For years, I’ve been bothered by NCAA’s insistence on formal language in regard to the tournament. For example, it drives me nuts that Greg Gumbel continually says things  like  “stayed tuned for more of CBS’s continuing coverage of the 2011 NCAA Men’s Division I basketball tournament.” Just call it “the NCAA tournament,” dude. Or “the tournament.” Or at the post-game press-conferences, when the moderator continually says “student-athletes” instead of “players.” I’d like to remind everyone to please direct your questions to a specific student-athlete. And it’s not like he does it once, it’s every time. Does anyone have any more questions for any of our student-athletes?

But the real kicker has to be “national semi-finals.” No one in the entire country calls it anything else but the “Final Four.” The NCAA uses the term “Final Four” all over its website. CBS’s pregame program before every single tournament game is called “The Road to the Final Four.” But anytime they discuss the games that occur on the Saturday just prior to the Monday night championship game, the say “national semi-finals.” Just a reminder folks, that Duke will play Memphis St. in our first national semi-final game, a 7:06 tip, next Saturday. Butler will meet Siena in the other national semi-final game, 20 minutes after the conclusion of the first game. Just kill me. And it’s not like this formality is universal or anything. They all call the first round of the regionals “the sweet sixteen.”

Still, they may have taken it to a whole new level this year, with the 3rd round nonsense.

Backfill: now that they have three play-in games instead of one, they’ve changed the name of that round from “opening round” to “1st round.” The old 1st round  is now the “2nd round,” and the old 2nd round is now the “3rd round.” 3rd round winners will make the sweet sixteen. The problem here is that there has not been a fundamental change to the tournament. This isn’t like when they went from 48 to 64 teams; this is like when they went from 64 to 65. You aren’t adding games anyone cares about, you’re adding more buildup. You might as well start calling the small-conference championship games “1st round” too. Same difference.

I guarantee you that no one — NO ONE — who does not work for the NCAA or CBS will be using this terminology. But we’re going to suffer through it on TV for at least a year, until someone turns their brain back on at CBS. I mean, it’s not like the office pools are suddenly going to start using “1st round” games. That would not only require people to care about what happens on Tuesday and Wednesday in the first round, but it would also mean organizing an entire office pool in less than 36 hours.

Ivy League basketball.

You probably know that the Ivy League is the only league left that has no conference tournament, and thus the regular-season champ gets the automatic bid to the NCAA tournament. And since the Ivy League rarely has two teams worthy of an at-large bid (remember, there’s no conference tournament so there are no upset champs), it is almost invariably the case that the regular-season champ — and only the regular season champ — makes the tourney.*

This makes Ivy League hoops pretty unique, and pretty awesome. Like a throwback to the 70’s — when each conference was only allowed 1 tourney bid and most conferences didn’t have end of year tournaments — every game counts. It’s super refreshing. Every night plays out like a do-or-die playoff game; fall two games back in the standings and it starts to look really dire.

On top of this, following the Ivy League is a lot like following the NFL; because of league rules, almost all games occur on Friday and Saturday nights. There are eight teams, you play the other seven two times each, for a 14-game conference season. In effect, it’s six weekends of Friday/Saturday games, plus two random games against the team you are “paired” with. For example, Yale is paired with Brown. So each weekend, Yale and Brown either have home games against another two paired teams (like Harvard and Dartmouth) on Friday and Saturday night, or travel to play the same two teams on Friday or Saturday night. (Yale also has to play it’s pair team — Brown — twice. Those two games are split, usually one early in the season, one late).

The effect of this is that the standings “sync” the way they do in the NFL — nothing happens all week, and then over the weekend everyone plays the same number of games, and the standings adjust. It’s great. Unless, of course, it’s your team’s turn for the dreaded trip to Penn and Princeton.

Of course, this all leads to what happens last night. Princeton beat Penn in the season-finale “pair” game, creating a first-place tie between  Princeton and Harvard. Which means the Ivy league has to have a playoff game, for all the marbles. There is so much to talk about here.  Four observations: Continue reading →

One of the more radical moves you can make as the minority party in certain state legislatures is to absent all your members from the chamber to deny the majority a quorum. This happened in Wisconsin today, where the Senate Democrats failed to show up to prevent a vote on removing collective bargaining rights from state employees. It happened in Texas several years ago. In both cases, the majority party sent state troopers out to round up the legislators and demand their appearance (which is a perfectly legal procedural option in both states). In both cases, the fugitive legislators simply left the state. Continue reading →

Right now, the House of Representatives is considering legislation via a process it has not used in quite some time: an open rule on the floor. Continue reading →

I knew the staffer, Gabe Zimmerman, who died Saturday in the Giffords assassination attempt. Not as a friend, just on a professional level. But it still made me look at the shooting and its aftermath in a different light. Like so many Hill staffers, he was smart, hard-working, earnest, and anonymous.

