More on New Jersey
I'll retract the line about "grounds for a riot" -- one day later it looks awful.

Andrew Sullivan shares my near-rage. In fairness, at some point (pretty recently too) he became a partisan hack. He really didn't used to be.

Mickey Kaus as the voice of reason.

And Joanne Jacobs with the California angle.

This whole "candidate drops out this late" thing still stinks to me. But if it's an accept practice then what on Earth is Bill Simon waiting for?

(My current plan is to write in Riordan.)

This is probably a fascinating book
A conservative's case for animal rights, as mentioned in this Matt Labash column.

Being a rules-driven bastard
In the event of a vacancy, howsoever caused, among candidates nominated at primaries, which vacancy shall occur not later than the 51st day before the general election, or in the event of inability to select a candidate because of a tie vote at such primary, a candidate shall be selected in the following manner...
-NJ Statute 19:13-20, quoted here, emphasis mine.

At least according to my watch, Election Day is way less than 51 days way.

If you want to write in Frank Lautenberg or Bill Clinton or whoever, be my guest (those of you who are registered to vote in New Jersey, which come to think of it is probably one fewer of you than I thought when I started typing this).

So if the New Jersey court ruled the other way would that be grounds for a riot? You only think I'm being facetious.

Is this a "level playing field"?
Is anyone else just insulted by this idea? Comments in no particular order:

1. This (Cochrane) is what you get when people figure out they can play the race card to get their own piece of the pie.

2. It's also what you get when trial lawyers effectively run the country.

3. Spot the innumeracy! (Hint: s***** s***.) In consecutive paragraphs:
Dr. Janice Madden, a labor economist, determined that black coaches averaged 1.1 more wins per season than white coaches and led their teams to the playoffs 67 percent of the time compared with 39 percent of the time for white coaches.

But Cochran noted there have been only five black head coaches since 1986 -- Art Shell, Dennis Green, Tony Dungy, Ray Rhodes and Herman Edwards. Only Indianapolis' Dungy and Edwards of the New York Jets are currently employed as head coaches.

4. If the NFL were actually crazy enough to do this, I would buy a field-level ticket just to see the game where the visiting coach was the first one to benefit from this, to scream affirmative action at him until my lungs gave out.

(This would probably be in Oakland, which would lead to irony on a few levels.)

And I'm not even (yet, at least) a bigot.

Garden State Culture
Why would the state of New Jersey even have a poet laureate to begin with?

Maybe I'm a philistine but I think we could avoid all the tough "censorship" questions if governments got out of arts patronage period. "Made possible by a grant from Mr. and Mrs. X" seems to work a lot better than "your tax dollars at work."

Someone should make me put my money where my mouth is and write a little check to some sort of community theater. It's a better use of the money than my alma mater's swollen endowment, though maybe not as good a use as one of my usual charities (typically ASPCA and the like, if you care).