Heh:

Thanks to Zell Miller, there is a rule to deal with Joe Lieberman.

Lieberman’s endorsement of Republican John McCain disqualifies
him as a superdelegate to the Democratic National Convention under what
is informally known as the Zell Miller rule, according to Democratic
State Chairwoman Nancy DiNardo.

Miller, then a Democratic senator from Georgia, not only
endorsed Republican George Bush four years ago, but he delivered a
vitriolic attack on Democrat John Kerry at the Republican National
Convention.

The Democrats responded with a rule disqualifying any Democrat
who crosses the aisle from being a superdelegate. Lieberman will not be
replaced, DiNardo said.

The Yaley Daily has more. (Hat tip: NRO.)

I can’t say I blame the Democrats for this one. I’m a little surprised they were planning to invite him to Denver in the first place, actually.

I must admit, though, at purely impish level, I’m mildly disappointed. It would have been extremely amusing to hear something like this at the convention:

Mr. Speaker, the Great State of Connecticut, the Nutmeg State, home of the NCAA women’s basketball national champion UConn Huskies… [YAY!! WHOO!!]

…and home of the Big East runner-up UConn men’s basketball Huskies, who recently made yet another trip to the Sweet Sixteen… [Yay!]

…and home of the Big East co-champion UConn football Huskies… [YAY!]

…Connecticut, with its great senior senator, a fine American and a loyal Democrat, Christopher J. Dodd…  [HURRAH!]

…and with its four fine Democratic representatives, Rosa DeLauro, John Larson, Joe Courtney and Chris Murphy… [Woo!]

…Connecticut, the Constitution State… ["Vote!"]

…the state that, in 1687, struck a blow for democracy by hiding its state charter in the Charter Oak… ["VOTE!!"]

…and the state that will, in 2008, strike another blow for democracy… ["VOTE!!!"]

…by helping end eight disastrous years of Bush/Cheney/McCain government… ["Boo!" "Yay!" "VOTE!!!!"]

…by casting its seven electoral votes for the next Democratic president of the United States… ["Hear, hear!" "Hurrah!" "VOTE!!!!!"]

…Mr. Speaker, Connecticut casts 35 votes for Senator Barack Obama, 25 votes for Senator Hillary Clinton, and 1 vote for Senator John McCain.

Hee hee. Would’ve been fun. Oh, well.

Let ‘er rip!

(Members of the Newington High School Class of ‘99 with long memories will understand the reference in the title of this post. Everyone else, move along, nothing to see here…)

So says the latest Rasmussen poll, taken on Sunday — the day after South Carolina, the day before Ted Kennedy. Obama 40%, Clinton 40%, Edwards 11%, Other 3%, Undecided 6%.

This is great news for Obama, as it’s the first empirical evidence that Obama’s recent momentum is actually translating into increased support in a Super Tuesday state. Previous polls, including a Hartford Courant poll 10 days ago, had Clinton leading by double digits.

The big question is whether this will start a trend. RCP’s Latest Polls page will be worth watching in the coming days, to see whether other post-S.C. (and post-Teddy) polls in Super Tuesday states also show Obama gains.

According to a Hartford Courant poll, Arizona’s John McCain is supported by 39% of likely GOP voters in Connecticut, well ahead of his rivals from bordering states, New York’s Rudy Giuliani (16%) and Massachusetts’s Matt Romney (11%).

Connecticut’s 27 pledged GOP delegates are all awarded to the winner of the February 5 primary. The state has been considered prime “Rudy Country” — along with neighboring New York (87 delegates) and New Jersey (52), both of which are also winner-take-all — so this is definitely bad news for Rudy. (The latest New Jersey poll shows him 2 points behind McCain in the Garden State, and the latest New York poll shows the rivals in a dead heat in Giuliani’s home state.)

On the Democratic side, it’s Clinton 41%, Obama 27% and Edwards 9%. Per national party rules, Connecticut’s Democratic delegates are awarded proportionally.

When Tennessee plays Memphis on February 23, will it be a #1 vs. #2 matchup between in-state rivals (and Jay’s alma maters)? Could be, if both teams keep winning, and if Kansas loses between now and then. The Tigers and Vols are #1 and #3 in the new AP poll.

Speaking of #1 and #3, the top-ranked UConn women beat #3 UNC yesterday. w00t! Go Huskies! (#2, of course, is Tennessee.)

Not that anybody is really focused on college basketball today, but Gonzaga and UConn are underway in Boston.

UPDATE: Zags win, 85-82. w00t!

