My latest cigar review is now up here.

After my review of the La Gloria Cubana Wavell Natural, Jerry from Stogie Review commented that he couldn’t wait for my take on the Serie R. So after work on Friday, I stopped as usual at my local cigar store and decided that I might as well pick one up. After all, it’s never too early in my cigar reviewing career to start taking requests, right?

For those of you who are interested, my latest cigar review is here.

The CAO Brazilia has long been one of my favorite smokes–I always have a couple on hand in my humidor. It’s perfect for a quiet, contemplative smoke, which is what I was in the mood for tonight. So I grabbed one of these and headed outside with my MP3 player to enjoy a smoke on the porch. My wife was kind enough to bring me two fingers of scotch to go with it (Talisker Single Malt, Aged 18 Years), and I found that the combination of a beautiful spring evening, some Johnny Cash, and a great cigar and scotch pairing made for a fantastic evening.

Read the whole thing.

Just saw Iron Man a little bit ago, and it was very, very good. I was going to write up more, but Jim Henley said pretty much everything that I was going to say. So just read his post.

27 Days to June 1…

In addition to writing about politics and current events up at Outside the Beltway, I am now “on staff” at the Cigar Review site CigarJack.net. You can read my first review of the La Gloria Cubana Wavell here.

I know what you’re thinking, though–what about this site?

Well, I have plans. Big plans. There probably won’t be much posting here for the next month or so, but I’d urge you to come back on June 1. It’s going to be a whole new thing…

Do you hear that strange, horn like sound in the distance? That’s the First Trump, marking the beginning of the Apocalypse. In other words, Guns N Roses is actually going to release Chinese Democracy.

Guns N’ Roses stated on its website that the band is ”in negotiations for the release of Chinese Democracy and things are going well.” The statement about the ridiculously long-awaited album was included as part of a post about the band’s new management. No other information was included about the record, which was most recently scheduled for release in March 2007.

Time to get Born Again now, kids. Rapture can’t be that far off.

Some humor for your Friday.

From Roderick Long, via Reason Hit & Run.

“He looks like a man, but he’s a legend…

…and his name is the Doctor.”

Just so you can’t say nobody told you it was coming back.

“I mean, who could possibly think that any sort of tyranny could fall upon a country like this one? Obviously, that is a ridiculous proposition. If we were falling under the yoke of tyranny, there would be warning signs. The state would be building torture chambers, dragging people away without trial, and instituting massive programs of indiscriminate surveillance of citizens. There would be wars of aggression, built upon lies for the purpose of lashing out at the world and seizing territory. Until such things happen, what do we have to fear?”
– Thoreau

Okay, I’ll be the first to admit that my bracket was terrible–I had Texas beating Memphis to advance to the Final Four, which just goes to show what I know. But I’m going to throw myself on the mercy of the court because I simply didn’t have much time to follow basketball this year, so my pro-KU, pro-Big 12 prejudices dominated my thinking about the brackets.

I’ve gotten caught up in a hurry so that I can fully savor tonight’s game.

On Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, all I heard about in the media was about how there was simply no way that Kansas could beat UNC. After all, they had a high speed offense led by Tyler Hansbrough that had been shutting down defenses all year.

Well, after reading that I did some stats looking, and determined that while it was true that UNC had a high powered offense, it’s also true that KU does too–only one that’s more balanced and doesn’t depend on a single player for execution. So that real battle, I decided was going to be on the defensive end. It didn’t take long to conclude that here KU had a monster advantage–UNC’s defense was, at the time, ranked only 17th in the nation, and its performance tended to be worse against top-25 teams. So I went around obnoxiously telling everyone I talked to the game about on Friday and Saturday (before the game) that KU’s defense was going to be the reason why KU wins the game.

And, as it turns out, I was right.

Defense, however, is not Memphis’s weak point. They’ve got some great action and good shot blockers, and have been consistently performing well all year. Indeed, as every sports columnist in the country has noted–KU and Memphis boast similar offensive strategies. I agree–we should be looking at a fast-paced, high scoring game. In all probability. And in a fast-paced, high scoring game, I have to give a slight edge to the Jayhawks. The simple reason?

Depth. KU is balanced enough down the bench that will simply have the ability to out-rotate players over Memphis. In a fast paced game, that can make all the difference. It certainly made a big difference against UNC, who staged a pretty scary comeback but couldn’t make it stick because their players just. got. tired.

There is also, I admit, something nagging me in the back of my mind. As noted above, I do agree with sports pundrity that we’re likely to see a fast-paced, high scoring game–lots of intensity and crowd pleasing steals and alley oops.

But here’s thing…

Bill Self likes to mix it up. He likes to focus on other team’s weaknesses and stab at them, like he did with weak side defense against UNC. KU and Memphis typically play with similar styles–fast pace, etc. But where KU almost stumbled in the tournament was against Davidson–who managed to slow down the tempo of the game and make it a grinding defensive and outside shooting battle.

