Tuesday, April 07, 2009
Obama's word play
The administration has created a lexicon that masks reality through the gauzy world of euphemism. To the world, it’s just words.
By Jonah Goldberg
USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/
April 7, 2009
President Obama had a grand time in Europe. He wowed the press, met the queen, gave some wonderful news conferences and got virtually none of the major policy concessions he wanted. But he did do a lot of talking, for what that's worth.
And for Obama, that's worth a lot. During the campaign, then-Sen. Obama made it clear that he thought words meant a great deal. "Don't tell me words don't matter," Obama proclaimed. " 'I have a dream' — just words? 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal' — just words? 'We have nothing to fear but fear itself' — just words? Just speeches?"
Give the man points for consistency. He has put rhetorical innovation on an equal footing with policy innovation. Exhibit A: "Overseas contingency operations." That's the Obama administration's term of choice to replace "the long war" or "the global war on terror." No doubt they were inspired by the famous Leo Tolstoy novel, Overseas Contingency Operations and Cessation of Overseas Contingency Operations, later dumbed-down by the publisher to War and Peace.
Janet Napolitano, head of Obama's Department of Homeland Security — primarily created to deal with terrorist attacks in the wake of 9/11 — has decided "terrorist attack" is too hard-edged. It's "man-caused disasters" now. "That is perhaps only a nuance," Napolitano explained to a German newsmagazine, "but it demonstrates that we want to move away from the politics of fear toward a policy of being prepared for all risks that can occur."
Meanwhile, the White House has announced that prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, will no longer be called "enemy combatants." No word yet on what the new term will be. No doubt the poetic euphony of "man-caused disasters" and "overseas contingency operations" sets a very high bar for Obama's Office of Euphemism Generation. But surely "Men Prone to Disaster Causation" or "Overseas Counter-Contingency Operators" are the most obvious choices. My friend Mark Steyn, however, suggests going another way: "Future Facebook Friends."
'Morally tone-deaf'
And that points to just one of the problems with the Obama administration's effort to use words to shape reality. It's morally tone-deaf. Maybe Napolitano is right about the need to bleed fear from our politics (a directive Obama didn't seem to have in mind when he suggested that failure to pass his budget would lead to catastrophe, er, man-caused disaster). But these phrases are morally meaningless. Public safety is an important government function, but, regardless of whether "war on terror" was the right term, it's surely wrong to use language better suited for a salmonella outbreak to describe a conflict with evil men who have American blood on their hands.
We've seen this before. Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton's secretary of State, famously declared that countries such as North Korea would no longer be called "rogue nations" but instead "states of concern," which sounded an awful lot like various poses from a photo shoot with Dr. Phil. One can hope that the problems that came with the Clinton administration's lawyerly approach to terrorism won't be replayed by this administration. President Clinton was very good at vowing to hunt down our enemies after terrorist attacks, but when he left the podium, he was more interested in how his comments played in polls and focus groups than what we were doing to catch the bad guys.
So far it's hard to say definitively how Clintonite Obama's approach really is. His approach toward Iraq and Afghanistan is better than his critics on the right expected and worse than his fans on the left hoped. Indeed, despite the change in jargon, in the war formerly known as "the war on terror," Obama's policies are shockingly in sync with Bush's.
However his policies turn out, it's clear that Obama still puts a great amount of stock in the power of words — his words. In particular he continues to have a candidate's relish for denigrating George W. Bush and a left-wing academic fondness for finding fault with America. In Europe last week, he pledged more "humility" and apologized for America's "arrogance."
Symbolism over substance
Similarly, as befits a very symbolic president, his administration enjoys symbolic gestures. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton worked on the Russians before the Group of 20 summit by giving them a giant red button with the word "reset" on it (or that was the plan; they used the wrong word in Russian). In a meeting with the Russian president, Obama followed up by lamenting the "drift" in Russian-American relations. Putting aside the oddness of giving a big red button to an antagonistic country with a boatload of nuclear weapons, it's still an odd tack to take with the Russians. After all, whatever mistakes the Bush administration may have made, Russia was hardly the aggrieved party. America didn't make Russia invade Georgia, aid Iran or crush democracy. President Bush famously, and naively, saw Vladimir Putin's soul in the Russian leader's eyes. Obama's naiveté may rest in his own belief that his words amount to some kind of Jedi mind trick.
Indeed, Obama spent the week telling Europeans everything they wanted to hear, but got little for it. The French and the Germans still belittled America's "Anglo-Saxon" capitalism and refused to follow our lead.
This might lead to a painful realization for Obama. While he may think words are everything, for our enemies and even our friends, words are — still — just words.
- Jonah Goldberg, editor at large of National Review Online, is a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors.
By Jonah Goldberg
USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/
April 7, 2009
President Obama had a grand time in Europe. He wowed the press, met the queen, gave some wonderful news conferences and got virtually none of the major policy concessions he wanted. But he did do a lot of talking, for what that's worth.And for Obama, that's worth a lot. During the campaign, then-Sen. Obama made it clear that he thought words meant a great deal. "Don't tell me words don't matter," Obama proclaimed. " 'I have a dream' — just words? 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal' — just words? 'We have nothing to fear but fear itself' — just words? Just speeches?"
Give the man points for consistency. He has put rhetorical innovation on an equal footing with policy innovation. Exhibit A: "Overseas contingency operations." That's the Obama administration's term of choice to replace "the long war" or "the global war on terror." No doubt they were inspired by the famous Leo Tolstoy novel, Overseas Contingency Operations and Cessation of Overseas Contingency Operations, later dumbed-down by the publisher to War and Peace.
Janet Napolitano, head of Obama's Department of Homeland Security — primarily created to deal with terrorist attacks in the wake of 9/11 — has decided "terrorist attack" is too hard-edged. It's "man-caused disasters" now. "That is perhaps only a nuance," Napolitano explained to a German newsmagazine, "but it demonstrates that we want to move away from the politics of fear toward a policy of being prepared for all risks that can occur."
Meanwhile, the White House has announced that prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, will no longer be called "enemy combatants." No word yet on what the new term will be. No doubt the poetic euphony of "man-caused disasters" and "overseas contingency operations" sets a very high bar for Obama's Office of Euphemism Generation. But surely "Men Prone to Disaster Causation" or "Overseas Counter-Contingency Operators" are the most obvious choices. My friend Mark Steyn, however, suggests going another way: "Future Facebook Friends."
'Morally tone-deaf'
And that points to just one of the problems with the Obama administration's effort to use words to shape reality. It's morally tone-deaf. Maybe Napolitano is right about the need to bleed fear from our politics (a directive Obama didn't seem to have in mind when he suggested that failure to pass his budget would lead to catastrophe, er, man-caused disaster). But these phrases are morally meaningless. Public safety is an important government function, but, regardless of whether "war on terror" was the right term, it's surely wrong to use language better suited for a salmonella outbreak to describe a conflict with evil men who have American blood on their hands.
We've seen this before. Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton's secretary of State, famously declared that countries such as North Korea would no longer be called "rogue nations" but instead "states of concern," which sounded an awful lot like various poses from a photo shoot with Dr. Phil. One can hope that the problems that came with the Clinton administration's lawyerly approach to terrorism won't be replayed by this administration. President Clinton was very good at vowing to hunt down our enemies after terrorist attacks, but when he left the podium, he was more interested in how his comments played in polls and focus groups than what we were doing to catch the bad guys.
So far it's hard to say definitively how Clintonite Obama's approach really is. His approach toward Iraq and Afghanistan is better than his critics on the right expected and worse than his fans on the left hoped. Indeed, despite the change in jargon, in the war formerly known as "the war on terror," Obama's policies are shockingly in sync with Bush's.
However his policies turn out, it's clear that Obama still puts a great amount of stock in the power of words — his words. In particular he continues to have a candidate's relish for denigrating George W. Bush and a left-wing academic fondness for finding fault with America. In Europe last week, he pledged more "humility" and apologized for America's "arrogance."
Symbolism over substance
Similarly, as befits a very symbolic president, his administration enjoys symbolic gestures. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton worked on the Russians before the Group of 20 summit by giving them a giant red button with the word "reset" on it (or that was the plan; they used the wrong word in Russian). In a meeting with the Russian president, Obama followed up by lamenting the "drift" in Russian-American relations. Putting aside the oddness of giving a big red button to an antagonistic country with a boatload of nuclear weapons, it's still an odd tack to take with the Russians. After all, whatever mistakes the Bush administration may have made, Russia was hardly the aggrieved party. America didn't make Russia invade Georgia, aid Iran or crush democracy. President Bush famously, and naively, saw Vladimir Putin's soul in the Russian leader's eyes. Obama's naiveté may rest in his own belief that his words amount to some kind of Jedi mind trick.
Indeed, Obama spent the week telling Europeans everything they wanted to hear, but got little for it. The French and the Germans still belittled America's "Anglo-Saxon" capitalism and refused to follow our lead.
This might lead to a painful realization for Obama. While he may think words are everything, for our enemies and even our friends, words are — still — just words.
- Jonah Goldberg, editor at large of National Review Online, is a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors.
Obama: Islam Has Shaped the U.S.A.
By Robert Spencer
http://www.frontpagemag.com/
Tuesday, April 07, 2009
President Barack Obama and Turkey's Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan (2nd L) visit the Ottoman-era Sultanahmet Mosque known as the Blue Mosque, in Istanbul April 7, 2009. (Reuters)
“We will convey,” said Barack Obama to the Turkish Parliament Monday, “our deep appreciation for the Islamic faith, which has done so much over the centuries to shape the world — including in my own country.”
Undeniably the Islamic faith has done a great deal to shape the world – a statement that makes no value judgment about exactly how it has shaped the world. It has formed the dominant culture in what is known as the Islamic world for centuries. But what on earth could Obama mean when he says that Islam has also “done so much” to shape his own country?
Unless he considers himself an Indonesian, Obama’s statement was extraordinarily strange. After all, how has the Islamic faith shaped the United States? Were there Muslims along Paul Revere’s ride, or standing next to Patrick Henry when he proclaimed, “Give me liberty or give me death”? Were there Muslims among the framers or signers of the Declaration of Independence, which states that all men – not just Muslims, as Islamic law would have it – are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Were there Muslims among those who drafted the Constitution and vigorously debated its provisions, or among those who enumerated the Bill of Rights, which guarantees – again in contradiction to the tenets of Islamic law – that there should be no established national religion, and that the freedom of speech should not be infringed?
There were not.
Did Muslims play a role in the great struggle over slavery that defined so much of our contemporary understandings of the nature of this republic and of the rights of the individual within it? They did not. Did the Islamic faith shape the way the United States responded to the titanic challenges of the two World Wars, the Great Depression, or the Cold War? It did not. Did the Islamic faith, with its legal apparatus that institutionalizes discrimination against non-Muslims, shape the civil rights movement in the United States? The Civil Rights Act of 1964 mandated equality of access to public facilities – a hard-won victory that came at a great cost, and one that Muslim groups have tried to roll back in the United States recently. One notable example of such attempts was the alcohol-in-cabs controversy at the Minneapolis-St. Paul international airport, when Muslim cabdrivers began to refuse service to customers who were carrying alcohol, on Islamic religious grounds. The core assumption underlying this initiative – that discrimination on the basis of religion is justified – cut right to the heart of the core principle of the American polity, that “all men are created equal,” that is, that they have a right to equal treatment in law and society.
Surveying the whole tapestry of American history, one would be hard-pressed to find any significant way in which the Islamic faith has shaped the United States in terms of its governing principles and the nature of American society. Meanwhile, there are numerous ways in which, if there had been a significant Muslim presence in the country at the time, some of the most cherished and important principles of American society and law may have met fierce resistance, and may never have seen the light of day.
So in what way has the Islamic faith shaped Obama’s country? The most significant event connected to the Islamic faith that has shaped the character of the United States was the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. Those attacks have shaped the nation in numerous ways: they’ve led to numerous innovations in airline security, which in generations to come – if today’s politically correct climate continues to befog minds -- may be added to future versions of the fanciful “1001 Muslim Inventions” exhibition. The Islamic faith has shaped the U.S. since 9/11 in leading to the spending of billions on anti-terror measures, and to the ventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to Guantanamo, and to so many features of the modern political and social landscape that they cannot be enumerated within the space of a single article.
Of course, it is certain that Obama had none of that in mind. But what could he possibly have had in mind? His statement was either careless or ignorant, or both – not qualities we need in a Commander-in-Chief even in the best of times.
- Robert Spencer is a scholar of Islamic history, theology, and law and the director of Jihad Watch. He is the author of eight books, eleven monographs, and hundreds of articles about jihad and Islamic terrorism, including the New York Times Bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His latest book, Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam is Subverting America without Guns or Bombs, is available now from Regnery Publishing.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/
Tuesday, April 07, 2009
President Barack Obama and Turkey's Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan (2nd L) visit the Ottoman-era Sultanahmet Mosque known as the Blue Mosque, in Istanbul April 7, 2009. (Reuters)
“We will convey,” said Barack Obama to the Turkish Parliament Monday, “our deep appreciation for the Islamic faith, which has done so much over the centuries to shape the world — including in my own country.”
Undeniably the Islamic faith has done a great deal to shape the world – a statement that makes no value judgment about exactly how it has shaped the world. It has formed the dominant culture in what is known as the Islamic world for centuries. But what on earth could Obama mean when he says that Islam has also “done so much” to shape his own country?
Unless he considers himself an Indonesian, Obama’s statement was extraordinarily strange. After all, how has the Islamic faith shaped the United States? Were there Muslims along Paul Revere’s ride, or standing next to Patrick Henry when he proclaimed, “Give me liberty or give me death”? Were there Muslims among the framers or signers of the Declaration of Independence, which states that all men – not just Muslims, as Islamic law would have it – are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Were there Muslims among those who drafted the Constitution and vigorously debated its provisions, or among those who enumerated the Bill of Rights, which guarantees – again in contradiction to the tenets of Islamic law – that there should be no established national religion, and that the freedom of speech should not be infringed?
There were not.
Did Muslims play a role in the great struggle over slavery that defined so much of our contemporary understandings of the nature of this republic and of the rights of the individual within it? They did not. Did the Islamic faith shape the way the United States responded to the titanic challenges of the two World Wars, the Great Depression, or the Cold War? It did not. Did the Islamic faith, with its legal apparatus that institutionalizes discrimination against non-Muslims, shape the civil rights movement in the United States? The Civil Rights Act of 1964 mandated equality of access to public facilities – a hard-won victory that came at a great cost, and one that Muslim groups have tried to roll back in the United States recently. One notable example of such attempts was the alcohol-in-cabs controversy at the Minneapolis-St. Paul international airport, when Muslim cabdrivers began to refuse service to customers who were carrying alcohol, on Islamic religious grounds. The core assumption underlying this initiative – that discrimination on the basis of religion is justified – cut right to the heart of the core principle of the American polity, that “all men are created equal,” that is, that they have a right to equal treatment in law and society.