I actually felt consciously less safe walking around Capitol Hill today.  I really wasn’t expecting that.

One reason — aside from the obvious — that congressional political assassinations are so heart-wrenching (and so rare) is that they serve virtually no plausible political purpose. That is, to say, there’s simply no rational political explanation for the motives. You cannot change a legislature by assassinating a single legislator; heck, you cannot effect any substantial political change by assassinating ten percent of a legislature. That’s one of the often-overlooked geniuses of the institution, the political safety and stability of distributed power. And thus, the global history of assassination is littered with Kings and Dictators and Rulers and Presidents and Presidential candidates and  leaders of social movements. But not legislators.

And so it bothers me that we even need to have a debate over the political motivations of Giffords’ assassin. Of course he’s insane (in the non-clinical sense) if he’s a political assassin; his methods are utterly irrational if he is seeking political ends.

But that’s not what I find most strange in all of this. That title would go to the structure of the political debate currently going on over the role of political rhetoric in the assassination attempt. I’m going to make four statements, all of which I believe are unarguably true, but which I have not seen a single writer/blogger/pundit/commentator accept in aggregate. Continue reading →

Diplomacy.

I played a good deal of this game between the ages of 17 (when I discovered it) and 24 (when I ceased to have enough friends who could clear out 10-15 consecutive hours to get together for a game). But make no mistake: this is the greatest board game of all time, and probably the greatest game of all time, period.

The key to its greatness is twofold. First, the strategy and tactics of the game have very little to do with what’s going on on the board. Sure, you have to understand how to move the armies and navies around to effectively conduct attacks and defenses, but that’s not too hard to pick up on. The real strategy and tactics come in negotiating with the other six players.

Second, the game has an uncanny way of reproducing a real diplomatic/war situation. You cannot win without alliances; you have to write military orders that will utterly fail if other nations betray you. You cannot win without breaking alliances; you have to plot to break others orders. You pretty much must engage in diplomacy with everyone; it’s almost impossible to fully trust anyone.

And so, very quickly, it really begins to feel like geo-political diplomacy. You start having utterly false conversations with people. You start telling people things in the hopes they will tell others. You look for intermediaries to carry conversations. You quit conversing with people to punish them. You think very carefully about every single word you say to people. You make up rumors. You pretend to have met or not met with people.

I bring this up because friends of mine just reignited our old Diplomacy crew for a new game. Only this time, we’re doing it online. And that is truly Diplomacy’s calling. Instead of each move being punctuated by a half-hour diplomatic period in someone’s basement, the moves are now set for two days. All diplomatic communication is done within a messaging system on the website. So instead of face-to-face meetings that third parties can observe having happened, it’s all diplomatic cables now. Which is masterful: at first, I was skeptical about putting stuff down in print. But it turns out it’s just as good, since any cable can be faked. You still don’t know who to trust, but you can (a) talk in pure secrecy, and (b) have extended diplomatic relations over a period of days between each move.

I cannot recommend this enough. The perfect game has been improved, dramatically.

Question: What do the following songs all have in common?

Aerosmith, Dude (Looks Like a Lady); Clay Aiken, Run to Me; Michael Bolton, How Can We Be Lovers?; Bon Jovi, Livin’ on a Prayer; Cher, We All Sleep Alone; Alice Cooper, Poison;  Hanson, Weird; Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, I hate myself for loving you; KISS, Let’s Put the X in Sex; Ricky Martin, Livin’ la Vida Loca; Katy Perry, Waking Up in Vegas; and LeAnn Rimes, Life Goes On.

Continue reading →

After the jump. For the House, votes expected on days highlighted in brown; No votes expected on days highlighted in white. The Senate calendar has recess days in red. Continue reading →

An old joke around the south side of the Capitol involves a Representative winning election to the Senate (and thus moving northward). It varies in its telling, but the punch line is always  and now the average IQ of both chambers has increased.  It’s a joke that can be retold often: historically, about 30-40% of Senators in any given Congress had previously served in the House… Continue reading →

Keep refreshing this page for election night commentary. Check here for my election night junkies guide.

