Oh, no you didn’t!

Democrats shook up tradition on Saturday by vaulting Nevada and South Carolina into the first wave of 2008 presidential contests along with Iowa and New Hampshire - a move intended to add racial and geographic diversity to the early voting.

The decision by the Democratic National Committee leaves Iowa as the nation’s first presidential caucus and New Hampshire as the first primary, but wedges Nevada’s caucuses before New Hampshire and South Carolina’s primary soon afterward.

To which the New Hampshirians reply: This means war! “The DNC did not give New Hampshire its primary, and it is not taking it away,” said the Granite State’s governor, John Lynch.

New Hampshire objected loudly to the lineup and has threatened to leapfrog over the other contests to retain its pre-eminent role.

The plot thickens!

Eager to avoid such a rebellion, Democrats also adopted sanctions to penalize presidential candidates who campaign in states that cut in line.

How? By denying them delegates from those states! More here:

The Democratic National Committee voted Saturday to penalize 2008 presidential candidates who defied a new nominating calendar devised to lessen the longtime influence of New Hampshire and Iowa, the two states that have traditionally kicked off the nominating process.

The sanctions will be directed at candidates who campaign in any state that refuses to follow a 2008 calendar of primaries and caucuses that was also approved Saturday. Any candidate who campaigns in a state that does not abide by the new calendar will be stripped at the party convention of delegates won in that state.

That’s a clever idea, but it isn’t going to work:

Despite the vote, the fighting over the calendar may not be over. … Several Democrats said candidates might make the calculation that it is worth losing delegates — assuming New Hampshire defies the party and the party penalizes candidates — to get the attention that might come from an early New Hampshire victory.

I think that calculation would most definitely be correct, so much so that it’s completely obvious, so obvious that everyone will make it and this whole thing will fail utterly.

Because of the way the media covers the primaries, and because the public doesn’t really understand how the system works, delegates don’t really matter in the early weeks of the campaign; momentum matters. And a New Hampshire victory, even if it results in zero delegates, means lots of momentum — and the best way to achieve a New Hampshire victory might be to take a “bold” stand against this DNC decision, as John Kerry, John Edwards and Evan Bayh are already doing. Which is why every single candidate will ultimately take the same “bold stand,” which is why this attempt by the DNC to change the rules of the game is basically doomed to fail. New Hampshire still holds all the cards, delegates or no. (And really, if every single candidate campaigns in New Hampshire — which they will — is the DNC seriously going to follow through on its threat to strip ALL of the candidates of their New Hampshire delegates, thus demoting the nation’s most famous primary to a D.C.-style delegate-less primary, and earning the everlasting ire of Granite State residents? I think not.)

P.S. DNC chairman Howard Dean is from Vermont — New Hampshire’s neighbor to the west. New Hampshire and Vermont do not always get along. This will get ugly fast.

WARNING: Clip contains profanity. Snake-related profanity, to be exact.

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P.S. Best. Movie. Ever. :)

Here’s a bootleg video of the movie’s climactic line, via YouTube. Again, the profanity warning applies.

And here, also via YouTube, is the rather strange music video at the end of the movie. Yet again, a profanity warning. :)

UPDATE: For more on the motherf***in’ snakes, see my latest post on the motherf***in’ topic.

Further supporting what I wrote yesterday about the district court opinion invalidating the NSA wiretapping program is this New York Times article:

Even legal experts who agreed with a federal judge’s conclusion on Thursday that a National Security Agency surveillance program is unlawful were distancing themselves from the decision’s reasoning and rhetoric yesterday.

They said the opinion overlooked important precedents, failed to engage the government’s major arguments, used circular reasoning, substituted passion for analysis and did not even offer the best reasons for its own conclusions.

Discomfort with the quality of the decision is almost universal, said Howard J. Bashman, a Pennsylvania lawyer whose Web log provides comprehensive and nonpartisan reports on legal developments.

“It does appear,� Mr. Bashman said, “that folks on all sides of the spectrum, both those who support it and those who oppose it, say the decision is not strongly grounded in legal authority.�

(Hat tip: Joe Mama.)

Meanwhile, Mickey Kaus asks:

Why is the press making such a fuss about a District Court opinion striking down the administration’s NSA eavesdropping program? It’s a District Court opinion! The actual decision will obviously be made by the Supreme Court, two levels up, and when it makes that decision the lower court’s opinion will have less weight than an editorial in Roll Call (unless the opinion’s brilliantly innovative, an exception that apparently does not apply in this case, or the judge has made a decision against his or her known tendencies–e.g. a states’ rights champion ruling for the feds–which also isn’t the case here). … The ritual in which the winning side extrapolates triumphantly from the meaningless event (”It’s another nail in the coffin of executive unilateralism”–ACLU) is a particularly disreputable bit of Kabuki.

Kaus adds that “the same point would apply if the lower court had decided in favor of the Bush administration.” Yes, it would, though somehow I think the media coverage would be a bit more muted. Just a hunch.

Last but not least, Eugene Volokh rebuts the ridiculous argument that we shouldn’t care about “the judicial quality of [the] opinion” because “the growing extremism and lawlessness to which our country has been subjected” is so much more important. This is, sadly, a pretty typical argument from the Left: that criticisms of liberals, regardless of the merits, are a waste of breath and shouldn’t be aired because what Bush is doing is so much worse. It’s a tiresome, specious point, and whoever raises it pretty much sacrifices a substantial sum of credibility in my eyes. (It would be equally tiresome coming from conservatives — “how dare you criticize Bush, even if the criticism is objectively valid, when we should all be focusing exclusively on how godless liberals are destroying this country” — but I just don’t see that happening very often.)

With the official start of my 3L year two days away, and the start of my third college-football season as an “Irish Trojan” two weeks away, it’s time to ponder a dilemma more than two years in the making, a question I’ve pondered since I first enrolled at Notre Dame, a quandry thrown into sharp relief as the 2006 college-football landscape has taken shape…

If Notre Dame were to play USC with a national title-game berth on the line for the Irish, and nothing at all on the line for the Trojans, would I still root for USC?

(more…)

Here’s a video of Samuel L. Jackson on the Daily Show earlier this week, discussing Snakes on a Plane. WARNING: it contains a clip (bleeped, of course) of Jackson’s already-famous line about the “motherf***ing snakes,” so if you don’t want to see that line until you see the movie, don’t watch the video!

I’m tentatively planning to go see the 7:30 PM show tomorrow with some law-school buddies. Fellow NDLSers, if you’re back in town and you’re interested in coming along, shoot me a motherf***ing e-mail! :)