The women’s soccer NCAA Tournament has reached the Elite Eight, and an astounding number of schools that I care about are still competing for the championship. Both of my alma maters, USC and Notre Dame, are still alive, as is my original home-state team, UConn. And my two least-favorite universities, UCLA and Duke, are still alive as well. The only thing that could have made the bracket any more Loy-o-riffic would be if my current hometown team, Tennessee, had beaten Portland in the Sweet Sixteen to set up a date with the hated Bruins.

As things stand, it’s Portland that must visit UCLA, while USC travels to West Virginia, Notre Dame hosts Duke, and UConn visits Florida State, all on Friday evening. Potentially, we could have a USC-UCLA semifinal on one side of the bracket and a UConn-Notre Dame semifinal on the other. Will the Women of Troy need to beat both of their school’s archrivals to win the championship? Heh!

For what it’s worth, in the final regular-season coaches’ poll, UCLA was #1, Portland #3, USC #9, Notre Dame #11, West Virginia #12, Florida State #14, UConn #24, and Duke unranked. So I guess that means both the Irish and the Trojans will be favored on Friday. Go ND and ‘SC, beat Duke and WVU!

Former Connecticut governor William O’Neill, who ran the state for 10 years and 10 days — including the first nine-plus years of my life — has died at 77.

“Bill O’Neill was one of the titans of Connecticut politics,” said current governor Jodi Rell. “No description of him would be complete without the words ‘decency’ and ‘fairness,’ and he understood that government must take its lead from the people it serves.” Former state Dem chairman John Droney called O’Neill “the Harry Truman of Connecticut.”

For the first time since 1993, the Newington High School football Indians won at Wethersfield this morning, beating their annual Thanksgiving Day rivals by a score of 9-7. Woohoo! [UPDATE: According to commenter Dave, the Indians won on a field goal with 26 seconds left. Wow! It was a 31-yard kick by quarterback/kicker Bobby Hemmann. More than 2,000 people were in attendance to watch the most dramatic NHS-WHS ending in many years.]

The Newington victory breaks a six-game Eagles home winning streak against the Indians that began my freshman year at NHS. Overall, counting games at both schools, NHS has now taken 3 of the last 4 after losing ten straight to WHS.

If not for Masuk’s 17-14 comeback win over Newtown last night, Newington would be celebrating more than just a win over Wethersfield right now — they’d also be celebrating a spot in the state playoffs. Instead, the Indians finish #5 in Class L, and they’ll have to be satisfied with a 9-1 record, Newington’s best winning percentage in 27 years. (Details after the jump.)

NHS is one of just three teams in the state to finish with one loss yet be denied a playoff berth. The others are Avon and Jonathan Law of Class M. Twelve other one-loss teams are still alive for a state championship.

Newington’s only loss was a 31-6 defeat at Bristol Eastern on October 20. The Lancers finished 10-0 and are the #1 seed in Class M.

It’ll be interesting to see how Newington does next season without superstar tailback Nathan Pagan, a 5-foot-9, 185-pound senior who is being recruited by several Division I-AA colleges. Coming into the Wethersfield game, Pagan had 1,816 yards and 32 touchdowns on 232 carries this season, and he ranks third all-time in Connecticut for both rushing yards and rushing touchdowns in his career. His arrival at NHS directly coincided with the Indians’ return to glory: they were 13-89-2 (.135) during the decade before he enrolled, then 31-9-1 (.768) during his four-year career. Will the 2008 season, the first of the post-Pagan era, be a return to the bad old days, or will Newington be able to maintain the momentum of the past four years? Only time will tell.

For now, I’m just glad they beat Wethersfield. I think a recitation of the fight song would be in order, eh?

We’re the boys of Newington High
The best team on the field
And we are the boys that do or die
The team that will not yield
(Rah! Rah! Rah!)
With our colors gold and blue
We’re out to win this game
‘Cuz we are the boys that
Fight! Right! Through!
Bring Newington High to fame!

(more…)

Masuk’s 17-14 victory over Newtown, combined with losses by East Hartford (to Manchester) and Windsor (to Bloomfield), have mathematically eliminated Newington from playoff contention before the Indians even take the field against Wethersfield in their annual Thanksgiving Day rivalry tomorrow morning.

Including “bonus points” from games that affect the playoff contenders’ strength of schedule, Masuk, currently ranked #4 in Class L, is guaranteed to finish with a point average of no worse than 124, while #5-ranked Newington’s maximum possible average is 123.

In addition to being stuck behind Masuk, the Indians also cannot leapfrog #1 Bunnell or #2 Staples, even if either loses tomorrow. Bunnell can finish with an average of no worse than 145.6; Staples is guaranteed at least a 123.3 average. #3 Conard, which has finished its season, can do no worse than its current 126 average.

