My college football blog, Condredge's Acolytes, is going to start covering the NCAA Tournaments in basketball and hockey. Since it's a collaborative site, I welcome the contributions of any who have two cents they'd like to put in.

Best news of the day for Democrats: Dick Morris is predicting a Bush landslide.

What to do, if the goals of fighting terrorism and fighting Saddam conflict? Well, if you're this President, to hell with 9/11, you give this guy a pass, and he ends up killing several hundred people in Iraq.

Slate takes John Kerry to task for "flip-flopping", a meme hatched by Karl Rove, et al. Most of the examples are bogus, or can be easily explained, but the question I have is, who f---ing cares? "Flip-flopping" is an attack that only resonates in primary contests, when you are trying to convince base voters that the other guy is insincere. In general elections, it's a loser issue, the type of thing that people who don't like you and won't vote for you anyway will use to rationalize their votes.

One example of that attack failing miserably was Jerry Brown's reelection bid in 1978. Brown turned the entire dynamics of that election on its head by changing his position on Proposition 13, which he had fought against when it was on the June 1978 ballot. After the initiative passed, Brown suddenly became its biggest supporter, defending its constitutionality in the courts, and earning kudos from Howard Jarvis in the process. His opponent, Evelle Younger, who had led in the polls, made Brown's "flip-flops" on that and other issues the centerpiece of his campaign. The voters, instead, returned Brown to office by an overwhelming margin. Clinton's strategy of triangulation after the 1994 elections is another example of how a politician who changes his position on issues not only survives, but thrives before the electorate.

One of the dirtiest secrets in politics is that voters in a democracy not only tolerate a politician who changes his mind, they demand it. If swing voters are unsettled by Iraq or the economy, they are not going to give a rat's ass whether Kerry changed his mind about welfare reform in the mid-90's. And since many of those same voters performed the same "flip-flops" over the Patriot Act and the war, it doesn't do the Republicans any good to rub their noses in it.

WACK JOB WATCH: James Lileks jumps the shark here, with a pitiful claim that supporters of Kerry are objectively pro-terrorist. And a Republican Congressman goes one-up on Move On, comparing Kerry to Adolf Hitler. Oh, yeah, he's "French" looking, too. Also, Donald Luskin links to a clearly bogus "corrections" site for the New York Times, fooling (among others) Mickey Kaus. Lastly, Ilsa, She-Wolf of the S.S. has her unique take on the latest Mel Gibson movie; no surprise here, she loves it [link via Pandagon].

UPDATE: A reader (Kaus, actually) writes in to explain to your ignorant correspondent what "doppel" means. Turns out he wasn't fooled, but I was. That, and the fact that I actually missed a question on the Harrick Jr. Final Exam, means that my entire week has been one of humiliation and despair. I SUCK !!

First of all, the fact that a criminal defendant has claimed that he provided several baseball superstars with the juice should be taken with a grain of salt. The bigger the story he can tell in court, and the bigger the names he can bring down, the more leniency the court will grant him when it comes time for sentencing. In that sense, Barry Bonds should be given the same benefit of the doubt that Lance Armstrong was given.

Second, any lawyer who puts out a statement that his client "never knowingly" did something should be disbarred for rank incompetence, or even worse, made to practice in the field of workers comp. If an attorney is going to be that stupid, why not just put out a statement saying that there is "no controlling legal authority" to implicate your client and be done with it. Far better for Sheffield's attorney to have just kept his mouth shut, or at least said that his client will have no comment on what was or wasn't said to the Grand Jury.

Third, steroid use in baseball will be The Big Story for the next year, and will probably color how fans eventually look back at the last decade in the sport. Obviously, Bonds' single-season home run record will come into question (as will McGuire and Sosa, btw), but he has had such an impressive career that he will still be viewed as one of the all-time greats. Less fortunate will be players like Sheffield or Giambi (or Nomar, or Piazza, or any other player who gets caught up in this net), who may not have a pre-steroid portion of their career they can point to if they get implicated. Any well-sculpted ballplayer from the last fifteen years is going to be tainted by rumors of steroid use, regardless of guilt, in much the same way that the late Flo-Jo was after the 1988 Olympics. Sheffield, for example, with three consecutive MVP-candidate seasons, was just starting to put together a legitimate case for Hall of Fame consideration, which the steroid rumors may have irreparably damaged. This is a scandal the sport can ill-afford.

Prof. Johnson presents: "The Passion of Elvis".

Contrary to my post last week, the Seeds didn't open for the reclusive Ken Layne & the Corvids last Thursday. No matter; it was still worth the $7 cover to see the opening night of the "Minotour". The group keeps getting tighter, and the night was marred neither by Matt Welch's solo cover of "Only Women Bleed" nor by the obscenity-laced spat over welfare-reform between Mickey Kaus and Sky Saxon that interrupted the concert for ten full minutes until the police finally arrived. Saturday, in Huntington Beach, they were even better, debuting three new songs, including one kick-ass blast that sounded like an unholy mixture of Johnny Cash, Buck Owens, and "Him or Me" by Paul Revere and the Raiders. Hopefully, a "Maxotour" is in store for the rest of the country real soon. And by all means, if you go see them, print out one of their flyers....

Any doubts I may have had about John Kerry being a better president than George Bush were resolved by his answer to yesterday's debate's final question: Is God on our side? A good leader often tells people what they don't want to hear, and Kerry's answer actually seemed to have been generated out of some thought on his part. There was none of the phony religiosity that one gets out of W, who clearly sees matters of faith as a prop he can use to pick up Red State votes, rather than something that actually has meaning to him. I'm still voting for the ambulance chaser tomorrow, but my respect for the frontrunner has gone up enormously.

