referring to actual returns rather than exit polls:

Don’t be fooled by early results. The cities and suburbs usually report their returns first, which gives the candidate favored in those areas a quick – and sometimes fleeting – lead. The conservative-leaning small towns through the center of the state usually filter in much later in the evening.

This tendency has wreaked havoc in past elections: A Democrat goes to bed thinking he or she is the winner, but wakes up the loser. The last time it happened was 2004, when the Associated Press called the state attorney general race for Democrat James Eisenhower and retracted it later in the night as the numbers closed. Some newspapers went to print with the wrong results.

So Obama could show a lead in the early results, but it might be short-lived. If Clinton is ahead at the start, she may never lose it.

Happy Earth Day!

By Brendan Loy

Hillary throws Osama at Obama

By Brendan Loy

When I wrote last week about a possible backlash among late-deciding Pennsylvania voters against Hillary Clinton's all-negative-all-the-time "kitchen sink" strategy, it occurred to me -- although I didn't say it -- that a possible flaw in my theory was that Hillary would probably stop blanketing the state with negative ads in the final few days before the primary, precisely to prevent any such backlash.

Well, so much for that idea:

Admittedly, the ad doesn't explicitly mention Obama's name. But the implicit attack is pretty damn clear, and very much in keeping with the central argument of her campaign: that he isn't "ready from day one," whereas she is. The Obama camp's response:

When Senator Clinton voted with President Bush to authorize the war in Iraq, she made a tragically bad decision that diverted our military from the terrorists who attacked us, and allowed Osama bin Laden to escape and regenerate his terrorist network. It's ironic that she would borrow the President's tactics in her own campaign and invoke bin Laden to score political points.  We already have a President who plays the politics of fear, and we don't need another.

And then this:

I honestly don't know whether Hillary's endlessly negative frontal assault on her Democratic opponent's basic fitness for office will create a backlash. (Well, I know it's apparently created at least a backlash of one. But will Marty's feelings be mirrored by broad swaths of the electorate? That's the question.)

But one thing that's clear is that Hillary's people are not worried about a backlash. If they were, they wouldn't be running this ad now. They clearly believe their relentless negativity will have no adverse consequences for them whatsoever -- or at least that any such impact will be outweighed by the benefits in tearing down Obama. And they may very well be right.

1 day to go

By Brendan Loy

Mark Halperin calls today "The Last Monday Before the First Tuesday of the Rest of Our Lives." He is referring, of course, to tomorrow's Pennsylvania primary. The latest polls show Clinton with a lead in the high single digits to low double digits. I maintain that a double-digit win is necessary for Clinton to really claim an unalloyed "victory"; Obama "wins" if he can hold her margin under 5 points; and a Clinton margin of between 5 and 10 points is a murky gray area. Though, the state of the race at around 10:00 or 11:00 PM Eastern time probably matters at least as much as the actual final numbers, since the media usually decides its transitory "winners" and "losers" before bedtime on the East Coast.

Oh yeah, and, um, delegates. Those matter too.

One cautionary note to those who, like me, are hoping for a strong Obama showing. Don't put any stock in the leaked exit poll numbers. I'll publish the details tomorrow, but bottom line, when you look at New Hampshire, Super Tuesday and March 4, Obama does, on average, roughly 7 to 8 points worse in the actual, final results than in the leaked, unweighted exit polls. (And sometimes the discrepancy is 15 points or more!) So when Drudge announces the inevitable "SHOCK EXIT POLL" numbers late tomorrow afternoon that show a "DEAD HEAT" in Pennsylvania, you shouldn't get all excited -- and neither should the media. When Hillary ultimately trudges to an 8-point win, nobody should be surprised, nor should it be considered some sort of Clinton "comeback," for heaven's sake. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me 21 times, shame on me.

UPDATE: Welcome, InstaPundit readers!

Here are the exit-poll details that I promised above.

P.S. Noam Scheiber writes:

Ben Smith makes a great point here. He says Obama's had such a rough stretch lately that it'll be almost impossible for Hillary to spin a single-digit win...into a victory. Expectations for Obama have fallen through the floor.

I certainly hope that's right, and from what I've read, the MSM seems to be sticking to its "Hillary must win big" guns for once (see, e.g., this AP article), rather than allowing the yea scenario to repeat itself.

Respect the world champion SoCal VoCals!

By Brendan Loy

Back in 2002, I griped in print that the Daily Trojan was ignoring the SoCal VoCals' newsworthy march to musical glory. (For the uninitiated, the VoCals are USC's premier a capella group, and I am a proud ex-groupie.) That year, alas, they fell just short of the International Championship of Collegiate A Capella finals. But six years and a world championship later, the VoCals are finally getting some front-page DT love.

Here's the article. Money quote: "It was absolutely beyond any of our wildest dreams," baritone Adam Hutchison said of the group's performance Saturday in New York City, which earned them the ICCA title (and a live appearance on the Today show Sunday morning).

The DT notes that the VoCals' winning set included Michael Buble's "Feeling Good," Singers Unlimited's "All the Things You Are" and Queen's "Somebody to Love." The A Capella Blog described it as "probably the best competition set I've ever seen," and the judges seemed to agree, giving it a whopping 454 out of a possible 465 points. For comparison purposes, the ICCA champs in 2007, 2006 and 2005 won with scores of 431, 422 and 372, respectively. Moreover, 454 points is the second-highest score of this entire ICCA season -- second only to the VoCals' own near-perfect 463 performing the same set in the semifinals. The 437 earned by Florida State University All-Night Yahtzee at the South semifinal is a distant third. (All-Night Yahtzee finished a very distant second at Saturday's final, with a 384.)

No cameras were allowed in the Lincoln Center for Saturday's final, but YouTube has video of the entire Western Regional semifinal, including the VoCals' 463-point set. So here, without further ado, are the three songs that brought home an ICCA world championship to USC:

Fight on, VoCals!

P.S. And speaking of "Fight on," here, in the interest of school spirit, is a video from this past fall of the VoCals performing their signature medley of the Alma Mater, Tusk, and Fight On, with a SoCal Spellout and some "UCLA SUCKS" thrown in good measure:

Quote of the day

By Brendan Loy

"I condemn remarks that are, in any way, viewed as anti-anything." --John McCain

Pope attempts miracle in New York

By David K.

Will the third time be the charm for the power of the Pontiff? Pope Benedict XVI will attempt to purify the most unholy ground in all of America tomorrow when he says mass at Yankee Stadium. Two previous Popes, John Paul II in 1979 and Paul VI in 1965, have said masses in Yankee Stadium, but sadly neither was able to dispel the evil aura surrounding the field. Perhaps Benedict will have more luck, and come Monday, George Steinbrenner will announce his bold plans for an MLB revenue sharing agreement, or Alex Rodriguez will donate half his monolithic salary to build new ballparks across America. Despite his holy powers, I think the Pope will fail and the Yankees will continue their diabolical ways, but hey, a guy can dream can't he??

SoCal VoCals are world champs!!

By Brendan Loy

The International Championship of Collegiate A Capella was tonight in New York City. I don't know yet how the SoCal VoCals did. I assume The A Cappella Blog will have results up soon. Go VoCals!!!

UPDATE: THE SOCAL VOCALS WON!!! WOOOHOOO!!!!!!!!

Congratulations, VoCals!!!

UPDATE 2: The A Capella Blog writes: "The SoCal VoCals' winning set gave them perhaps the best-deserved victory I've ever seen at an ICCA show. This is the sort of set that needs to be seen to be believed and I am proud to have been a witness to something truly fantastic. Believe the hype -- this was probably the best competition set I've ever seen."

With "analysts" like these...

By Brendan Loy

...who needs P.R. hacks?

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found. ...

[C]ollectively, the...several dozen...military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror. It is a furious competition, one in which inside information and easy access to senior officials are highly prized.

Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks. ...

In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.

A few expressed regret for participating in what they regarded as an effort to dupe the American public with propaganda dressed as independent military analysis.

(Hat tip: copndor.)

The Shirt

By Brendan Loy

The Shirt 2008 is out. It was unveiled yesterday. (Hat tip: Lisa.) The money quote is "NOTRE DAME WILL RISE AGAIN," which seems appropriate.

Domersphere reactions? Her Loyal Sons hates it. Rakes of Mallow likes it, although he wishes it was green. Blue-Gray Sky thinks it's "pretty good." Of course, it features the famous quote about "the blue, gray October sky" that BGS is named after, so they would like it. ;)

Arr.

By Brendan Loy

The green flash.

Earthquake! Earthquake!

By Brendan Loy

Via Brian Neudorff, here's a YouTube clip of an Evansville meteorologist live on the air during the earthquake this morning:

Heh. Cool.

He remains calm, but you can tell he was flustered by the quake from the way he just reads the numbers without in any way indicating what they mean: "We're at 73 and 50, 68 and 44 here, 87 and 26." Huh? I also like how he keeps saying the word "here." Sort of like Wolf Blitzer, Wolf Blitzer, except with a better excuse. :) All in all, though, a pretty good job of keeping his cool.

Anyway, catching the earthquake live on camera reminds me of the time, freshman year at USC, when I was awakened around 3:00 AM by the Hector Mine Earthquake, whereupon I promptly jumped out of bed and called Hillary Clinton rushed over to my camcorder in hopes of getting it started while the room was still shaking. I didn't quite succeed, but I did get footage of the lights flickering while I, looking rather wide-eyed, announced to the camera, "Earthquake! Earthquake!"

Hector Mine was a strong but distant quake; it had a magnitude of 7.1, but was centered out in the desert and caused little damage, none to speak of in the Los Angeles area. My scarier earthquake experience came two years later, with a much smaller tremor that was much nearer by: a magnitude 4.2 quake centered in Beverly Hills on September 9, 2001. (Yeah - far worse things were less than 48 hours away.) It was a Sunday afternoon, the second week of the semester, and I was all alone in the library (!), two floors below ground level. To be precise, I was in the stacks of Doheny Library -- which, coincidentally enough, had just reopened after being earthquake-retrofitted -- sitting near the far wall, with several long, tall rows of books between me and the exit. All of a sudden, everything, including the overhead lights and the bookstacks, started to shake.

Having taken a geology class about earthquakes the previous semester, I knew this was either a) a weak (or distant) earthquake, or b) the weaker P-waves of a strong earthquake, whose destructive S-waves would arrive shortly thereafter. When the shaking stopped (after maybe 15 seconds), I was momentarily paralyzed by indecision: should I make a dash for the door, in hopes of escaping before the S-waves arrive and potentially knock the bookstacks over, but putting myself in greater danger if the S-waves hit while I'm running directly past the stacks? Or should I wait it out and hope those weren't just P-waves (and/or that the building's earthquake retrofit was really good)? I chose the latter course, and after a couple of minutes, I concluded correctly that there would be no more shaking. I then promptly got the hell out of there. Being alone in an underground room surrounded by heavy objects during an earthquake is creepy.

I'm pretty sure I never studied in the Doheny stacks again.

P.S. I also sorta kinda experienced the 1988 Saguenay earthquake. I was seven years old, bounding around the house -- as was my wont at seven years old -- on a Friday evening (~6:46 PM), while my mom was sitting on a chair in the living room. (My dad was, I think, at work. It was the day after Thanksgiving, but that had been a presidential election year, so he would have been super busy working on the Statement of Vote.) We were dog-sitting for my aunt and uncle's old dog, Rusty, at the time, which is significant because Rusty was sleeping under or behind the chair that my mom was sitting on. Suddenly my mom felt a slight but distinct shaking. At first, she figured that Rusty must be shaking the chair somehow, but then she looked and saw that he was sound asleep. (So much for animals anticipating earthquakes!) A minute or two later, one of our neighbors knocked on the door to ask if we'd felt it, too. It was then that my mom realized it was probably an earthquake. 

Alas, the reason I say "my mom felt" and "my mom realized" is because I didn't feel a darn thing. I was so busy bounding around the house, making a ground-shaking ruckus in my own right by being a rambunctious seven-year-old boy, that I didn't even notice the slight shaking from the earthquake. Needless to say, I was sorely disappointed when I realized that I'd missed the earthquake. Harumph.

Fear! Fire! Foes! Awake! 5.2 earthquake rattles Midwest, felt in Tennessee

By Brendan Loy

A 5.2-magnitude earthquake centered near the southern Illinois-Indiana border rattled several states this morning, including Tennessee. Becky and I didn't feel anything; the quake happened at 5:37 AM EST, when we were still asleep, and it didn't rouse us. But some East Tennesseeans were awakened by the distant tremor.

Here's a map showing the epicenter, and another map showing where people have reported feeling the quake, and how strongly (close-up here):

If you're a Californian wondering how on earth something a puny as a 5.2 quake (or "temblor," as you guys say out there) could be felt so strongly, and in places as far afield as Chicago and Knoxville, it's because, as explained here, "seismic waves in the East travel farther and pack more destructive punches." The exact reason for this phenomenon is a topic of much debate among scientists, but "one explanation is that eastern geology is older and simpler, with fewer faults in the ground to slow the travel of quake waves." See also here:

Earthquakes in the central and eastern U.S., although less frequent than in the western U.S., are typically felt over a much broader region. East of the Rockies, an earthquake can be felt over an area as much as ten times larger than a similar magnitude earthquake on the west coast.

That point is graphically illustrated here.

Of course, this morning's mini-quake is nothing compared to the Big One that will someday destroy Memphis and cause massive devastation all across the region.

P.S. Brian Neudorff has more, and some history.

P.P.S. Ann Althouse felt it. (Hat tip: InstaPundit, who didn't.)

U.K. church boycotts all weddings to protest ban on gay marriage ceremonies

By Brendan Loy

Here's an interesting Newington story that has nothing to do with my hometown (though I did find it via my Google News Alert for "newington"). It's from jolly old England:

Newington Green Unitarian Church, which the 18th century feminist Mary Wollstonecraft once attended, has announced it will not hold marriages until it is able to conduct civil partnerships for gay couples. ...

At the moment, the law bans any religious service from taking place during a gay civil partnership.

Minister Dr Andrew Pakula, who will only conduct services of blessing at Newington Green until this is changed, said: "We will have no legal weddings until we can conduct the same equal ceremonies for all couples - including same-sex couples."

It's pretty incredible to me that churches can be legally banned from doing as they please in this regard.  I, of course, completely agree with the council member who stated: "I wouldn't advocate the law being changed to force churches to do gay marriages but if they wanted to do it, then the law shouldn't prevent it." Obviously. But I guess freedom of religion is "an American concept," too?

Idiot drives bus into bridge

By Brendan Loy

Maybe dashboard GPS devices should come with a warning label that reads, "You still have to look at the road, dumbass":

The driver of the bus carrying the Garfield High School girls softball team that hit a brick and concrete footbridge was using a GPS navigation system that routed the tall bus under the 9-foot bridge, the charter company's president said Thursday.

Steve Abegg, president of Journey Lines in Lynnwood, said the off-the-shelf navigation unit had settings for car, motorcycle, bus or truck.

Although the unit was set for a bus, it chose a route through [Seattle's] Washington Park Arboretum that did not provide enough clearance for the nearly 12-foot-high vehicle, Abegg said. The driver told police he did not see the flashing lights or yellow sign posting the bridge height.

"We haven't really had serious problems with anything, but here it's presented a problem that we didn't consider," Abegg said of the GPS unit. "We just thought it would be a safe route because, why else would they have a selection for a bus?"

"It" presented a problem? The GPS unit is the problem? Really?!

Well anyway, no one was seriously hurt, thank God. And, having said that: HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

Said Garmin spokesman Ted Gartner: "The bigger comment here is that drivers always need to obey all the rules of the road at all times. Stoplights aren't in our databases, either, but you're still expected to stop for stoplights." LOL!

The best part about this is, it wasn't even close. Remember the truck that six inches too tall for the Lincoln Tunnel? Well, at least that was only six inches. This bus was three feet too tall to fit under the bridge! Here's the photo evidence:

A local RV seller is quoted in the P-I story as saying, "If this guy was a professional driver, he should have known his bus was 12 feet high and couldn't fit into a 9-foot box." A professional driver?? If this guy was a trained monkey, he should have known that! It doesn't exactly take a genius to realize, as you're approaching a bridge, that the vehicle you're driving is way, way too tall to clear the bridge.

The Seattle Times has more, including word that the bridge wasn't structurally damaged. The Times also mentions that, on top of everything else, the softball team lost the game it was returning from, 10-0. Oh, and they give the driver's name, Brad Adams. I actually kind of feel bad for the guy. He must be so freakin' embarrassed. Not to mention prayerfully hoping that none of those softball players develop injuries that would make for a good claim of damages in a negligence lawsuit...

(Hat tip: David K.)

Springtime in Knoxville

By Brendan Loy

Hey, I thought of something non-political that I can blog about: pretty pictures! Those always work. :)

As a follow-up, sort of, to my shiny old cars post, here is my promised photo gallery of "Springtime in Knoxville." A few highlights:

That's Neyland Stadium in the distance in that bottom picture, and the Tennessee River on the left... in case you were wondering. The middle picture is of Knoxville's Krutch Park. And the top one was taken from a downtown parking garage. Those white trees are gorgeous (though they aren't white anymore; they turned green a couple of weeks ago).

