Two days before Tuesday’s election, Saddam Hussein will — presumably — be convicted and condemned to die on Sunday. Are we sure Karl Rove isn’t secretly running the Iraqi court? This is great for the GOP, as it will presumably turn the electorate’s attention to the one thing that everyone agrees is good about the Iraq war: the overthrow of a brutal tyrant.

If the Republicans end up winning, it may be that they’ll owe one election (2004) to Osama bin Laden and one (2006) to Saddam Hussein. Heh. And I suppose you could credit the 2002 victory to Mohammed Atta & co. That would leave 2000 as the only recent GOP victory not attributable to a terrorist or tyrant — unlike Theresa LePore is more tyrannical than I realize. :)

On the other hand… what if Saddam is acquitted?

My brother-in-law Casey Zak writes:

In a recent NRO piece, Kathryn Jean Lopez claims that, “No one can truly be pro-Casey-for-Senate.â€? I was not aware that I was running for Senate, but I am outraged by this claim nevertheless. I have many fine qualities that would make me an excellent Senator. I am good at standing in place and staring lustfully at waving flags. I am taller and stronger than most other Senators, and could probably whoop ass in a 19th century cane fight. Finally, I would be willing to swear a solemn vow not to abuse the less attractive Senate pages. …

I would like you to vote for me. I have worked hard during these past 5 minutes in which I have been aware that I am running for Senate, and I promise that if elected, I will continue to work hard for the people of Pennsylvania until I tire or lose interest.

LOL! There’s more. Over-the-top, tongue-in-cheek Santorum-bashing is involved.

Also on Casey’s blog, a new justification for the war in Iraq. I expect the Bush Administration to be echoing it within days. :)

Elsewhere in the Brendansphere, Texasyank’s translation of John Kerry’s apology is funny: “To any stupid serviceman dumb enough not to understand what I was saying, and furthermore to any of said serviceman stupid enough to actually be offended by what, to anyone listening, was clearly a smart-aleck remark aimed at your retarded commander-in-chief (who got better grades than me at the same university, but let’s not go there) . . . to all you idiots, and to your idiot families, I apologize. Kind of.”

My blog, October 31, 2006: “[A]ny doubts about whether grad students ‘care’ [about Notre Dame football] can be satisfactorily eliminated simply by establishing a common-sense rule (applicable to grads and undergrads alike) that you must be a season-ticket holder to enter the lottery. As I understand it, no such rule currently exists, but it obviously should, and it would effectively solve this (perceived) problem. Starving grad students aren’t generally known for their spendthrift natures, and $203 (or $406 for married students) is no drop in the bucket. If you have season tickets, that should create at least a rebuttable presumption that you’re a good enough fan to ‘earn’ a spot in the lottery.”

The Observer, November 2, 2006: “[Graduate Student Union president Mike Lundin] added that graduate students would most likely be required to purchase season home football tickets in order to be included in away game lotteries [in future years].”

That requirement should apply to both undergrads and grad students. (Granted, a far higher percentage of undergrads buy season tickets, so it’s less likely to be an issue. Still, there’s no valid basis for discriminating between the two groups on this basis.) But so long as it applies to both, it makes perfect sense, and I support it. Nobody should be able to enter the away-game ticket lottery if they haven’t made the $200+ commitment to Irish football that buying season tickets entails.

Until tonight, I hadn’t read the Supreme Court’s decision in Bush v. Gore since the day after it was decided in 2000. My belief back then was that the opinion was utter crap. But of course, I was a college sophomore majoring in journalism at the time, not a law student. (I was also much more liberal than I am now.) Since starting law school, I’ve often told myself that I should read the case again and apply the legal knowledge I’ve acquired in the last six years to come up with a more educated viewpoint on the merits of the opinion. I’ve never gotten around to doing so, though… until tonight, when it was required reading for my Election Law class. I just finished reading it. And you know what?

It’s utter crap.

I’d go into more detail, but I really need to get to bed. Suffice it to say, what a horrid piece of judicial vomit. Seriously.

