We here at Political Vindication will be hosting our first annual fantasy football league. If you are a political blogger that loves the game of football as much as I do, I invite you to join our league and knock me off one of the greatest fantasy football gamers in human history… Uncle Seth the Undefeated! Just drop me an e-mail to join - leave your name and URL of your blog, and I will e-mail you your exclusive invitation to P.V.F.F.L. The league will be hosted through ESPN fantasy sports and is free to all.

Invitations are open to all political ideologies… Conservative, Liberal, Moderate and Ron Paul supporters! The only prerequisite for joining the league is that you are part of a blog that talks politics (DOES NOT HAVE TO BE EXCLUSIVELY A POLITICS BLOG, BUT AT LEAST OCCASIONALLY TALKS POLITICS). You can visit the league office anytime you like to check standings and stats. I will also post weekly results every Monday at Political Vindication. Should be a fun blogger league…good luck!

NOTE: A draft date will be determined sometime in the near future. I will most likely schedule it on a Sunday. If you have problems making the live draft, ESPN allows you to set up your own dept chart so the system will pick for you according the chart that you set up.

If you have any further question, just drop me an e-mail at politicalvindication@hotmail.com

It’s almost football season - God Bless America!

Frank (Uncle Seth)

Jim Geraghty today on the Aimes Iowa Straw Poll:

Good for Team Romney, they did what they had to. Winning by thirteen points tops the George W. Bush standard. But when Fred jumps in, it’s a different race, and Romney’s real competitors are the big dogs - Rudy, Fred, possibly McCain if the news from Petraeus is good, and people give him credit for standing by the surge when no one else wanted to. Also, we have to see if Huckabee really turns this into a springboard, and whether we’re talking about a Big Five instead of a Big Four. Winning Ames with so many rivals staying home (and, I would note, a lower-than-expected turnout) is like being minor-league batting champion. It’s nice, but the big leagues still await.

Me yesterday, same subject:

…Romney did win by double-digits.  But it’s kind of like the early college football season when a Nebraska or a Florida plays Drillbit Tech and “only” wins 35-7 when they should have reached anybody-playing-Charlie-Brown’s-AllStars blowout level.  Yeah, they’re highly ranked, and yeah, they’ll probably be really good this season, but you can’t really point to this game as persuasive proof.

I will accept tickets for two on the next NRO cruise, though, if any complimentary ducats are still available….

UPDATE: AmSpec commits headline infringement….

I didn’t do much thinking ahead about ”To YouTube Or Not To YouTube” debate because, as you and all of Ed’s readers know (or can rummage through his archives to remind themselves), I didn’t think it would matter much one way or the other.  Yes, it’s an obvious lib media ambush, but not necessarily a memorable one if the candidates keep their wits about themselves and gut out the foolishness-suffering for an hour or two.

So how is it that this exercise in political Karaoke is back on?  Simple - CNN kicked the date ahead a couple of months.  Scheduling conflicts were the excuse cited by Giuliani and Romney in the first place, and this move seems to accomodate them.  Rudy has agreed to appear, which pretty much drags Romney into it, and FDT as well, assuming he can get off his “front porch”.

But I don’t think it’s quite that simple.  There’s also the matter of the re-scheduling putting this mass YouTubing in much closer proximity to the Iowa and New Hampshire contests.  Skipping this farce in September would be one thing; doing so not much more than a month before the first primary votes are cast would make impressions, for weal or for woe, that would be a lot more difficult to shrug off if they proved to be unfavorable.

The irony is, of course, that the same thing applies even more strongly to any gaffes the front-runners are provoked into - which, from CNN’s standpoint, is the whole point of using this format.  Ed is, I think, wasting keystrokes “hop[ing] CNN does a better job selecting the questions.”  They’re going to choose the most insulting, insipid, vapid, contemptuous, embarrassing queries they possibly can in order to so collectively humiliate the remaining Republican field that it will almost not matter what answers they give.

What has changed about the YouTube encounter is that CNN has significantly raised the stakes - both of ducking it and of taking part in it.  Now it does matter - and that makes it a “box canyon” that Republican candidates will find correspondingly more difficult to bypass, even while knowing that going through it will run even bigger risks.

Anybody want to tell me again how the “legacy media” has lost its stroke?  Maybe they’re fading at the margins, but their clout seems largely intact if they can compel the Pachyderms to run a telegraphed gauntlet.

TONIGHT’S GUEST ON “A CONVERSATION WITH ANDREA AND… ”

David Marron, a blogger at ThunderRun, recently snagged an interview with a battlefield commander who gave him an overview of your mission in the Iraqi theater of operations. Marron posted about it under the heading:

“What Right Could Look Like”

Tonight at 9 ET, David joins us to tell us all about it. Join us.

*****

No need to stop chirping….