Surveying the whole tapestry of American history, one would be hard-pressed to find any significant way in which the Islamic faith has shaped the United States in terms of its governing principles and the nature of American society. Meanwhile, there are numerous ways in which, if there had been a significant Muslim presence in the country at the time, some of the most cherished and important principles of American society and law may have met fierce resistance, and may never have seen the light of day.
So in what way has the Islamic faith shaped Obama’s country? The most significant event connected to the Islamic faith that has shaped the character of the United States was the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. Those attacks have shaped the nation in numerous ways: they’ve led to numerous innovations in airline security, which in generations to come – if today’s politically correct climate continues to befog minds -- may be added to future versions of the fanciful “1001 Muslim Inventions” exhibition. The Islamic faith has shaped the U.S. since 9/11 in leading to the spending of billions on anti-terror measures, and to the ventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to Guantanamo, and to so many features of the modern political and social landscape that they cannot be enumerated within the space of a single article.
Of course, it is certain that Obama had none of that in mind. But what could he possibly have had in mind? His statement was either careless or ignorant, or both – not qualities we need in a Commander-in-Chief even in the best of times.
- Robert Spencer is a scholar of Islamic history, theology, and law and the director of Jihad Watch. He is the author of eight books, eleven monographs, and hundreds of articles about jihad and Islamic terrorism, including the New York Times Bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His latest book, Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam is Subverting America without Guns or Bombs, is available now from Regnery Publishing.
No need for 'what ifs'; the better team won
By MICHAEL ROSENBERG
DETROIT FREE PRESS COLUMNIST
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/frontpage
April 7, 2009
Yeah, fine. You Tar Heels go celebrate. But a little warning, fellas: Michigan State is going to kick your butt the third time around.
Kidding, kidding.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say the better team won Monday night. This truth should make the result easier on Spartan fans -- and, eventually, easier on the Spartans themselves.
Normally after a big loss, you ask what-if questions. Try that now. It’s almost impossible. What if the South had won the Civil War? Then North Carolina couldn’t possibly won the national championship!
In order to win this game, Michigan State had to limit turnovers, outrebound the Tar Heels, make smart decisions in transition, and perhaps remove North Carolina’s hoop. The Spartans did none of those things, and while I respect the sportsmanship of leaving that hoop up there, I question the wisdom.
When these teams played back in December –- a game we will refer to, henceforth, as “the good one” –- Michigan State committed 21 turnovers and North Carolina committed nine. Obviously, that had to change for MSU to win Monday.
And it did. It got worse. MSU lost the ball 14 times in the first half alone. They committed turnovers on fast breaks, they committed turnovers in their halfcourt offense, they ate turnovers in the huddle. It was absurd.
“Kind of foolish turnovers,” MSU guard Travis Walton said. “Kind of the same thing we did in the first game.”
North Carolina point guard Ty Lawson had seven steals in the first half alone. That gave Lawson 14 steals in 46 minutes against MSU this season. In other news, Lawson now owns legal title to MSU's Berkowitz Basketball Complex and has somehow accumulated enough credits to earn to bachelor’s degrees from Michigan State.
At one point, Lawson drove into a triple-team and the Spartans still couldn’t stop him. He got fouled. It’s just a shame that Michigan State never got that fourth defender over there in time.
DETROIT - APRIL 06: Ty Lawson #5 of the North Carolina Tar Heels drives in the first half against Delvon Roe #10 and Kalin Lucas #1 of the Michigan State Spartans during the 2009 NCAA Division I Men's Basketball National Championship game at Ford Field on April 6, 2009 in Detroit, Michigan. (Photo by Andy Lyons/Getty Images)
In the first game, North Carolina scored a preposterous 53 points in the first half. This time the Tar Heels saw that total and raised it two. It was 55-34 at the break, the biggest halftime margin in championship game history.
So the teams came out for the second half, and there was no realistic chance of Michigan State winning the game at that point, but in sports, sometimes you trick yourself into believing. If they cut it to 10 …
Apparently, even the Spartans were playing that trick. Asked about his halftime thoughts, Walton said: “We felt we could have gotten it within 10.”
Then Durrell Summers committed a turnover. Two possessions later, Raymar Morgan was whistled for a moving pick. Another turnover.
You can say Michigan State played lousy, and you’d be right. But say this, too: the best team in the country played at an extremely high level in the national championship game.
That’s almost impossible to beat. Ask Larry Bird. Thirty years ago, Michigan State won its first national championship against Indiana State in the famous Magic Johnson-Larry Bird game. At a news conference Monday, Bird talked about his thoughts after beating DePaul in a semifinal.
“I remember back at the hotel, I had some time by myself,” Bird said. “I was thinking, ‘If I don't score 40 points Monday night, we don't have a chance to win.’ I really believed that at the time.“
Bird says he has never watched a tape of that game. Too painful. But there is this, too: for 30 years, Larry Bird has always known that the better team won. Sometimes, you don’t have to check the tape. Sometimes, you just know.
Contact MICHAEL ROSENBERG: 313-222-6052 or mrosenberg@freepress.com.
DETROIT FREE PRESS COLUMNIST
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/frontpage
April 7, 2009
Yeah, fine. You Tar Heels go celebrate. But a little warning, fellas: Michigan State is going to kick your butt the third time around.Kidding, kidding.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say the better team won Monday night. This truth should make the result easier on Spartan fans -- and, eventually, easier on the Spartans themselves.
Normally after a big loss, you ask what-if questions. Try that now. It’s almost impossible. What if the South had won the Civil War? Then North Carolina couldn’t possibly won the national championship!
In order to win this game, Michigan State had to limit turnovers, outrebound the Tar Heels, make smart decisions in transition, and perhaps remove North Carolina’s hoop. The Spartans did none of those things, and while I respect the sportsmanship of leaving that hoop up there, I question the wisdom.
When these teams played back in December –- a game we will refer to, henceforth, as “the good one” –- Michigan State committed 21 turnovers and North Carolina committed nine. Obviously, that had to change for MSU to win Monday.
And it did. It got worse. MSU lost the ball 14 times in the first half alone. They committed turnovers on fast breaks, they committed turnovers in their halfcourt offense, they ate turnovers in the huddle. It was absurd.
“Kind of foolish turnovers,” MSU guard Travis Walton said. “Kind of the same thing we did in the first game.”
North Carolina point guard Ty Lawson had seven steals in the first half alone. That gave Lawson 14 steals in 46 minutes against MSU this season. In other news, Lawson now owns legal title to MSU's Berkowitz Basketball Complex and has somehow accumulated enough credits to earn to bachelor’s degrees from Michigan State.
At one point, Lawson drove into a triple-team and the Spartans still couldn’t stop him. He got fouled. It’s just a shame that Michigan State never got that fourth defender over there in time.
DETROIT - APRIL 06: Ty Lawson #5 of the North Carolina Tar Heels drives in the first half against Delvon Roe #10 and Kalin Lucas #1 of the Michigan State Spartans during the 2009 NCAA Division I Men's Basketball National Championship game at Ford Field on April 6, 2009 in Detroit, Michigan. (Photo by Andy Lyons/Getty Images)In the first game, North Carolina scored a preposterous 53 points in the first half. This time the Tar Heels saw that total and raised it two. It was 55-34 at the break, the biggest halftime margin in championship game history.
So the teams came out for the second half, and there was no realistic chance of Michigan State winning the game at that point, but in sports, sometimes you trick yourself into believing. If they cut it to 10 …
Apparently, even the Spartans were playing that trick. Asked about his halftime thoughts, Walton said: “We felt we could have gotten it within 10.”
Then Durrell Summers committed a turnover. Two possessions later, Raymar Morgan was whistled for a moving pick. Another turnover.
You can say Michigan State played lousy, and you’d be right. But say this, too: the best team in the country played at an extremely high level in the national championship game.
That’s almost impossible to beat. Ask Larry Bird. Thirty years ago, Michigan State won its first national championship against Indiana State in the famous Magic Johnson-Larry Bird game. At a news conference Monday, Bird talked about his thoughts after beating DePaul in a semifinal.
“I remember back at the hotel, I had some time by myself,” Bird said. “I was thinking, ‘If I don't score 40 points Monday night, we don't have a chance to win.’ I really believed that at the time.“
Bird says he has never watched a tape of that game. Too painful. But there is this, too: for 30 years, Larry Bird has always known that the better team won. Sometimes, you don’t have to check the tape. Sometimes, you just know.
Contact MICHAEL ROSENBERG: 313-222-6052 or mrosenberg@freepress.com.
Tar Heels’ Wayne Ellington Shows His Winning Touch
By GREG BISHOP
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com
April 7, 2009
DETROIT — While his teammates clipped at strands of net, Wayne Ellington wiped at the tears running down his cheeks. His thoughts drifted to the past 12 months, to his decision to forgo the N.B.A. draft and return to college, to his prolonged shooting slump, to the hardware he acquired Monday night.
Ellington considered all of what happened between, and he strained for a summary that would explain everything. He did not find it.
“You never know what this really feels like until you experience it,” Ellington, who was named the Most Outstanding Player of the Final Four, said. “It’s something that you can’t explain.”
Less than two minutes into the N.C.A.A. championship game on Monday night, Ellington made an open jumper. Minutes later, he made a 3-pointer from the left wing to give North Carolina a 15-5 lead.
It was a good omen for the Tar Heels. Although it is point guard Ty Lawson who powers North Carolina’s potent offense, and forward Tyler Hansbrough collects the most trophies on the most talented team in college basketball, it is Ellington, and specifically his shooting percentage, that often signals victory.
In fact, after North Carolina beat Michigan State, 89-72, to win the national championship, the Tar Heels improved to 49-0 when Ellington shoots 50 percent or better from the field.
Not Hansbrough. Not Lawson. But Ellington, a less heralded junior guard and the Tar Heels’ third option on some nights and the fourth on others.
On the court afterward, his shoes flecked with pieces of colorful confetti, he said he did not play well earlier this season. But he turned to extra jump shots instead of pity, shooting his way out of the slump, and the result was a swirl of emotions Monday night.
“He shot the ball great this tournament,” the Tar Heels’ Danny Green said. “He stepped up big for us.”
Over the weekend, as North Carolina dominated its games at Ford Field, it was a sharpshooting guard from Pennsylvania who transformed the tournament into the Wayne Ellington 3-Point Shootout.
Against Villanova in the national semifinals, Ellington made five 3-pointers and finished with 20 points. He made 7 of 14 shots — 50 percent on the button, signaling another victory in a North Carolina season filled with them.
Tar Heels fans sprinkled throughout the green and white sea at Ford Field screamed for Ellington in the first half Monday night. They appreciated his contribution, maybe more so because he had been doubtful to return this season.
Ellington was a second-team all-Atlantic Coast Conference selection after his sophomore season, and like his teammates Hansbrough, Lawson and Green, he flirted with the N.B.A. Ellington, Green and Lawson made themselves eligible for the draft, but none signed with an agent, and they decided to return to North Carolina.
They came back for this — surrounded by more than 70,000 hostile fans, sentiment and hometown pride in their opponent’s favor, one final chance to deliver the national title they had come so close to but never won.
North Carolina Coach Roy Williams said earlier this weekend that his guards make the offense go: when teams double- and triple-team the Tar Heels’ waves of post players, Williams said, Ellington and Green provide the outside balance, playing yin to the yang of the tall trees that dominate inside.
So it was that Ellington provided the punch that took the Tar Heels to the title. In the first five games of the N.C.A.A. tournament, he scored 25, 23, 19, 9 and 20 points.
“He has one speed,” Michigan State guard Travis Walton said. “His one speed is going hard. Tonight was his night. He had a great tournament run.”
Ellington resumed the scoring barrage against Michigan State, scoring early and often, staking North Carolina to a 55-34 halftime lead. In the first half, Ellington made three 3-pointers, scored 17 points and emerged as an early favorite for most outstanding player.
As the game ended, Ellington stood above the Tar Heels’ bench, trying to suppress the tears he knew were coming. After the return, the slump and the tournament of a lifetime, his emotions were so strong, so wide and so varied, he could not come close to explaining them.
Maybe the N.B.A. awaits after this season. Maybe not. But for now, Ellington and his fellow returnees will savor the moment they returned for.
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com
April 7, 2009
DETROIT — While his teammates clipped at strands of net, Wayne Ellington wiped at the tears running down his cheeks. His thoughts drifted to the past 12 months, to his decision to forgo the N.B.A. draft and return to college, to his prolonged shooting slump, to the hardware he acquired Monday night.
Ellington considered all of what happened between, and he strained for a summary that would explain everything. He did not find it.
“You never know what this really feels like until you experience it,” Ellington, who was named the Most Outstanding Player of the Final Four, said. “It’s something that you can’t explain.”Less than two minutes into the N.C.A.A. championship game on Monday night, Ellington made an open jumper. Minutes later, he made a 3-pointer from the left wing to give North Carolina a 15-5 lead.
It was a good omen for the Tar Heels. Although it is point guard Ty Lawson who powers North Carolina’s potent offense, and forward Tyler Hansbrough collects the most trophies on the most talented team in college basketball, it is Ellington, and specifically his shooting percentage, that often signals victory.
In fact, after North Carolina beat Michigan State, 89-72, to win the national championship, the Tar Heels improved to 49-0 when Ellington shoots 50 percent or better from the field.
Not Hansbrough. Not Lawson. But Ellington, a less heralded junior guard and the Tar Heels’ third option on some nights and the fourth on others.
On the court afterward, his shoes flecked with pieces of colorful confetti, he said he did not play well earlier this season. But he turned to extra jump shots instead of pity, shooting his way out of the slump, and the result was a swirl of emotions Monday night.
“He shot the ball great this tournament,” the Tar Heels’ Danny Green said. “He stepped up big for us.”
Over the weekend, as North Carolina dominated its games at Ford Field, it was a sharpshooting guard from Pennsylvania who transformed the tournament into the Wayne Ellington 3-Point Shootout.
Against Villanova in the national semifinals, Ellington made five 3-pointers and finished with 20 points. He made 7 of 14 shots — 50 percent on the button, signaling another victory in a North Carolina season filled with them.
Tar Heels fans sprinkled throughout the green and white sea at Ford Field screamed for Ellington in the first half Monday night. They appreciated his contribution, maybe more so because he had been doubtful to return this season.
Ellington was a second-team all-Atlantic Coast Conference selection after his sophomore season, and like his teammates Hansbrough, Lawson and Green, he flirted with the N.B.A. Ellington, Green and Lawson made themselves eligible for the draft, but none signed with an agent, and they decided to return to North Carolina.
They came back for this — surrounded by more than 70,000 hostile fans, sentiment and hometown pride in their opponent’s favor, one final chance to deliver the national title they had come so close to but never won.North Carolina Coach Roy Williams said earlier this weekend that his guards make the offense go: when teams double- and triple-team the Tar Heels’ waves of post players, Williams said, Ellington and Green provide the outside balance, playing yin to the yang of the tall trees that dominate inside.