Anyway, again, the full album is here. It starts on March 6 and continues through April 9 (and I'll add to it if I take more pictures that belong in it). Nothing photographically spectacular, IMHO, but some nice pictures anyway. It's truly a beautiful time of year here.

Wanted: random blog topics!

By Brendan Loy

I've gotten more than 10,000 hits today, the bulk of them coming in via last night's Sullylanche, directly or indirectly. Normally, when I get a big new influx of traffic like this, I make a special effort to live up to my sub-moniker of "hyperactive blogger," posting as much new material as possible, so as to give the new visitors a reason to become regulars. Unfortunately, although I have several new political posts swirling around in my head, my brain has turned to mush this evening and I have no motivation to actually write any of them. (Stay tuned, though, for thoughts on Pennsylvania's implications, Hillary's 9/11 exploitations, and my Obama-fatuations!)

Meanwhile, I find myself strangely unable to think of anything non-election-related that I particularly want to blog about. The Pope's visit to America? Interesting and important, but I haven't been following it so I don't really have anything to say about it. Time magazine's Iwo Jima/global warming cover? Meh. Seems like a tempest in a teapot to me (notwithstanding that my grandfather was a Marine in World War II, and I revere what those guys did... but still, who cares about a stupid magazine cover?). The Yale abortion art project? It's a fake.* A judge telling J.K. Rowling her books are "gibberish"? What's to say, other than "Heh"? (Can you tell I get most of my news from Drudge?) And nothing's really caught my eye in the world of sports, or any of my other pet blog topics. (Although, hey! fUCLA's Kevin Love is going pro! I'm shocked, shocked.)

So, I'm turning it over to y'all. What non-election-related topics/items should I be blogging about? Serious suggestions are welcome, though I'm thinking especially of frivolous stuff. Like, have you seen any interesting "news of the weird" type stories lately? How about funny YouTube clips? (A sequel to my Captain Vegetable post, perhaps?) Suggest something in comments, and maybe I'll post it out of sheer desperation! ;)

In the mean time, and in the spirit of utter randomness, here's yet another Makem & Clancy YouTube clip, of yet another one of my favorite songs to sing to Loyette: "The Mermaid."

(New readers who wonder why I'm posting a video of Liam Clancy and the late great Tommy Makem -- or who they are, for that matter -- click here, and for more, here.)

*UPDATE: Upon further review, the Yale art/abortion thing may not be fake, after all. Or, it may. The university says she says she didn't do it. But she says she never said that, and that she did it, and that the university is lying. But the university says she told them she'd say that if they said she said she didn't do it. (Got all that?) So, who's lying? My money's on her. It's all part of the "art." Regardless, the whole thing is disgusting and pointless.

A very Republican Democratic debate

By Brendan Loy

David Brooks offers his take on last night's debate, under the headline "No Whining About the Media." He thinks it was fantastic.

He's in the minority, of course, among the commentariat. But it's easy to see why a conservative commentator would be pleased with the debate (as demonstrated by the veritable glee over on National Review Online last night). First of all, the questions were stacked in such a way that the candidates' answers were chock full of sound bites that John McCain can use to great effect against either candidate in November. (I still Barack Obama's long, rambling, noncommittal answer on the Iran-Israel question may have well and truly lost him Florida.) [UPDATE: In comments, Sean Braisted scolds me for buying into the Florida-as-Israel meme. He's got a point! ... Bad Brendan, listening to Clinton/MSM spin! Bad!]

But secondly and perhaps more importantly, when the moderators finally finished asking things like "Does your pastor love America?" and got around to asking policy questions, they were largely policy questions that Republicans care about, framed in ways that Republicans would frame them. Will you pledge not to raise taxes? How would you change affirmative action to prevent reverse discrimination? Will you still withdraw from Iraq even if the grownups tell you not to? Don't you think gun control violates the Second Amendment? If Iran nukes Israel, will you pledge to nuke 'em back?

Now, there's nothing illegitimate about these questions, as such. (As for Charlie Gibson's fuzzy capital-gains math, well, that's another story.) What's problematic is that they were being asked in a Democratic debate, ahead of a primary in which Democratic voters will choose between Democratic candidates, presumably based on Democratic issues. Issues like, well, this list of topics, created by a Daily Kos diarist. We can nitpick the exact topics, but I mean, really: how many Pennsylvania Democrats are going to be choosing between Clinton and Obama on the basis of who is more committed to keeping the capital-gains tax at current levels? And yet those sorts of issues -- ones that most Democratic voters simply don't care that much about -- absolutely dominated the debate.

Will there be a backlash?

By Brendan Loy

That, I think, is the only question* that matters now, in terms of Tuesday's result in Pennsylvania. Will the Keystone State's Democratic voters -- remember, these are Democrats, not general-election voters -- rebel against the negativity, the "gotcha"-ism, the endless drumbeat of cynical word-twisting and opportunistic gaffe-pouncing, that has become the central operating principle of the Clinton campaign, and vote instead for the man whose message of "hope" and "change" and a "new kind of politics" so inspired voters in the early stages of this nomination contest? If there's ever a moment for that message to gain new traction, it would be now.

The conventional wisdom holds, and the polling suggests, that undecided voters will break for Hillary, as they did in New Hampshire, and in various big Super Tuesday states, and in Texas and Ohio. But in the last week, Hillary's campaign has gone almost entirely negative, and her inner attack dog been unmasked as never before. Pennsylvanians, remember, have rarely if ever been the center of the political universe like this before -- they're not used to being New Hampshire on steroids -- and the negativity must be absolutely overwhelming at this point. I imagine a lot of voters are getting awfully tired of it all.

If I'm right, tonight's debate, while superficially helpful to Hillary (Sullivan calls it Obama's "worst performance yet on national television," and I don't disagree), may actually have damaged her -- precisely because it seemed, in some ways, almost like an extension of the last week of her campaign. It wasn't really a "debate" so much as an endless series of "gotcha" moments, an ongoing riff on "electability" and side-issues and distractions. The lefty blogosphere is in an uproar; Ed Rendell is mad as hell; commenters on ABC's site are livid. But what will Pennsylvania's voters think? And if they were turned off the debate, will that turn them on to Obama's message, and turn them off to Clinton's transparent Rovianism? I think it just might.

One of the night's most popular answers, according to WPVI's undecided voter reaction tracker thingy, was this response by Obama to a question about his relationship to former Weather Underground bomber William Ayers:

George, but this is an example of what I'm talking about.

This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who's a professor of English in Chicago, who I know and who I have not received some official endorsement from. He's not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis.

And the notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago when I was 8 years old, somehow reflects on me and my values, doesn't make much sense, George. ...

[T]his kind of game, in which anybody who I know, regardless of how flimsy the relationship is, is somehow -- somehow their ideas could be attributed to me -- I think the American people are smarter than that. They're not going to suggest somehow that that is reflective of my views, because it obviously isn't.

Hillary's response? "Well, I think that is a fair general statement, but I also believe that Senator Obama served on a board with Mr. Ayers for a period of time, the Woods Foundation, which was a paid directorship position." The undecided-voter meter plummeted.

Perhaps I'm being a pollyanna-ish member of the Cult of Obama here, but I think there is a real chance the voters of Pennsylvania will rise up and, once and for all, reject the endless, party-destroying "gotcha" tactics of Hillary Clinton, and choose the candidate of "change." It would be the backlash to end all backlashes. I'm not predicting it. But I think it could happen.

And it would be so sweet if it did.

*Check that: "Will there be a backlash?" is one of two questions that matter. The other one is, "What constitutes 'victory' for Hillary Clinton?" I still maintain she must win by double digits, but I worry, in keeping with the yea theory, that a late rush of pro-Obama polls -- or even leaked, unweighted, pro-Obama exit polls on election night -- could lower the bar and allow her to claim "victory" with a mere narrow win.

UPDATE: Welcome, Andrew Sullivan readers!

P.S. Full disclosure for my new readers: before you put too much stock in my quasi-prediction here, you should be aware of my track record. In October 2005, I made a friendly bet that Giuliani, not McCain, would win the GOP nomination. In November 2007, I bragged that Rudy's strong showing in national polls proved my long-held belief that the GOP isn't as monolithically closed-minded as many liberals think it is. (I actually still think this point is correct, but my use of Giuliani as an exemplar was obviously woefully premature.) In January 2008, one day before New Hampshire, I predicted that Hillary Clinton, after being crushed in the Granite State, would quickly fade and "will not win a single primary." I implied she'd drop out after Super Tuesday. The next day, I picked not just Obama, but Romney, as New Hampshire winners. Later that month, in a reversal of wrongness, I picked McCain to win Michigan. I subsequently opined about a possible "Rudy surprise" in Florida. I could go on, but you get the idea. I've repeatedly been spectacularly wrong this election season. :)

But hey, here's hoping this is the time I'm right!

UPDATE, 7:45 AM: I've been Digged! Also Kossed and DU'd. Already more than 5,000 hits today, and it isn't even 8:00 AM yet. Craziness!

Meanwhile, in comments, Jim Hu writes, "Maybe there will be a backlash, but basing it on the uproar in blogs and comments sections strikes me as wishful thinking. If these were reliable indicators, Ron Paul would be the GOP nominee."

Heh. Touche. But actually, I'm not "basing it on" those things. I'm basing it on my own sense of voters' likely reactions, which the online uproar has only confirmed. My sense is simply this: Democratic voters (not to be confused with general election voters) seem generally unmoved by Bittergate and these other "gotcha" issues. That sense seems to be generally confirmed by polls, "man on the street" interviews, and so forth. So, given that voters are generally unmoved by those issues; and given that Hillary has run an unceasingly negative campaign in the last week or so, based primarily on those issues; and given that last night's debate seemed like an extension of that negative campaign; and given that Pennsylvania has really never been saturated like this with a sustained, PA-centric, negative campaign; I think a backlash is possible. I may well be wrong, but if I am, it won't be because I'm putting too much stock in online commentary. It'll be because my internal predictive sense of how voters are likely to react is wrong. As demonstrated above, it wouldn't be the first time!

UPDATE: The ever-insightful FlyOnTheWall writes in comments:

There may be a backlash provoked by the debate, Brendan, but I suspect that the narrative of a backlash will be far more important. Scanning the coverage this morning, there seems to be an emerging consensus among the talking heads that Clinton hurt herself through her unrelenting negativity last night. I'm not sure that's entirely fair - it strikes me that she's mostly guilty of sinking to the level of the moderators, and taking their bait. But it may not matter.

Consider, for example, this gem from Halperin: "The Obama campaign tells Stephanopoulos that 'prominent Pennsylvania supporters' will switch their support from Clinton to Obama Thursday morning due to Clinton’s negativity." Now, I'd be willing to wager that if they actually exist, these supporters came around before last night. But Axelrod and Plouffe aren't stupid - they recognize the value of reinforcing perceptions. So they'll roll them out this morning, and the day-after cycle will be dominated by the news that Hillary even turned off some of her own supporters. (Assuming Stephanopolous is correct - can you trust the guy after last night?)

I doubt that the debate itself changed many minds. But far more people will see coverage of the debate and its aftermath than tuned in to watch the event itself last night. And if Obama can make Hillary's negativity the crucial issue, he can turn a truly dismal performance to his advantage.

Well, hey, Hillary won New Hampshire on the basis of a ridiculous, trumped-up "sympathy card." If Obama can do the same in Pennsylvania, they'll be even. Oh, and Obama will be the nominee.

UPDATE TO THE UPDATE: Upon reflection, it occurs to me that the "narrative of a backlash" could be bad for Obama, because it could have the effect of resetting the expectations game -- again! -- so as to lower the bar for Clinton -- again! -- thus allowing her to claim a "win" on the basis of a narrow margin that should really be seen as a moral victory for Obama -- again!

As commenter "yea" pointed out two weeks ago, and as I alluded earlier in this post, this late-in-the-game resetting of expectations has been a major Achilles' heel for Obama throughout the campaign. (Think New Hampshire, Super Tuesday, Texas & Ohio.) And it could happen again, with the "backlash narrative" being the launching point.

Think about it: there are still six whole days before the primary. That's a lot of time. And polls are already showing a tightening race, as they always seem to do when primary day nears. That in itself will start to reset expectations, but what's worse, the "backlash narrative" may convince the commentariat that Obama will pick up a big chunk of the undecided vote. Throw in a couple more polls that, by random variation, show Obama with a slight lead -- which will, in keeping with the conflation of correlation and causation, be attributed to the "backlash," thus strengthening the meme -- and, by Tuesday, the MSM could be well-nigh convinced that Obama has a chance to win Pennsylvania outright.

And then think about what will happen when the first wave of leaked, unweighted exit polls -- which always seem to favor Obama -- appear on the media's and blogosphere's radar. If those numbers show a dead heat or an Obama victory, and if the first round of published, issue-based exit polls show the voters saying by wide margins that they hate all the negative campaigning, and that it was important to their vote -- which voters always say, whether it's true or not -- the narrative of a "possible Obama upset" will become conventional wisdom by the time the polls close.

All of which will mean that, when Hillary wins by 5 or 6 points, she'll be able to claim a "comeback" victory, and the narrative will abruptly shift back to: "Well, I guess that 'bitter' stuff, and the Wright stuff, and the Rezko stuff, and the Ayers stuff, and the flag stuff, really hurt Obama after all! Why, look, he lost the working-class white male vote by a 2-to-1 margin! Obama is in trouble!" The superdelegates go back to being alarmed; Hillary again vows to stay in the race until the convention; the thumb-suckers suck their thumbs vigorously; and, basically, we're back to square one. All because of a narrative that I played some small role in starting. Dammit. :)

Dem debate open thread

By Brendan Loy

The "Philly style" Clinton-Obama duel -- "cheesesteaks at ten paces," as commenter JD suggested -- begins at 8:00 PM. I don't know how much liveblogging I'll be doing, but y'all can feel free to leave your own running commentaries in comments here.

Live video stream here.

UPDATE: Obama isn't exactly hitting these initial questions about Bittergate out of the park. He could (and should) have had a clearer explanation of his remarks prepared, and he's missing some chances to take sharper shots at Hillary.

Then again, Hillary is rambling pretty badly now.

Here is Josh Marshall's liveblog.

UPDATE 2: Hillary can't seem to decide if she's really going for the jugular or not, so she's sort of talking around herself. Ramble, ramble, ramble.

Meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan notes: "So far, neither Gibson nor Stephanopoulos have asked a single policy-related question. They seem utterly uninterested in foreign or domestic policy. After the past eight years, we have had half an hour with nothing but process questions. Gibson and Stephanopoulos are clearly part of the problem in this election and part of what has to be reformed."

UPDATE 3: The undecided voters whose reactions are being charted on the WPVI stream hated Hillary's horrible Bosnia answer, and loved Obama's response that we need to stop obsessing over gaffes.

UPDATE 4: Sullivan again: "Now, it's flag-pins! I'm just pointing out that we are now almost halfway through this debate and ABC News has not asked a single policy question. It's pure Rove, sustained and hyped and sustained by Stephanopoulos and Gibson. It's what they know; it's easy; and it will generate ratings. It is not journalism." And later: "I have to say I am actually shocked at the appallingly poor quality of the questions: the worst of the campaign so far. Pure MSM process bulls**t."

I'm actually not entirely sure I agree. They've debated policy in 25 debates, and we already know they disagree on virtually nothing. The "pure MSM process bulls**t" is really the only thing we haven't heard them talk about face-to-face ad infinitum.

Then again, in light of my recent stance on "gotcha" tactics, I suppose I should be on Sullivan's side on this one. I dunno. I can see both sides of it.

UPDATE 4 1/2: Upon further reflection, I'll say this. It does make some degree of sense to talk about the "process bulls**t" in the sense that it's new, whereas the policy questions aren't. However, the policy questions are vastly more important; they elevate the debate, whereas the process questions degrade it. The policy questions inform voters, whereas the process questions distract them. A responsible journalist, committed to fulfilling the press's unique role as a crucial element of our democracy, would spend less time thinking of obvious gotcha potshot questions, and more time thinking of new, different, and more informative and educational ways to ask important questions. This debate, however, was not an exercise in responsible journalism. It was, as The Huffington Post says, "the gotcha debate."

UPDATE 5: Did Obama just lose Florida with his rambling, evasive answer on Israel and Iran -- followed by Hillary's straightforward "massive retaliation" answer?

Substantively: he'll make a rock-solid promise to withdraw from Iraq by a date certain, but he won't promise anything more than "appropriate action" in the event of Iranian nuclear attack on Israel? Bleh.

To be clear, I'm not sure an ironclad pledge by a presidential candidate is appropriate in either instance. But if I was going to promise one and not the other, I'm pretty sure I'd make the opposite choice from the one Obama made.

