Irish Trojan in Tennessee

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.