So it was that Ellington provided the punch that took the Tar Heels to the title. In the first five games of the N.C.A.A. tournament, he scored 25, 23, 19, 9 and 20 points.
“He has one speed,” Michigan State guard Travis Walton said. “His one speed is going hard. Tonight was his night. He had a great tournament run.”
Ellington resumed the scoring barrage against Michigan State, scoring early and often, staking North Carolina to a 55-34 halftime lead. In the first half, Ellington made three 3-pointers, scored 17 points and emerged as an early favorite for most outstanding player.
As the game ended, Ellington stood above the Tar Heels’ bench, trying to suppress the tears he knew were coming. After the return, the slump and the tournament of a lifetime, his emotions were so strong, so wide and so varied, he could not come close to explaining them.
Maybe the N.B.A. awaits after this season. Maybe not. But for now, Ellington and his fellow returnees will savor the moment they returned for.
Hansbrough's Singular Focus Propels UNC to No. 1
By Steve Yanda
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 7, 2009; 11:00 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
DETROIT -- Gene Hansbrough remembers the way his middle son looked before each and every wrestling match, and how he certainly knew better than to try to talk to his boy. As a 9-year-old preparing to grapple at some youth tournament in southeastern Missouri, Tyler Hansbrough would stare blankly at anything that wasn't his opponent and start to shake.
"He gets in a game mode and he starts thinking about what he has to do, and he works toward that goal," Gene Hansbrough said. "He's not going to talk about it, but it's just a quiet confidence and a single-mindedness."
Gene Hansbrough said his son gave up wrestling long ago. Too lanky. Got tied up like a pretzel. But Tyler Hansbrough found another sport more to his liking, and on Monday night, he reached its pinnacle at the college level. A star-studded North Carolina squad put away Michigan State, 89-72, to claim the national title, and when it was over, there may have been no Tar Heel more relieved than the 6-foot-9 senior from Poplar Bluff, Mo.
"I've always talked about being part of a championship," Hansbrough said. "And I'm glad I'm just part of something special on this team."
For the better part of four years, Hansbrough was chided, mocked even, for his unrelenting focus. He didn't smile a whole lot and rarely said anything interesting. He claimed he didn't even like to watch college basketball outside of the game film used for preparation, though his father debunked that notion.
As it turned out, North Carolina -- "a NBA team kind of that can maybe beat the worst team in the NBA probably," according to Michigan State guard Travis Walton -- needed more of Hansbrough's tunnel vision.
From the season's outset, much was expected of the Tar Heels, who fell to Kansas in the Final Four in 2008. After four of five starters from that team spurned the NBA to return to Chapel Hill, chatter was not confined merely to a national title. Rather, this squad was thought to possess enough talent to go undefeated.
It did not. North Carolina fell at home to Boston College on Jan. 4 and then again a week later at Wake Forest. It lost in overtime at Maryland on Feb. 21, squandering a nine-point lead with 1 minute 54 seconds left in regulation, and bowed out of the ACC tournament with a loss to Florida State in the semifinals.
Talent-wise, the Tar Heels were undoubtedly superior to any of those teams, but as junior forward Deon Thompson pointed out on Sunday, "We have a tendency to let up and let teams back in."
So when North Carolina carried a 21-point lead into halftime on Monday night against Michigan State -- a team the Tar Heels defeated by 35 on Dec. 3 -- there was little joy or contentment in either locker room.
The Spartans did attempt to push their way back into contention. They cut North Carolina's lead to 13 with just less than five minutes remaining. The largely pro-Michigan State crowd rose to its feet voiced its approval, but the green-clad audience members quickly were silenced.
North Carolina point guard Ty Lawson dashed into the lane for a layup. When Lawson sank a pair of free throws moments later to push the Tar Heels' lead back to 17, a mass exodus occurred at Ford Field.
"I like it when it's quiet and you see people leaving early," North Carolina senior guard Bobby Frasor said. "Since our first big win at Kentucky my freshman year, I've always enjoyed seeing that."
With just more than one minute remaining, the Tar Heels' key contributors were subbed out of the game so that the seldom-used reserves could bask in the spotlight, as well. Along the North Carolina sideline, there were handshakes and high-fives and bear hugs galore.
The Tar Heels claimed the national crown in spectacular fashion, as they had been expected to since November. When asked whether anything shy of a championship won in April would have been a disappointment for this particular squad, junior guard Wayne Ellington nodded in agreement.
"It would have felt a little bit like that, just knowing that we had all the tools and all the potential," said Ellington, who along with Lawson and Danny Green declared for the NBA draft last spring before electing to return to college.
Though he never entered his name into the draft, Hansbrough weighed the risks and rewards of jumping to the NBA early. But despite all the accolades Hansbrough had already garnered and would add to this season, the prevailing notion was that his college career somehow would be considered a failure should he not win a national title at North Carolina.
Gene Hansbrough said there never was much doubt that his son would return for his senior year.
"Tyler is compulsive about things he has to get done in a certain time," the father said.
Over the past five months, Tyler Hansbrough has become the ACC's all-time leading scorer and earned all-American honors for the fourth consecutive year. When asked to list the best moment of his college career, though, Hansbrough referenced the confetti raining down around him 20 minutes after his legacy had been finalized.
Teammates Marcus Ginyard, who shares a house in Chapel Hill with Hansbrough and Frasor, said he'd never seen Hansbrough so relaxed as during the aftermath of North Carolina's title win. And indeed, as he wandered about all the postgame commotion, an irremovable smile was plastered across his face.
"You know, it's been some pressure on the outside," Hansbrough said. "But we stayed within our team and we got the job done."
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 7, 2009; 11:00 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
DETROIT -- Gene Hansbrough remembers the way his middle son looked before each and every wrestling match, and how he certainly knew better than to try to talk to his boy. As a 9-year-old preparing to grapple at some youth tournament in southeastern Missouri, Tyler Hansbrough would stare blankly at anything that wasn't his opponent and start to shake.
"He gets in a game mode and he starts thinking about what he has to do, and he works toward that goal," Gene Hansbrough said. "He's not going to talk about it, but it's just a quiet confidence and a single-mindedness."Gene Hansbrough said his son gave up wrestling long ago. Too lanky. Got tied up like a pretzel. But Tyler Hansbrough found another sport more to his liking, and on Monday night, he reached its pinnacle at the college level. A star-studded North Carolina squad put away Michigan State, 89-72, to claim the national title, and when it was over, there may have been no Tar Heel more relieved than the 6-foot-9 senior from Poplar Bluff, Mo.
"I've always talked about being part of a championship," Hansbrough said. "And I'm glad I'm just part of something special on this team."
For the better part of four years, Hansbrough was chided, mocked even, for his unrelenting focus. He didn't smile a whole lot and rarely said anything interesting. He claimed he didn't even like to watch college basketball outside of the game film used for preparation, though his father debunked that notion.
As it turned out, North Carolina -- "a NBA team kind of that can maybe beat the worst team in the NBA probably," according to Michigan State guard Travis Walton -- needed more of Hansbrough's tunnel vision.
From the season's outset, much was expected of the Tar Heels, who fell to Kansas in the Final Four in 2008. After four of five starters from that team spurned the NBA to return to Chapel Hill, chatter was not confined merely to a national title. Rather, this squad was thought to possess enough talent to go undefeated.
It did not. North Carolina fell at home to Boston College on Jan. 4 and then again a week later at Wake Forest. It lost in overtime at Maryland on Feb. 21, squandering a nine-point lead with 1 minute 54 seconds left in regulation, and bowed out of the ACC tournament with a loss to Florida State in the semifinals.
Talent-wise, the Tar Heels were undoubtedly superior to any of those teams, but as junior forward Deon Thompson pointed out on Sunday, "We have a tendency to let up and let teams back in."
So when North Carolina carried a 21-point lead into halftime on Monday night against Michigan State -- a team the Tar Heels defeated by 35 on Dec. 3 -- there was little joy or contentment in either locker room.
The Spartans did attempt to push their way back into contention. They cut North Carolina's lead to 13 with just less than five minutes remaining. The largely pro-Michigan State crowd rose to its feet voiced its approval, but the green-clad audience members quickly were silenced.
North Carolina point guard Ty Lawson dashed into the lane for a layup. When Lawson sank a pair of free throws moments later to push the Tar Heels' lead back to 17, a mass exodus occurred at Ford Field.
"I like it when it's quiet and you see people leaving early," North Carolina senior guard Bobby Frasor said. "Since our first big win at Kentucky my freshman year, I've always enjoyed seeing that."With just more than one minute remaining, the Tar Heels' key contributors were subbed out of the game so that the seldom-used reserves could bask in the spotlight, as well. Along the North Carolina sideline, there were handshakes and high-fives and bear hugs galore.
The Tar Heels claimed the national crown in spectacular fashion, as they had been expected to since November. When asked whether anything shy of a championship won in April would have been a disappointment for this particular squad, junior guard Wayne Ellington nodded in agreement.
"It would have felt a little bit like that, just knowing that we had all the tools and all the potential," said Ellington, who along with Lawson and Danny Green declared for the NBA draft last spring before electing to return to college.
Though he never entered his name into the draft, Hansbrough weighed the risks and rewards of jumping to the NBA early. But despite all the accolades Hansbrough had already garnered and would add to this season, the prevailing notion was that his college career somehow would be considered a failure should he not win a national title at North Carolina.
Gene Hansbrough said there never was much doubt that his son would return for his senior year.
"Tyler is compulsive about things he has to get done in a certain time," the father said.
Over the past five months, Tyler Hansbrough has become the ACC's all-time leading scorer and earned all-American honors for the fourth consecutive year. When asked to list the best moment of his college career, though, Hansbrough referenced the confetti raining down around him 20 minutes after his legacy had been finalized.
Teammates Marcus Ginyard, who shares a house in Chapel Hill with Hansbrough and Frasor, said he'd never seen Hansbrough so relaxed as during the aftermath of North Carolina's title win. And indeed, as he wandered about all the postgame commotion, an irremovable smile was plastered across his face.
"You know, it's been some pressure on the outside," Hansbrough said. "But we stayed within our team and we got the job done."
Champs' hallmark is staying power
By Bob Ryan, Boston Globe Columnist
http://www.boston.com/
April 7, 2009
DETROIT - APRIL 06: Ty Lawson #5 of the North Carolina Tar Heels drives on Travis Walton #5 of the Michigan State Spartans in the second half during the 2009 NCAA Division I Men's Basketball National Championship game at Ford Field on April 6, 2009 in Detroit, Michigan. (Photo by Streeter Lecka/Getty Images)
DETROIT - When Tyler Hansbrough, Ty Lawson, and Danny Green decided to wait a year to enter the NBA, thus pretty much assuring the outcome of the 2008-09 college basketball season that we all saw last night, North Carolina coach Roy Williams needed to make sure of one thing before he began picturing himself cutting down the nets on this April Monday at Ford Field.
He wanted to make sure they would be focused on winning, not on, you know, "working on their game," or some such nonsense. The players were practically insulted. "Coach," they said, "it's us, true Tar Heels through and through." (OK, I may have embellished this a little.)
"If they were not 100 percent in agreement with that," Williams said at the time, "they should go on and stay in the draft."
They stayed and they conquered, erasing the memory of last year's semifinal shocker against Kansas (an early 40-12 deficit, you may recall) with one of the great championship shows in NCAA history, rolling to a 20-point lead over Michigan State before the game was 10 minutes old, leading by a record 21 points (55-34) at the half, and cruising to a 89-72 victory.
It was the fifth NCAA championship for North Carolina, and the second in five years for 1972 Carolina alumnus Williams, who was allowed to migrate to Kansas for a head coaching apprenticeship (that included two Final Four appearances) before being ordered home to Momma by the great Carolina pooh-bah Dean Smith to rescue the university from the shame of having the world think Duke was a better basketball school.
Oh, the indignity!
DETROIT - APRIL 06: Head coach Roy Williams and Tyler Hansbrough #50 of the North Carolina Tar Heels celebrate after they won 89-72 against the Michigan State Spartans during the 2009 NCAA Division I Men's Basketball National Championship game at Ford Field on April 6, 2009 in Detroit, Michigan. (Photo by Andy Lyons/Getty Images)
Well, no one thinks that anymore. Coach K has a lot of serious recruiting to do if he wishes to keep up with his neighbor in Chapel Hill. In the last four years, Carolina quietly has separated itself from the rest of the ACC, Duke included.
And it didn't take the Heels long to put some distance between themselves and Michigan State, not to mention its hordes, last night.
The only thing keeping this from being an official wire-to-wire Carolina conquest was a Goran Suton 3-pointer that gave the Spartans a 3-2 lead. Green answered with an instant 3-pointer, and Carolina never trailed again, running out to such leads as 17-7 and 24-8. It was 31-11 when the game was 9 1/2 minutes old.
The Tar Heels demonstrated superiority in every category, hitting six of their first seven shots, not allowing Michigan State to get its cherished second-chance points, and harassing State, which had been taking very good care of the ball as it marched to the championship game, into 11 first-half turnovers.
During the season, much was made of the fact that six teams (Carolina, Duke, Wake Forest, Connecticut, Pittsburgh, and Oklahoma) were No. 1 at some point. And yet didn't most seasoned observers (and even quite a few lightly-seasoned ones) feel that, if all things were equal, North Carolina was a bit more equal than anyone else? Why, yes, they did. And during this NCAA Tournament, we all found out why.
In fact, had senior guard Marcus Ginyard been healthy and in the lineup all season, there is a very good chance the Tar Heels would have become the first Division 1 team since the 1975-76 Indiana Hoosiers to go undefeated. That's conjecture, of course, but what is beyond debate is the scope of Carolina's postseason accomplishment.
DETROIT - APRIL 06: Danny Green #14 of the North Carolina Tar Heels celebrates with the championship trophy after defeating the Michigan State Spartans 89-72 during the 2009 NCAA Division I Men's Basketball National Championship game at Ford Field on April 6, 2009 in Detroit, Michigan. (Photo by Streeter Lecka/Getty Images)
Michigan State was a worthy competitor. The Spartans had arrived at the championship game having eliminated third-seeded Kansas, top-seeded Louisville, and top-seeded Connecticut, and coach Tom Izzo was confident his team could make Carolina its third consecutive top-seeded victim.
Oh, he had acknowledged that if the Heels brought their A game, his team couldn't compete. But he also stressed that it was a one-game scenario and that his team had found a very successful formula in the tournament.
"We have found a way to have some good teams not play as good against us," Izzo noted.
Ah, not this team.
State had ripped the heart out of Louisville and outlasted UConn, but the Spartans looked like just another speed bump on the Carolina road to glory in the first half. Much had been made of the stupendous backing the Spartans were going to receive from the NCAA-record crowd of 72,922, but Williams declared that his teams never had been beaten by a building. The Heels made sure the crowd would not be a factor by taking it out of the game with their blistering start.
Deon Thompson, the least-heralded member of the Carolina starting five, began posting up at will, and soon Wayne Ellington was hitting jumpers and, of course, every once in a while the Heels would rip off a fast break.