UPDATE 6: This is funny. All the liberal bloggers think these moderators are terrible. Meanwhile, over at National Review: "These are the GREATEST DEBATE QUESTIONS EVER."

It's easy to see why. This debate has been a veritable gold mine of sound bites that John McCain will use to great effect, whoever wins the nomination.

UPDATE 7: I think both of these candidates are tired. They're both terrible tonight.

FINAL UPDATE: I totally checked out on the end of the debate: I stopped watching as the affirmative action question was being asked. Did I miss anything good?

On the conflation of correlation with causation

By Brendan Loy

TPM Cafe contributor FlyOnTheWall has an excellent post (as per usual) on "Signals, Noise and Polling." It is very insightful and totally correct, whatever one thinks of Bittergate. I won't excerpt it; just, by all means, read it.

Hillary's strategy: all negative, all the time

By Brendan Loy

It appears that Hillary Clinton's new campaign theory is "if you can't say something mean, don't say anything at all." Her television ad campaign in most Pennsylvania markets right now is 100 percent negative.

I think there's a real chance the voters will rebel against this. But we'll see.

Clinton vs. Obama, Philly style

By Brendan Loy

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama will face off tonight in Philadelphia at 8:00 PM EST, in their first debate since February 26.

It will be very, very interesting to see how things shake out. I think there is a serious risk of Hillary overplaying her hand if she continues to hammer Obama on his "small town" gaffe. The Obama campaign apparently agrees, judging by this ad:

I'm not sure what Hillary's debate strategy will be, but I doubt we'll be seeing any "I am honored to be here with Barack Obama" moments. And if she tries that crap, I hope to God he hits back with something like: "If you're so 'honored' to be here with me, Senator Clinton, then why have you been lying to the good people of Pennsylvania by telling them I'm an 'elitist,' which you know perfectly well isn't true, and that I'm supposedly 'not ready' to be president? These are false, Republican-style attacks that have no place in a Democratic primary. You need to make up your mind and be straight with the voters of this state." Hell, I hope he says something like that regardless of what she says. That's be awesome. And it could help continue the erosion of trust in Hillary.

P.S. On the issue of the bitter/cling controversy and the question of whether Hillary is overplaying her hand, Noam Scheiber says: "[The comment in San Francisco] was unquestionably a serious stumble on Obama's part. But the high-percentage move [for Hillary] would have been to get out of the way and let the media run with it. If this were going to do Obama in, it would have done so without her help. Instead, she's thrown Obama a lifeline. She's made herself look completely cynical, she's once again reminded superdelegates of everything they hated about the Clinton era, and she's started making claims about her own cultural authenticity that don't pass the smell test."

I agree, and I actually wonder if she's inadvertently thrown Obama a lifeline for the November election as well. I've had a lengthly blog post about this percolating in my head for several days, which I will attempt to briefly summarize thusly:

Obama's comments are naturally more damaging among the general electorate than among the Democratic primary electorate. I.e., if they're going to destroy him, it'll be in November, not now. Moreover, it will/would be much easier for John McCain to play the "how dare you insult our religion and our guns" card than it is for Hillary Clinton to do so. If this gaffe had occurred without Hillary in the picture, McCain would have immediately pounced, with the guns/religion part of the comment being his central focus. Instead, although McCain did pounce too, Hillary's pounce got the most play, because of the current state of the race -- and she focused mostly, at first, on the "bitter" part, which, as I've said, is by far the most easily defensible part of what Obama said. That resulted in the media labeling this as the "bitter" controversy, "Bittergate," Obama's "bitter" remarks, etc. -- and, once the media decides on a storyline like that, it's pretty well set in stone.

Hillary has since pivoted to talk more about the religion/guns part, but the focus of public discourse is still on "bitter." And I think there may be a growing, vague sense in the psyche of the average, barely-paying-attention swing voter, that this is much ado about nothing, that Obama's comments weren't that big of a deal (after all, we are kind of "bitter"!), that he's being unfairly attacked for an insignificant poor choice of words, and that the "typical politicians" attacking him (for daring to claim that working folks are "bitter") are the ones who are "out of touch."

So, if I'm right, what does this mean for Obama if he wins the nomination? Well, the big question is, what happens when McCain tries to bring this issue up again after Labor Day, when most people really start paying attention to the election? I think it might mean he'll get much less traction than if he'd been the one raising it in the first instance. I think it's possible that the vague "much ado about nothing" impression I just described may trickle down, through swing voters' veils of primary-season apathy, and become a sort of an unconscious sense of the inherent nature of this issue, such that when McCain brings it up again, people will be far less receptive to his argument than they otherwise would have been. I say this because, often times, people's impressions of political events are like newly laid concrete: it's really easy to change their shape initially, but once they take hold, they become very solid almost to the point of immovability. I wonder whether, in part because of the limited degree to which people are paying attention, combined with Hillary's poor tactics in initially highlighting "bitter" instead of "cling," such a "cementing" process may now be occurring, with limited damage to Obama. If so, that is very good news for Obama and very bad news for McCain, who might otherwise have been able to absolutely bury Obama with this.

Mind you, I'm not saying I think any of the above has definitely happened or is definitely happening -- indeed, I could be entirely wrong -- but I think what I've just described is at least plausible. And if I'm actually right, maybe Obama should thank Hillary for being such a cynical, power-hungry monster who cares not at all for her party's well-being. She may be accidentally saving the Democrats, despite her best efforts to destroy them!

Shiny old cars! Whee!

By Brendan Loy

Last weekend, Becky, Loyette and I went to "Harriman' Cruisin 2008," a street festival in the kinda sorta nearby town of Harriman. Basically, Harriman Cruisin' involves a bunch of car buffs parking their classic cars all up and down Main Street and letting people ooh and aah at them. Here's my photo gallery.

As the title and the above photo suggest, it's mostly pictures of shiny old cars, but there are a few miscellaneous shots of what is otherwise, frankly, kind of a depressed, Rust Belt-ish looking downtown area. (See, e.g., here and here.) In fact, if you look closely, you might see some small-town folk who look a little bitter and might well be clinging to religion and, er, antipathy to people who aren't like them. ;)

Anyway, we had fun. Old cars are neat. We even saw a Ford Model A! Here, again, is the link to the gallery.

UPDATE: As noted in comments, the above-pictured car is (I think!) a 1959 Chevy Impala. Here's an old "subliminal" TV ad for it, featuring Pat Boone and Dinah Shore:

Ain't YouTube great?

Miscellaneous silliness

By Brendan Loy

If only Scrabulous allowed lolspeak words:

That reminds me, apropos of my previous Scrabulous post... I just got a new external hard drive (actually an internal drive and an external enclosure), and, in keeping with my tradition of giving my hard drives silly names, it is now officially known as:

Heh. "Khaaan" joins, among others, "GENIUS HARD DRIVE OF DEATH" (the name that started the tradition, courtesy of Kristy), "One Hard Drive to Rule Them All," and "Sectumsempra II." (The original "Sectumsempra" had a technical issue and had to be returned.) So, with a Lord of the Rings-themed name and a Harry Potter-themed name, it seemed only fitting that I have a Star Trek-themed name.

Some readers might recall that I used to have an external hard drive named "Joementum," but it too had technical difficulties -- for which I blame Ned Lamont -- and ultimately it had to be replaced. In fact, "Khaaan" is, in essence, its replacement. Alas, I totally forgot about my original plan to name its replacement "Joementum the White." Oh well. (Hmm: replacing Lieberman with Shatner? Well, at least I'm staying within the Tribe.)

Hillary at the bar

By Brendan Loy

John McCain did "Hardball" at Villanova today, and a student -- in reference to the recent photos of Hillary Clinton doing (or possibly sipping) a whiskey shot at Bronko's restaurant in Crown Point, Indiana -- asked him, "I was wondering if you think that she's finally resorted to hitting the sauce just because of some unfavorable polling. And I was also wondering if you would care to join me for a shot after this?"

Heh.

That reminds me: I have a proposal for Hillary Clinton. As you all know, I've soured on her rather severely in recent months, and at this point, I'd be pretty hard-pressed to vote for her under any circumstances. However, there is one thing that might make me change my tune. Hilldog, if you'll go to The Backer, order one of their terrible yet potent Long Islands, and get yourself photographed and videotaped singing the "God Bless the USA" followed by the Notre Dame Victory March (yes, this would mean staying until -- ahem -- 3:00 AM), I might consider switching my allegiance. :)

P.S. Possible campaign ad: "It's 3:00 AM, and your children are safe and asleep. But Hillary Clinton is wide awake, if slightly tipsy, singing patriotic music while swaying back and forth in a circle of townies* in South Bend, Indiana. Suddenly, a cell phone rings -- the cab is here. Who do you want answering that phone? The elitist snob Barack Obama, who will jump in the cab at the earliest opportunity to get away from the 'bitter' townsfolk, and miss the Victory March? Or Hillary Clinton, the woman who respects your traditions, who'll tell the cabbie to wait ten minutes so she can stay right through to the end of 'Oh What A Night'? Make the right choice: Vote for Hillary Clinton on May 6. [slurred Hillary voiceover: 'I'm Hilllary Clinton and I (hiccup) approve this message.']"

*Why townies, you ask? Because the Domers are too "elitist," of course! ;)

Seattle Sonics soap opera gets new twist

By David K.

To be perfectly honest, I really don't much care for the NBA.  I'd rather watch an NHL game than an NBA game (NFL and MLB beating both, MLS coming in a distant last place).  When I heard that the Sonics had been sold to a group of investors from Oklahoma City, I didn't much care if they stayed in Seattle or went to Oklahoma (which, despite what we were told by this new group, was really what everyone assumed would happen).  There were exorbitant demands for public funding of a new arena followed by efforts of other local cities to come up with competing offers.  The mayor, the legislature and the governor all chimed in, and in the end, it looked like the Sonics were as good as gone.  But this week it got much more interesting.

First came e-mails that were obtained from Clay Bennett and the other owners of the Sonics that showed, despite their promises of a good-faith effort to work out a deal to keep the team in Seattle, that they pretty much intended to move the team all along.  It certainly showed what most of us believed all along, that these Oklahoma City investors were lying through their teeth, but it still probably is not enough to keep the team in Seattle, as basketball commissioner Howard David Stern seems to fully support the efforts to oust the team. 

The latest twist is probably the most unexpected.  Former owner and Starbucks founder Howard Schultz is planning to sue Bennett, alleging that he broke the good faith agreement that was part of the deal to sell the Sonics to the OK City group in the first place.  He is not seeking financial damages; he just wants to roll back the deal.  It will be interesting to see how this all plays out. 

Only 334 days till Selection Sunday!

By Brendan Loy

Joe Lunardi has published his initial, ridiculously early, meaningless yet fun, pre-pre-season 2009 Bracketology projections. (Hat tip: BK.) His #1 seeds are North Carolina, Duke, Texas and Pittsburgh. 2007 finalists Kansas and Memphis drop to #2 and #3, respectively, and UCLA plummets to a #7. w00t! :)

More importantly, Notre Dame is a #2 seed (without Gene Cross? Hmm...), Gonzaga is a #5, and USC is a #9. Frankly, those all seem high to me, but maybe I'm just a pessimist about my own teams. (Although, if so, it didn't prevent my irrational Zag-xuberance last year.)

Tennessee falls all the way to #9... where they're matched up in a brutal first-round game against #8 Davidson. (Stephen Curry FTW!) This year's mid-major superpower that almost beat UT, Butler, is on the bubble but out, as are the Washington Huskies. The UConn Huskies, though, are sitting pretty as a #2 seed. Oh, and the University of Hartford Hawks, after falling one game short in 2008, make their NCAA Tournament debut in 2009 as a #16 seed. Hurrah!

Yeah, so, we have a college football season to start -- and finish -- before I'll get really excited about any of this, but it's fun to look ahead. :)

I'm Hillary Clinton, and I approved this John McCain ad

By Brendan Loy

Scoring political points (for herself, and -- much moreso -- for the Republicans), or overplaying her hand?

Al Giordano: "The question is, how many Clinton supporters are there that aren’t signing up for the slash-and-burn-down-the-Democratic-Party strategy that is now naked and running around on TV? Those that remain silent will probably lose credibility later on because in times of moral crisis, silence is seen as complicity."

John Aravosis calls the ad "vile, sickening, and filthy," and urges his readers to "ask yourself if you'll ever vote for this woman again." (Hat tip: The Jed Report, which replies, "I know my answer to that question. As far as I am concerned, Hillary Clinton is no longer a Democrat.")

Random YouTube of the day: Captain Vegetable

By Brendan Loy

A bit of joyful bizarreness to brighten up your tax day, courtesy of Sesame Street circa 1982:

I dare you to not have that song stuck in your head for the rest of the day. :)

(Hat tip: Barb.)

Physics giant John A. Wheeler dead at 96

By Joe Loy

Only a vanishingly small fraction of us can ever hope to learn & teach so much before we subside back into the quantum foam. / Well done, Professor: and may infinities of angels, dancing on the singular pinpoints of Many Worlds, sing thee to thy rest. (Emphases added :) ~

John A. Wheeler, a visionary physicist and teacher who helped invent the theory of nuclear fission, gave black holes their name and argued about the nature of reality with Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, died Sunday morning at his home in Hightstown, N.J. He was 96.

...As a professor at Princeton and then at the University of Texas in Austin, Dr. Wheeler set the agenda for generations of theoretical physicists, using metaphor as effectively as calculus to capture the imaginations of his students and colleagues and to pose questions that would send them, minds blazing, to the barricades to confront nature.

Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said of Dr. Wheeler, “For me, he was the last Titan, the only physics superhero still standing.”

... “He rejuvenated general relativity; he made it an experimental subject and took it away from the mathematicians,” said Freeman Dyson, a theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study across town in Princeton.

Among Dr. Wheeler’s students was Richard Feynman of the California Institute of Technology, who parlayed a crazy-sounding suggestion by Dr. Wheeler into work that led to a Nobel Prize. Another was Hugh Everett, whose Ph.D. thesis under Dr. Wheeler on quantum mechanics envisioned parallel alternate universes endlessly branching and splitting apart — a notion that Dr. Wheeler called “Many Worlds” and which has become a favorite of many cosmologists as well as science fiction writers.

Recalling his student days, Dr. Feynman once said, “Some people think Wheeler’s gotten crazy in his later years, but he’s always been crazy.”

Yes and Feynman (who, assuredly, should Know :) would agree: we should All be so crazy :}. More after the leap jump :}.

CNN Breaking News

By CNN

The directors of Delta and Northwest approved a deal for the companies to merge and create the world's largest airline, Delta says.

Hollow scandals and ignored travesties

By Brendan Loy

Ezra Klein on Bittergate:

There's no actual attack being levied [against Obama] that anyone can rebut, or ideas being tossed out that anyone can argue. Instead, Obama has said something Politically Damaging. And it will Damage him. And we'll all watch to see how badly.

But let's be clear: It's not damaging because we think it foretells him doing something harmful to the country. It's not damaging because it suggests his policy agenda is poorly conceived, or his priorities are awry. If you think of policy and politics as two circles in a Venn diagram, this is damage that only exists in the politics circle, and doesn't even come close to the area of intersection. We reporters have to cover it, of course, because it's Really Important, and matters more than the housing plans of all the candidates put together. But it matters in a completely self-referential way, it matters only because it matters, not because it means anything about Obama, or illuminates anything about his potential presidency. It's a hollow scandal. Those housing plans, by contrast, don't "matter" in a way that convinces the media to cover them, or to relentlessly hound McCain about the inadequacy of his proposal. They don't "matter," but they are meaningful. And this is why I don't like writing about the campaign. It's full of hollow scandals and ignored travesties.

Meanwhile, it seems some Pennsylvanians have had enough of Hillary's manipulation of this particular "hollow scandal." Is it possible Hilldog is overplaying her hand here? It's hard to say, but I think she has at least damaged her case by focusing so much on the "bitter" portion of Obama's comments -- clearly the most easily defensible part -- rather than zeroing in, with laser-like focus, solely on the far more problematic comments about religion, guns and (especially) xenophobia and racism. As long as the debate is centered primarily on whether Pennsylvanians are "bitter," a lot of people are going to agree with the best political team on television that Hillary is, at best, cynically making a mountain out of a molehill, and at worst, demonstrating that she's out of touch with how pissed-off voters really are. I have an emerging sense that she has inadvertently thrown Obama a major lifeline with her chosen line of attack.

Fun with lolcats

By Brendan Loy

Last chance to help Sara!

By Brendan Loy

Last month, I blogged about Sara Crowther (née Alpsan), Becky's high-school classmate who is competing in an online contest that could result in her getting to sing on-stage with Rascal Flatts (and getting backstage passes and all sorts of other cool stuff). If Sara gets into the Top 10*, she'll be eligible to be hand-picked by the band -- and she stands a really good chance if that happens, as she's pretty clearly the best singer of the bunch.