1:36: Last post of the night. Murkowski’s write-in victory will be remarkable if it happens. I would assume the vast, vast majority of the write-ins are for Murkowski. But easily 10% of them could be for others; we’re talking about an odd state with the population of a congressional district. And that could be the difference between write-in and Miller. So the opening of the ballots could be hugely suspenseful.

1:35: I wonder if Reid’s miracle is going to save Titus?

1:05:  It is striking how much FoxNews and MSNBC have drifted ideologically in the last 3 years. Prior to the beginning of the 2008 election cycle, an honest debate could be had as to whether these networks were neutral news organizations or not. But now they are unabashedly partisan organs. And neither one seems the least bit conflicted about it. Not that I am, either. I don’t see terrible problems with openly partisan news sources. It sure beats partisan news sources pretending to be delivering non-editorialized content. Post-mortem thoughts tomorrow.

12:45: Paging Mickey Kaus! The redistricting initiative is up 2-1 in CA right now, with 18% reported. Pot still lags badly behind, 55-45.

12:41: Still two precincts outstanding in VA-11, both in Fairfax County. Connolly by 485 votes right now.

12:30: House Appropriations Committee body count: Dems lose Obey and Kennedy to retirement (2); Mollahan to primary (1); Rodriguez, Murphy, Bishop, Davis, Boyd, and Edwards to defeat (6); with Chandler too close to call. Total count: 9.

12:26: Fox is calling Nevada for Reid. That is a triumph. If they haven’t started already, the establishment GOP recriminations will be coming on strong soon. Delaware, Nevada, and Connecticut were all very plausibly within their grasp, and now all appear to be gone.

12:19: Very much looking forward to Obama’s presser  this afternoon. Boehner’s interviews aside, POTUS really is the first-mover here. I think he will be conciliatory but firm, highlighting the criticizing/governing divide and the GOP challenge to make that transition. Wings thinks he might be combative, but I don’t think he’ll burst out the gate with a “bring it on speech.” You can always get tougher, but once you go that route, it’s hard to back down. So  I assume he starts from the opposite tack. But who knows.

12:00: Ballot measure updates: The name change got crushed in Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. Pot is down 55-45 in California, but only 13% have reported. Abortion restrictions are far behind in CO (70-30) with 30% of the vote in. And the income tax is down 65-35 in WA, it’s not clear how much has been reported.

11:55: CNN calls the Senate for the Dems. I think 7 months ago, if you said “65 House seats and only 7 Senate seats,” you would have been judged nonsensical. But it may very well happen.

11:32: Matt Zeller has lost NY-29. Hamilton Rugby will wait another cycle to become a special interest. Continue reading →

During last night’s game between the Saints and Steelers, there were two plays challenged in the first half that I think illustrate well the fundamental irrationality in both the decision-making process for challenging among coaches, and the evaluation of the decision to challenge by the announcers.  Continue reading →

What can we say about the Miami heat, one game into the season? Let’s do some Bayesian mathematical analysis… Continue reading →

People my exact age have a strange relationship with the Internet, for a very specific reason: we were college freshman in Fall 1996, the year the Internet exploded on college campuses. It was a strange time: none of the juniors or seniors really used email, but all of the freshmen did. Most freshmen used AIM or ICQ to communicate with each other on campus; if you got a phone call, it was probably an upperclassmen.  And so on.  So while most of the campus was effectively going to college in 1975, most the freshman were effectively going to college in 2002. I suspect the gap has never been as large, before or  since. It was truly a technological divide — between people born merely a few years apart.

It was also  a simpler time in regard to the internet itself. We were amazed by the trivial — chain email forwards were still cool, and could still produce mass hysteria — and spent much of time trying to find things, which meant going through  Webcrawler, Yahoo, Lycos, Altavista, and all the rest of the awful search enginges until you succeeded. But it wasn’t clear what we were looking for — without the blogs, the .MP3s, online poker, or facebook, there was nothing really to do online except look at pornography or play silly games or just generally marvel at the whole situation.

It was, perhaps, the perfect moment of the modern age to be a college freshman.

The other option, of course, was to get rich. None of us bothered, but it wasn’t for lack of being very, very close to some huge ideas.  Two that come to mind: Continue reading →