The Tar Heel bench isn't particularly deep, but it does have one keeper in 6-foot-9-inch freshman Ed Davis, who made himself known with a strong inside presence. The rumor is that he, too, will be joining Messrs. Hansbrough, Green, and Lawson in a major exodus to the Land of Stern. But the way Williams has it going, there's little doubt there will be another future NBA lad to take his place.
State's not going anywhere, by the way. Unless some of his key players elect to do something foolish - you never know - Izzo will be right back next year with a Final Four-level team led by guard Kalin Lucas and excellent young players such as Delvon Roe (oh, did Williams lust for him during the recruiting process), Durrell Summers, and Draymond Green.
But these kids weren't ready for the Carolina team that greeted them last night. It turns out Carolina was exactly who we always thought it was.
Bob Ryan is a Globe columnist and host of the Globe's 10.0 on Boston.com. He can be reached at ryan@globe.com.
http://www.boston.com/
April 7, 2009
DETROIT - APRIL 06: Ty Lawson #5 of the North Carolina Tar Heels drives on Travis Walton #5 of the Michigan State Spartans in the second half during the 2009 NCAA Division I Men's Basketball National Championship game at Ford Field on April 6, 2009 in Detroit, Michigan. (Photo by Streeter Lecka/Getty Images)DETROIT - When Tyler Hansbrough, Ty Lawson, and Danny Green decided to wait a year to enter the NBA, thus pretty much assuring the outcome of the 2008-09 college basketball season that we all saw last night, North Carolina coach Roy Williams needed to make sure of one thing before he began picturing himself cutting down the nets on this April Monday at Ford Field.
He wanted to make sure they would be focused on winning, not on, you know, "working on their game," or some such nonsense. The players were practically insulted. "Coach," they said, "it's us, true Tar Heels through and through." (OK, I may have embellished this a little.)
"If they were not 100 percent in agreement with that," Williams said at the time, "they should go on and stay in the draft."
They stayed and they conquered, erasing the memory of last year's semifinal shocker against Kansas (an early 40-12 deficit, you may recall) with one of the great championship shows in NCAA history, rolling to a 20-point lead over Michigan State before the game was 10 minutes old, leading by a record 21 points (55-34) at the half, and cruising to a 89-72 victory.
It was the fifth NCAA championship for North Carolina, and the second in five years for 1972 Carolina alumnus Williams, who was allowed to migrate to Kansas for a head coaching apprenticeship (that included two Final Four appearances) before being ordered home to Momma by the great Carolina pooh-bah Dean Smith to rescue the university from the shame of having the world think Duke was a better basketball school.
Oh, the indignity!
DETROIT - APRIL 06: Head coach Roy Williams and Tyler Hansbrough #50 of the North Carolina Tar Heels celebrate after they won 89-72 against the Michigan State Spartans during the 2009 NCAA Division I Men's Basketball National Championship game at Ford Field on April 6, 2009 in Detroit, Michigan. (Photo by Andy Lyons/Getty Images)Well, no one thinks that anymore. Coach K has a lot of serious recruiting to do if he wishes to keep up with his neighbor in Chapel Hill. In the last four years, Carolina quietly has separated itself from the rest of the ACC, Duke included.
And it didn't take the Heels long to put some distance between themselves and Michigan State, not to mention its hordes, last night.
The only thing keeping this from being an official wire-to-wire Carolina conquest was a Goran Suton 3-pointer that gave the Spartans a 3-2 lead. Green answered with an instant 3-pointer, and Carolina never trailed again, running out to such leads as 17-7 and 24-8. It was 31-11 when the game was 9 1/2 minutes old.
The Tar Heels demonstrated superiority in every category, hitting six of their first seven shots, not allowing Michigan State to get its cherished second-chance points, and harassing State, which had been taking very good care of the ball as it marched to the championship game, into 11 first-half turnovers.
During the season, much was made of the fact that six teams (Carolina, Duke, Wake Forest, Connecticut, Pittsburgh, and Oklahoma) were No. 1 at some point. And yet didn't most seasoned observers (and even quite a few lightly-seasoned ones) feel that, if all things were equal, North Carolina was a bit more equal than anyone else? Why, yes, they did. And during this NCAA Tournament, we all found out why.
In fact, had senior guard Marcus Ginyard been healthy and in the lineup all season, there is a very good chance the Tar Heels would have become the first Division 1 team since the 1975-76 Indiana Hoosiers to go undefeated. That's conjecture, of course, but what is beyond debate is the scope of Carolina's postseason accomplishment.
DETROIT - APRIL 06: Danny Green #14 of the North Carolina Tar Heels celebrates with the championship trophy after defeating the Michigan State Spartans 89-72 during the 2009 NCAA Division I Men's Basketball National Championship game at Ford Field on April 6, 2009 in Detroit, Michigan. (Photo by Streeter Lecka/Getty Images)Michigan State was a worthy competitor. The Spartans had arrived at the championship game having eliminated third-seeded Kansas, top-seeded Louisville, and top-seeded Connecticut, and coach Tom Izzo was confident his team could make Carolina its third consecutive top-seeded victim.
Oh, he had acknowledged that if the Heels brought their A game, his team couldn't compete. But he also stressed that it was a one-game scenario and that his team had found a very successful formula in the tournament.
"We have found a way to have some good teams not play as good against us," Izzo noted.
Ah, not this team.
State had ripped the heart out of Louisville and outlasted UConn, but the Spartans looked like just another speed bump on the Carolina road to glory in the first half. Much had been made of the stupendous backing the Spartans were going to receive from the NCAA-record crowd of 72,922, but Williams declared that his teams never had been beaten by a building. The Heels made sure the crowd would not be a factor by taking it out of the game with their blistering start.
Deon Thompson, the least-heralded member of the Carolina starting five, began posting up at will, and soon Wayne Ellington was hitting jumpers and, of course, every once in a while the Heels would rip off a fast break.
The Tar Heel bench isn't particularly deep, but it does have one keeper in 6-foot-9-inch freshman Ed Davis, who made himself known with a strong inside presence. The rumor is that he, too, will be joining Messrs. Hansbrough, Green, and Lawson in a major exodus to the Land of Stern. But the way Williams has it going, there's little doubt there will be another future NBA lad to take his place.
State's not going anywhere, by the way. Unless some of his key players elect to do something foolish - you never know - Izzo will be right back next year with a Final Four-level team led by guard Kalin Lucas and excellent young players such as Delvon Roe (oh, did Williams lust for him during the recruiting process), Durrell Summers, and Draymond Green.
But these kids weren't ready for the Carolina team that greeted them last night. It turns out Carolina was exactly who we always thought it was.
Bob Ryan is a Globe columnist and host of the Globe's 10.0 on Boston.com. He can be reached at ryan@globe.com.
Perfect night for all-but-perfect Tar Heels
By Mike Lupica
New York Daily News
Tuesday, April 7th 2009, 4:00 AM
http://www.nydailynews.com
Lyons/Getty
Tyler Hansbrough and Roy Williams (below) lead UNC to a convincing win over Michigan State on Monday night.
DETROIT - This is how it still looks in sports when you play your best game in the biggest game. This is how it looks on the biggest stage you've ever had and might ever have in your life, and your team becomes everything it was ever supposed to be. That's what it was like for the North Carolina Tar Heels on the night when they won their school its fifth national championship in college basketball, became the great college basketball team you thought they would be at the start of the season, when you really thought with the size and speed and talent and depth they had, that the Tar Heels might win them all. All this Michigan State green inside Ford Field Monday night, drowning in all that Carolina blue, 89-72 when it was all over.
That is the way it really was, almost from the first minutes of the game, Carolina coming at State in waves, coming at them with Deon Thompson and Tyler Hansbrough inside and Wayne Ellington - playing his best game, in his biggest game - outside and Ty Lawson everywhere else. By the time they were ahead 20 points in the first half, and they were ahead 20 when the game was just 10 minutes old, you wondered how Boston College beat Carolina in Chapel Hill this year, and how Florida State got them, and Maryland and Wake Forest.
Tom Izzo, the State coach, had talked about "winning the weekend." North Carolina won the weekend, it won the March part of March Madness, it won April. Won it all. Won it with as much talent, on the court and on the bench, as any basketball champion has had lately, and maybe ever. Here is what you have to know about the basketball game that Carolina and State played Monday night in front of more than 70,000 in Detroit, maybe 60,000 of them State fans:
When State cut the Carolina lead to 13 points with five minutes left, the place went mad.
And even then the score was misleading, for all of State's heart, because this game was won in the first half and was over at halftime. Ellington was too good on offense and Lawson (seven steals) was too good on defense. And Carolina was great when it was supposed to be, on the first Monday in April.
All day long, even with the snow blowing through Detroit, there really was green everywhere on the streets near Ford Field, caps and sweatshirts and parkas, sometimes giving you the idea it stretched all the way across the water to Canada. State fans knew all about Carolina's talent, everybody did; once the tournament started and they started making it look easy, you wondered how they lost the four games they did. But State had knocked off Louisville and knocked off UConn on Saturday, and so their players and fans and and even their coach had begun to believe they could pull this off. Just because it had happened before on this Monday night in college basketball.
It had happened with Jimmy V. and Rollie Massimino. Why couldn't it happen here in Detroit, at a time when the city and state needed a team and a run like this?
After Saturday's game, Izzo had talked about this kind of chance, "(seeing) if we can make the dream, the miracle, come true, one more time."
Then the game started, after Magic Johnson and Larry Bird had come out on the court and stood together, 30 years after they had played the most-watched NCAA final ever played. Then it was clear that Michigan State would have needed at least one of them in his prime to play with North Carolina Monday night. Sometimes sports really does go back to the old Runyon line: The race isn't always to the swift nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet. And it trumps romance almost every single time.
Carolina had just four turnovers in the first half. When it was 48-25 for them with four minutes left in the half, they were shooting nearly 60% at the time and it seemed like 160%, because it was as hard trying to remember missed shots as it was for Michigan State trying to play with them on this night. Ellington and Ed Davis, the 6-11 freshman whom Williams tried to hide to keep him out of pro basketball for at least another year. Ty Lawson and Hansbrough.
When Ellington broke away form everybody after another State turnover and threw down a slam with exactly one minute left in the half, North Carolina had 55 points and no team had ever scored more in the first half of a championship game.
"It's not like we've dodged anybody so far," Izzo had said, talking about his team's last three tournament wins, against last year's national champion Kansas, then top-seeded Louisville and UConn. And State hadn't dodged anybody. You had to give them a chance. Until it was clear less than 10 minutes into this that they had no chance to win a national championship off North Carolina Monday night.
Lawson had seven steals at halftime. Ellington wouldn't miss. Davis looked like he will someday be the best NBA player out of all of them. They came at you inside and outside and seemed to have saved their best defense of the whole season for the biggest game of their lives, at least so far. On the Monday night of the season, Carolina beating State the way they beat everybody else in March and April, it seemed as if the worries about Lawson's injured toe were from another season now.
This was the season it was supposed to play. This was the team it was supposed to be. A team that ended up 34-4 and could have won
New York Daily News
Tuesday, April 7th 2009, 4:00 AM
http://www.nydailynews.com
Lyons/GettyTyler Hansbrough and Roy Williams (below) lead UNC to a convincing win over Michigan State on Monday night.
DETROIT - This is how it still looks in sports when you play your best game in the biggest game. This is how it looks on the biggest stage you've ever had and might ever have in your life, and your team becomes everything it was ever supposed to be. That's what it was like for the North Carolina Tar Heels on the night when they won their school its fifth national championship in college basketball, became the great college basketball team you thought they would be at the start of the season, when you really thought with the size and speed and talent and depth they had, that the Tar Heels might win them all. All this Michigan State green inside Ford Field Monday night, drowning in all that Carolina blue, 89-72 when it was all over.
That is the way it really was, almost from the first minutes of the game, Carolina coming at State in waves, coming at them with Deon Thompson and Tyler Hansbrough inside and Wayne Ellington - playing his best game, in his biggest game - outside and Ty Lawson everywhere else. By the time they were ahead 20 points in the first half, and they were ahead 20 when the game was just 10 minutes old, you wondered how Boston College beat Carolina in Chapel Hill this year, and how Florida State got them, and Maryland and Wake Forest.
Tom Izzo, the State coach, had talked about "winning the weekend." North Carolina won the weekend, it won the March part of March Madness, it won April. Won it all. Won it with as much talent, on the court and on the bench, as any basketball champion has had lately, and maybe ever. Here is what you have to know about the basketball game that Carolina and State played Monday night in front of more than 70,000 in Detroit, maybe 60,000 of them State fans:
When State cut the Carolina lead to 13 points with five minutes left, the place went mad.
And even then the score was misleading, for all of State's heart, because this game was won in the first half and was over at halftime. Ellington was too good on offense and Lawson (seven steals) was too good on defense. And Carolina was great when it was supposed to be, on the first Monday in April.All day long, even with the snow blowing through Detroit, there really was green everywhere on the streets near Ford Field, caps and sweatshirts and parkas, sometimes giving you the idea it stretched all the way across the water to Canada. State fans knew all about Carolina's talent, everybody did; once the tournament started and they started making it look easy, you wondered how they lost the four games they did. But State had knocked off Louisville and knocked off UConn on Saturday, and so their players and fans and and even their coach had begun to believe they could pull this off. Just because it had happened before on this Monday night in college basketball.
It had happened with Jimmy V. and Rollie Massimino. Why couldn't it happen here in Detroit, at a time when the city and state needed a team and a run like this?
After Saturday's game, Izzo had talked about this kind of chance, "(seeing) if we can make the dream, the miracle, come true, one more time."
Then the game started, after Magic Johnson and Larry Bird had come out on the court and stood together, 30 years after they had played the most-watched NCAA final ever played. Then it was clear that Michigan State would have needed at least one of them in his prime to play with North Carolina Monday night. Sometimes sports really does go back to the old Runyon line: The race isn't always to the swift nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet. And it trumps romance almost every single time.
Carolina had just four turnovers in the first half. When it was 48-25 for them with four minutes left in the half, they were shooting nearly 60% at the time and it seemed like 160%, because it was as hard trying to remember missed shots as it was for Michigan State trying to play with them on this night. Ellington and Ed Davis, the 6-11 freshman whom Williams tried to hide to keep him out of pro basketball for at least another year. Ty Lawson and Hansbrough.
When Ellington broke away form everybody after another State turnover and threw down a slam with exactly one minute left in the half, North Carolina had 55 points and no team had ever scored more in the first half of a championship game.
"It's not like we've dodged anybody so far," Izzo had said, talking about his team's last three tournament wins, against last year's national champion Kansas, then top-seeded Louisville and UConn. And State hadn't dodged anybody. You had to give them a chance. Until it was clear less than 10 minutes into this that they had no chance to win a national championship off North Carolina Monday night.
Lawson had seven steals at halftime. Ellington wouldn't miss. Davis looked like he will someday be the best NBA player out of all of them. They came at you inside and outside and seemed to have saved their best defense of the whole season for the biggest game of their lives, at least so far. On the Monday night of the season, Carolina beating State the way they beat everybody else in March and April, it seemed as if the worries about Lawson's injured toe were from another season now.