At the time of my previous post, she was ranked #14. Votes, views and comments from the Irish Trojan crowd helped boost her to #12... but now she needs a final push before the deadline at 11:59 PM tomorrow night. That's where y'all come in (again). Vote for Sara! And while you're at it, leave a comment, pass on the link, etc. Pretty much any activity gives her "viral points" that help her climb up the charts. As she explained on the previous post: "you can vote once every 24 hours as a member or once every few hours as a guest. ... If you create a member name your vote counts for more and you can rate the reviews as helpful or not which gets more points."

Anyway, here's her video:

Thanks, everybody! Good luck, Sara!

*Actually, it may be enough to get into the Top 11, or even to stay in the Top 12, according to rumors that one or two of the current Top 10 are actually ineligible due to age and/or residency requirements. But regardless, Sara needs our support!

Obama goes on the offensive

By Brendan Loy

"That's some politics being played by Hillary Clinton," he says of her reaction to his "bitter" gaffe. "She knows better. Shame on her."

Don't miss the riff on Clinton "talking like she's Annie Oakley," from around 4:10 to around 5:00. LOL!

P.S. Just the other day, I heard a tune on WDVX that might be a good campaign theme song for Hillary. It's Track 7 on the Biscuit Burners' new album, and can be found on iTunes here. Here's the chorus:

:)

Meanwhile, we now have the Bitter Voters for Obama. Heh. (Hat tip: Marty West.)

P.P.S. Theda Skocpol writes into TPM with her take on Bittergate:

I have been in meetings with the Clintons and their advisors where very clinical things were said in a very-detached tone about unwillingness of working class voters to trust government -- and Bill Clinton -- and about their unfortunate (from a Clinton perspective) proclivity to vote on life-style rather than economic issues. To see Hillary going absolutely over the top to smash Obama for making clearly more humanly sympathetic observations in this vein, is just amazing. Even more so to see her pretending to be a gun-toting non-elite. Give us a break! ...

The distribution of "we're not bitter" stickers to her campaign rallies is the height of over-the-top crudity, and the reports are that very few audience members seem to have much enthusiasm for this nonsense. Not surprisingly, people cannot see the reasons for so much fuss. ... [W]here is her authenticity and her dignity and her sense of any proportion?

Authenticity? Dignity? Hillary? Surely you jest.

It's a Kerry flip-flop! Emanuel backtracks on hurricanes and global warming

By Brendan Loy

Kerry Emanuel, the influential M.I.T. climate scientist who has been at the forefront of making the argument that global warming will lead to more intense hurricanes, has released a new study that backtracks on his earlier findings, revealing more uncertainty on the question of whether such a link exists. (Hat tip: InstaPundit.)

I've pointed out repeatedly that the question of what global warming would do vis a vis hurricanes is an entirely separate issue -- about which there is much less consensus and much more uncertainty, even among the most ardent AGW true believers -- from the question of whether global warming is happening (and the subsidiary question of whether, and to what extent, human activity is causing or contributing to it). This new Emanuel study basically reinforces that point. Entirely aside from the broader global warming debate, everyone ought to recognize that we really just don't know for sure yet what the impact on hurricanes will be, if any. (cc: Al Gore)

Personally, notwithstanding my entirely tongue-in-cheek headline, I think the most important point is the one made by Eric Berger, the Houston Chronicle's "SciGuy":

This should put to rest a lot of the nonsense about a global warming conspiracy among scientists. Emanuel, faced with new evidence, has moderated his viewpoint. That's what responsible scientists do, and most are responsible. The amount of scientist-bashing when it comes to global warming is generally quite deplorable.

Indeed. (I would have loved to see Glenn Reynolds quote that point, instead of rehashing the silly, trivial and misleading point about a "relative paucity of hurricanes over the last couple of years." See my Pajamas Media article for a full rebuttal to that.) [UPDATE: Glenn has updated his post, adding a link to this post and quoting the very passage I wished he had quoted initially. Thanks, Glenn.]

Berger also points out that "if you're a skeptic, and you welcome these results, please remember that [the climate models used in this new study] are the same climate models you bash when they show global temperatures steadily rising during the next century."

Meanwhile, Becky tells me she saw the National Hurricane Center's new director, Bill Read, talking on The Weather Channel last week about how we need to stop obsessing over the global warming issue when talking about hurricanes, and focus more on promoting greater preparedness. I agree 100% with that, and I would add that we also need to focus on figuring out what to do about runaway coastal development. As I wrote in my PJM article:

[T]he whole argument over global warming really misses the point, in a certain sense. The biggest downside of the politicization of weather is that it has largely blinded us to more pressing issues related to disaster preparedness.

Regardless of whether global warming is real and manmade — and regardless of whether warming ocean temperatures will lead to more active hurricane seasons, which is actually a separate question — it is an undeniable reality that hurricanes are going to become more damaging and deadly in the coming decades because of increased coastal development. It is also undeniable that certain cities (e.g., Houston/Galveston, Tampa, Miami, New York, and, still, New Orleans) are incredibly vulnerable to absolute devastation from a major hurricane, and more steps need to be taken to protect them, regardless of global warming. Disaster preparedness should not be a political issue, but because of intellectual dishonesty and laziness on both extremes in this feud, it has become one.

Whatever our positions on global warming and related political issues, we should all be happy that the 2006 and 2007 hurricane seasons have turned out to be relatively less devastating than some other recent seasons — and we should use that relative inactivity not as an excuse to grow complacent, but as an opportunity to get ready for the next big storm. Because there will be another big storm. That’s one inconvenient truth that nobody can deny.

P.S. Commenter Jason Ward points to a statement in early 2006 by Emanuel and other top scientists echoing the above sentiment (or, I guess more accurately, I'm echoing their sentiment):

As the Atlantic hurricane season gets underway, the possible influence of climate change on hurricane activity is receiving renewed attention. While the debate on this issue is of considerable scientific and societal interest and concern, it should in no event detract from the main hurricane problem facing the United States: the ever-growing concentration of population and wealth in vulnerable coastal regions. These demographic trends are setting us up for rapidly increasing human and economic losses from hurricane disasters, especially in this era of heightened activity. Scores of scientists and engineers had warned of the threat to New Orleans long before climate change was seriously considered, and a Katrina-like storm or worse was (and is) inevitable even in a stable climate.

Rapidly escalating hurricane damage in recent decades owes much to government policies that serve to subsidize risk. State regulation of insurance is captive to political pressures that hold down premiums in risky coastal areas at the expense of higher premiums in less risky places. Federal flood insurance programs likewise undercharge property owners in vulnerable areas. Federal disaster policies, while providing obvious humanitarian benefits, also serve to promote risky behavior in the long run.

We are optimistic that continued research will eventually resolve much of the current controversy over the effect of climate change on hurricanes. But the more urgent problem of our lemming-like march to the sea requires immediate and sustained attention. We call upon leaders of government and industry to undertake a comprehensive evaluation of building practices, and insurance, land use, and disaster relief policies that currently serve to promote an ever-increasing vulnerability to hurricanes.

Amen. (Emphasis mine.)

P.S. Since I now have a mini-Instalanche headed my way, which inevitably means a global warming flame-war is imminent, I wanted to quote one other key passage from my PJM article. I've added a few bracketed points for the sake of clarity.

“All scientists agree,” Berger writes, “that a single hurricane season cannot make or break an argument for global warming having a measurable impact of hurricanes.” Alas, this message is often lost on non-scientists in the pro- and anti- crowds.

Just as it was both unsound and unwise for some global-warming advocates to hold up the 2005 hurricane season as proof of their position, it would be equally unsound and unwise for global-warming skeptics to hold up 2006 and 2007 as somehow disproving the existence of global warming [or of a link between global warming and hurricanes]. Such arguments are unsound because they confuse climate, which is comprised of long-term trends, with weather, which chronicles individual events. They are also unwise strategically because they are so vulnerable to attack when things — predictably — turn out differently in future years.

The heavy reliance on 2005 in certain quarters, which gave some lay observers the false impression that all hurricane seasons would henceforth be similar to the freakish ‘05 season, left global-warming advocates open to cynicism, criticism and rebuttal when 2006 and 2007 failed to live up to expectations. Similarly, a global-warming skeptic who claims today that 2007 disproves global warming [and/or an AGW link to hurricanes] is leaving himself open to the argument, if 2008 is an active season, that ‘08 proves global warming is real [and linked to hurricanes] after all. The more honest (and strategically sound) course, for both sides, is to discuss global warming on its actual merits, and not obsess over minor year-to-year variations that tell us very little, if anything, about long-term trends.

Something for everyone, on both sides, to keep in mind as the 2008 hurricane season approaches.

Notre Dame loses in hockey title game

By Brendan Loy

Notre Dame's magical, unexpected run through ice hockey's NCAA Tournament ended one step short of a national title, as Boston College beat the Irish 4-1 last night.

I neglected to post about this last night (sorry!), but on a different post, several commenters complained that the Irish got screwed by a wrongly disallowed goal that totally changed the momentum of the game. *sigh*

Regardless, and despite the loss, an amazing run for the Irish.

CNN Breaking News

By CNN

Texas Rangers meet with and then release a man suspected of abusing a teenage girl at a polygamist compound.

Heh.

By Brendan Loy

Hillary Says Memphis National Champ Despite KU Having More Points: "Just because some team comes along in the last minute and scores more points than the other guy doesn't mean they're necessarily able to be National Champion on Day One." (Hat tip: GT12.)

Uh-oh

By Brendan Loy

Obama sure has been making his share of rhetorical gaffes lately, hasn't he? Yikes. How many more "terribly, terribly phrased" (or, if you prefer, "not the most felicitously phrased") remarks must we suffer through?

Once again, it's perfectly possible to defend his remarks at an intellectual level, but... he does realize he's running for President of the United States, not, like, dean of the law school, right? He can't win the general election if he keeps saying intellectually defensible but politically indefensible stuff like this.

P.S. In fact, I'm growing increasingly concerned that he can't win the general election, period. Maybe that's just sleepy pessimism talking, or maybe Hillary Clinton put a Borg microchip in my brain and the assimilation process is beginning ("Votes are irrelevant. Delegates are irrelevant. Resistance is futile."), but nevertheless, I fear the game might already be over. Has Obama done enough long-term damage to himself (with Rev. Wright's help) that the man who I once thought would be the "liberal Reagan" is going to lose in a landslide come November? I'd like to say no; I'd like to think American voters will rise to the occasion and judge these two fine men, Obama and McCain, on their actual merits, rather than on a handful of sound bites. But is that really a good bet to make? Can Obama really survive "God damn America" and "typical white person" and "punished with a baby" and "cling to guns or religion"? If he can, he really will be the liberal Reagan: truly teflon-coated.

P.P.S. To be clear: I say I "fear" this outcome because I want a competitive race between two well-respected candidates that's fought on the merits and the issues -- not necessarily because I want Obama to win. I'm undecided between Obama and McCain. But I'd like to see a real race, not a YouTube- and attack-ad-fueled McCain rout. But the latter becomes more likely with each Obama gaffe.

P.P.P.S. Mickey Kaus:

Because Obama's comments are clearly a Category II Kinsley Gaffe--in which the candidate accidentally says what he really thinks--it will be hard for Obama to explain away. [He could say he was tired and it was late at night?--ed But he was similarly condescending in his big, heartfelt, well-prepared "race speech." Better to embrace them. Let's have a national dialogue about egghead condescension!]

Heh.

Robot Dhimmitude Watch

By Brendan Loy

Glenn Reynolds's hyperactive sense of political correctness is blinding him to the threat robots pose!

For God's sake, Glenn, think of the Insta-Mom!! When they grab her with those metal claws, she won't be able to break free, because they’re made of metal, and robots are strong.

More Comcast weirdness

By Brendan Loy

In the latest twist in my Comcast saga, I have another techie scheduled to come over tomorrow afternoon, due to the continuing intermittent speed and connectivity problems I've been having. The latest odd behavior has been a couple of instances where my connection has slowed to an inconsistent crawl, and when I've done a speed test, I've gotten a perfectly reasonable downstream speed but no upstream reading, like so:

Anyone have a clue what might cause that? I'm stumped. I just know that, when it happens, it seems to produce extremely erratic behavior: one minute, stuff is loading fine; the next, it's not loading at all; the next, it's crawling; then it's suddenly fine again. Very frustrating.

The calm before the storm

By Brendan Loy

In the last half hour, a spooky sort of here-come-the-storms feeling has definitely settled over Knoxville. Tornado warnings off to the west. I'm heading home, and should beat the storms.

UPDATE: I'm home, in case anyone was worried. :) No major storms yet here, though I think Jay's hometown of Loudon got pounded. [UPDATE: Apparently not.]

Looks like we may get some action in 30-45 minutes, but overall, the line of storms appears to be weakening. Indeed, thankfully, there are no more tornado warnings at the moment.

LATER UPDATE: The line of storms kind of fell apart as it neared Knoxville proper, so we were largely spared. But one isolated storm cell did move over a while later, bringing some heavy rain for a few minutes and briefly turning the sky a weird shade of yellow -- I'm not sure what that was all about. Here are the "before & after" shots, at 8:02 PM and 8:07 PM:

Hmm... upon further review, sunset was at 8:07, so maybe the sunlight at 8:02 was somehow shining through the clouds and rain at some weird angle, producing the yellowness.

It was a bit spooky, though, regardless.

SoCal VoCals update

By Brendan Loy

The field is set for the International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella in New York City next Saturday! The event will be held at the Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Hall, the 2,738-seat venue where the New York Philharmonic plays.

As I mentioned previously, the USC SoCal VoCals advanced to the finals for the first time ever by earning the West Region championship on March 15. At the time I wrote that, however, the identities of most of their competitors were still to be determined.

Well, the last semifinal was held six days ago, so now the full field is known. The VoCals will compete against Oxford University Out of the Blue (Western Europe champion), Northwestern University Purple Haze (Midwest champion), Florida State University All-Night Yahtzee (South champion), New York University N'Harmonics (Northeast champion) and Ithaca College Ithacappella (Mid-Atlantic champion).

You hear that, Kristy? USC vs. Ithaca! Oh, it's ON!!

Fight on, Trojans! Beat the Seminoles, Wildcats, Violets, Bombers and... um... Oxons?

P.S. Here's the official ICCA website, including a link to buy tickets. I wish I could go! Alas, I don't think a random trip to New York City is in the cards. But if any of y'all are in the area, I'd recommend it. I'm sure it'll be an amazing show.

P.P.S. Newly discovered site: The A Cappella Blog. Cool.

Toledo hires ND assistant coach

By Brendan Loy

Notre Dame's men's basketball assistant coach Gene Cross, credited by some with turning Mike Brey's team around over the last two years, has been hired by Toledo as their new head coach. (Hat tip: Chris A.)

Whenever I've eaten crow and praised Brey -- whose first name, for blog purposes, used to be "Fire" -- over the last two years, Becky has countered that "he has an awesome assistant coach," choosing to credit Cross rather than Brey for the Irish's improvement. I guess now we'll find out who's right.

(Well, maybe. There is, of course, a third person whose arrival between the 2004-05 and 2005-06 seasons was also rather a big deal: Luke Harangody.)

Storms a-comin'

By Brendan Loy

Becky e-mails that The Weather Channel "is telling people in western Nashville suburbs to take cover." That would be because of the tornado warning for central Cheatham County. And that line of storms is headed our way. "Methinks it'll be one helluva night," Becky writes. Indeed.

UPDATE: The big Dogwood Arts Parade in downtown Knoxville, scheduled for 7pm tonight, has been postponed to next Friday April 25 due to the approaching line of storms.

The expectations game, Keystone edition

By Brendan Loy

From the Economist's Election '08 blog:

The Clinton campaign would have us believe that after all the resources Barack Obama has poured into Pennsylvania, anything but a huge victory for him in that state's primary should raise grave doubts about his electability. But of course, Mr Obama has always trailed Hillary Clinton by huge margins in the Keystone State, which is precisely why he's had to spend so much cash, in hopes of avoiding an embarassing rout.

Nevertheless, what is the appropriate "expectations" benchmark with polls bouncing erratically week to week? Does Mr Obama "beat expectations" if, as per the most recent polls, he holds Mrs Clinton below the double-digit leads she was showing in surveys a month ago? Or are new expectations established by the polls conducted this month? Or, rather, by whatever results are released in the next few days? How long before we decide that a "benchmark" as fluid as "expectations" is essentially meaningless, allowing both campaigns to spin in their preferred direction by selecting their preferred baseline?

Amen to that.

Alas, I'm afraid the media will probably fulfill the prediction of commenter "yea" last week:

who could have predicted this would happen? obama is trailing by a huge amount in a state he's never been to. he shows up in the state and the margin starts to decrease slowly. all of a sudden he surges and even takes the lead in a few polls. things stabilize as the election gets closer, and then there is a natural drift back to hillary that allows her to win the state. she wins the state be a smaller margin than anyone thought possible 4-5 weeks ago, yet by a bigger margin than most of the late polls indicated. hillary then claims the momentum.

*sigh*

Today's stupid politicians file

By dcl

Today's edition, primarily because it will annoy Brendan.

