The Racket over Your Bracket

Today on NRO

RAMESH PONNURU & REIHAN SALAM: It was once the Republicans, and it should be again. The Party of Work.

THE EDITORS: Good intentions don't justify bad results. Paul Ryan Is Right.

KEVIN WILLIAMSON: In an age of thumb-typing, the end of penmanship. The Barbarous Relic.

JAMES PETHOKOUKIS: The Florida senator has been laying out innovative, nuanced proposals for domestic-policy reforms. Right On, Rubio.

SLIDESHOW: Navy Blue Angels.

Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty

March 17, 2014

The Racket over Your Bracket

Even if today had not been a snow day here in the greater Washington area, this week would still rank among the least productive ones of the year nationwide. Yes, this week, almost everyone in your office is working on their NCAA brackets. It seems like everybody — even folks with serious duties, pressing deadlines, and major crises erupting — pushes all their work aside, lets the calls go straight to voice mail, and spends an inordinate amount of time struggling over those games with the eight and nine seeds that feel like they could go either way.

Including you-know-who.

As if Bracket Week wasn't a natural distraction as is, now Quicken Loans has decided to offer a billion dollars -- well, a half billion up front, or a bunch of millions every year thereafter — for a perfect bracket.

The odds of you picking a perfect bracket are roughly one in 9 quintillion, and no, I'm not making that up. As David Sarno puts it, "If all 317 million people in the U.S. filled out a bracket at random, you could run the contest for 290 million years, and there'd still be a 99 percent chance that no one had ever won." Then again, if you just end up with one of the twenty most accurate brackets in the Quicken Loan contest, you get $100,000, and that's not bad.

I don't follow college basketball as much as I used to, so if I end up filling out a sheet, I'll be operating with only a bit more knowledge than the people in your office who pick teams based upon which school mascot they like better. Still, I did win an office pool quite a few years back, so let me offer some not-so-fun but pretty functional advice: Pick the higher seeds as often as your gut will allow you. (The one exception: the eight seed only wins 47 percent of the time.)

Sure, there will be upsets, but unless you're a college-basketball junkie with a great instinct for how teams match up, you're not going to pick the right upsets. And the favorite beats the underdog more often than the other way around. In the office pool, you don't have to be perfect; you just need to be less wrong than the other guys who are totally convinced that they know which number four seed will be upset by a number 13 seed. (Number four seeds win 79 percent of the time, so there's a chance that one of the quartet of this year's four-seeds — Michigan State, UCLA, San Diego State, and Louisville — will go home early. But you don't know which one, and if you pick the wrong one, you'll be drawing red 'X's on your brackets all the way through to the Sweet Sixteen.)

Again, this is less fun, but more likely to give you the most wins. So maybe it's worth entering two brackets.

I Don't Think This Guy Respects Our President

Via NBC News producer James Novogrod, the Crimean prime minister jokes that President Obama may as well work for the KGB considering the outcome of the Crimean crisis, and offers this Photoshop:

This Sandoval Guy Looks Like He Knows What He's Doing in Nevada

Congratulations on your second term, Nevada governor Brian Sandoval! Okay, it's not official, but he's pulling a Jindal -- putting together such a solid record in his first term that no top-tier or even second-tier challenger is throwing a hat into the ring to prevent a second term. The AP is saying it's just about over before it begins:

Fifteen challengers filed for the Nevada governor's race by Friday's deadline. But with little name recognition, none pose much of a threat to the re-election of Republican Gov. Brian Sandoval in November.

Sandoval will face four opponents in the June 10 GOP primary. All are newcomers or candidates who file every election with little chance of winning. Nine Democrats also filed, but none can be considered a front-runner to defeat the popular incumbent.

An Independent American Party and a Green Party candidate also filed by the 5 p.m. deadline.

Challengers to Sandoval who make it to November will face a huge financial hurdle. Reports show Sandoval took in more than $3 million last year in contributions for his re-election.

You may recall that four years ago, Rory Reid, the son of Senator Harry Reid ran against Sandoval. He raised $2.1 million and lost, garnering 41.6 percent to Sandoval's 53.4 percent.

Oh, and one other detail:

Rory Reid kept using the word "transparent" last week to describe an elaborate ruse so he could accept a $750,000 contribution from a single political action committee — 75 times the legal limit.

He's right. It was transparent. But not in the way he means it.

This was a transparent attempt to find a loophole in the campaign contribution laws by a gubernatorial candidate apparently desperate for money to try to revive his moribund campaign. And it was specifically designed to be opaque — a master PAC created with a name that belied its true purpose and 91 phony entities with names concocted to mislead.

Whether what Reid did was legal — or should be legal — will be determined later. But this was nothing short of a conspiracy to commit the equivalent of money laundering in a political campaign, where Reid solicited contributions in large amounts for a PAC ($850,000 during one reporting period) and then the money was washed through sham entities in smaller amounts ($10,000 increments) to appear in the candidate's war chest. . . .

The man who insisted during the campaign "we need to build a foundation of trust in Nevada," the man who claimed to have cleaned up the ethical morass left at the Clark County Commission by G-Sting, the man who assailed his opponent for being controlled by special-interest money, began a subterfuge that required cunning deception, murky ethics and special-interest cash.

Remember this the next time his daddy starts yammering on and on about the Koch brothers trying to buy elections and all that nonsense.

The great Jon Ralston recently examined the possibility of Sandoval running against Reid in 2016. Sandoval says he's not thinking about it . . . but Reid certainly seems worried about it.

ADDENDUM: [LANGUAGE WARNING]

Here's the good news. You know that term that pops into your head when you hear a president offering an all-too-perfect anecdote of an all-too-perfect ordinary American writing in to him, offering a comment that just happens to perfectly illuminate the point he wants to make? Like when Bill Clinton gave his 1994 State of the Union Address? Well, someone within the White House — perhaps Bill himself! — had the same thought, too:

This is from the latest Clinton Presidential Library document dump, which I discussed with Fox News Friday afternoon.

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