This was the season it was supposed to play. This was the team it was supposed to be. A team that ended up 34-4 and could have won
Monday, April 06, 2009
This Title Game Could Have an Epic Feel
By John Feinstein
The Washington Post
Monday, April 6, 2009; D06
http://www.washingtonpost.com
DETROIT
If you were going to write a script for Monday's national championship game, it would go something like this: The forces of good are fighting to overcome the odds and spread light throughout the land against the forces of evil, who have all the power, speed, quickness and the experience.
Either North Carolina Coach Roy Williams, left, or Michigan State Coach Tom Izzo will win his second national title tonight in Detroit. (By Eric Gay -- Associated Press)
Michigan State isn't just David taking on Goliath; it is David With a Cause. North Carolina has certainly played the role of the unbeatable giant throughout the NCAA tournament, wiping out one opponent after another with almost shocking ease.
The only problem with this story line is this: The Tar Heels aren't evil; they're just really, really talented.
"I'm as big a Tom Izzo fan as there is," North Carolina Coach Roy Williams said of the Spartans coach on Sunday. "I just won't be one on Monday night."
That's certainly not an unreasonable position. In a basketball sense, Williams and his team have as much at stake Monday night as Izzo and the Spartans do. The difference is the Tar Heels haven't become a national symbol in the past two weeks.
"We're the blue-collar team, and this is the blue-collar city," Izzo said after Michigan State beat Connecticut in Saturday's first semifinal. "We understand that this isn't just about basketball."
Izzo's right. Connecticut Coach Jim Calhoun understood that after hearing the roars of the more than 72,000 people wedged into Ford Field. He spoke eloquently about what Izzo and his team had done for Detroit in the wake of the auto industry's downfall and all that has befallen the city economically in the past year.
Williams is every bit as sensitive as Calhoun. But on Monday he will be a basketball coach trying to win one of the biggest games of his life. His team was anointed as this season's probable champion before a shot was taken or a screen was set. He and his players have been candid about the fact that anything short of winning the national championship will be a disappointment.
"Last year we got to the Final Four, and we were just happy to be here," North Carolina's Tyler Hansbrough said. "This year we won't be happy unless we come out of here as the winners."
By all logical basketball standards, they should. Their 83-69 victory over Villanova on Saturday was as much a clinic as it was a basketball game. The Wildcats, who had played so well on defense to get here, looked helpless at times as Carolina made 11 of 22 three-point attempts and then got the ball inside whenever it wanted with Ty Lawson constantly breaking down the defense and Hansbrough controlling the lane.
Even so, the old cliche that anything can happen in one game is true, although the last truly stunning upset was 12 years ago when Arizona took down Kentucky. This would not be an upset of Villanova-Georgetown or North Carolina State-Houston proportions, but it would certainly be remarkable.
And yet . . .
"They've become a special team in the last two weeks," Calhoun said. "I thought Louisville was playing the best basketball of anyone, and they won that game going away. I was stunned by that."
One of the keys for the Spartans on Saturday was Raymar Morgan finding his game again. After a bout with mononucleosis and walking pneumonia in January, Morgan had struggled and had been a nonfactor throughout the tournament. Saturday, after Izzo took him aside in the locker room prior to the game to tell him to relax and let the game come to him, Morgan responded with 18 points and nine rebounds.
He will need to play a similar game Monday night. So will Michigan State's guards, Kalin Lucas and Travis Walton. They will have to to slow down Lawson, and all the Spartans will have to find Carolina's shooters, especially Danny Green and Wayne Ellington.
"I expect about 80 percent of the crowd to be for them," Williams said. "We expect to be facing all of Michigan."
Spoken like a true Dean Smith disciple. No one in the history of sports was better than Smith at finding ways to limit expectations for his team. Lefty Driesell once said of Smith, "He's the only man in history with 800 wins who has been the underdog in every one of them."
That was part of Smith's genius, and Williams will put that to work for this game. His players will jog down the long tunnel leading from the locker room to the court Monday convinced that not a soul in the building wants to see them win. When North Carolina beat Illinois for the championship in St. Louis four years ago, most of that crowd was pulling for the Illini, whose campus was just a couple of hours drive from the Edward Jones Dome.
"This will be like a road game," Lawson said. "But we're pretty good on the road."
At the end of road wins Smith always like to tell his players to, "listen for the silence," a sound he considered as sweet as any he ever heard. Williams and his players will be doing that Monday night, looking to silence a crowd that is hoping, as Izzo put it, "for one more miracle."
Whichever coach wins this game will be sitting on top of the college basketball world in ways that go beyond this national championship. It will be the second title for either Williams or Izzo. Williams has now been to seven Final Fours at two schools in 18 seasons and is coaching in his fourth final. Izzo has been to five Final Fours in 11 seasons and is in his second championship game. With Mike Krzyzewski (three titles, 10 Final Fours) having not been to the last weekend since 2004, Billy Donovan (back-to-back titles in 2006 and 2007) having gone to two straight NITs and Calhoun perhaps being at or near the end of his career, the mantle appears to be passing. Monday night's winner will surely wear it, at least for a while.
If this were a movie, there isn't much doubt about how it would end. Michigan State would fight from behind, and someone -- perhaps Lucas, who asked to be introduced as being from Detroit on Saturday even though he grew up about 25 miles from here -- would make a shot at the buzzer to complete the dream and the miracle. America would weep for the blue-collar team from the blue-collar town.
The only thing blue about the Tar Heels are their uniforms. Through no fault of their own, they have become the villain in this Monday night melodrama.
Regardless of the outcome, college basketball will crown a worthy champion Monday night. When the game is over, CBS will play "One Shining Moment" as it always does. If Carolina wins, America will watch. If Michigan State wins, America will sing along, and there won't be a dry eye -- here or anyplace else.
The Washington Post
Monday, April 6, 2009; D06
http://www.washingtonpost.com
DETROIT
If you were going to write a script for Monday's national championship game, it would go something like this: The forces of good are fighting to overcome the odds and spread light throughout the land against the forces of evil, who have all the power, speed, quickness and the experience.
Either North Carolina Coach Roy Williams, left, or Michigan State Coach Tom Izzo will win his second national title tonight in Detroit. (By Eric Gay -- Associated Press)
Michigan State isn't just David taking on Goliath; it is David With a Cause. North Carolina has certainly played the role of the unbeatable giant throughout the NCAA tournament, wiping out one opponent after another with almost shocking ease.
The only problem with this story line is this: The Tar Heels aren't evil; they're just really, really talented.
"I'm as big a Tom Izzo fan as there is," North Carolina Coach Roy Williams said of the Spartans coach on Sunday. "I just won't be one on Monday night."
That's certainly not an unreasonable position. In a basketball sense, Williams and his team have as much at stake Monday night as Izzo and the Spartans do. The difference is the Tar Heels haven't become a national symbol in the past two weeks.
"We're the blue-collar team, and this is the blue-collar city," Izzo said after Michigan State beat Connecticut in Saturday's first semifinal. "We understand that this isn't just about basketball."
Izzo's right. Connecticut Coach Jim Calhoun understood that after hearing the roars of the more than 72,000 people wedged into Ford Field. He spoke eloquently about what Izzo and his team had done for Detroit in the wake of the auto industry's downfall and all that has befallen the city economically in the past year.
Williams is every bit as sensitive as Calhoun. But on Monday he will be a basketball coach trying to win one of the biggest games of his life. His team was anointed as this season's probable champion before a shot was taken or a screen was set. He and his players have been candid about the fact that anything short of winning the national championship will be a disappointment.
"Last year we got to the Final Four, and we were just happy to be here," North Carolina's Tyler Hansbrough said. "This year we won't be happy unless we come out of here as the winners."
By all logical basketball standards, they should. Their 83-69 victory over Villanova on Saturday was as much a clinic as it was a basketball game. The Wildcats, who had played so well on defense to get here, looked helpless at times as Carolina made 11 of 22 three-point attempts and then got the ball inside whenever it wanted with Ty Lawson constantly breaking down the defense and Hansbrough controlling the lane.
Even so, the old cliche that anything can happen in one game is true, although the last truly stunning upset was 12 years ago when Arizona took down Kentucky. This would not be an upset of Villanova-Georgetown or North Carolina State-Houston proportions, but it would certainly be remarkable.
And yet . . .
"They've become a special team in the last two weeks," Calhoun said. "I thought Louisville was playing the best basketball of anyone, and they won that game going away. I was stunned by that."
One of the keys for the Spartans on Saturday was Raymar Morgan finding his game again. After a bout with mononucleosis and walking pneumonia in January, Morgan had struggled and had been a nonfactor throughout the tournament. Saturday, after Izzo took him aside in the locker room prior to the game to tell him to relax and let the game come to him, Morgan responded with 18 points and nine rebounds.
He will need to play a similar game Monday night. So will Michigan State's guards, Kalin Lucas and Travis Walton. They will have to to slow down Lawson, and all the Spartans will have to find Carolina's shooters, especially Danny Green and Wayne Ellington.
"I expect about 80 percent of the crowd to be for them," Williams said. "We expect to be facing all of Michigan."
Spoken like a true Dean Smith disciple. No one in the history of sports was better than Smith at finding ways to limit expectations for his team. Lefty Driesell once said of Smith, "He's the only man in history with 800 wins who has been the underdog in every one of them."
That was part of Smith's genius, and Williams will put that to work for this game. His players will jog down the long tunnel leading from the locker room to the court Monday convinced that not a soul in the building wants to see them win. When North Carolina beat Illinois for the championship in St. Louis four years ago, most of that crowd was pulling for the Illini, whose campus was just a couple of hours drive from the Edward Jones Dome.
"This will be like a road game," Lawson said. "But we're pretty good on the road."
At the end of road wins Smith always like to tell his players to, "listen for the silence," a sound he considered as sweet as any he ever heard. Williams and his players will be doing that Monday night, looking to silence a crowd that is hoping, as Izzo put it, "for one more miracle."
Whichever coach wins this game will be sitting on top of the college basketball world in ways that go beyond this national championship. It will be the second title for either Williams or Izzo. Williams has now been to seven Final Fours at two schools in 18 seasons and is coaching in his fourth final. Izzo has been to five Final Fours in 11 seasons and is in his second championship game. With Mike Krzyzewski (three titles, 10 Final Fours) having not been to the last weekend since 2004, Billy Donovan (back-to-back titles in 2006 and 2007) having gone to two straight NITs and Calhoun perhaps being at or near the end of his career, the mantle appears to be passing. Monday night's winner will surely wear it, at least for a while.
If this were a movie, there isn't much doubt about how it would end. Michigan State would fight from behind, and someone -- perhaps Lucas, who asked to be introduced as being from Detroit on Saturday even though he grew up about 25 miles from here -- would make a shot at the buzzer to complete the dream and the miracle. America would weep for the blue-collar team from the blue-collar town.
The only thing blue about the Tar Heels are their uniforms. Through no fault of their own, they have become the villain in this Monday night melodrama.
Regardless of the outcome, college basketball will crown a worthy champion Monday night. When the game is over, CBS will play "One Shining Moment" as it always does. If Carolina wins, America will watch. If Michigan State wins, America will sing along, and there won't be a dry eye -- here or anyplace else.
Bruce Springsteen, tour 2009: working on a dream
Wally Skalij / Los Angeles TimesBruce Springsteen, photographed at the Convention Hall in Asbury Park, New Jersey.
As he and the E Street Band kick off a world tour, the troubadour for troubled times reflects on where he's been and where he's headed.
By Geoff Boucher reporting from Asbury Park, NJ
Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com
April 5, 2009
"There are a lot of ghosts in this place," Bruce Springsteen said as his boots clomped on an ancient staircase at the Asbury Park Convention Hall. It was here in this old seaside venue that Springsteen, as a teenager, watched Jim Morrison prowl the stage and Keith Moon thunder away on drums for the Who. It was also in the corridors here that he brushed past a wild-child named Janis Joplin. "Our elbows, they came this close," said Springsteen, somehow still amazed that a Jersey kid could come within arm's reach of rock history.
Unlike those lost icons, Springsteen was built for the long haul. He will turn 60 in September, and he'll do so while on the road with the E Street Band supporting their latest album, "Working on a Dream." The world tour (which comes to the Los Angeles Sports Arena on April 15 and 16) officially began Wednesday in San Jose, but it was in late March, here at this creaky boardwalk venue, that Springsteen began working on "the conversation" of the concert tour, as he calls it, trying out the new songs in front of a live audience for the first time.
On a blustery Monday afternoon, just hours before the first of two charity shows, Springsteen arrived at the venue with a 155-year-old surprise for his bandmates. During sound check he told the singers in the group to line up along the lip of the stage and, looking down at the lyrics, Springsteen coached them through a late addition to their opening-night lineup, a Civil War-era lament by Stephen Foster called "Hard Times Come Again No More":
It's a song that the wind blows across the troubled wave
It's a cry that is heard along the shore.
It's the words that are whispered beside the lowly grave
When hard times will come again no more.
It's a song and a sigh of the weary.
Hard times, hard times, come again no more.
Afterward, Springsteen leaned against a pockmarked wall and plucked at his Telecaster with a distracted look on his face. "We're sort of in search of the show," he said. "I've got half a thing planned in my head . . . mainly we're getting the new songs down and then finding the things that are in tune with the times and what's going on out there right now. But, you know, we are a band built for hard times."
Still, nothing comes easy these days for the E Street Band. The band prides itself on work ethic, but the struggles are different now. Two members are coming off of major surgery and then there's the hardscrabble nature of the music business these days. Album sales (494,000 copies in the U.S.) are good, not great, and the tour hasn't stirred the same sort of mad scramble as the old days. There are 3 1/2 decades in the band's rear-view mirror too, but Springsteen has his eye on the road ahead.
"The live show is a current event at all times," said Springsteen,who, more than any other performer, has figured out how to be Woody Guthrie and Elvis Presley at the same time. In January, he serenaded a new president by singing "The Rising," his wrenching Sept. 11 spiritual, with a red-robed choir at the Lincoln Memorial; a few weeks later it was Springsteen the showman, belting out a 12-minute medley with "Glory Days" and "Born to Run" between the fireworks and cheerleaders of the Super Bowl halftime show. "There were some requests for 'The Ghost of Tom Joad,' " Springsteen deadpanned when asked about his jukebox duty at the ballgame, "but we decided to save that one for a different day."
The inaugural event was a natural for a man who, as he puts it, has "been involved in national conversation" for a long time, but the Super Bowl appearance came with the risk of crassness. Springsteen said he took the booking because of his confidence in halftime producer Don Mischer (who also handled the inauguration concert), but there was another pragmatic motivation as well.
"I've said no for about 10 years or however long they've been asking, but, I tell you, we played on the last tour and there were some empty seats here and there and, well, there shouldn't be any empty seats at an E Street Band show. I hold pride that we remain one of the great wonders of the world . . . so sometimes you got to remind people a little bit."