In the wake of tonight’s Louisville win over West Virginia, ESPN’s latest SportsNation poll is asking whether an undefeated Big East team should make the BCS title game. (The results by state are predictable; fans in Texas, SEC country and Ohio State/Michigan/Notre Dame territory say no, everyone else says yes.) But if Mark May’s on-air words are any indication, people may answer differently depending on which Big East team they’re talking about. (May, discussing Louisville, made an unequivocal statement that “any” team that goes undefeated in a major conference “deserves” a shot at the championship — but then waffled when asked whether that would apply to Rutgers as well.) So, I’m going to get a little more specific:

Remember, the question is “should” they, not “will” they. What do you think?

All points bulletin… calling any and all Louisville and West Virginia students who can actually FREAKING HOLD ONTO THE BALL!!! Your schools’ football teams need you!

(It’s 23-14 Cardinals at the moment.)

UPDATE: Louisville wins, 44-34! Now they travel to New Jersey to play Rutgers in a huge battle next Thursday. GO SCARLET KNIGHTS!!!

P.S. Man, now I almost wish I was flying to New Jersey instead of Colorado next Wednesday night… that’d be a fun game to go to. But… [insert your own New Jersey joke here]. Hey, I said almost. :)

Back in September, when my parents and I were deciding which Notre Dame home game they would come out for, I suggested North Carolina rather than Army because I figured, with the game being two weeks earlier, there was a better chance of good weather.

Heh. The Irish Trojan’s meteorological clairvoyance strikes again! :)

I think this pretty much guarantees it will be 60° and sunny the weekend of the Army game. ;)

If you can’t tell from the above pictures, it was snowy, blustery and freezing cold in South Bend today; the temperature never rose above 33 degrees, and the wind chill made it feel much colder. Lake-effect bands came and went, producing heavy snow at times throughout the afternoon. All in all, not exactly ideal conditions for the campus tour I took my parents on. D’oh!

We had a good time anyway, though. It’s their first visit to Notre Dame, and they both liked it a lot. Here are a couple more pictures of unusual snowy scenes:

More photos here, including one of me and my mom in front of First-down Moses.

#3 West Virginia and #5 Louisville are underway in a game that could end up being effectively a national semifinal (the other “semifinal” being Ohio State vs. Michigan, obviously).

Those hoping for the Big East to produce no undefeated teams should probably root for Louisville, since they face the very real potential of a “letdown” game against Rutgers next Thursday after the excitement and hype of this game. And then the Mountaineers can take care of Rutgers on Dec. 2.

P.S. Speaking of OSU-Michigan, the Columbus Dispatch reported on Oct. 20 that the rumors of ABC moving the game from 3:30 PM to 8:00 PM are “just that — rumors”:

Although it seems logical that the network would like to have a potential No. 1 vs. No. 2 matchup in prime time, a school official said ABC never asked and Ohio State wouldn’t have agreed to it. … As it stands now, ABC plans to have California at Southern California as its night game Nov. 18.

This creates quite a dilemma for Notre Dame seniors, 3Ls and other final-year students who are big college football fans — and, above all, for ND grad/law students who are Ohio State or Michigan alums (i.e., “Irish Buckeyes” and “Irish Wolverines”). The Nov. 18 game between Notre Dame and Army kicks off at 2:30 PM; OSU-Michigan is at 3:30 PM. This presents a stark choice: miss the #1 vs. #2 game that everyone’s been anticipating since September, or miss our final home game as Notre Dame students. Yikes! I suspect there will be a lot of portable TVs in Notre Dame Stadium two weeks from Saturday — and I hope the stadium P.A. announcer gives frequent updates.

Of course, for my part, I’m glad I don’t have to choose between ND-Army and USC-Cal. :)

Murder and arson charges have been recommended against 36-year-old Raymond Lee Oyler in the fire that killed five U.S. Forest Service firefighters in Southern California, Sheriff Neil Lingle said. Visit CNN for the latest.

According to Kristin, for 5-10 minutes this morning — until just a few moments ago — there were “super loud” sirens going off near campus, audible from both FOG and University Park. She described them as “not just fire truck/cop car sirens” but rather “like those huge industrial ones they have for real fires in small towns, or tornado warnings.” No idea why, but apparently they just stopped.