Feel free to draw your own conclusions. I can think of two, neither of which cast St. Joe in a particularly elegant light.

Springtime, for now

By Brendan Loy

It's a beautiful spring day here in Knoxville, with forecast highs in the upper 70s. But, better enjoy it while it lasts; a wintry blast is coming, and by Monday the high will be around 40. Yikes!

ND, Michigan battle in Frozen Four

By Brendan Loy

The Frozen Four is underway, and Notre Dame leads Michigan 3-2 with 10:44 left in the second period. It was 3-0, but Michigan just scored two rapid-fire goals to get back in it.

Liveblogs here and here. The game is being televised live on ESPN2. Winner gets Boston College in the national championship game Saturday. GO IRISH!!! BEAT SKUNKBEARS!!!

UPDATE: Michigan tied it at 3-3... then Notre Dame just took a 4-3 lead with less than 9 minutes left.

UPDATE 2: Tie game 4-4, with 5:21 left. Ugh.

UPDATE 3: Overtime. And, alas, I have to go to bed. Go Irish.

UPDATE 4: IRISH WIN!!!! (Okay, so I didn't actually go to bed...) WOOOHOOO!!!

UPDATE 5: The Associated Press is mean. Check out their lede:

Michigan has Notre Dame's number on the football field. Not so the ice.

Jeez! Is that really necessary? The Irish hockey team makes it to the national championship game for the first time ever -- upsetting the #1-ranked team in the country, and becoming the first #4 seed ever to advance this far -- and the first sentence of the AP article takes an irrelevant shot at the football team? WTF?! Is Brian Cook working ghost-writing for the AP or something?

Moreover, it's inaccurate. Yes, Michigan beat Notre Dame -- badly -- in 2007 and 2006, but the Irish won easily in 2005 (when Michigan was ranked #3 in the country, the Irish just #20) and in 2004 (when ND was unranked and Michigan was #7). Michigan won in '03; Notre Dame won in '02. That makes them 3-3 in their most recent series. (They didn't play from 1998 to 2001.)

If you want to go back further, the Irish are 12-11-1 against the Skunkbears since the series was renewed in 1978 after a 35-year hiatus. Michigan leads the overall series 20-14-1, but somehow I don't think the Wolverines' 9-2 record between 1884 and 1943 was what the AP reporter had in mind.

In any event, 20-14 is hardly a massive advantage, and 11-12 isn't an advantage at all, nor is 3-3. However you look at it, you simply cannot construct an accurate historical reality in which "Michigan has Notre Dame's number on the football field," unless you're looking only at the last two years, which is rather myopic and hardly a sufficiently representative sample to make such a sweeping statement. Neither team has the other's number; they've been very even in recent years.

Maybe the AP's hockey writers should stick to talking about hockey. How about that.

Anyway, here's a better ESPN article about Notre Dame's amazing run to the national championship game. In hockey.

P.S. Now, if you want to say that USC currently has Notre Dame's number in football, thanks to six straight wins -- five of them blowouts -- that would be accurate. :) Likewise, it would have been accurate to say that the Irish had the Trojans' number back during their 13-year undefeated streak in the '80s and '90s. But no way does either ND or UM have the other's number right now.

Quote of the day #2

By Brendan Loy

"I really don’t understand why the Republican Party very clearly decided what they were going to do [about the Florida and Michigan delegations], and the Democratic Party can’t decide." --Hillary Clinton.

Actually, Senator Clinton, the Democratic Party did decide what to do. They decided to strip those states of all their delegates. This decision was made through the proper procedures, at the proper time, by the proper decision-makers -- including your own adviser Harold Ickes, who voted "yes" on the delegate-stripping plan. The decision was clear and straightforward: if Florida and Michigan didn't move their primary dates, they'd lose their delegations. Period. That was, and is, the decision.

You initially accepted this decision because it was politically necessary for you to do so -- after all, you couldn't be seen as the only candidate not currying favor with Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina. Now, you are refusing to accept that very same decision because it is, again, politically necessary for you to do so, as you can't "win" without those "delegates" who were "elected" in those states' illegitimate "primaries."

To make matters worse, you are dishonestly and absurdly cloaking this cynical Machiavellian maneuver under the guise of democratic idealism, arguing that there's some sort of moral imperative to count the votes of citizens who chose to participate in "elections" that everyone knew were non-binding beauty contests. Better yet, you're making this argument while simultaneously advocating the importance of a "popular vote" count that excludes all voters in Iowa, Nevada, Maine and Washington (whose caucuses didn't report raw vote totals, only delegate counts), and all Obama and Edwards supporters in Michigan (whose candidates weren't on the ballot).

And now, on top of all that, you have the unmitigated gall to gripe that your party "can't decide" what to do, when in fact they decided long ago precisely what to do, and you acquiesced in that decision until you realized that you couldn't win without changing the rules in the middle of the game -- i.e., that you can't win without cheating.

You are truly a piece of work, Hillary Clinton.

UPDATE: Welcome, Andrew Sullivan readers! I could be wrong, but I think this is my first Sully-lanche. :)

Quote of the day

By Brendan Loy

"Freedom of expression is absolutely a human right but there are small limitations." --Jacques Rogge, International Olympic Committee president, explaining the IOC's rule against "propaganda" at the Olympics, which may limit athletes' ability to express opinions about the raging controversy over Tibet and related protests.

(Sorry, Doc. Hey, at least I wanted until March Madness was over.)

CNN Breaking News

By CNN

The main suspect in the killing of pregnant fellow Marine Maria Lauterbach has been captured, the FBI says.

"Big, black dogs just don't get adopted"

By Brendan Loy

Andrew Hiller on this story: "It's time to stop barking, and start listening. An invitation to a national conversation on dog race." Heh.

As the owner of a big, black dog, I am personally offended by the prejudice against said dogs, and I hereby demand that all the presidential candidates immediately and personally reject and denounce the dog-racist sentiments which CNN has bravely shined a light on... and if any candidate does not do so within the next five minutes, I will consider him or her to be presumptively a dog-racist! :P

Gooo Begich, Beeeat Stevens!

By Brendan Loy

Will Alaska's corrupt U.S. senator and pork grand-champion, Ted "Bridge to Nowhere" Stevens, be defeated in 2008? Please, lord, let it be true!

I bet his opponent, Mark Begich, is funding his campaign in part by raising a bunch of money over a series of tubes.

Good news, bad news

By Brendan Loy

The bad news: O.J. Mayo is going pro. (I'm shocked, SHOCKED.)

The good news: LSU has hired Stanford's Trent Johnson, which obviously means they won't be hiring USC's Tim Floyd.

Rice, other top officials approved torture

By Brendan Loy

That whole McCain-Rice thing? Er, well, even if the parties involved wanted it to happen (and she has denied any such thing), this probably wouldn't help:

In dozens of top-secret talks and meetings in the White House, the most senior Bush administration officials discussed and approved specific details of how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, sources tell ABC News. ...

The high-level discussions about these "enhanced interrogation techniques" were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed -- down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic. ...

At the time, the Principals Committee included Vice President Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

As the national security adviser, Rice chaired the meetings, which took place in the White House Situation Room and were typically attended by most of the principals or their deputies. ...

[After the leak of the 2002 "torture memo,"] CIA officials ... returned to the Principals Committee for approval to continue using certain "enhanced interrogation techniques."

Then-National Security Advisor Rice, sources said, was decisive. Despite growing policy concerns -- shared by Powell -- that the program was harming the image of the United States abroad, sources say she did not back down, telling the CIA: "This is your baby. Go do it."

Of course, the officials involved would dispute my headline, as they regard these "enhanced interrogation techniques" as "not torture." Duly noted.

March Madness in review

By Brendan Loy

Wrapping up the men's NCAA Tournament Tuesday morning, Deadspin wrote: "Mostly: What a fun tournament. Even with all No. 1 seeds in the Final Four, we had three legitimate glories: Western Kentucky's last-second win, Stephen Curry's brilliance and Mario Chalmers' massive shot. That's three more than last year. We'll take it."

Along the same lines, yesterday morning College Hoops Journal posted the Top Ten games of the tourney, prefacing the list with the comment: "Who said it was a down year? Give me 10 games of the caliber listed below and I’ll be fine if the other 54 are snoozers."

Daily Beacon

By Brendan Loy

And here's the UT student paper. It notes that Pat Summitt is two championships away from tying John Wooden's record. Hey, this could be my opening to root for the Lady Vols without being disloyal. :)

Grrr8

By Brendan Loy

The News-Sentinel front page.

The shirts are here

By Brendan Loy

I'm at the UT bookstore on my lunch break, and the Lady Vols national championship t-shirts are out in force.

March for Babies!

By Rebecca Loy

Brendan, Loyette and I will be walking in the Knoxville March for Babies, sponsored by the March of Dimes, later this month. The march raises money for research to help babies born with health problems. (Here's a more detailed blurb about it.) If you want to make a donation to support us, and more importantly the research, you can do so here.

The line must be drawn here!

By Brendan Loy

Apropos of nothing, except a comment by Josh on a previous post:

Obama's refrain

By Brendan Loy

"Get me more white people!"

And also, a shrubbery.

The best of times, the worst of times

By Brendan Loy

I've been looking all day for a scan of the Lawrence Journal-World's front page, so I could do a compare & contrast with the front page of the Memphis Commercial Appeal. But the J-W wasn't on Newseum when I checked earlier. Now it is, albeit with a strangely low-quality picture. Anyway, both front pages are after the jump. Heartbroken Memphis fans, you may not want to click the link below.

Hey...

By Brendan Loy

...does this mean there's going to be a parade?? I love parades!!

UPDATE: Local news says there will be a celebration at Thompson-Boling Arena at 5:30 PM tomorrow, free and open to the general public, with doors opening at 5:00. No word yet on any parade plans.

P.S. My Facebook profile asks the question:

Jeff Freeze wins women's pool

By Brendan Loy

The Tennessee Lady Vols defeated two Indiana schools on their road to the Final Four, but their national championship means victory for at least one Hoosier: newly crowned Living Room Times women's pool champion Jeff Freeze.

Freeze, a resident of Portage, Indiana and an alumnus of Indiana, Michigan State and Notre Dame -- the latter having been one of Tennessee's tournament victims, along with Purdue -- jumped from eighth to first place tonight on account of the Lady Vols' 64-48 win over Stanford tonight. He finishes with 381 out of a possible 477 points, good enough for a two-point win over Joseph Hiegel in the 11th annual Times women's pool.

Like men's pool winner Alex Whitfield, Freeze has been an Irish Trojan reader since Hurricane Katrina. (Hiegel, on the other hand, only discovered the site earlier this month, by Googling "NIT prediction pool.")

Hiegel, of Greenfield, Wisconsin, finishes second with 379 points. F.X. McGahee of Aiken, South Carolina is third with 374 points, followed by Dan Port of Los Angeles, in fourth with 372. Port wins the prize for best two-tournament performance, as he finished second in the men's pool.

Port is also one of just three contestants to correctly predict the national champions in both the men's and women's tournaments. The others are Chris Aemisegger (51st in the women's pool, 27th in the men's) and "Loyette" Loy (85th, 234th).

Ken Stern of Thomaston, Maine -- who started the night in first place, but had no chance of winning because his national champion had already been eliminated and he was bound to be leapfrogged -- finishes fifth with 362 points. Jeff Vaca, a Cal alum and Elk Grove, California resident who would have won the pool if Stanford had beaten Tennessee tonight, instead finishes sixth with 362 points.

Complete standings here and after the jump.

UT vs. Tree

By Brendan Loy

It's Candace vs. Candice (and Smoky vs. The Tree) in the women's national championship game, and Jeff vs. Jeff in the Living Room Times women's pool, as March Madness officially ends tonight.

If the Tennessee Lady Vols, led by Candace Parker, beat the Stanford Drunken Trees Cardinal, led by Candice Wiggins, in tonight's title showdown, then Jeff Freeze, a 1992 Indiana alum, will win the 11th annual Times women's pool. If Stanford prevails, then Jeff Vaca, a 1982 Cal alum, will be the pool champion.

The game starts at 8:30 PM EST on ESPN. Gamecast here.

P.S. If Tennessee wins, there will be three contestants in my pools who correctly predicted both the men's and women's champions: Chris Aemisegger, Dan Port, and... Loyette! Heh. (If Stanford wins, there will be no such contestants.)

UPDATE: It's 37-29 Tennessee at halftime.

UPDATE 2: The Lady Vols win!

The final score was 64-48. I guess they used up all the drama in their Final Four win over LSU:

Paging William Shatner...

By Brendan Loy

Fun with Scrabulous:

Oh, come on, that should totally be a word. :)

Won't someone please think of the children!

By David K.

Homer is out, the Hoff is in down in Venezuela, where President Hugo Chavez recently demanded "The Simpsons" be pulled from its 11am timeslot because it has been deemed inappropriate for children.  It's replacement?  Baywatch.  Cause nothing says wholesome family entertainment like Pamela Anderson running down the beach with her life preservers along for the ride!

So was it some conservative t.v. watchdog group or upset parents who forced the change?  Nope, the station insists it had recieved no complaints about the show which has been a huge success for them in that timeslot, the highest viewership in that timeslot in the stations history.  And you thought New York was a nanny state!

I am offended by your offense

By Brendan Loy

Ladies and gentlemen, the game of "gotcha" that has characterized the 2008 presidential campaign to date has officially jumped the shark.

The levels of pique, outrage, faux-outrage, and hypersensitivity -- and the cynical manipulation of all of the above -- on all sides, and in all camps, have just gotten absolutely ridiculous. Enough already. Honestly.

P.S. I admit that I have been guilty of this myself once or twice. But, going forward, I promise to do my best not to play the "gotcha" game about trivial, non-substantive matters. If I break this vow, feel free to slap me.

P.P.S. Also, and perhaps more importantly: the fact that some police officers in this allegedly free country feel they have the right to fine people for "disorderly conduct" any time they "do something that alarms or disturbs another" -- even if the "alarming" or "disturbing" conduct is nothing more than arguably offensive speech -- is genuinely frightening. Ever heard of the First Amendment?

Would you pay $275...

By Brendan Loy

...for this seat?

Rock, Chalk, Ripoff!

UPDATE: Some commenters suggest the picture may be Rock, Chalk, Photoshopped.

UPDATE 2: Sports by Brooks, which originally published the image, says the image is Photoshopped, but not in a bad way. SbB says the photo is comprised of of "three images we put together that gives you the lovely panorama from section 330." In other words, it's Photoshopped, but it's also legit!

A good omen?

By Brendan Loy

Last night, Kansas won its first national championship since 1988. You know, it occurs to me, there's another storied national powerhouse that won its last national championship in 1988. Hmm... could the Jayhawks' return to glory be a good omen for the Irish?

One Shining Moment

By Brendan Loy

The Leprechaun made the cut!

Pretty decent, by recent years' standards. But I still object to the trend of cramming together all the buzzer-beaters and other assorted awesome shots in the musical bridge two-thirds of the way through the song. It cheapens each highlight to put them back-to-back-to-back like that, and it results in the first two verses feeling stuffed with "filler" -- too many shots of mascots, fans, cheerleaders, and slow-mo close-ups of balls and nets and players' and coaches' faces, and not enough, you know, basketball. Spread the love!

P.S. Don't get me wrong, I love the shots of mascots, cheerleaders and the like. But they have a place, and that place is during the intro music and maybe the first verse. Not the later parts of the song, unless they have some actual significance to the storyline of the tournament (like the shot of Stephen Curry's mom). For instance, the clip at the 1:23 mark of some guy dancing with the mascot of George Mason -- a team that was unceremoniously bounced in the first round -- is totally out of place. How about putting a basketball highlight there? (Although, that said, I have no objection to the shot of the USC Song Girls immediately afterward... hehe.)

And did I miss it, or is CDR's unforgettably awesome dunk over Kevin Love not in the highlight reel? WTF?? I could forgive the absence of Dorsey's bank-shot 3, since CBS obviously has limited time to finish editing the thing, but the absence of that Final Four highlight is inexcusable! Clearly, the song was mixed by a UCLA fan who wanted to spare Kevin Love's fragile emotions. ;)

And yes, I realize I think about this way too hard. :)

P.P.S. One last thing. What is it with Jim Nantz and his lame-o canned lines, so painfully obviously prepared in advance, announcing each team's championship? "Rock, Chalk, Championship" was actually not as bad as some of them, like "Leave it to Cleaves" (Michigan State 2000), "The 'Meka of college basketball is in Storrs, Connecticut" (UConn 2004, a punny reference to Emeka Okafor), "It started in March, ended in April, and belonged to May" (North Carolina 2005, an even punnier reference to Sean May), and of course, the worst of all, from 1999:

Folks, you gotta believe, because just when people say you can't, you can, and UConn has won the national championship!

Ugh. Would Nantz-Packer please just retire already?

The shot

By Brendan Loy

CNN Breaking News

By CNN

The Kansas Jayhawks defeated the Memphis Tigers 75-68 in OT to win the NCAA Men's Basketball Championship.