For the singer, it's not enough to be an essential artist, he also wants to be urgent. He mocked the idea of "heritage" or "legacy" acts, the concert-industry jargon for aging bands that tour with just the old hits. "Resting on their laurels, resting on their . . . legacy," he said with a wicked grin. " 'Hey, I'm sitting on my legacy! Ow, my legacy's killing me!' "
The forever-young Springsteen seemed to be pulsing with new reasons to believe after watching the election of Barack Obama.
"You felt like the country that you had been imagining in your work, the kind of place you want your kids to grow up in, on that election night it showed its face," he said. "I never knew if I would see its face. I always wondered if maybe I was just a link in the chain pulling toward that place. But to catch a glimpse of it, just a glimpse . . . so it's real right now. I didn't know we had it in us, to tell you truth. The next day all my music was a little truer than the day before. That was big for me."
Springsteen is driven, competitive and, whether it's on stage or at the gym, obsessed with a muscular expression of himself as some sort of populist-poet-as-athlete, a concept that may be as peculiar to America as, well, the practice of bringing guitars and fighter planes to a football game.
The singer wants to be a force of good but also amplify his music by reaching the biggest audience possible. That puts him in awkward spots. Last year, he signed a sweetheart deal with Wal-Mart for an exclusive CD but then publicly apologized for it after critics said he betrayed his role as a workers rights champion ("I dropped the ball," he told the New York Times). In February, Springsteen was in the news again, lashing out at Ticketmaster for acting suspiciously like the nation's largest scalper with tickets for the new tour. By March, the rock icon was ready for a laugh but instead found himself squirming in discomfort on " The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" as the typically smooth host devolved on-air into a babbling Boss fan.
In person, Springsteen seems oddly shy and has a truly goofy laugh. He is intense when it comes to quality control, but his band's rehearsals are peppered with old-pal razzing. But there's no doubt that Springsteen is an earnest man in an ironic age, a vinyl-era rock evangelist at a time when music fans are losing that religion -- or at the very least, setting their denomination on shuffle. Then there's the fact that Springsteen is a tycoon singing protest songs during economic calamity. He's well aware of the tugs; he even sang about in 1992's "Better Days": "It's a sad funny ending to find yourself pretending / a rich man in a poor man's shirt."
For Springsteen, though, the mission becomes clear when he is on tour.
"Our music, our songs, they have a lot of bittersweet in them. People come up mostly and they say the same thing: They mention more how you got them through the tough parts of their life. It's always, 'You got me through' this or that: a divorce, high school, when I lost someone.
"It was kind of where we came from, particularly from 'Darkness on the Edge of Town' out. It was also just in the kind of intensity the band played with. It was always in the music. The band has developed this philosophy that is nurturing to people when things are very stressful. We're a good band to see when it's not going so good, you're having a tough time. So we're getting this thing going, we're finding the show."
Whether all of that makes you get a catch in your throat or simply roll your eyes, there's no denying the power of seeing this band on this shore and in front of these fans, every one of them waiting for the bells that ring, as the old song put it. No matter the year, audacious promises are made when Bruce Springsteen plays with the ocean at his back and Jersey at his feet.
Smoothing rough edges
"Evenin', everybody," said the singer, dressed in blue jeans, a dark gray T-shirt and a black vest, as he walked out and waved at the hometown crowd of 1,990. The audience bellowed back its love, but Springsteen cautioned them. "All right, tonight is the night you get to be the guinea pigs . . ."
The experiment was mostly successful. There were moments when the band lurched or misfired and Springsteen apologized, but most fans were too busy shouting out the lyrics to "Darlington County."
The group opened with the dusty epic "Outlaw Pete" (one of seven songs from the new album in the set), which seems inspired by "Jungleland," "Jeremiah Johnson," Ennio Morricone and perhaps, oddly, the loopy myth-speak of the old " Davy Crockett" television theme. The song starts off with a wink:
He was born a little baby on the Appalachian Trail
At six months old he'd done three months in jail
He robbed a bank in his diapers and his little bare baby feet
All he said was, 'Folks, my name is Outlaw Pete.'
"Pete" seems to be the standout song from "Working on a Dream," an album that has not been treated kindly by critics. Ann Powers, writing in The Times, called it "boisterously scatterbrained, exhilaratingly bad," while Greg Kot of the Chicago Tribune found it "overdone and remarkably slight." A notable exception to the sour appraisals was Brian Hiatt's five-star review in Rolling Stone, which hailed the "romantic sweep and swaggering musical ambition" and dubbed it the "richest of the three great rock albums" from the band this decade.
The album is layered and ornate with flashes that recall Roy Orbison, Phil Spector and the Byrds, so it's no surprise that no one is comparing it to "Darkness on the Edge of Town," the 1978 classic that had a dark sawmill spirit. No one, that is, except for Springsteen himself.
"When 'Darkness' came out -- and people don't remember this now -- it was not tremendously received initially by plenty of fans," Springsteen said as he sat in his dressing room before the first Asbury Park show. "It was a record that people really needed to hear live. We went out and played and played and played. And that music through the years -- it's become some of our most durable music. It seems to have tentacles that reach out to our darkest things and our most inspirational things. It seems to sit center; it's almost like a little compass that guides you into the center of the band. It has an element of political implications to it, and at the same time it was gospel music in its intent. The verses were blues, and the choruses were gospel. It can sit near [the 1982 acoustic album] 'Nebraska,' and it can sit near [2007's ] 'Magic'. It spreads its arms between those places."
He paused and pondered his illustrious songbook. "They all come to their final life on stage. That's what I would say. They're born in the studio, but they learn to walk in concerts. . . . Some never quite work out the way you think. 'I'm Going Down' [on "Born in the U.S.A."], for instance, had a swing on the record we could never capture live."
The dressing room was cluttered. On the table in front of the singer was the night's set list, his reading glasses and a Sharpie marker. He also had the page with the 19th century Foster song. He initially changed chunks of lyrics, fretting that the language and messages should be more contemporary, but then he crossed out the edits and decided to rely on the song's innate powers. He has a similar approach to his own songwriting.
"As I get older I find that writing is getting more fluid and I'm giving myself less rules. No matter what you put out at this point, everyone has their particular Bruce Springsteen record that they're waiting for or thinking of. It should be dealing with this, it should be talking about that, it should sound like this. . . . That's just part of being around for a long time. The nice part of it is your ears are always open to the voices of your audience. But at the same time I don't tend to sit down with an external idea . . . A lot of it is listening to what's coming. One week the potatoes are up in the garden, one week it's tomatoes."
He leaned back and laughed, pleased with the idea of digging in the dirt. Skeptics who think the star takes himself too seriously would have been surprised to hear him braying with laughter. "If potatoes are up, I pick 'em!"
Prove it all night
On Night 2 in Asbury Park, Springsteen decided maybe it was best to start the show with the compass right in his hand; the E Street Band hit the stage with "Badlands," the first track from "Darkness."
Poor men wanna be rich, rich men wanna be kings,
And a king ain't satisfied 'til he rules everything.
I wanna go out tonight, I wanna find out what I got.
The show was nothing less than incandescent. The night before was fine for mere mortals, but Night 2 pleased even the exacting Springsteen, who introduced an encore with relief: "What a difference a day makes!"
The new material had a sharper edge. "Kingdom of Days" opened with far more throttle than the album version; Springsteen also sang it harder and in a higher key, subtle shifts that made a major difference. The show also had a suite of songs for the desperate and dispossessed -- "Seeds," "Johnny 99" and "Tom Joad" -- that created a coiled energy in the room. The local headlines that day told of the state unemployment fund running dry, and a Newark radio station was planning to load hearses with empty wallets and dump them at the statehouse.
Springsteen grew up in working-class Freehold (if that's not enough symbolism, he also lived for a time on Institute Street) and his family scraped to get by. "I'm telling the stories of my parents and their friends," he said backstage. "I think the things that happen to you before you're 12, they stay with you your whole life and as a writer and artist, you're just finding new ways to express them."
The E Street Band, now reunited for a decade after Springsteen's 1990s solo excursions, finished the "Magic" tour just last year and now it's back for an outing that may total 70 shows by the finish. Keyboardist Danny Federici, a founding member, died a year ago this month after a battle with melanoma ("Working on a Dream" is dedicated to him). Clarence Clemons, the saxophone player, used a cane to get on and off the stage in Asbury Park after double knee-replacement and guitarist Nils Lofgren had both hips replaced last year.
Springsteen, father of three kids ages 15 to 18, winces at the words "farewell tour" and gives every indication that he and his wife, E Street singer Patti Scialfa, won't trade the road life any time soon for their horse ranch in Monmouth County, N.J. He has songs written for the next album already and is just waiting "for the opportunity to record."
For this tour, a large video screen will sit right behind the band, a production touch that purist Springsteen had long resisted. At one point during the warmup shows, the screen flashed a railroad image that suggested a locomotive might come barreling through the drum kit. Springsteen chuckled when asked about it.
"Patti told me there was something about getting into your 50s, that people get very focused and busy in their 50s, and that maybe it's because an oncoming train focuses the mind," he said. "There may be some element of that involved with me right now. I hear a whistle in the distance somewhere -- maybe I'd better start to writing."
geoff.boucher@latimes.com
Book Review: "The Swastika Against the Cross"
By Herbert E. Meyer
http://www.americanthinker.com/
April 04, 2009
For more than a year now, Bruce Walker has been publishing essays at American Thinker that read like Bach preludes -- tiny compositions that are so simple, and so perfect, that they could be composed only by a genius.
If you (as I) were wondering what Walker could do with a bit more elbowroom, get your hands on a copy of The Swastika Against the Cross. In this tightly focused, exceptionally powerful book Walker fills a gap left by virtually every historian of Nazi Germany. More precisely, Walker shows - proves, really - that Hitler's war against the Jews was merely a prelude to the war he planned to wage against Christianity. And he neatly demolishes the current myth that Christians, and in particular Catholics, stood by while Hitler and his Nazi Stormtroopers embarked on their ghastly plans to rid Germany, and Europe itself, of its Jews:
"The religion of the Nazis was much close to Islam or Hinduism than it was to Christianity. The Nazis hated Christianity and were fairly open about that fact. Part of the reason that the Nazis hated Jews so much was because Jews were supposed to have "tricked" Aryans into accepting Christianity.....and there is no doubt that Christianity itself would have faced a Nazi holocaust had the Nazis not been defeated in war....Christians also resisted the Nazis and these Christians paid a terrible price for their defiance."
Throughout The Swastika Against the Cross, Walker cites an astonishing number of books and essays published in the 1930s that make precisely this point. For instance, in Nazism versus Religion Raymond Freely writes bluntly that "Nazism will seek to exterminate Christianity if Nazism dominates Europe." In his 1939 book entitled Religion in the Reich Michael Power writes that "There has probably been no more curious persecution in history than the attack made by National-Socialism upon the Christian churches." In 1938 the American journalist Dorothy Thompson - who was herself kicked out of Germany - warned that National Socialism, like communism, simply couldn't be understood until one grasped that these are secular religions that could tolerate no rivals.
Walker's point is to demonstrate that at the time serious people inside and outside Germany understood that the Nazi attack on the Jews was merely the opening shot. In other words, the slaughter that Hitler had in mind for Europe after he'd won the war would have been even more ghastly than the Holocaust itself.
In fact, the Nazis' attack on Christianity started even before World War II broke out. For example, as early as 1934 they ordered the Prussian secret police to break into the homes of members of the Pastors Emergency Fund, and then sent one pastor to a concentration camp. In 1935, the Nazis arrested or put under house arrest 700 pastors for having read to their congregations the manifesto of the Provisional Church, which denounced Nazi racism. Walker's calm, almost clinical listing of these and other such incidents will come as a surprise to those who've been under the mistaken impression that Christians in Nazi Germany were a protected species while the Jews were rounded up.
In The Swastika Against the Cross, Bruce Walker skillfully pulls together a huge amount of evidence to illuminate the great lesson of the twentieth century: Crazy, vicious people sometimes get political power, and when they tell you what they're going to do with that power - believe them. Today, as North Korea fuels that missile on its launch pad and as the lunatics in Iran build nuclear bombs, it's a lesson we need to learn - fast.
Herbert E. Meyer is author of The Cure for Poverty.
http://www.americanthinker.com/
April 04, 2009
For more than a year now, Bruce Walker has been publishing essays at American Thinker that read like Bach preludes -- tiny compositions that are so simple, and so perfect, that they could be composed only by a genius.
If you (as I) were wondering what Walker could do with a bit more elbowroom, get your hands on a copy of The Swastika Against the Cross. In this tightly focused, exceptionally powerful book Walker fills a gap left by virtually every historian of Nazi Germany. More precisely, Walker shows - proves, really - that Hitler's war against the Jews was merely a prelude to the war he planned to wage against Christianity. And he neatly demolishes the current myth that Christians, and in particular Catholics, stood by while Hitler and his Nazi Stormtroopers embarked on their ghastly plans to rid Germany, and Europe itself, of its Jews:"The religion of the Nazis was much close to Islam or Hinduism than it was to Christianity. The Nazis hated Christianity and were fairly open about that fact. Part of the reason that the Nazis hated Jews so much was because Jews were supposed to have "tricked" Aryans into accepting Christianity.....and there is no doubt that Christianity itself would have faced a Nazi holocaust had the Nazis not been defeated in war....Christians also resisted the Nazis and these Christians paid a terrible price for their defiance."
Throughout The Swastika Against the Cross, Walker cites an astonishing number of books and essays published in the 1930s that make precisely this point. For instance, in Nazism versus Religion Raymond Freely writes bluntly that "Nazism will seek to exterminate Christianity if Nazism dominates Europe." In his 1939 book entitled Religion in the Reich Michael Power writes that "There has probably been no more curious persecution in history than the attack made by National-Socialism upon the Christian churches." In 1938 the American journalist Dorothy Thompson - who was herself kicked out of Germany - warned that National Socialism, like communism, simply couldn't be understood until one grasped that these are secular religions that could tolerate no rivals.
Walker's point is to demonstrate that at the time serious people inside and outside Germany understood that the Nazi attack on the Jews was merely the opening shot. In other words, the slaughter that Hitler had in mind for Europe after he'd won the war would have been even more ghastly than the Holocaust itself.
In fact, the Nazis' attack on Christianity started even before World War II broke out. For example, as early as 1934 they ordered the Prussian secret police to break into the homes of members of the Pastors Emergency Fund, and then sent one pastor to a concentration camp. In 1935, the Nazis arrested or put under house arrest 700 pastors for having read to their congregations the manifesto of the Provisional Church, which denounced Nazi racism. Walker's calm, almost clinical listing of these and other such incidents will come as a surprise to those who've been under the mistaken impression that Christians in Nazi Germany were a protected species while the Jews were rounded up.