Here’s the thing–when it comes to the frontcourt and post, KU has an edge over Memphis. I can’t help but wonder if it might not be a bad strategy for KU to simply slow the game down by playing a zone and keeping Memphis to the perimeter, creating a lower-scoring, outside shooting battle. That’s the kind of game Self liked to coach for Illinois. I don’t expect to see that, but I might not be too suprised if it happens.

In either case, I do think that if KU can keep their mistakes to a minimum, they have an edge over Memphis and will take the national title for the first time in 20 years. We’ll know for sure tonight.

“What Roy Williams needed was a comeback for the ages. What he got was a disappointing dose of payback - a chance to see what it feels like when Kansas breaks his heart.”
– whoever wrote the AP wire story on KU’s absolute THUMPING of North Carolina

Well, it’s that time of year again, so let me share with you who the Final Four this year will be:

Kansas
Duke UCLA
North Carolina
Texas Memphis

The best game of the tournament will be the KU-UNC game, but that’s not to say I’m not going to enjoy my beloved Jayhawks kick the ever loving snot out of Duke Texas Memphis to take the national title this year.

This one’s mostly for Alex. I’m pretty sure he’ll find this as amusing as I did.

This is for those who don’t recognize the style of the image.

This is for those who don’t get the teapot reference.

“Occasionally, I am a human being like everybody else.” — Hillary Clinton

Which begs the question, of course. What, exactly, is Hillary Clinton when she’s not a human being?

Well, it’s that time of year again, so let me share with you who the Final Four this year will be:

Kansas
Duke UCLA
North Carolina
Texas

The best game of the tournament will be the KU-UNC game, but that’s not to say I’m not going to enjoy my beloved Jayhawks kick the ever loving snot out of Duke Texas to take the national title this year.

Well, it’s that time of year again, so let me share with you who the Final Four this year will be:

Kansas
Duke
North Carolina
Texas

The best game of the tournament will be the KU-UNC game, but that’s not to say I’m not going to enjoy my beloved Jayhawks kick the ever loving snot out of Duke to take the national title this year.

Because everybody tries to kill Hitler their first time.

“By teaching people to hold their beliefs up to experiment, Mythbusters is doing more to drag humanity out of the unscientific dark ages than a thousand lessons in [scientific] rigor. Show them some love.”
-xkcd

There has been a fair amount of coverage over this story:

Alton Logan was convicted of killing a security guard at a McDonald’s in Chicago in 1982. Police arrested him after a tip and got three eyewitnesses to identify him. Logan, his mother and brother all testified he was at home asleep when the murder occurred. But a jury found him guilty of first degree murder.

… Logan, who maintains he didn’t commit the murder, thought they were “crazy” when he was arrested for the crime.

Attorneys Dale Coventry and Jamie Kunz knew Logan had good reason to think that, because they knew he was innocent. And they knew that because their client, Andrew Wilson, who they were defending for killing two policemen, confessed to them that he had also killed the security guard at McDonald’s - the crime Logan was charged with committing.

… The problem was the killer was their client. So, legally, they had to keep his secret even though an innocent man was about to be tried for murder.

This scenario is every lawyer’s nightmare.  And I’ve been following the story in a few places, partly because I took the Multistate Professional Responsibility Exam last saturday.

I can perfectly understand people finding the result in this circumstance unfortunate and distasteful.  I do too.  But I’ve seen far too much rationalization and twisting of legal rules to try and make these lawyers into even bigger monsters by trying to convince themselves that these lawyers didn’t have to violate legal ethics rules to achieve justice in this case.

The unfortunate truth is that the lawyer’s duty to maintain a client’s confidentiality did prevent these lawyers from ethically revealing what they learned to the public.  Lawyers have an obligation, just like doctors, priests, and other professionals who need intimate knowledge of their clients in order to do their job effectively, not to reveal that information to others.

There are exceptions, and these attorneys were clearly very cognizant of them.  These attorneys knew that confidentiality can be broken to save a life, so they decided to break confidentiality if innocent defendant received the death penalty.   But there seem to be a number of people who want to think that the confidentiality requirement had far more exceptions than it really does.

There is an exception for ongoing crimes and crimes a client intends to commit.  But since there’s no crime in not admitting to a crime you committed, the exception doesn’t apply.

There’s an exception for when the client waives its confidentiality, but in this case the killer only agreed to that after his death.

There’s an exception for disputes between the attorney and the client.  Typically this means that if a lawyer claims he did 20 hours of work and the client claims he did only 10, the attorney can show what he did for those 20 hours.   Likewise, if the client accused his attorney of committing the murder, the attorney can break privilege to defend himself from the accusation.

I’m not going to say this was an ideal situation.  It was far from it.  But the attorneys did the best they could with the constraints they were under.  I’m sure it ate at their consciences, but revealing what their client told them would have opened them up to disbarment proceedings.  With that hanging over their heads, and the ethical rules telling them they had a duty to the client they represented, I can’t blame them for staying quiet about it.

“Saying that Hillary has Executive Branch experience is like saying Yoko Ono was a Beatle.”
– Jsn

(link via Andrew Sullivan)