The Observer reports:

At the urging of the Office of Student Affairs, the Student Union Board (SUB) decided Wednesday to include graduate students in the Notre Dame vs. USC football ticket lottery less than an hour before it began.

The threat of a possible protest by graduate students was a catalyst for the change in policy, said Director of Student Activities Brian Coughlin, who spoke on the phone with senior staff members in Student Affairs around 11 a.m. Wednesday.

Together, Coughlin and top officials from Student Affairs - who were also concerned with SUB’s reasons for excluding graduate students in the first place - decided “to tell [SUB manager] Patrick [Vassel] to open up the lottery to graduate students.” …

Although SUB is solely responsible for the distribution of the 300 tickets allocated to students for away games, the Student Activities Office advises the organization and it delivered an “instruction” that SUB include graduate students in the lottery.

“It was a hard thing to do and we don’t like to do it. … We like to be advisors, we don’t like to tell student groups what to do,” Coughlin said.

Graduate students were originally excluded from the lottery because they do not pay the Student Activities Fee, which funds SUB. But Student Affairs officials decided that reason “was not significant enough.”

“We were completely in support of the decision [to exclude graduate students],” Vassel said. “We stood behind it and this change in policy has nothing to do with us.”

He did not want to comment further on the inclusion of graduate students until the lottery was completed, he said. …

Student body president Lizzi Shappell, who stood behind SUB’s decision to exclude graduate students, said she was “very surprised” when she learned about the changes.

“We need to see where the communication breakdown occurred and avoid decision-making problems like this in the future,” she said.

Methinks this debate is not over. SUB is clearly not happy, and there will be more wrangling about this between now and the next SUB-run lottery, whether that’s the bowl-game lottery or next year’s away-game lotteries. (I’m not sure whether SUB will be running the bowl-game lottery this year. They didn’t run last year’s Fiesta Bowl lottery — the ticket office did — but the graduate students who organized yesterday’s preempted protest seemed to be under the impression that the SUB would be running the bowl-game lottery this year.)

Anyway, according to the Observer, roughly 230 of the 2,220 students who entered the lottery — so, a little over 10% — were grad students. Assuming the number of winners is roughly proportional, that means there should be approximately 15 grad students winners.

AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts) in conjunction with Design for Democracy brings us The Polling Place Photo Project. Now, I know Brendan already has his cameras all fired up for Tuesday, but these guys apparently want pictures of every polling place in America, and though he might want to try, Brendan’s velcro tennis shoes simply won’t make it to every polling place nationwide. So if you’d like to help out, check your local laws, read the fine print and find your camera.

The Polling Place Photo Project is a nationwide experiment in citizen journalism that seeks to empower citizens to capture, post and share photographs of democracy in action. By documenting their local voting experience on November 7, voters can contribute to an archive of photographs that captures the richness and complexity of voting in America.

Both of my teams’ opponents this weekend, Stanford and North Carolina, are ranked in ESPN’s Bottom 10. In fact, they’re in the Bottom Six: the Cardinal are #2; the Tar Heels are #6. USC and Notre Dame have lost a combined total of two games; Stanford and UNC have won a combined total of one game.

So basically, these games should be the biggest blowouts of the season for both the Trojans and the Irish. (Knock on wood.) The Vegas lines are USC by 29 and Notre Dame by 27 1/2. Only two other games in the country have wider point-spreads: Michigan over Ball State (-34) and Auburn over Arkansas State (-31).

Here’s hoping for a lot of pushups and victory signs on Saturday!

Those who regularly visit the Drudge Report have already seen this picture, since it was on the front page all day Wednesday, but for those who haven’t, check it out:

LOL!! I don’t care who you are, that’s funny right there.

The Washington Post has more on the fallout from Kerry’s idiotic-but-obviously-not-malicious, poorly-worded anti-Bush (not anti-troops) joke:

Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) issued two apologies for remarks that seemed to impugn U.S. troops and abandoned his public schedule yesterday, but he denounced what he called the “campaign of smear and fear” against him as the surreal sequel to the 2004 presidential election echoed across the campaign trail.