In The Swastika Against the Cross, Bruce Walker skillfully pulls together a huge amount of evidence to illuminate the great lesson of the twentieth century: Crazy, vicious people sometimes get political power, and when they tell you what they're going to do with that power - believe them. Today, as North Korea fuels that missile on its launch pad and as the lunatics in Iran build nuclear bombs, it's a lesson we need to learn - fast.
Herbert E. Meyer is author of The Cure for Poverty.
The Real Climate Deniers
Another Perspective
By Peter C. Glover & Michael Economides on 4.3.09 @ 6:07AM
The American Spectator
http://spectator.org/
For at least a decade, intimately connected with energy use, have been claims on climate change. Richard Lindzen, arguably the world's most renowned climate scientist, describes our understanding of the science of climate as "primitive." Yet many in the media persist in treating alarmist "climate experts" as "all-knowing." But then the same media have a long history of taking up "end is nigh" scaremongering. It's good for ratings. We have had a litany of warnings that "billions could die" when AIDS, Avian flu, SARS, Ebola, mad cow disease, the millennium bug -- the list is endless -- hit the headlines. When they didn't of course, media alarmists shrugged, claimed they "simply report the facts" and moved on to warn about the next looming disaster.
Since man set foot on the earth, however, nothing has quite gripped the angst-ridden imagination like the weather gods visiting their fury at human behavior and life, so much connected with the use of fossil fuel energy. Media editors know this. Where once we banished such "end is nigh" eccentrics to the limits of society, today, they are fêted for spinning prediction as science and conducting publicly funded research to "save the planet." Their messages are aided by apocalyptic video game scenarios passing for media news reports.
Nowhere has this been thrown into more graphic relief than in two international climate conferences held in March this year. The "expert" conclusions of each could not have been more starkly divergent. But it is in the aims, nature and public pronouncements of each conference that we discern where the real science of climate understanding lays, and thus who are the real "climate deniers." All of which has profound implications for the future of energy, energy policy and energy investment.
The Alarmist Conference
The climate alarmist conference met in Copenhagen March 10-12 and was attended by over 2,000 activists, mostly non-scientists. It was billed as an "emergency summit" ahead of next December's UN global climate summit to be held in the same city. Such is the panic among climate/political activists that world governments will use the economic crisis as an excuse to avoid committing to binding national carbon targets come December, it was felt vital to up the political ante. If you thought that would mean scientists pointing to the latest accruing scientific evidence of impending disaster, however, you would be wrong. Far from presenting any new (or old) actual evidence, the conference majored on politicians doling out the media's headlines based on the latest apocalyptic computer-modeled predictions.
The conference duly warned of even higher sea levels and even higher global temperatures all presaging even greater catastrophes. Apparently warnings of temperature rises of 2 to 3 degrees C. clearly were not shocking us enough. Now they could be as high as 4 or 5 degrees C. The London Times reported the conference as claiming the "ice sheets are melting" and that increased global warming would lead to other "impacts," including more hurricanes, floods, and starvation.And just to show how previous prevarication by world leaders has already cost us, we learned that "two years ago it was widely thought that holding temperature increases to a maximum of 2C was achievable if governments made the effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent by 2050. It is now recognised that an 80 percent cut is needed."
To sum up, the alarmist conference in Copenhagen was not about science, it was about politics and prophecy. For the actual science, including the latest scientific evidence and trends, observers in Copenhagen would have had to travel to New York.
The Non-Alarmist Conference
Seven hundred climate "skeptics," many of them scientists, including Richard Lindzen of MIT, attended the Second International Conference on Climate Change, "Global Warming: Was It Ever Really a Crisis?" The conference sponsored by the Heartland Institute, was held in New York on March 8-10. This was a wholly different kind of affair. It focused on the empirical science of climate, the latest scientific data and climate trends. As such, in dealing with the gritty reality of climate science, it duly got almost zero mass media coverage. Most journalists, it seems, do not like dealing with real science and allaying public scares is just bad for business.
In complete contrast to Copenhagen, the New York conference was addressed by a who's who of distinguished climate scientists. As well as hearing from Professor Lindzen, the conference was addressed by Professor Syun-Ichi Akasofu, former director of the International Arctic Research Center, Professor Paul Reiter of the Pasteur Institute, and Dr. Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, to name but a few. These eminent scientists are the very ones the media likes to smear as "crackpots" and "climate deniers." What the conference received was the fruit of real research and study that showed sea levels, far from experiencing dramatic rise, are seeing the same level of rise they have been seeing for over 200 years. Professor S. Fred Singer, highlighting the claim of one alarmist who warned a rise of even 18 cm over a century would be "catastrophic," pointed out that the gentleman concerned is "apparently unaware that 18cm a century is the ongoing rate of rise -- which implies no additional rise in sea levels. In other words, the human influence is zero."
Alarmist claims over the "melting of the Western Antarctic ice sheet" also got short shrift as it was revealed the long-term melting of the Western ice sheet has been known about for decades. Far more significant was the data that confirmed how the Antarctic is not melting at all except for one tiny corner, the Antarctic Peninsula. The lack of scientific evidence that global ice was in meltdown was tied in with the fact that key computer-modeled temperature predictions -- upon which the whole alarmist edifice stands -- assume a linear rise in temperatures as carbon emissions rise. But such computer predictions were shown to have proven consistently and hopelessly inept. Far from following the linear rise anticipated by the alarmists, the actual satellite-measured global temperature data reveals that global temperatures have flattened out in recent years and, more recently, dropped. On the plain scientific data, if the present trend continues, the world will in fact be 1.1 degree C. cooler by 2100. In short, the world's ice is not in meltdown. Similarly, claims that hurricane activity was rising was refuted by the scientific data showing hurricane activity, currently, is at a 30-year low.
Much more could be said, but reading the New York presentations (linked below) one can only be impressed by the standard of empirical scientific study and debate and, in Copenhagen, the distinct lack of it. The juxtaposition of these two conferences is thus iconic of the entire climate debate -- or rather the mass media's collusive and shameful closing down of it. Unfortunately, many political leaders have simply bought the media-dominating alarmist line.
Vaclav Klaus, keynote speaker at the New York conference and current president of the European Union, lamented that, "the minds of world leaders are firmly shut to anything but the fantasies of the scaremongers." Yet it's those same leaders who are about to consider diverting vast economic and energy resources at the current G20 and at December's "Kyoto II." Frightening, when you consider they will do so based on an agenda propagated by a highly anti-intellectual, exclusively prophetic, anti-science 'faith' movement -- the real climate deniers.
(Go here for a list of links to the audio, video, power point and pdf presentations from the ICCC's "Global Warming: Was It Ever Really a Crisis?" -- decide for yourself.)
Peter C. Glover is European associate editor for the independent online magazine Energy Tribune.
Michael Economides is editor-in-chief of Energy Tribune.
By Peter C. Glover & Michael Economides on 4.3.09 @ 6:07AM
The American Spectator
http://spectator.org/
For at least a decade, intimately connected with energy use, have been claims on climate change. Richard Lindzen, arguably the world's most renowned climate scientist, describes our understanding of the science of climate as "primitive." Yet many in the media persist in treating alarmist "climate experts" as "all-knowing." But then the same media have a long history of taking up "end is nigh" scaremongering. It's good for ratings. We have had a litany of warnings that "billions could die" when AIDS, Avian flu, SARS, Ebola, mad cow disease, the millennium bug -- the list is endless -- hit the headlines. When they didn't of course, media alarmists shrugged, claimed they "simply report the facts" and moved on to warn about the next looming disaster.Since man set foot on the earth, however, nothing has quite gripped the angst-ridden imagination like the weather gods visiting their fury at human behavior and life, so much connected with the use of fossil fuel energy. Media editors know this. Where once we banished such "end is nigh" eccentrics to the limits of society, today, they are fêted for spinning prediction as science and conducting publicly funded research to "save the planet." Their messages are aided by apocalyptic video game scenarios passing for media news reports.
Nowhere has this been thrown into more graphic relief than in two international climate conferences held in March this year. The "expert" conclusions of each could not have been more starkly divergent. But it is in the aims, nature and public pronouncements of each conference that we discern where the real science of climate understanding lays, and thus who are the real "climate deniers." All of which has profound implications for the future of energy, energy policy and energy investment.
The Alarmist Conference
The climate alarmist conference met in Copenhagen March 10-12 and was attended by over 2,000 activists, mostly non-scientists. It was billed as an "emergency summit" ahead of next December's UN global climate summit to be held in the same city. Such is the panic among climate/political activists that world governments will use the economic crisis as an excuse to avoid committing to binding national carbon targets come December, it was felt vital to up the political ante. If you thought that would mean scientists pointing to the latest accruing scientific evidence of impending disaster, however, you would be wrong. Far from presenting any new (or old) actual evidence, the conference majored on politicians doling out the media's headlines based on the latest apocalyptic computer-modeled predictions.
The conference duly warned of even higher sea levels and even higher global temperatures all presaging even greater catastrophes. Apparently warnings of temperature rises of 2 to 3 degrees C. clearly were not shocking us enough. Now they could be as high as 4 or 5 degrees C. The London Times reported the conference as claiming the "ice sheets are melting" and that increased global warming would lead to other "impacts," including more hurricanes, floods, and starvation.And just to show how previous prevarication by world leaders has already cost us, we learned that "two years ago it was widely thought that holding temperature increases to a maximum of 2C was achievable if governments made the effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent by 2050. It is now recognised that an 80 percent cut is needed."
To sum up, the alarmist conference in Copenhagen was not about science, it was about politics and prophecy. For the actual science, including the latest scientific evidence and trends, observers in Copenhagen would have had to travel to New York.
The Non-Alarmist Conference
Seven hundred climate "skeptics," many of them scientists, including Richard Lindzen of MIT, attended the Second International Conference on Climate Change, "Global Warming: Was It Ever Really a Crisis?" The conference sponsored by the Heartland Institute, was held in New York on March 8-10. This was a wholly different kind of affair. It focused on the empirical science of climate, the latest scientific data and climate trends. As such, in dealing with the gritty reality of climate science, it duly got almost zero mass media coverage. Most journalists, it seems, do not like dealing with real science and allaying public scares is just bad for business.
In complete contrast to Copenhagen, the New York conference was addressed by a who's who of distinguished climate scientists. As well as hearing from Professor Lindzen, the conference was addressed by Professor Syun-Ichi Akasofu, former director of the International Arctic Research Center, Professor Paul Reiter of the Pasteur Institute, and Dr. Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, to name but a few. These eminent scientists are the very ones the media likes to smear as "crackpots" and "climate deniers." What the conference received was the fruit of real research and study that showed sea levels, far from experiencing dramatic rise, are seeing the same level of rise they have been seeing for over 200 years. Professor S. Fred Singer, highlighting the claim of one alarmist who warned a rise of even 18 cm over a century would be "catastrophic," pointed out that the gentleman concerned is "apparently unaware that 18cm a century is the ongoing rate of rise -- which implies no additional rise in sea levels. In other words, the human influence is zero."
Alarmist claims over the "melting of the Western Antarctic ice sheet" also got short shrift as it was revealed the long-term melting of the Western ice sheet has been known about for decades. Far more significant was the data that confirmed how the Antarctic is not melting at all except for one tiny corner, the Antarctic Peninsula. The lack of scientific evidence that global ice was in meltdown was tied in with the fact that key computer-modeled temperature predictions -- upon which the whole alarmist edifice stands -- assume a linear rise in temperatures as carbon emissions rise. But such computer predictions were shown to have proven consistently and hopelessly inept. Far from following the linear rise anticipated by the alarmists, the actual satellite-measured global temperature data reveals that global temperatures have flattened out in recent years and, more recently, dropped. On the plain scientific data, if the present trend continues, the world will in fact be 1.1 degree C. cooler by 2100. In short, the world's ice is not in meltdown. Similarly, claims that hurricane activity was rising was refuted by the scientific data showing hurricane activity, currently, is at a 30-year low.
Much more could be said, but reading the New York presentations (linked below) one can only be impressed by the standard of empirical scientific study and debate and, in Copenhagen, the distinct lack of it. The juxtaposition of these two conferences is thus iconic of the entire climate debate -- or rather the mass media's collusive and shameful closing down of it. Unfortunately, many political leaders have simply bought the media-dominating alarmist line.
Vaclav Klaus, keynote speaker at the New York conference and current president of the European Union, lamented that, "the minds of world leaders are firmly shut to anything but the fantasies of the scaremongers." Yet it's those same leaders who are about to consider diverting vast economic and energy resources at the current G20 and at December's "Kyoto II." Frightening, when you consider they will do so based on an agenda propagated by a highly anti-intellectual, exclusively prophetic, anti-science 'faith' movement -- the real climate deniers.
(Go here for a list of links to the audio, video, power point and pdf presentations from the ICCC's "Global Warming: Was It Ever Really a Crisis?" -- decide for yourself.)
Peter C. Glover is European associate editor for the independent online magazine Energy Tribune.
Michael Economides is editor-in-chief of Energy Tribune.
A Nation of Moochers
Happy April 15.
by P.J. O'Rourke
The Weekly Standard
04/13/2009, Volume 014, Issue 29
http://www.weeklystandard.com/
As April 15 rolls around let us take a moment to recall why we Americans pay taxes: Because some of our country's good-for-nothing bums are too chicken to rob us at gunpoint. That would be members of Congress and the executive branch. How come we keep electing politicians who will tax the bejeezus out of us? Especially Democrats? At least Republicans are smart enough to lie about it.
We keep electing them because taxes are a pretty good deal. The American government will spend $3.6 trillion this year. There are 306 million of us Americans. We each get $11,765. Sure, we get it mostly in transportation pork projects, agricultural price supports, GM charitable contributions, the Marine Corps, and interest payments on Chinese T-bills when we'd rather get it in cash. But, still, $11,765 isn't bad. Let's say you're a family of five: a dad, a mom and three lovely, high-scoring kids participating in enough community service programs to pad their college applications. You're the kind of family we conservatives endorse. And you're getting $58,825. Even Republicans are on the dole. Dad (conservative women are proud to be stay-at-home moms) will have to make a pile of money to pay $59K in taxes so you can each get $11,765 from the government.
Although it is unclear just how big a pile of money Dad will have to make to ensure that he's feeding, housing, and grooming America for the future rather than sucking her teat.
For one thing there's the possibility that President Obama will make all income greater than the 2009 Madoff investor average return subject to punitive capitation. Also U.S. income taxes are so complex that even Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner can't understand them. Plus we all cheat on our taxes (except for Timothy Geithner who can't understand his). Furthermore, personal income tax, Social Security, and Medicare exactions account for only 75 percent of federal receipts. Corporate taxes provide 13 percent, 6 percent is borrowed, and 6 percent comes from that $9 pack of Marlboros you just bought because April 15 is stressing you out.
Pete Sepp of the National Taxpayers Union did some complicated mathematics and says, "By my reckoning, somewhere between 85 and 95 million households out of 115 million total have a smaller tax liability than the per-capita spending burden." The breadwinners for 18 to 26 percent of our households are shoveling coal in the engine rooms of the ship of state, while everybody else is a stowaway, necking with Kate Winslet like Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic.