So the Indians are out of the state championship hunt. That sucks. With star tailback Nathan Pagan a senior, you had to think, or at least hope, that maybe this was their year. But as it turns out, their one loss of the season — a 31-6 setback at undefeated Class M power Bristol Eastern on October 20 — was too much to overcome, as too many other Class L teams finished either unbeaten or with one loss, and all of them had stronger schedules than Newington.

But there’s still plenty to play for tomorrow. The Wethersfield game is always important, regardless of any outside implications, and in this case the Indians are looking for their first victory at Wethersfield since 1993, as I mentioned previously. Also, with a win, Newington would finish the season 9-1 — their best season, judging by win-loss percentage, since they won the state championship at 11-1 in 1980.

Back in September, the football team at nearby Bearden High School here in West Knoxville lost to archrival Farragut High School for the eighth straight time, 35-28 in 2 OTs. Although I didn’t go, it was an epic Friday-night football clash by all accounts — and now it’s going to have a sequel, in the state playoffs this Friday night.

Meanwhile, back home in Connecticut, the Newington Indians are on the playoff bubble. They need to hope Newtown beats Masuk tomorrow night, and then the Indians must take care of business on Thanksgiving Day against their archrival, Wethersfield.

More on both Bearden and Newington after the jump.

(more…)

Yesterday and today mark the 10th anniversary of a pair of tragedies that anyone who was at Newington High School at the time remembers well: the unrelated deaths, on consecutive days, of junior Bob Aniello and freshman Jen Partridge. Back in 1997, I made a memorial website for Bob and Jen, which is still online.

Bob (or "BoB," as he was widely known) was a classmate of mine, and a friend. He lived in Hartford but was bused to school in Newington, which was unusual because he was white; most of the "Project Concern" kids, like most Hartford residents generally, were black or Hispanic. Bob once joked that he could cross the street in Hartford without looking, and traffic would stop for him, because people "don’t want to kill the last white kid in Hartford." :)

Me and Bob at an NHS football game.

Alas, Bob wasn’t impervious to his own demons. He committed suicide on Tuesday night, November 18, 1997 — a total shock to everyone who knew him. The school was in stunned mourning all day Wednesday after the news broke… and then things got even worse. That afternoon, Jen — who I didn’t know personally, but who shared a lot of mutual friends with Bob — was hit by a car while riding her bike, and killed.

Needless to say, it was a terrible, terrible week at NHS. The deaths were bookended by a pair of nonfatal car accidents involving NHS kids, one of them quite serious and involving two close friends of mine (one of whom was also very close to Bob), another less serious but on school grounds Friday morning, mere minutes before the principal was to address the school about the week’s tragedies. There were also unverified rumors of other tragedies — e.g., a janitor suffering a heart attack — and fears of "copycat" suicides. It felt like the whole world was crashing down around us; people were talking about the school being "cursed." A week that had begun with normal high-school concerns — I remember my friend Angela off-handedly saying on Monday morning that she hoped she could "survive this week," meaning get all her work done — ended with the trauma of Bob’s wake after school on Friday, and his memorial service that night.

Hard to believe it’s been ten years since all that happened. I vividly recall that Wednesday morning, November 19, 1997; I was in Dr. Pilotte’s chemistry class when someone asked me if I’d heard about Bob, and I said no, and they told me he’d killed himself the night before. I spent much of the rest of the class staring, in numb disbelief, at a poster of a frog on Dr. Pilotte’s desk. (I always hated that frog, for the rest of the school year.) I remember getting home from school that day, my dad asking me how my day had been, and responding, "Terrible." I didn’t even know how to put it into words. And then I also vividly remember the phone call later that night, around 10:30 PM, with the rumor that somebody else had died (we didn’t yet know who), and watching the 11 o’clock news as WFSB’s Dennis House reported that an NHS freshman had been hit by a car. But which freshman? I didn’t find out until the next morning.

Over the weekend, as I was sorting through a box of old photos from both high school and college, it occurred to me that when I look back on my NHS and USC experiences, I tend to mentally compartmentalize them into "before" and "after" periods, in each case defined by a tragic event in the fall of my junior year. College, of course, is split into pre-9/11 and post-9/11. But just as profoundly, high school is split into pre-11/18 and post-11/18.

It’s cliché to say it, but I lost a bit of my innocence that week, and nothing ever seemed quite the same afterwards, because sudden, tragic deaths of friends and loved ones had become a real possibility, not just something that happens on TV or in the movies, or to other people. Ten years ago, it happened to all of us at NHS. (And it’s happened far too often since. As my dad wrote after a similar string of tragedies two Novembers ago, "Bob Aniello. Jen Partridge. Christina Guyon. Sarah LeFoll. Brendan Horan. Coach Richard Hastings. Master Police Officer Pete Lavery. NHS Resource Officer Ciara McDermott." Also Elizabeth Carlson, Chris Kotch and Joe Michalski. And, more recently, Daniel Gorski, Jon Calderone, Nick Tine, Tim Hazelton, and Kerri Donlin. Terrible tragedies all. So many young people, taken too soon — four of them from my graduating class alone, Bob included.)