Alex Whitfield wins men's pool

By Brendan Loy

Just call it the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

Kansas won the national championship in thrilling fashion Monday night, and Alex Whitfield -- a Nebraska fan who goes by the blog nickname "CORNHUSKERS 94 95 97" -- rode the Jayhawks' coattails to win the 13th annual Living Room Times men's basketball pool presented by the UCLA Bruins.

Whitfield, a Duke alum and resident of Brooklyn, New York, finished with 392 out of a possible 477 points, the second-highest total in Times men's pool history behind Arash Markazi's 409 points last year. Whitfield correctly predicted the entire Final Four, both finalists, and the champion. (Here's his bracket.)

It almost wasn't to be for Whitfield. Kansas trailed by 9 points with 2:12 left, and until Mario Chalmers's instant-classic three-pointer with 2.1 seconds left in regulation, it looked like Amy Greca would join her husband Tom as the first pair of spouses to each own a Times pool championship. (Tom Greca won the 2002 men's pool.) Instead, Amy Greca finished sixth in the final standings.

Dan Port, a 2004 USC alum, finished second with 379 points. N.C. State alum and Ph.D. student Chuck Wessell was third with 369 points. Ken Inadomi had 360 points to finish fourth. Rounding out the Top 5 -- all of whom picked Kansas -- is Virginia student Logan Pugh with 355 points.

Hannah McLaughlin of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, who finished 12th, is the only contestant other than Whitfield who got the entire Final Four, both finalists and the champion correct. Port and Pugh got both finalists and the champion right, plus three of the Final Four.

Complete standings here and after the jump.

Finally, a good game?

By Brendan Loy

It's halftime in the national championship game between Memphis and Kansas, and thus far, the predicted blowout (for whichever team) has failed to materialize. It's 33-28 Jayhawks at the break.

20 minutes till One Shining Moment!

P.S. If this is true, it would be the greatest "shining moment" of them all: "Nantz seemed to go out of his way to mention Packer’s 34th-straight Final Four broadcast. It does seem like this could be his last." More here.

UPDATE: OVERTIME!!! Memphis couldn't hit its free throws down the stretch (missing 4 of its last 5), opening the door for Kansas to tie it on an AWESOME three-point shot with 2.1 seconds left by Mario Chalmers. The Jayhawks finished regulation on a 12-3 run. And now the Tigers have to play OT without Joey Dorsey, who has fouled out.

UPDATE 2: Rock, Choke, Tigers?? Memphis has totally collapsed here. In addition to the free-throw woes, they haven't scored a field goal in over 5 minutes, and it's now 69-63 Kansas with 2:29 left. Poor Jay. He must be losing his mind right now. The Tigers had a national championship within their grasp -- I was already working on the "Amy Greca wins the pool" write-up -- and they let it slip away. Can they get it back?

UPDATE 3: Kansas wins!

Sorry, Jay. :(

P.S. Here's what my current list of TypePad blog posts looks like. The little pencil icon indicates a draft post.

Amy Greca wins! Dewey Defeats Truman! Heh.

P.P.S. I understand John Calipari wants to praise his players and blame himself, but um, how can he say "they did everything they could" when they missed 4 of 5 free throws in the final minute, any one of which would have been enough to win the game?

P.P.P.S. Let it be known that, after an incredibly weak start, I actually won the Loy Household Sub-Pool, thanks in large part to my correct prediction that Kansas would win the championship. (I believe that's the first time I've correctly picked the national champ since UConn won it all in '99.) The final standings were:

Brendan 266
Becky 213
Toby, Sasha & Butter 197
Loyette 194
Robbie 133

Yes, I'm bragging about doing better than my three-month-old daughter, my cats and my dog. :) Hey, when you finish tied for 122nd place in the overall pool, this is what you're reduced to!

If we expand the field a bit, to include all immediate family, we get:

Ginny 310
Ted 290
Leanna 287
Brendan 266
Soren 257
Becky 213
Toby, Sasha & Butter 197
Joe 195
Loyette 194
Jen 174
Robbie 133
Casey 35

Congrats to Ginny! And to Casey! :)

Tonight: Alex Whitfield vs. Amy Greca

By Brendan Loy

It's a battle of the sexes tonight in the 13th annual Living Room Times men's basketball pool presented by the UCLA Bruins, as Alex Whitfield, a lifelong Nebraska fan who goes by the blog nickname "CORNHUSKERS 94 95 97," goes head-to-head with Amy Greca, a Newington, Connecticut resident who professes to "know absolutely nothing about basketball."

If Kansas wins the national championship, Whitfield will win the pool, rewarding his faith in the Big 12's best team. If Memphis prevails, Greca will win; the bracket that she put together "in probably less than 2 minutes" will be the best of the pool's 245 entries.

Whitfield lives in Brooklyn, New York, is a Duke alum, and has been an Irish Trojan blog reader since Hurricane Katrina. Greca, originally of Farmington, Connecticut, is married to Tom Greca, a high-school classmate of pool administrator Brendan Loy and the designer of this year's pool logo. Tom Greca has been competing in Times pools since their inception, and he won the seventh annual men's pool in 2002; if Memphis wins tonight, the Grecas would be the first-ever husband & wife pair to each win a Times pool championship.

Whitfield finished tied for 19th out of 263 in last year's men's pool; Greca finished tied for 97th. Whitfield finished 49th out of 104 in last year's women's pool.

Brennan on the Moor

By Brendan Loy

I linked yesterday to a YouTube clip of Tommy Makem and Liam Clancy singing "Rambles of Spring." That's just one of a whole new treasure trove of Clancy/Makem video clips that have been recently uploaded to YouTube. You might recall that I posted a bunch of clips last August, after Makem's death, but a lot of new videos have appeared since then. Here's another one, a real oldie but goodie, showing a much younger foursome singing "Brennan on the Moor" in 1963:

That, incidentally, is -- like the Kingston Trio's "M.T.A." -- one of my favorite songs to sing to Loyette. Hey, just because I'm a lawyer doesn't mean I can't teach my daughter a "good, healthy disrespect for law!" Hee hee. Actually, I just like singing it to her because it's fun, bouncy and repetitive. No doubt I'll regret this when she gets a little older and, just like I did when I was little, starts bursting out in bawdy Irish songs at inappropriate moments. :) History repeats itself in the new generation...

Quote of the day

By Brendan Loy

Spike Lee: "The Clintons, man, they would lie on a stack of Bibles. Snipers? That’s not misspeaking; that’s some pure bulls***. I voted for Clinton twice, but that’s over with."

He went on to refer to the former president as "Massuh Clinton" -- as in, a slave master -- and to mock "old black politicians" for obsequious loyalty to him. Cue someone from Hillary's campaign calling on Obama to "personally repudiate" those remarks in 5... 4... 3...

USC freshman found dead in dorm room

By Brendan Loy

A tragedy at 'SC: "A USC freshman was found dead in his New/North dorm room around noon Wednesday, after suffering from what appears to be an accidental drug overdose, USC Department of Public Safety officials said." (Hat tip: Becky.)

The student's name is Michael Weiss. His death reportedly follows on the heels of a "series of incidents involving substance abuse" at New/North, "prompting a mass e-mail to residents warning of a new zero tolerance drug use policy."

So sad. May he rest in peace.

CNN Breaking News

By CNN

Coroner's jury rules Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed unlawfully killed; blames reckless actions of her driver and paparazzi.

It's Vaca vs. Freeze in women's pool

By Brendan Loy

Rachel Wetherill was 0.7 seconds away from clinching victory in the 11th annual Living Room Times women's basketball pool -- and putting a UCLA stamp on both of this year's NCAA pools.

Instead, the Bruin alum was mathematically eliminated when Tennessee's Alexis Hornbuckle hit a putback with 0.7 ticks left on the clock, knocking out Wetherill's predicted national champion, LSU. That sets up a "Battle of the Jeffs" in the pool, dependent on the result of Tuesday's title game between Tennessee and Stanford.

Jeff Vaca, a 1982 Cal alum who now lives in Elk Grove, California, will win the pool if his alma mater's archrival, Stanford, wins the championship. Jeff Freeze, a 1992 Indiana alum who now lives in Portage, Indiana, will win the pool if Tennessee repeats as champs.

Rambles of spring

By Brendan Loy

Ever since I saw (and photographed) the above-pictured robin en route home from work on March 6, I've been meaning to put together a "springtime in Knoxville" photo gallery for the blog. There are a ton of beautiful flowers, trees and other lovely signs of spring in this part of the world. Unfortunately, I haven't had time to make the album yet, but I hope to do so soon.

I'll definitely have a lot more material to work with after today, as Becky, Loyette and I ventured out to the Crescent Bend Tulip Time festival this afternoon, then walked three miles along the riverfront, snapping photos all the way. Here's one pic from the tulip gardens:

Very pretty. It was an absolutely gorgeous day here, and it looks like a very nice week ahead. It all puts me in mind of the song "Rambles of Spring," one of my favorite Makem & Clancy numbers -- of which, conveniently enough, I found a YouTube clip recently. Enjoy!

UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds has some nice pictures from yesterday as well.

Another Comcast update

By Brendan Loy

Hmm...

Not so good. Nadine, where can I get that "testing program" you mentioned?

P.S. To be clear, this is not my typical speed with Comcast. Usually, my download speed is in the 5000-6000 range. However, my connection was crawling last night, which is the same sort of intermittent issue I was experiencing prior to my apparently-successful visit from Comcast techs on Saturday. Hence my concern.

Veepstakes bombshell: McCain-Rice?!

By Brendan Loy

ABC News reports that, according to GOP strategist Dan Senor, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is "actively...campaigning" for the vice presidential spot on John McCain's ticket. Drudge is going nuts with this.

Senor's evidence seems a little thin, though. He cites Rice's unexpected appearance at some sort of Grover Norquist conservative confab a week-and-a-half ago, and... well, that's it. If he's extrapolating that she's "actively campaigning" from that data point alone, I'm highly skeptical.

In any event, I expect we'll see Rice tamping down this speculation, through a spokesperson or otherwise, probably tomorrow. The key will be the language she uses. Will she issue an out-and-out denial? A half-denial? A non-denial denial? (She's already sorta kinda denied interest, for whatever that's worth.)

[UPDATE: John McCain has already issued a non-response response: "I did not hear that [she's campaigning for the spot]. I missed those signals. I think she's a great American, I think there's very little that I can say that isn't anything but the utmost praise for a great American citizen, who served as a role model to so many millions of people in this country and around the world. But as I mentioned to you, we're not talking about the [veep selection] process because it just then gets into things that could easily to spill over into an invasion of privacy."]

If Rice does want the VP spot, I don't see the downside for McCain. She's young, smart, articulate*, well-respected, and obviously qualified to be president from day one. And of course, the benefits in the identity-politics game are obvious; she's the perfect antidote to either (or both) the Dems' "historic" candidates.

Once upon a time, I thought Rice was a problematic pick because she's so closely associated with the Bush Administration and the Iraq War. But at this point, McCain has already tied himself so closely to those things that I don't see how her presence harms him. He's been harshly critical of the Rumsfeld strategy, but unless I'm mistaken in my understanding of the Bush Administration's internal dynamics, Rice is not exactly considered a member of the "Rumsfeld wing." In any event, I think she'd help McCain more than she hurts him**, and tapping her would be a political masterstroke.

*and clean! ;)

**I may, however, be underestimating the significance of the ralcitrant racist voting bloc, which would be left with no major-party options in a race between Obama and McCain-Rice. I'd like to think there aren't enough of these folks (in swing states, at least) to really hurt McCain if they stay home, but I could be wrong.

Mark Penn resigns; blogosphere sighs

By Brendan Loy

Hillary Clinton's Karl Rove, Mark Penn, has resigned as her chief strategist. He will stay on board as her chief pollster. (Hat tip: aeromusek.)

The immediate cause of Penn's departure is a flap over his meeting last week with the Colombian government -- in which he was ostensibly acting in his private capacity as a lobbyist and strategist, not as a member of Hillaryland -- but that was really just the straw that broke the camel's back. Penn has been widely reviled by everyone in Hillary's inner circle (except Hillary herself) throughout the entire campaign and before, and he almost certainly would have been sacked back in January as part of Hillary's rumored post-New Hampshire "shakeup" if she had, as expected, lost the Granite State's primary. Instead, he was inexplicably kept on board despite the fact that everyone hates him and his "strategy" was an obvious failure. To make matters worse, as Josh Marshall says, it was absolutely crazy to have "Mark Penn both run message and polling when his polling is so legendary for cherry picking data to confirm his preferred political strategies and messages."

Anyway, I'm kind of sad about this, as Penn was easily the most reliable source on the Clinton campaign team for nonsensical, risible bulls*** spin, which made for great fun mocking him. Alas, to paraphrase Richard Nixon, the blogosphere won't have Mark Penn to kick around anymore.

P.S. Chris Cillizza writes:

While the news of chief political strategist Mark J. Penn's abrupt departure from Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign this evening took many in the Democratic political world by surprise, talk soon turned to how the move would impact the overall message of the campaign. One Democratic consultant, granted anonymity to speak candidly, predicted "a less combative campaign and more focused on her strengths."

Penn was a major influence in Clinton's decision to focus on her toughness and readiness to be commander in chief during the campaign. He was one of the guiding forces behind the now-infamous "3 am" telephone ringing at the White House ad that sought to raise questions about Sen. Barack Obama's (Ill.) ability to lead the country in the event of a national security crisis.

Go Huskies & Lady Vols!

By Brendan Loy

The women's Final Four is underway, and UConn-Stanford is a good game early. The nightcap will be Tennessee-LSU. Although this Final Four isn't as "chalky" as the men's, it's just as stacked with talent: each team in tonight's semifinals has one of the five AP first-team All-Americans (Maya Moore, Candice Wiggins, Candace Parker and Sylvia Fowles, respectively).

I'm rooting for the Huskies and Lady Vols, so we can see the Geno vs. Pat grudge match in the title game -- in which, of course, I'll be rooting like crazy for UConn and its AP Coach of the Year. :)

UPDATE: There will be no dream matchup -- or clash of "Evil Empires," depending on your perspective -- in the national title game. Stanford wins, 82-73. :(

The Cardinal's victory eliminates Joseph Hiegel, Kevin Pilz, Kevin Hauschulz, Josh Krause and Gerry deSimas from any chance of winning my women's pool.

If LSU beats Tennessee tonight, UCLA alum Rachel Wetherill will clinch the pool. If Tennessee wins tonight, it'll be a battle of the Jeffs in Tuesday's title game, with Jeff Freeze winning if Tennessee captures the championship and Jeff Vaca winning if Stanford wins. Freeze is a graduate of Notre Dame, Michigan State, and Indiana; Vaca is a Cal alum.

Sam Gamgee campaigns for Hillary

By Brendan Loy

Yesterday was the second stage of the Washington caucus process (which is the most convoluted of all the Democratic caucus processes), and Politico's Ben Smith reports that Hillary Clinton sent Sean Astin -- a.k.a. Rudy, a.k.a. Sam Gamgee -- out to be her "surrogate" in one of the state's legislative districts. Heh.

Astin's presence made a fair amount of sense when the Clintons were visiting South Bend, where everybody loves Rudy. But Washington-state blogger Eli Sanders is skeptical of Astin's relevance to this particular event in his state: "the type of people who show up for legislative district caucuses on a Saturday don't really need a celebrity (or semi-celebrity) to motivate them to take political action."

Personally, I think Saruman, Grima Wormtongue, or perhaps best of all, Gollum, would be a better spokesman for the Clinton campaign. :) "The presidency, it's ours, it is! Our precious! They stole it from us, the nasssty Obamasses, and we wants it back!"

Charlton Heston dies

By Brendan Loy

Movie legend and former NRA president Charlton Heston has died. He was 84.

Hillary's 3 a.m. problem

By Brendan Loy

Mark Steyn:

Jeepers, will all business during this Clinton administration be transacted at 3 a.m.? Is it some union-negotiated flex-time deal? "Home foreclosures mounting"? We'd better wake the president. There are now so many foreclosures the banks can no longer foreclose on everyone they need to foreclose on during normal banking hours. "The First National Bank of Dead Skunk, Maine, has begun issuing midnight foreclosure notices, Madam President."

"OK, nuke 'em."

"Er, well, maybe this can wait till the regular afternoon meeting."

It's 3 a.m., and your children are safe and asleep. But there's a phone ringing in the White House. And ringing and ringing and ringing. Kim Jong-il No Dong missiles are heading for every major West Coast city, but the president's not picking up because at 2:57 a.m. the Secretary for Soccer Moms called to alert her to the growing crisis caused by the lack of federally mandated children's bicycling helmets.

Heh. (Hat tip: InstaPundit.)

P.S. On a more serious note, it looks like Hillary has been "misspeaking" again:

Over the last five weeks, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York has featured in her campaign stump speeches the story of a health care horror: an uninsured pregnant woman who lost her baby and died herself after being denied care by an Ohio hospital because she could not come up with a $100 fee. ...

