This is a rare case where I think (hope?) that even our resident liberal trolls will admit that a Republican president in the same situation would be utterly destroyed by the media for wasting time on something so inane as NCAA brackets at a moment of global high anxiety. Libyan rebels holed up in Benghazi are preparing to make their last stand, with all that entails; cable news is wall-to-wall with updates on how much worse than Three Mile Island the situation in Japan is and whether Californians should be stockpiling iodide. And meanwhile, this guy’s talking about Pitt’s perimeter game. If you want to equivocate on world events that have captured the public’s imagination, okay (well, not okay), but can we at least deep-six the lighthearted photo ops until we know for sure that a cesium cloud isn’t headed for Tokyo? Says John Podhoretz, “We’re going on four weeks now, or more, that Barack Obama has been reading My Pet Goat.” Except he’s not just reading it. He’s doing ESPN segments about it.

This is just a brief snippet from his interview with a Pittsburgh TV station; the ESPN chat will air tomorrow. As for my own picks: I’ve got Qaddafi in the Libyan regional, radioactive steam over the containment vessels out east, and China over Duke in the final. At the buzzer.