The White House and Republican allies orchestrated a cascade of denunciations throughout the day to keep the once and possibly future presidential candidate on the defensive and force other Democrats to distance themselves. Kerry canceled plans to appear with several candidates and returned home to avoid becoming “a distraction to these campaigns.”

Republican strategists appeared almost gleeful over the contretemps because it revived a favorite target at a time they need to motivate core supporters to vote in Tuesday’s midterm elections. GOP officials have tried to make the elections not a referendum on President Bush but a choice between two parties with competing visions over taxes, terrorism and Iraq, but they have struggled to find a symbol for Democrats. Kerry’s comments have allowed Republicans to make him again the face of his party and cast 2006 as a rerun of Bush vs. Kerry.

Democrats were irritated to lose two days in the homestretch that they would rather have devoted to Bush’s troubled Iraq policy, and they pressed Kerry to apologize and get out of sight. Hoping to change the subject, Democrats seized on comments by Bush, who told reporters he wants Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to remain in their jobs for the final two years of his administration.

The one silver lining in this whole ridiculous, maddening, possibly election-deciding Kerry Kerfuffle is that it may damage his 2008 presidential ambitions.

Incidentally, the National Review’s John Derbyshire agrees with me that, however contemptible Kerry might be generally, he quite clearly didn’t mean to insult the troops:

John Kerry is awful, and anything we can do further to degrade his political prospects is worth doing. But really, I saw a clip of him making the much-deplored remark, and it was obvious that the dimwit in Iraq that he referred to was George W. Bush, not the American soldier. It was a dumb joke badly delivered, but his meaning was plain. My pleasure in watching JK squirm is just as great as any other conservative’s, but something is owed to honesty. There’s a lot of fake outrage going round here.

Derbyshire later added:

Outrage from several readers — and, obviously some of my Corner colleagues — that I would dare to suggest that John Kerry was not slandering our troops.

But he wasn’t. He may regard them with contempt (my personal impression is that JK regards most of the human race with contempt); he may despise them; he may think they’re dumb crackers; but T-H-A-T-’-S N-O-T W-H-A-T H-E S-A-I-D.

What he said was: “You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.”

Who is stuck in Iraq? Not the common soldier, who just does a tour of duty, as Kerry himself knows from (sorry to bring it up) experience. Who’s stuck in Iraq? George W. Bush is stuck in Iraq. That was the point of Kerry’s joke. Which he botched. No fair-minded person, watching Kerry deliver those lines, could think otherwise.

I’m not carrying any water for John Kerry. I wrote this about John Kerry, and a good deal more uncomplimentary stuff besides. I don’t like John Kerry. I didn’t vote for John Kerry. Truth is truth, though, even when applied to John Kerry. If you can’t handle the truth, that’s your problem.

Derb is right, IMHO. (Hat tip: Aaron.) So is Andrew Sullivan:

[T]he ad lib was obviously ambiguous - and there is, alas, a plausible inference to make it mean what some have jumped on. I understand why, if Kerry really didn’t mean that at all, he resists apologizing. I understand the rage at the cynicism of the way the right-wing machine has blown this out of all perspective.

But just as the president has to deal with reality, so does Kerry. The reality is that all the Bush machine needs for traction is a plausible inference - not even a probable one - and they have an issue. And that’s all Kerry needs to apologize for. It came out wrong. He can explain what he meant and still apologize if others interpreted it differently. And an apology like that kills this non-issue before it continues to obscure the life-and-death matters we have to deal with.

Kerry finally did issue that apology, but as Jim Geraghty says, it was “the right words, 24 hours too late.” When will politicians learn that it’s almost always the reaction to the mistake, not the mistake itself, that does the most damage? Argh.

“The universe of subjects upon which he doesn’t blog is smaller than that upon which [he] does.” —a poster named San Pedro, describing my blog on ND Nation (where they’re predictably annoyed that I entered the USC ticket lottery). Heh.

Winning numbers are supposed to be announced this evening on the SUB website.

UPDATE: The winning numbers are out.

You can all rest easy. I didn’t win.