[H]ospital administrators said Friday that Ms. Bachtel was under the care of an obstetrics practice affiliated with the hospital, that she was never refused treatment and that she was, in fact, insured.

“We implore the Clinton campaign to immediately desist from repeating this story,” said Rick Castrop, chief executive officer of the O’Bleness Health System.

The idea of Hillary using the (false) tale of someone dying because they couldn't pay a $100 fee reminds me a bit of that wonderful old campaign ballad, The M.T.A. Song. But instead of "Fight the fare increase, vote for George O'Brien!" I guess now it's "Fight the premium increase, vote for Hillary Clinton!" Heh. Hillary descends further and further into self-parody...

P.P.S. Video of the M.T.A. Song:

I sing that song to Loyette all the time. :)

P.P.P.S. For those not familiar with the song, they actually did a lyrical switcheroo in the final verse in the above clip. You can view the real lyrics here. It's supposed to be "Fight the fare increase, vote for George O'Brien! And get Charlie off the M.T.A.! Or else he'll never return..."

Kansas wins; Whitfield vs. Greca in pool

By Brendan Loy

Incredibly, after falling behind 40-12 with seven minutes left in the first half (and having Billy Packer declare, "This game is over"), North Carolina has rallied to within eight points of Kansas, 54-46, with 12:16 left in the game. "It looks like panic is setting in" for Kansas, Jim Nantz says.

UPDATE: Now 54-48. UNC is on a 12-0 run, and more broadly, a 36-14 run. "We've seen some comebacks, Jim, but I have never seen anything like this," says Packer. "This would be the mother of all comebacks," Nantz agrees.

UPDATE 2: After pulling within 4 points at 54-50, North Carolina has gone cold, Kansas is on a 26-11 and 13-0 run, and it's 80-61 with under two minutes left. What a weird game.

UPDATE 3: Kansas 84, UNC 66, final. So it's Kansas vs. Memphis for the national title -- and Alex Whitfield vs. Amy Greca for the championship of the 13th annual Living Room Times men's basketball pool presented by the UCLA Bruins.

Whitfield (a.k.a. "CORNHUSKERS 94 95 97"), a Duke alum and Nebraska grad who lives in Brooklyn, New York, will win the pool if Kansas wins the championship. He is currently in first place with 367 out of a possible 452 points.

Dan Port, a 2004 USC alum, is in second place with 354 points, but he cannot pass Whitfield because they both picked Kansas to win.

Greca, a resident of Newington, Connecticut and wife of the man who designed the pool logo, Newington High School Class of 1999 Tom Greca, is third with 352 points, and will win the pool if Memphis wins the championship.

Rounding out the current Top 10 are Chuck Wessell (344 points), Ryan Morgan (336), Ken Inadomi (335), Liz Janelle (332), Shari Long (332), Chris Mulvey (332) and Logan Pugh (330). Long and Mulvey were eliminated by Kansas's win -- in Long's case, sparing her an agonizing decision over whether to root for her favorite team, Memphis, or for her own pool prospects (she picked UNC).

Full standings here and after the jump.

P.S. For posterity's sake, it should be noted that the original title of this post was "Rock, Choke, Jayhawk?"

Will Kansas make Roy Williams cry?

By Brendan Loy

It looks like the OMG BEST FINAL FOUR EVER is on the verge of turning into a total dud, as Kansas leads North Carolina 33-10 with 8:44 left in the first half. Yikes.

UPDATE: With 7:32 left in the first half, and Kansas leading 38-12, Billy Packer declares, "This game is over."

UPDATE 2: Wow! UNC rallied within 42-27 just before halftime... though Kansas got a layup at the buzzer to make it 44-27.

Meanwhile, Jay sends along this photo from the first game, of Kevin Love getting pwn3d by Chris Douglas-Roberts:

Nice.

Beat the Bruins!

By Brendan Loy

It's Memphis 56, UCLA 47 with 10:31 left. As Jay would say, GO TIGERS GO!

UPDATE: Memphis 78, UCLA 63, final. WOO!!! Three straight Final Fours for fUCLA, but no championships. Are the Bruins becoming the Buffalo Bills of college basketball?

Meanwhile, for all the talk about this being OMG The Most Stacked Final Four Ever, that wasn't exactly an instant classic. Kevin Love was basically a non-factor in the second half, foul trouble killed Darren Collison and Russell Westbrook, and the whole Bruins team went ice-cold down the stretch. All credit to Memphis for forcing fUCLA into those problems, of course, but this wasn't exactly a memorable clash of titans; the Bruins looked overmatched. It's like I said: a whole bunch of powerhouse teams advancing to play one another doesn't guarantee great games, any more than the presence of a Cinderella team guarantees blowouts. That concept is just a silly fallacy.

Also, apparently Memphis can shoot free throws. I almost think John Calipari instructed them to miss on purpose during the Conference USA schedule, just to lull everyone into a false sense of security. :)

P.S. Updated scenarios for who can win the 13th annual Living Room Times men's basketball pool presented by, ahem, the UCLA Bruins:

If UNC beats Memphis for title: Shari Long wins
If Memphis beats UNC for title: Chris Mulvey wins
If Kansas beats Memphis for title: Alex Whitfield wins
If Memphis beats Kansas for title: Amy Greca wins

Joseph Hiegel, Robert Dokes, Chuck Wessell and Keith Evans were mathematically eliminated by UCLA's loss.

Current standings here and after the jump.

CNN Breaking News

By CNN

137 children have been removed from a polygamist compound in Texas, and more being sought, a state official says.

Comcast update

By Brendan Loy

In light of my recent negative post about Comcast, as well as my earlier litany of complaints about the company's "craptastic" service, I should point out, in the interest of being fair & balanced, that a pair of friendly, articulate, and highly competent-seeming Comcast employees just showed up and gave me the quickest and most well-explained answer to a support question I've ever gotten from their company. Details after the jump.

A little piece of history

By Brendan Loy

Digging through some old computer files, looking for job-related stuff, I stumbled upon a text file titled "message to drudge - katrina," dated Friday, August 26, 2005, at 10:23 PM. That would be about 8 1/2 hours after my oft-quoted "New Orleans in peril" post (i.e., the one I read aloud in Spike Lee's movie), less than a half-hour after my post titled "Models 'cluster' on near-worst-case track" -- which accompanied the final westward shift of the National Hurricane Center's official forecast track, which ended up being almost exactly accurate even though it was ~60 hours out -- and an hour before my frequently referenced "get the hell out" post.

Even as all that was going on, the Drudge Report was still focused on the possibility of another Florida landfall (recall that the Sunshine State had been hit by six hurricanes in the preceding 14 months or so, including Katrina's first landfall on the peninsula), and much of the media was following suit, focusing on the Florida panhandle instead of the looming New Orleans doomsday scenario, despite the clear change in the forecast over the preceding 12 hours. Exasperated, I wrote to Drudge using his anonymous tips form thingy. I don't think I've ever published my message before, and I thought it might be of some mild interest, so I've posted it after the jump.

Final Four tonight

By Brendan Loy

With the men's Final Four tonight, just a reminder of the stakes in the 13th annual Living Room Times men's basketball pool presented by the UCLA Bruins:

If UNC & Memphis win: Title game is Shari Long (UNC) vs. Chris Mulvey (Memphis)

If UNC & UCLA win: Title game is Joseph Hiegel (UNC) vs. Robert Dokes (UCLA)

If Kansas & Memphis win: Title game is Alex Whitfield (Kansas) vs. Amy Greca (Memphis)

If Kansas & UCLA win: Title game is Chuck Wessell (Kansas) vs. Keith Evans (UCLA)

In other news, Tulsa won the inaugural CBI last night, and fans rushed the court. (Hat tip: Chris Newbury.) As for the WNIT, I, er, misspoke earlier: the title game is tonight.

Mexico conquers U.S. ... in vodka ad

By Brendan Loy

I guess this means Lou Dobbs will be switching to Stoli:

Obligatory outrage here, here and here. And more links here.

My reaction? It's a vodka ad, people.

Vladimir Putin, Trojan?

By Brendan Loy

Okay, but I'm not sure we want him roaming the sidelines:

Then again, I'm not sure we ever wanted Snoop Dogg roaming the sidelines, either. Unfortunately, nobody listens to me about these things. :)

Yes we can!

By Brendan Loy

40 years later

By Brendan Loy

Today is the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in Memphis. Politico's Ben Smith has a video clip of Bobby Kennedy's famous speech, announcing Dr. King's death at what was to be a campaign rally in a black neighborhood in Indianapolis:

Here's the back story:

Amid the tragedy of the assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, April 4, 1968, an extraordinary moment in U.S. political history occurred as Robert F. Kennedy, younger brother of slain President John F. Kennedy, broke the news of King's death to a large gathering of African Americans in Indianapolis, Indiana.

The gathering was actually a planned campaign rally for Robert Kennedy  in his bid to get the 1968 Democratic nomination for President. Just after he arrived by plane at Indianapolis, Kennedy was told of King's death. He was advised by police against making the campaign stop which was in a part of the city considered to be a dangerous ghetto. But Kennedy insisted on going.

He arrived to find the people in an upbeat mood, anticipating the excitement of a Kennedy appearance. He climbed onto the platform, and realizing they did not know, broke the news.

You can hear the crowd's stunned screams in the clip. Yet Kennedy went on to deliver a memorable speech, and despite the Secret Service's worries, he was unharmed that night.

Bobby Kennedy, of course, was himself assassinated two months later in California.

If the Democratic convention in Denver this August becomes a contentious floor fight, there will be a lot of comparisons in the media -- and even on this blog, probably -- to the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, exactly four decades earlier. The confluence of the anniversary and the superficial similarities will be too much to ignore. But it's worth remembering the context of the '68 mayhem before taking such flippant analogies too seriously. For all the heated rhetoric, Machiavellian machinations, and important issues at stake in this election, 2008 is nothing like 1968, thank God.

Job market continues to tank

By Brendan Loy

Fan-freakin'-tastic:

The U.S. economy shed 80,000 jobs in March and the unemployment rate jumped to 5.1 percent, as the labor market continued to be battered by an economic slowdown.

U.S. employers have now eliminated more than 232,000 jobs in the last three months. ...

The latest employment figures, released this morning by the Labor Department, add evidence to the developing sense of an economy in recession. In addition to the March figures, the department said that even more jobs had been lost in January and February than earlier reported. Statistics for those months were revised downward by 67,000.

"Trends are awful," said Ian Shepherdson, chief U.S. economist with the High Frequency Economics consulting firm. Factoring out the increase in government jobs, he noted, private employers dropped nearly 100,000 positions. Considering that as of the end of last year, businesses were adding an average of 45,000 jobs a month, "the turnaround has been very fast," he wrote in an analysis of the latest employment report. ...

The latest jobs report "shows that we're right in the middle of a recession that will probably take a while," said Carl Lantz, an analyst with Credit Suisse in New York, told the Reuters wire service. "Our expectation is that it will be a longer recession than the last two and we're just in the beginning."

I think I may need to create an "Economic News" category for the blog, since it sounds like there will be a lot more of these cheerful posts in coming months and years.

P.S. The candidates react.

At least he doesn't refer to himself in the third person

By Brendan Loy

Ross Douthat looks at John McCain as Bob Dole. Insert your own Viagra joke here.

tOSU wins NIT

By Brendan Loy

Your 2008 NIT champion is The Ohio State University. Say it with me, Buckeye fans: "We're #66! We're #66!" (Okay, so it's more like "We're #49," really; nobody was ever suggesting that the NCAA auto-bid teams seemed lower than #12 are better than the top-tier NIT teams. Although, tell it to San Diego and Siena...)

Anyway, here are the final standings of the 4th annual Irish Trojan NIT Pool. As I mentioned already, Gary Kirby won the pool. Kirby, a resident of San Bernadino, California and a former USC student, finished with 273 out of a possible 317 points under the pool's 7-10-15-20-25 scoring system. That's five better than the 268 points he got in winning last year's pool, and represents a new NIT Pool record. He made only four mistakes in the entire bracket. Kirby, a.k.a. "gahrie," is celebrating over on his blog.

Joshua Krause of New Britain, CT finished second with 258 points, just ahead of Mark Gardner of Fredericksburg, VA, who had 257. Jeff Burch of Syracuse, NY was fourth with 253, and Ginny Zak of Gold Canyon, AZ was fifth with 250.

Patrick Roach and Derek McDonald (243 apiece), Katrina Lewonczyk (235), Steve Ivey and Larry Caplin (234 each) round out the Top 10.

I finished dead last, 62nd place, with 76 points. :) Behold my hideous bracket! Heh.

Complete standings here and after the jump. 

Polls show narrow Clinton lead in Indiana

By Brendan Loy

South Bend Tribune: "Clinton, Obama neck and neck in Hoosier state." (Hat tip: TPM.)

The cited poll has Hillary up by 3%. A different poll a few days ago showed her up by 9%. In any event, a close race in Domerland.

Quote of the day

By Brendan Loy

"There is no such thing as a pledged delegate." --Hillary Clinton.

This is fascinating -- truly fascinating. Hillary has painted herself as a champion of democracy, both by promoting the supremacy of primaries over caucuses, and by insisting that the illegitimate Florida and Michigan primaries should count, lest millions of voters be disenfranchised. But now, by arguing that the delegates elected in any and all primaries and caucuses shouldn't be considered "pledged," she is quite literally advocating the disenfranchisement of all voters in all states.

After all, what on earth can the purpose of those primaries and caucuses have been, if not to produce "pledged delegates"? What was the point of bothering to have elections at all, if their results can be so casually disregarded when it comes time to actually choose the nominee?

As a technical, procedural matter, of course, she's right: the delegates aren't "pledged" to follow their state's result. Just as there can be "faithless electors" in the Electoral College, there can be "faithless delegates" at the convention, and there's no legal mechanism to stop them from casting their votes however they please. But that's a legalistic, proceduralist argument, which isn't what Hillary is driving at here. She's making a legitimacy argument. She's contending that "there is no such thing as a pledged delegate" in an attempt to convince people that it's perfectly okay for her to try and "flip" Obama's delegates -- that there's nothing normatively wrong with doing that, and so she shouldn't be criticized for it.

Which is fine, if that's what she wants to argue, but then she ought to be called on the carpet for the inevitable logical extension of her argument, which is that Democratic voters have no binding role in the selection of their own nominee. All the primaries and caucuses were, according to Hillary's logic, strictly advisory in nature. Somehow, I don't think Democratic voters will go for this. (Nor is it remotely consistent with her own statements about Michigan and Florida, the popular vote, and many other things.)

This isn't the first time, of course, that Hillary has raised the possibility of "flipping" pledged delegates. But she's never put it in such stark terms until now. In my mind, it's one thing to suggest, as she has implicitly done before, that she might try to flip some pledged delegates if the overall delegate result appears unjust for some reason (e.g., not in line with the "popular vote"). But it's another thing entirely to dismiss the whole concept of pledged delegates as being altogether meaningless. Her underlying strategy may be the same in both cases, but the rhetoric in the latter case is vastly more inflammatory. "No such thing as a pledged delegate." Think about that. Really think about it. She might as well be saying to the 28+ million voters who've already cast ballots in Democratic primaries and caucuses: "Your votes didn't count. You elected nobody and nothing."

Obama needs to hit back on this, hard. It should be the easiest thing in the world to spin Hillary's comment as appallingly antidemocratic. It'll be easy because, unlike the vast majority of Hillary's spin, it's actually true.

(More here and here.)

Comcastic!

By Brendan Loy

You know what makes me, like, totally love my cable company? When I leave work 2 1/2 hours early so I can be home when they send a tech over to check on our malfunctioning high-speed Internet -- supposedly between 3:00 and 5:00 PM -- and they never show up, because they couldn't reach me by phone, because, as it turns out, someone made a typo and transcribed my area code as "830" instead of "860." Yup, I'm absolutely freakin' thrilled with Comcast right now. [/sarcasm]

UPDATE, 11:50 PM: A guy at Comcast's executive offices just e-mailed me: "It was too late to call, but I wanted to apologize for the Comcast experience that you have had. I have asked that my contacts in your area reach out to make sure you are fully taken care of for your troubles. It is unacceptable that we created that experience for you, and I will make sure to share the feedback."

Sometimes it's nice to have a blog with a decent-sized audience! Heh. I never expected by whiny kvetching to actually get results. I am blogger, hear me roar! :)

CBI & WNIT update

By Brendan Loy

In case you somehow missed it, Bradley beat Tulsa in the CBI yesterday, to force a decisive Game 3 of the best-of-three "championship series." The Braves and Golden Hurricane will meet again Friday, in Tulsa, to determine who's number... um... let's see here... 65 + 32 = 97... who's #98! Go Bradley!! :)

In case you're wondering, attendance was 9,014 (out of a capacity of 11,060), up from 7,337 (out of 8,355) in Game 1. That ain't half bad for a tournament that looks at the NIT and thinks, "If only we were that cool." I wonder if Game 3 will be a sellout?