Anyway… rest in peace, BoB and Jen.

West Virginia beat Louisville yesterday — in a game attended by Trojan CFB blog road-tripper Jonathan Tu, who will drive to Knoxville today for tomorrow’s Tennessee-Arkansas game — in Morgantown by a score of 38-31, thereby keeping the pressure on surprise Big East leader UConn. If WVU (3-1 Big East) had lost, UConn (4-0) would have had a two-game lead over everyone in the conference, meaning they could have lost any one of their final three games, including the November 24 game at West Virginia, and still won the conference. Instead, as things stand now, the Huskies can still finish 2-1 and win the conference, but one of the wins must be over West Virginia.

UConn plays Cincinnati, which is also still in the Big East hunt at 2-2, Saturday at Cincy. The Huskies have yet to prove they can beat a quality opponent on the road, so this is a big game, even though UConn could lose it and still win the conference by beating Syracuse and WVU. The Huskies’ three consecutive wins over Louisville, South Florida and Rutgers were all at Rentschler Field; their only two victories away from East Hartford have been over Duke and Pitt, and their one loss was on the road against Virginia. Two of their final three games are on the road against tough opponents: the Bearcats on Saturday, the Mountaineers in two weeks.

Also, if UConn beats Cincinnati and follows it up with a home win over lowly Syracuse next week, and West Virginia loses at Cincy next week, the Huskies would clinch the conference before even taking the field against WVU.

I never got around to writing my planned “UConn is for real” post after they beat USF, but Sunday Morning Quarterback had a good post on Tuesday titled “Getting to know UConn.” In it, SMQ examines how the Huskies have managed to achieve this level of success, and then asks, “is UConn good? Does it matter?” A comparison to 2006-07 Wake Forest is made. Those guys, you may recall, ended up in a BCS bowl.

My normally "blue" hometown of Newington, Connecticut unexpectedly swung Republican in yesterday’s election, with 35-year-old Jeff Wright — the older brother of one of my high-school classmates — defeating Maureen Klett for mayor, and Republicans taking over majorities on the board of education and, for the first time in 16 years, the town council. My dad says it was a "tax revolt." Wright is the first Republican elected mayor of Newington since Rodney Mortensen won on the GOP line in 1991. (Mortsensen subsequently won as an independent in 1993, and again as an independent two years ago. Democratic mayors were elected in 1995, 1997, 1999, 2001 and 2003.)

Here in Knoxville, by contrast, Election Day was a real snoozer. Most of the races were decided at the primary stage.

In South Bend, all the incumbents won. In Mesa, voters approved the construction of a $250 million resort and adventure park. And in Denver, a series of infrastructure bonds and tax increases appears likely to pass.

In Kentucky, indicted Republican governor Ernie Flitcher was defeated in a landslide. But in Mississippi, another Republican governor, possible vice-presidential contender Haley Barbour, won easily. More results of national interest here.

Also, back in Connecticut, the statewide debut of optical scan voting machines, replacing the venerable old lever machines, appears to have gone well. Of course, voting systems always perform "well" — until there’s a close election. :)

Any interesting election results where y’all live?

UPDATE: Via Anonymous Hoosier, news of another stunning Republican mayoral upset — in Indianapolis, where underfunded outsider Greg Ballard ousted an incumbent Democrat who had been expected to cruise to an easy victory. Some are calling it "the biggest upset in Indiana political history." The Star says "voter anger about rising taxes and crime blew massive change into the
City-County Building, from the mayor’s office to the council, where
Republicans also recaptured the majority they lost four years ago."

UPDATE 2: Elsewhere, Democrats were more successful. (Hat tip: Angrier & Angrier.)

Speaking of teams with histories of futility having successful seasons, the Newington High School football Indians are now 5-0 after beating Bulkeley 55-21 on Friday — in a game that saw senior Nathan Pagan surpass 5,000 career rushing yards, making him the ninth player in state history to achieve that milestone.

Oh, and the Indians are ranked #10 in the state by the Hartford Courant — soon to jump to #9, probably, as #8 Fairfield Prep got crushed by unranked Cheshire 42-7 Friday and will presumably tumble out of the rankings.

Newington is also one of five remaining undefeated teams in Class L, though if the season ended today, they wouldn’t qualify for the playoffs due to their #5 ranking. They’ll put their unbeaten record to the test next Friday at Bristol Eastern, which is also 5-0 and ranked #2 in Class M (and #15 in the Courant’s state rankings).