OK, Wall Street Journal — don’t write about college football. Ever. Our regional/local papers across the football-mad areas of the South and the Midwest can do a good enough job writing stories that send a blinding flash of the obvious. Apparently, ooh, a vast majority of football coaches, especially college coaches, tend to be conservative.

Well, hell. You could knock us over with a Blake Mitchell.

Florida State head coach (and Birmingham native) Bobby Bowden said in the story, “I’d say that sounds likely — very likely. … In coaching, you’ve got to have more discipline and you’ve got to be more strict and just conservative, I think. It fits with the Republicans.”

Unfortunately, the piece also quotes noted fraud Lou Holtz, which is like talking to former U.S. Rep. Jim Traficant about ethics. Regardless, it seems that 74.3 percent of contributions to the presidential nominees last year from college and pro coaches (we have to assume they only looked at FBS coaches — the story doesn’t say either way) went to U.S. Sen. John McCain.

Tom Osborne, legendary Nebraska coach and former three-term member of the U.S. House, said, “There’s an awful lot of people who want to be in coaching for the number of jobs. It’s highly competitive. And many of them have had to spend a fair amount of time as graduate assistants, interns — as much as four, five, six, seven, eight years — making very, very little money to get into the profession. And they will work 70, 80, 90 hours a week during the season. I think that background — adherence to discipline, sometimes sacrifice, loyalty to core values—those things tend to have people move in that direction.”

For the next WSJ story, it’ll say that “offense wins games, but defense wins championships.”

In the past, as in the most recent election cycle, Gov. Mark Sanford used his coterie of independent groups to run ads favorable to his slate of candidates, who were, ironically, running against fellow Republicans.

The Governor has taken to the airwaves again, this time courtesy of his group, “Carolinians for Reform.” Of course, the names and staff for these organizations are basically interchangeable, so the name barely matters.

However, and here is the kicker: CfR was the group Sanford gave state grant money to after the National Governors Association convention. Maybe the Governor does not understand that people know how to use Google (he should probably tell Mr. Kuyk that). Maybe he does not care, period. In the event that taxes may have to be raised, it does not take a brilliant pollster to find out that people would be willing to shell out an extra couple bucks for good schools and secure prisons.

Wonkette is already on top of the matter and reposted the video below.

Interestingly today, Sanford combined this ad with bypassing the S.C. media and going directly to The Washington Post. After a number of years of digesting and dissecting the Governor’s pablum, most journalists in this state have figured out how to separate the wheat from the chaff, and that is not good for Sanford’s ambitions.

So, he went to talk to Chris Cillizza. In the interview, Sanford admitted that the issue was a political loser. But, that is what gets him off. If he really thinks that pulling stunts like this is what is going to get him the Republican nomination in 2012, then he truly is out to lunch. The national Republican Party does not nominate people like Sanford to be its presidential candidate these days. Normally, it is someone who has bided their time (McCain, Dole), an establishment figure (Dole, Bush Sr.) a legacy (Bush Jr.), or preferably a combination of any two of the three factors.

And, has been said many times, Sanford does not play well with others. This appears to be another one of those circumstances.

An irregular commentary.

You could take a person from 1994, drop them into 2009, and it would be hard for that person to figure out anything is different. Unfortunately, the national conservative commentariat has devolved into polemics that would look more appropriate years ago.

It is hard to look at the extremist rhetoric of sites like Hot Air, Michelle Malkin and other sites and feel like we have moved on as an electorate. I have seen these posts more often than liberal Web posts because, to be quite honest, Democrats do not have any power in South Carolina. Still, I do not read DailyKos, and only check out the Huffington Post when something silly or unusual comes up.

One of the things that I pride myself on is that me and my friends, no matter their political stripe, do not go to the extremes on policy debates. It is a shame that, these days, commentators are making a headlong push to the edges of debate.

After studying Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky for a solid sophomore year in high school, I became used to reading writings and speeches from the edge of political debate. The fact is, most American voters come down in the middle. Increasingly, voters are leaving both the Democratic and Republican parties and calling themselves independents.

These moves make it even more ridiculous that there is a movement in South Carolina to institute closed primaries. Many voters split tickets, and move from Republican to Democrat, and vice versa, depending on the circumstances. This has been a trend among voters for the past decade, and isn’t stopping any time soon.

As, such, this brings us to the concept of RINOs (Republicans In Name Only). As any good copy editor will tell you, if people call themselves Republicans, or Democrats, then that is what they are. This trend is even more significant when you consider the minority status of the national Republican Party. When you are in the minority, it is not the time to go into a Bolshevik-style argument on ideological purity.

It is the 21st Century. This is a time for big tents. It should not be a problem to lay off the polemics but keep your core beliefs. Even new RNC chairman Michael Steele has figured this out.

“You stay true to what you believe and what you think is going to be in the best interest of the country. That goes back to what I was saying, the debate of ideas,” Steele said on the Tavis Smiley Show. “A debate we are going to be seeing a lot over the next two to four years is how we make the case, one to the other, about the ideas of the day, about the policies of the day. And I will always be respectful of the office of the president, but I have that extra sense of respect because I know someone in there looks like me and his holding down the reigns, and you want to give him every attempt to be successful, as well.

“The key thing to recognize is that we are the conservative party in the United States. We are the conservative opposition to the liberal opposition. Barack Obama and the Democrats have, I think, appropriately staked out the left. We have appropriately staked out the right. From my standpoint, those principles, conservative principles, do matter. They still have resonance with the American people. The country still is a center-right nation. Post-election polls still confirm that. What it means, though, is how we argue the case. In the past, we argued the case in such a way that people feel alienated, they feel that we sit in judgment of their lives, they think that we feel that we know better than they how to do things. What I want to be able to do is lay out the argument. State the case, and let the people decide for themselves which of these polices, these ideas, these candidates, best represents where I am right now. The other challenge we have is to make sure we adapt that ideology to our current circumstances. That doesn’t mean you change what your core beliefs are, but it does mean, when you talk to people, you have to communicate in a language they can appreciate and understand. Communicate in a way in which you don’t alienate them, and that you take those principles, and you reaffirm them in the modern times. We can no longer still talk as if Ronald Reagan is still president of the United States.”

It is the time for all of us to realize the political reality has changed.