Meanwhile, in news that's sure to completely and utterly soothe Marquette fans who are upset about losing Tom Crean to Indiana, the Marquette women advanced to the WNIT final for the second time in three years. They'll play in-state foe Michigan State on Friday for the WNIT championship.

Man, if only I had more free time, I'd totally run pools for these lame-o tournaments... :)

UPDATE: Ahem. I mixed up my Marquettes. Although there is a Marquette in Michigan, the Marquette in question -- Marquette University -- is in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Sorry, my bad.

The things I do to myself...

By Brendan Loy

In an e-mail this morning about possible travel plans for the Fourth of July, I referred to Loyette as "a six-month-old," then added: "OMG, she's going to be six months old!! That's DOUBLE her current age!! She'll be going to prom and heading off to college before I know it!! AAAAHHH!!!! :)"

This brings to mind the Blue Plate Special last Friday, when I was holding Loyette in the back of the room, "dancing" with her to the old-timey bluegrass music -- and a vision popped into my head of our father-daughter dance at her wedding someday. Argh! Why must I think these things?? The pre-nostalgia is killing me! :)

McCain-Crist?

By Brendan Loy

Man, oh man, would they ever look old if they were up against, say, an Obama-Webb ticket.

Memphis senior suspended for Final Four

By Brendan Loy

Memphis's backup point guard, senior Andre Allen, has been suspended from the team for a violation of team rules -- reportedly, he failed a drug test -- and will not play in the Final Four.

Allen is described as a "tenacious defensive player who comes off the bench to be a stopper. ... Not having him is a big deal with Memphis facing UCLA's Darren Collison and Russell Westbrook on Saturday."

According to the Memphis Commercial Appeal, head coach John Calipari "did not rule out the possibility of Allen... becoming available Monday if the Tigers reach the NCAA championship game."

Why the popular vote doesn't matter

By Brendan Loy

A Politico reader makes an interesting point about Hillary Clinton's reliance on the "popular vote" as a reliable, and perhaps even dispositive, metric of public support:

I wonder whether the technical difficulties in counting the popular vote obscure a more fundamental reason why it's an uninformative metric for the strength of the candidates - namely, it was never contested. Both campaigns were (or should have been, anyway) focussed on accumulating delegates. To do this they developed very specific strategies. Obama invested resources in caucus states, a place he could garner many delegates but not much of the popular vote, for instance. Even in primary states, the candidates focussed much of their efforts on certain (odd-number-of-delegate or otherwise mathematically interesting) districts over others. So although the popular vote might appear like it should be a good measure of overall preference, it seems to me more of a coincidental consequence of how delegate strategies played out.

That's absolutely true. Of course, it's equally true, if not moreso, in the November election, when candidates focus on the Electoral College, not on general popular-vote turnout. Would Al Gore have "won" the popular vote by 0.5% in 2000 if Bush's campaign had invested more resources in "running up the score," if you will, in the red states? Would Bush have "won" by 2.5% in 2004 if Kerry's people had been mounting truly intensive (because potentially decisive) get-out-the-vote efforts in places like Los Angeles, New York and Chicago? The broader lesson is that the process matters, and you really shouldn't try to judge an election by a metric other than the intended one. You gotta follow the process, or you get results of very limited utility.

Somewhat relatedly, I would direct your attention to my recently revised article defending the Electoral College. Among other things, I've revised my hypothetical 2012 scenario: Mike Huckabee, instead of Jeb Bush, is now President Obama's opponent. :) Let it be known, by the way, that in the original version of article, I pegged Obama as the hypothetical 2012 incumbent, way back in April 2007 -- heh!

R.I.P., Pug

By Brendan Loy

It is my sad duty to report that Pug, my goldfish, has passed away.

Pug had been showing increasing signs of listlessness in recent days, so it's probably fair to say that it was "his time." We think he probably died sometime this morning or early afternoon; he was discovered floating amidst his fake plants this evening when I tried to feed him.

He was given the traditional burial at sea, and afterwards we played Confutatis (from Mozart's Requiem) in his honor.

Shortly after Pug's nautical burial, Becky, Loyette and I were walking Robbie on this pleasant spring evening, and we (well, Becky and I, at least) found ourselves musing about what an eventful time in our lives Pug witnessed. When we first got him, way back on May 30, 2007, I was a brand new law-school graduate, just starting to think about the daunting prospect of studying for the bar. Becky, meanwhile, was a mere nine weeks pregnant -- and we'd only known that she was pregnant for less than a month. Loyette, for her part, was not quite an inch long, about the size of a grape. Oh yes, and our apartment was still full of unpacked boxes from our big move to Knoxville a mere nine days earlier.

Flash forward to today: Loyette is 3 months old, and a true master at the fine art of grabbing things and putting them in her mouth. Becky's a mom, and a damn fine one. I'm a dad, an experienced law clerk, and an honest-to-goodness lawyer. (Is that an oxymoron?) Our once box-filled apartment has become a comfy home, as, more broadly, has the once unfamiliar city of Knoxville. And Becky and I are both way more "domestic" than we ever could have imagined back then, having settled very comfortably into our roles as parents.

From inside his watery home, atop the side table next to our couch, Pug saw all these changes in our lives. And he saw them while braving the hungry stares of frustrated cats who could never quite figure out how to pry open that darn tank. Pug may have been a neurotic fish (thanks to those cats), but he was a good fish, and we bid him a fond farewell. Swim in peace, Pug. May you find comfort in that great fishy palace in the sky sea.

Can ManBearPig be far behind?

By Brendan Loy

Remember back in 2006, when Wonkette made fun of President Bush for randomly condemning "human-animal hybrids" in his State of the Union address? ("OMG HUMAN-ANIMAL HYBRIDS! BUSH SAYS NO TO WEREWOLVES. HEAR THAT CONGRESS? The man is taking a stand. To repeat: Hybrid cars: Good. Hybrid human-animals: Bad.")

Well, maybe ol' Dubya was on to something. If you missed the headline earlier this evening Drudge...

Here's the story:

A team has grown hybrid embryos after injecting human DNA into eggs taken from cows' ovaries, which had most of their genetic material removed.

The embryos survived for three days and are intended to provide a limitless supply of stem cells to develop therapies for diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and spinal cord injuries, overcoming a worldwide shortfall in human embryos.

Opponents decry the hybrid embryos as "monstrous." Hmm. Half man, half cow, half monster? It's ManCowHilldog!

And the CBS Orchestra?

By Brendan Loy

Éire PM Ahern to resign May 6

By Joe Loy

No more the Teflon Taoiseach: bid a long farewell to Bertie ~

April 2 (Bloomberg) -- Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern will resign next month after presiding over the euro region's fastest-growing economy for 10 years and helping broker peace in Northern Ireland. He quit under pressure from lawmakers over his failure to explain gifts and cash he got in the 1990s.

``I believe it's in the best interests of the government, my party and the people of Ireland to set out a timetable for my departure,'' Ahern, 56, told reporters in Dublin today.

A Dublin-based tribunal is investigating Ahern's personal finances as part of a probe into illegal payments to politicians. The prime minister, leader of the Fianna Fail party, gave evidence for eight days at the tribunal and is scheduled to appear again next month.

...During Ahern's time as premier, or taoiseach in Irish, the size of the economy more than doubled to $280 billion and the number of people with jobs increased 40 percent to a record 2.1 million. His government cut income, corporation and capital taxes and still ran budget surpluses in every year of his tenure except one.

...With then U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair, Ahern helped bring about a Northern Ireland peace deal between unionists and republicans in the divided province. The climax came in May 2007, when Democratic Unionist Party leader Ian Paisley agreed to become first minister in a government with Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, signaling the end of more than three decades of conflict.

Once known as the ``Teflon Taoiseach,'' Ahern had previously escaped the taint of corruption scandals of the sort that destroyed the reputations of a number of Irish politicians, winning a third term in May 2007.

...``There's still a huge amount of people in Ireland who 100 percent support Bertie,'' said Nial Ring, 48, a pub owner from the Ballybough area of north Dublin, who was standing outside government buildings holding a banner saying ``Ballybough Loves Bertie.''

Ahern's announcement of his timetable for leaving office means he will still be able to take up an invitation to address a joint session of the U.S. Congress in Washington on April 30...

Something tells me that the Congress's applause will be a cheering rousing chorus of appreciation for yer man notwithstanding any possible peccadilloes, and a grand Sendoff.

WNIT + CBI = OMG excitement!

By Brendan Loy

With the NIT title game not until tomorrow, and both the men's and women's NCAA Tournaments on hold until Saturday and Sunday, respectively, you might think there's no college basketball tonight. But you'd be wrong! Try to contain your excitement, but tonight features the WNIT semifinals (N.C. State vs. Michigan State, Marquette vs. Colorado) and Game 2 of the best-of-three CBI championship series (Bradley vs. Tulsa). Tulsa won the first game, 73-68 on its home floor, but now the series moves to Peoria, where Bradley will try to tie it up and earn a return trip to Tulsa for a decisive Game 3 on Friday. WOOO!!!! :) And, best of all, you can watch tonight's thrilling CBI action live online for the low, low price of $6.95, which is only $6.95 more than CBS charges to watch the entire NCAA Touranment online!

Obama gaining ground in Pennsylvania

By Brendan Loy

Something strange is happening en route to Hillary Clinton's presumed Reverend Wright-fueled romp in Ed Rendell's not-ready-to-vote-for-a-black-guy Keystone State: Barack Obama is gaining ground, again.

Yesterday, a new Rasmussen poll showed Hillary's lead in Pennsylvania down to 5 points, from 10% a week ago in the same poll. I held off posting anything, because one shouldn't put too much stock in a single poll. But later yesterday, SurveyUSA showed Hillary's lead shrinking from 19% three weeks ago to 12% now. Today, Quinnipiac has her lead at 9%, down from 12% two weeks ago.

And then, of course, there's a one labeled by Drudge as a "SHOCK POLL," the Public Policy Polling survey that shows Obama ahead by 2%. The same poll had Hillary leading by 26 points just over two weeks ago -- a 28-point swing in 16 days!

According to TPM, PPP "has had a solid record this year." Still, TPM says, and I agree, that this Obama-by-2 poll "has to be seen as an outlier, though it is important to note that [it] is the most recent survey." It should also be noted that the RCP average now has Clinton up just 6%.

Relatedly, Mark Halperin looks at What Hillary Clinton Has to Do to Really “Win” Pennsylvania.

Oh, and here are some interesting Electoral College maps, again showing Hillary and Obama having very different strengths (and weaknesses). They appear to confirm something my dad said, way back before Super Tuesday, which I initially questioned but now whole-heartedly agree with: that Obama, electorally, has "both more upside and more downside potential."

Finally, on a totally unrelated note, it looks like Washington state is headed for another Gregoire-Rossi barnburner.

UPDATE: Commenter "yea" writes:

who could have predicted this would happen? obama is trailing by a huge amount in a state he's never been to. he shows up in the state and the margin starts to decrease slowly. all of a sudden he surges and even takes the lead in a few polls. things stabilze as the election gets closer, and then there is a natural drift back to hillary that allows her to win the state. she wins the state be a smaller margin than anyone thought possible 4-5 weeks ago, yet by a bigger margin than most of the late polls indicated. hillary then claims the momentum.

Heh. Indeed.

I'm not sure, though, if the Clintons will be able to get the media to buy that load of bull this time around. I'm not totally putting it past them (or rather, past the media to be that dumb, again), but at some point, the reality of, well, reality, as opposed to spin-based unreality, has to take hold, doesn't it?

Look, the following is a fact: whatever barely plausible case Hillary might currently, arguably have that she can still catch up and win the nomination, she will have no such case when April 23 dawns, unless she won Pennsylvania the previous day in a massive blowout (like 15+ points) and thus earns a huge delegate edge there. The delegates to make up Obama's lead have to come from somewhere -- they can't all be uncommitted superdelegates, there aren't enough of those -- and she's running out of chances. She can't beat Obama by running out the clock with a series of delegate draws and claiming "momentum." Momentum is meaningless unless, at some point, it gets her delegates.

I think this is a case of fool me once (New Hampshire), shame on me; fool me twice (Super Tuesday), shame on me; fool me thrice (Texas & Ohio), shame on me; but I'll be damned if you're going to fool me a fourth time. :)

More unintentional comedy

By Brendan Loy

From the makers of that godawful "Hillary for you and me" video, here comes the sequel -- "Hillary in the House" -- in which they, um, rap:

Commentary would be superfluous.

In other news, Bill Clinton went on a tirade last weekend, attacking, among others, Bill "Judas" Richardson for his alleged disloyalty. (Loyalty! It's always about loyalty with these wretched buffoons!) Speaking of Richardson, he responded to his attackers in yesterday's Washington Post:

I do not believe that the truth will keep Carville and others from attacking me. I can only say that we need to move on from the politics of personal insult and attacks. That era, personified by Carville and his ilk, has passed and I believe we must end the rancor and partisanship that has mired Washington in gridlock. In my view, Sen. Obama represents our best hope of replacing division with unity. That is why, out of loyalty to my country, I endorse him for president.

It seems as if the Clintons truly do not understand that their behavior vis a vis Richardson, among many other things in this campaign, solidifies and confirms every negative impression that people have of them. Like the people who make those hilarious (in the "laughing at you" sense) YouTube videos, Billary and their surrogates appear to entirely lack self-awareness.

UConn women back in Final Four!

By Brendan Loy

UConn survives! The Huskies mounted a huge comeback against Rutgers to reach their first Final Four since 2004. Hurrah!

Among other things, this means the Geno vs. Pat Championship Game Grudge Match is still a possibility! All it takes now is for UConn to beat Stanford and Tennessee to beat LSU. (If it happens, I'll be rooting for the Huskies, Becky will be rooting for the Lady Vols, and I'm pretty sure she'll buy Loyette some sort of Tennessee onesie for the occasion... harumph!)

Latest women's pool standings here and after the jump. Also after the jump, updated scenarios of who can win, and how.

Kirby repeats as NIT Pool champ

By Brendan Loy

For the second year in a row, Gary Kirby is the Irish Trojan NIT Pool champion.

Kirby, a.k.a. "gahrie," clinched when UMass knocked off Florida to advance to Thursday's championship. Kirby actually picked the Gators to win this game, but he had them losing to Ohio State in the title game, while Brian Dupuis, a.k.a. "DUP," picked Florida to win the title -- and needed them to do so in order to overcome Kirby in the standings.

In 2006, Kirby was the runner-up in the second annual Irish Trojan NIT Pool. Last year, he won the third annual pool, and now he's the champion of the fourth annual pool as well.

The Ohio State-Ole Miss semifinal is still underway. Complete standings here and after the jump.

Lady Vols win; UConn losing

By Brendan Loy

Tennessee is going to the Final Four despite an injury to Candace Parker. Will UConn join them, putting the Huskies and Lady Vols one win each away from an epic Geno vs. Pat showdown in the national championship game? So far, Rutgers isn't cooperating with that plan.

After the jump, a look at where things stand in my pool.

Your chance to do me a solid...

By Jay Johnson

As most of you know, I'm a die-hard Memphis Tiger fan, and as such, I like to take the opportunity to show some Tiger pride when I can.

Now, all of you USC (and other folk, too) can take an opportunity to strike a mighty blow for Tigers everywhere.

You see, there's a Mascot competition at the Chicago Trib's website, and this round features my beloved Memphis Tiger Pouncer against the reviled, drunken, moronic Stanford Tree.

I'd certainly appreciate a little love for Pouncer. That would greatly rock.

Here's the link.

Not a joke: Tom Crean to Indiana

By Brendan Loy

Even as I was engaging in some April Foolishness, claiming that ESPN's Andy Katz was reporting that Indiana would hire Mike Brey, Andy Katz was actually reporting that Indiana would hire Marquette's Tom Crean -- and that has now been confirmed.

Meanwhile, "El Kabong" at ND Nation has taken some heat for his Brey-to-Indiana April Fool's joke, which he now admits was a joke. (Money quote: "Part of me thinks the only thing I should be embarrassed about is the joke is so hackneyed a twit like Brendan Loy apparently thought of it too." Heh.)

The geography of dating

By Brendan Loy

Where are all the single guys? West of the Mississippi, apparently. A fascinating map. Suddenly I understand why our two closest single SHA-girl friends like Denver so much... :)

(Hat tip: Sully.)

Taking Snipergate up a notch

By Brendan Loy

Christopher Hitchens accuses Hillary Clinton of "flagrant, hysterical, repetitive, pathological lying about her visit to Bosnia." And then he gets really harsh!

[H]ere is the historical rather than personal aspect [of the controversy], which is what you should keep your eye on. Note the date of Sen. Clinton's visit to Tuzla. She went there in March 1996. By that time, the critical and tragic phase of the Bosnia war was effectively over, as was the greater part of her husband's first term. What had happened in the interim? In particular, what had happened to the 1992 promise, four years earlier, that genocide in Bosnia would be opposed by a Clinton administration?

In the event, President Bill Clinton had not fou