I certainly wouldn't begrudge her the Oscar she won tonight, but does anyone else think that Charlize Theron maybe was under a heatlamp for too long this week?



UPDATE: Nope, turns out she just overdid the make-up. Check out this photo from the night before, at the Independent Spirit Awards. I'm told that an exaggerated "tan" is often used to cover up acne problems, an especially acute problem when a significant share of the audience (particularly in Hollywood) is tuning in to the show via TV sets of the high-definition variety. Anyway, she's not necessarily a candidate for a melanoma...whew.

Atrios...revealed !!

Needless to say, I disagree with the President's call for a constitutional amendment to outlaw gay marriages and civil unions. I have nothing to add to what has been so eloquently stated this morning by Andrew Sullivan, except to pray that Senators Kerry and Edwards do the right thing on this issue, even if it means four more years of W. In the end, it is not a political position, it is a point of decency.

For whatever reason, I don't think John Edwards' inability to answer a question on the foreign corporate tax credit and its relation to the European Union is going to be a big issue come Super Tuesday. Reporters seem to think that playing "Stump the Candidate" is an effective way to demonstrate how much more learned they are than the people running for office, so last time we had some smartass reporter questioning candidate Bush on who the President of Taiwan was, and now we have this story.

It is an article of faith that one of the more significant after-effects of 9-11 has been the creation of a substantial segment of former liberals whose backing of the President in the "War on Terror" will realign American politics into the foreseeable future. This group, disproportionately represented in the blogosphere, sees Bush as a modern-day combination Woodrow Wilson and Winston Churchill, galvanizing the forces of freedom in a twilight struggle against Islamofascism, and they uncritically supported the decision to go to war with Iraq, no matter what the current rationale happened to be. The Democrats, with their support of such trivialities as "international law", were derided as unserious, doomed to a certain landslide defeat in November 2004.

Well, as it turns out, the more important segment of the voting public, albeit one that hasn't had the gumption to set up their own vanity sites with Blogger yet, are the voters who cast their lot with George Bush in 2000, and who have now gotten a case of buyer's remorse. Up to eleven percent of the people who voted for Bush last time now say they will pass on the G.O.P. this time, as opposed to only five percent who now regret their vote for Al Gore in the last election. The key issues: anger over the decision to go to war in Iraq, and concern over the President's economic priorities. In particular, independents now overwhelmingly disapprove of Bush's performance as President. [link via CalPundit]

Two big music events this week: tonight, the singer with the voice of Patsy Cline and the looks of Tara Reid, Annette Summersett, plays at the Springbok in Van Nuys at 9:00 p.m. And of course, Thursday will bring us the start of the Ken Layne & the Corvids 2004 World Tour, at King King in Hollywood. The Seeds (of "Pushin' Too Hard" fame) will open, and many elite SoCal bloggers will be there to sign autographs and pose for pictures beforehand. For those of you who bought the CD, liked what you heard, but have yet to hear them perform live, it the universal consensus (actually, just me and Kaus) that the Corvids are even better in concert.

Smythe's World is officially endorsing Damien for President !!

Twenty-five of the forty-two men to have been President were, by profession, lawyers. For men and women whose ambitions aim towards a life in politics, the practice of law is a popular choice: both Kerry and Edwards are lawyers, and Bush famously was rejected when he applied to law school at the University of Texas. Although the education, training, and even the definition of what it is to be an attorney have changed during the history of the republic, it has from the outset been the career option most taken by politicians before they sought office.

Very few of the lawyers who became President, though, could truly be said to have "practiced" law. Clinton, for example, pretty much went straight into politics after law school, with a brief sojourn as a law professor, and I doubt FDR ever saw the inside of a courtroom. Kerry worked as a D.A. for a few years, but pretty much was angling for a career in public service from the moment he passed the bar. Being an attorney opens some doors for the would-be public servent, and a legal education exposes one to many of the same issues faced by politicians, but the actual nitty-gritty details of representing a client, building a practice, handling a caseload, and sweet-talking a jury, are well outside the norm for what someone whose ultimate goal is to run for high office.

That makes the case of John Edwards somewhat extraordinary. He is not just a lawyer. He was one of the top trial attorneys in America when he decided to run for the Senate in 1998. Not only was he gifted in court, but for most of his adult life, it was how he fed his family. Clearly, he practiced law because it was what he did for a living, not so that he could get placed on the fast track to the Presidency.

Thus, Edwards is the exception among lawyer-politicians, not the rule. Looking back at the men who preceded him, only a few stand out as having been skilled in the practice of law. Adams, of course, made his name in the pre-Revolutionary period representing British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre, and his son was an accomplished attorney himself. Lincoln, who incidentally never went to college, much less law school, secured some degree of wealth for his family representing anyone who could pay a retainer (including a few odd debtors in bankruptcy). Of the rest who actually practiced law, almost all of them worked at some level for the government, usually as prosecutors, except for Nixon, who started off as a low-level attorney in the government during WWII before joining a small transactional firm in Whittier.

Anyways, I hope to begin a study of the legal careers of Presidents, and eventually give you some idea as to what kind of practitioner someone like James Monroe or Chester Arthur was before they became Commander-in-Chief. In the meantime, if anyone can identify another President who was a trial lawyer between Honest Abe and Senator Edwards, I'd love to hear from you.

The latest Gallup Poll now has both Kerry and Edwards with double-digit leads over George Bush among likely voters. The combination of the Kay Report, the AWOL charge and now the admission that the employment forecast last week was bogus operate as an anchor around the President. If Kucinich pulls ahead in the horse race numbers, SELL !!

Osama Found !?! If true, what does this say about whom we really are fighting?

Michael Totten discovers the "Little Green-Eyed Monster" phenomenum. [link via Roger L. Simon]