Pete Sepp goes on to note that those breadwinners doing all the work are also less likely to be on welfare or receiving other government largesse and are more likely to have their Social Security benefits taxed. "If we were to compensate for this," he says, "I imagine that more like 100 million households have a smaller liability than the per-capita spending burden." One hundred out of 115 is 87 percent. Our nation is 87 percent mooch, 87 percent leech, 87 percent "Spare (hope and) change, man?"
It may be even worse than that or--depending on how greedily liberal you are--better. Let's abandon the complicated mathematics of taxation. We don't understand complicated mathematics. We were liberal arts majors. If we understood complicated mathematics we'd be wealthy hedge managers in jail today. Let's go to arithmetic. The U.S. gross domestic product for 2008 has been calculated by the Department of Commerce's Bureau of Economic Analysis as $14.2 trillion. Say the recession keeps recessing and GDP shrinks a bit in 2009. We'll round down to $14 trillion. The federal budget, being $3.6 trillion, is 25.7 percent of the gross domestic product. The government makes off with 25.7 percent of our goods and services. This is our real rate of national taxation. Then the government gives us an $11,765 kickback. If we figure out what $11,765 is 25.7 percent of, we see that before you can call yourself a taxpayer instead of a tax vampire you have to earn $45,778 if you're single, and $228,890 if you're supporting that family of five.
How many households have this kind of income? The president's does, and with only two kids. The president is taxing himself. Good. But all the rest of the U.S. government's operating expenses are being paid by AIG bonus recipients, the ten or a dozen hedge fund managers who aren't in jail yet, a couple of "debt restructuring" scam artists advertising at 3 A.M. on the Food Channel, and Bill Gates.
America's grossly unfair tax system won't lead to class war. Or, if it does, the war will be brief. There are millions upon millions of us Sponge Bobs and relatively few of the sucker fish we're soaking. On the other hand, young people--with no dependents except their Twitter followers--need to earn only double their age to be ladling gravy to Uncle. These are the devotees of the multi-culti who most adore super-diverse Barack, and they're being "bled white," as it were. They could turn on the president if they started thinking about this--or anything else.
The rest of us are in clover. True, we have to "give" 25.7 percent of our work week to the IRS. That's 10 hours, 16 minutes, and 48 seconds. Call it all of Wednesday and most of Thursday morning. But nothing gets done on Monday or Friday. Tuesday we had to go get our kid from school because a peanut was discovered in the food dish of the 5th grade's gerbil and the whole building had to be hypo-allergenicized. On Thursday, after an early lunch, we left the computer on in our cubicle, draped our suit jacket over the back of our chair, and went and caught a Nationals game. So we shouldn't worry that out-of-control government spending or an insane tax structure will destroy the American economy--because we have government jobs.
P. J. O'Rourke is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
by P.J. O'Rourke
The Weekly Standard
04/13/2009, Volume 014, Issue 29
http://www.weeklystandard.com/
As April 15 rolls around let us take a moment to recall why we Americans pay taxes: Because some of our country's good-for-nothing bums are too chicken to rob us at gunpoint. That would be members of Congress and the executive branch. How come we keep electing politicians who will tax the bejeezus out of us? Especially Democrats? At least Republicans are smart enough to lie about it.
We keep electing them because taxes are a pretty good deal. The American government will spend $3.6 trillion this year. There are 306 million of us Americans. We each get $11,765. Sure, we get it mostly in transportation pork projects, agricultural price supports, GM charitable contributions, the Marine Corps, and interest payments on Chinese T-bills when we'd rather get it in cash. But, still, $11,765 isn't bad. Let's say you're a family of five: a dad, a mom and three lovely, high-scoring kids participating in enough community service programs to pad their college applications. You're the kind of family we conservatives endorse. And you're getting $58,825. Even Republicans are on the dole. Dad (conservative women are proud to be stay-at-home moms) will have to make a pile of money to pay $59K in taxes so you can each get $11,765 from the government.Although it is unclear just how big a pile of money Dad will have to make to ensure that he's feeding, housing, and grooming America for the future rather than sucking her teat.
For one thing there's the possibility that President Obama will make all income greater than the 2009 Madoff investor average return subject to punitive capitation. Also U.S. income taxes are so complex that even Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner can't understand them. Plus we all cheat on our taxes (except for Timothy Geithner who can't understand his). Furthermore, personal income tax, Social Security, and Medicare exactions account for only 75 percent of federal receipts. Corporate taxes provide 13 percent, 6 percent is borrowed, and 6 percent comes from that $9 pack of Marlboros you just bought because April 15 is stressing you out.
Pete Sepp of the National Taxpayers Union did some complicated mathematics and says, "By my reckoning, somewhere between 85 and 95 million households out of 115 million total have a smaller tax liability than the per-capita spending burden." The breadwinners for 18 to 26 percent of our households are shoveling coal in the engine rooms of the ship of state, while everybody else is a stowaway, necking with Kate Winslet like Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic.
Pete Sepp goes on to note that those breadwinners doing all the work are also less likely to be on welfare or receiving other government largesse and are more likely to have their Social Security benefits taxed. "If we were to compensate for this," he says, "I imagine that more like 100 million households have a smaller liability than the per-capita spending burden." One hundred out of 115 is 87 percent. Our nation is 87 percent mooch, 87 percent leech, 87 percent "Spare (hope and) change, man?"
It may be even worse than that or--depending on how greedily liberal you are--better. Let's abandon the complicated mathematics of taxation. We don't understand complicated mathematics. We were liberal arts majors. If we understood complicated mathematics we'd be wealthy hedge managers in jail today. Let's go to arithmetic. The U.S. gross domestic product for 2008 has been calculated by the Department of Commerce's Bureau of Economic Analysis as $14.2 trillion. Say the recession keeps recessing and GDP shrinks a bit in 2009. We'll round down to $14 trillion. The federal budget, being $3.6 trillion, is 25.7 percent of the gross domestic product. The government makes off with 25.7 percent of our goods and services. This is our real rate of national taxation. Then the government gives us an $11,765 kickback. If we figure out what $11,765 is 25.7 percent of, we see that before you can call yourself a taxpayer instead of a tax vampire you have to earn $45,778 if you're single, and $228,890 if you're supporting that family of five.
How many households have this kind of income? The president's does, and with only two kids. The president is taxing himself. Good. But all the rest of the U.S. government's operating expenses are being paid by AIG bonus recipients, the ten or a dozen hedge fund managers who aren't in jail yet, a couple of "debt restructuring" scam artists advertising at 3 A.M. on the Food Channel, and Bill Gates.
America's grossly unfair tax system won't lead to class war. Or, if it does, the war will be brief. There are millions upon millions of us Sponge Bobs and relatively few of the sucker fish we're soaking. On the other hand, young people--with no dependents except their Twitter followers--need to earn only double their age to be ladling gravy to Uncle. These are the devotees of the multi-culti who most adore super-diverse Barack, and they're being "bled white," as it were. They could turn on the president if they started thinking about this--or anything else.
The rest of us are in clover. True, we have to "give" 25.7 percent of our work week to the IRS. That's 10 hours, 16 minutes, and 48 seconds. Call it all of Wednesday and most of Thursday morning. But nothing gets done on Monday or Friday. Tuesday we had to go get our kid from school because a peanut was discovered in the food dish of the 5th grade's gerbil and the whole building had to be hypo-allergenicized. On Thursday, after an early lunch, we left the computer on in our cubicle, draped our suit jacket over the back of our chair, and went and caught a Nationals game. So we shouldn't worry that out-of-control government spending or an insane tax structure will destroy the American economy--because we have government jobs.
P. J. O'Rourke is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
Government vs. the Axles of Evil
By George F. Will
The Washington Post
Sunday, April 5, 2009; A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
The Constitution enumerates three requirements for those who would be president (they must be natural-born citizens, at least 35 and a resident within the country for 14 years) and now the government's thrashing about in the economy imposes a fourth: Presidents must be able to speak pluperfect nonsense with a straight face, lest the country understand what the government is doing. Obfuscation serves political salvation when what the government is doing includes promising that if Chrysler will sell itself to Fiat, U.S. taxpayers will lend that Italian firm $6 billion.
2007 Chevrolet Silverado
Barack Obama displayed reality-denying virtuosity last week when, announcing the cashiering of General Motors' CEO, and naming his replacement, and as the government was prompting selection of a new majority of GM's board of directors, and as the government announced the next deadline for GM to submit a more satisfactory viability plan than it submitted at the last faux deadline, and as the government kept the billions flowing to tide GM over until, well, whenever, the president said: "The United States government has no interest in running GM."
Actually, his administration prefers to do that rather than allow bankruptcy to infuriate the United Auto Workers union, which was preemptively grateful to Obama's administration with lavish contributions to candidate Obama. The president supposedly showed "toughness" in sacking a conspicuous member of a particularly unpopular little cohort, CEOs of big corporations.
He will need more grit if, as his administration hints, this time it is serious, that its patience is wearing thin, that someday GM could face "controlled" or "prepackaged" or "surgical" bankruptcy. One suspects that those adjectives intimate that it will be faux bankruptcy, gentle in dealing with the UAW.
Last November, five months and $17.4 billion in auto bailouts ago, this column noted: "Some opponents of bankruptcy say: GM must not be allowed to fail before it perfects batteries for its electric-powered Volt, which supposedly is a key to the company's resurrection. This vehicle was concocted to serve GM's prolonged attempt to ingratiate itself with the few hundred environmentally obsessed automotive engineers in Congress. They have already voted tax credits of up to $7,500 for purchasers of such cars -- bribes that reveal doubts about consumer enthusiasm for them at a price that would reflect cost."
In December, GM, by then a mendicant groveling before its congressional masters, ran a full-page newspaper ad apologizing for having "disappointed" everyone, vowing to stop selling so many "pickups and SUVs" (which were 11 of GM's 20 most profitable products in 2008), and promising "revolutionary new products like the Chevrolet Volt." Another ad, which appeared before December and is still running, features a car attached to an electric cord, and says the Volt amounts to "reinventing the automobile."
Last week, in an unenthralled summary of GM's "viability" plan, Obama's administration said: "GM earns a large share of its profits from high-margin trucks and SUVs, which are vulnerable to a continuing shift in consumer preference to smaller vehicles. Additionally, while the Chevy Volt holds promise, it will likely be too expensive to be commercially successful in the short term."
The stunning shift in consumer preferences that should make the White House's freshly minted auto experts feel vulnerable has been reported under headlines such as "Like a Rock: Hybrid Car Sales Plummet" (Wall Street Journal, Dec. 9) and "Hybrid Car Sales Go From 60 to 0 at Breakneck Speed" (Los Angeles Times, March 17). Absent $4 gasoline, customers, those nuisances with their insufferable preferences, do not want the vehicles the politicians want them to want, even with manufacturers now offering large rebates and other incentives.
The two best-selling vehicles in America this year are large pickup trucks (Ford F-Series and Chevy Silverado). In February, Toyota sold 13,600 Tundra and Tacoma pickups and 7,232 Priuses. It sells the Prius at a loss, which it can afford to do because it makes pots of money selling pickups. Has the Car Designer in Chief, a.k.a. the president, considered the possibility that what he calls "the cars of tomorrow" will forever be that?
His administration cannot be faulted for failing to do well what cannot be done well -- industrial policy, wherein the political class, with negligible experience in commerce, flounders. The administration can, however, be faulted for trying. The government's wallow in the automobile industry, under this and the previous administration, merits a hockey coach's evaluation of his team: "Every day you guys look worse and worse. And today you played like tomorrow."
georgewill@washpost.com
The Washington Post
Sunday, April 5, 2009; A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
The Constitution enumerates three requirements for those who would be president (they must be natural-born citizens, at least 35 and a resident within the country for 14 years) and now the government's thrashing about in the economy imposes a fourth: Presidents must be able to speak pluperfect nonsense with a straight face, lest the country understand what the government is doing. Obfuscation serves political salvation when what the government is doing includes promising that if Chrysler will sell itself to Fiat, U.S. taxpayers will lend that Italian firm $6 billion.
2007 Chevrolet SilveradoBarack Obama displayed reality-denying virtuosity last week when, announcing the cashiering of General Motors' CEO, and naming his replacement, and as the government was prompting selection of a new majority of GM's board of directors, and as the government announced the next deadline for GM to submit a more satisfactory viability plan than it submitted at the last faux deadline, and as the government kept the billions flowing to tide GM over until, well, whenever, the president said: "The United States government has no interest in running GM."
Actually, his administration prefers to do that rather than allow bankruptcy to infuriate the United Auto Workers union, which was preemptively grateful to Obama's administration with lavish contributions to candidate Obama. The president supposedly showed "toughness" in sacking a conspicuous member of a particularly unpopular little cohort, CEOs of big corporations.
He will need more grit if, as his administration hints, this time it is serious, that its patience is wearing thin, that someday GM could face "controlled" or "prepackaged" or "surgical" bankruptcy. One suspects that those adjectives intimate that it will be faux bankruptcy, gentle in dealing with the UAW.
Last November, five months and $17.4 billion in auto bailouts ago, this column noted: "Some opponents of bankruptcy say: GM must not be allowed to fail before it perfects batteries for its electric-powered Volt, which supposedly is a key to the company's resurrection. This vehicle was concocted to serve GM's prolonged attempt to ingratiate itself with the few hundred environmentally obsessed automotive engineers in Congress. They have already voted tax credits of up to $7,500 for purchasers of such cars -- bribes that reveal doubts about consumer enthusiasm for them at a price that would reflect cost."
In December, GM, by then a mendicant groveling before its congressional masters, ran a full-page newspaper ad apologizing for having "disappointed" everyone, vowing to stop selling so many "pickups and SUVs" (which were 11 of GM's 20 most profitable products in 2008), and promising "revolutionary new products like the Chevrolet Volt." Another ad, which appeared before December and is still running, features a car attached to an electric cord, and says the Volt amounts to "reinventing the automobile."
Last week, in an unenthralled summary of GM's "viability" plan, Obama's administration said: "GM earns a large share of its profits from high-margin trucks and SUVs, which are vulnerable to a continuing shift in consumer preference to smaller vehicles. Additionally, while the Chevy Volt holds promise, it will likely be too expensive to be commercially successful in the short term."
The stunning shift in consumer preferences that should make the White House's freshly minted auto experts feel vulnerable has been reported under headlines such as "Like a Rock: Hybrid Car Sales Plummet" (Wall Street Journal, Dec. 9) and "Hybrid Car Sales Go From 60 to 0 at Breakneck Speed" (Los Angeles Times, March 17). Absent $4 gasoline, customers, those nuisances with their insufferable preferences, do not want the vehicles the politicians want them to want, even with manufacturers now offering large rebates and other incentives.
The two best-selling vehicles in America this year are large pickup trucks (Ford F-Series and Chevy Silverado). In February, Toyota sold 13,600 Tundra and Tacoma pickups and 7,232 Priuses. It sells the Prius at a loss, which it can afford to do because it makes pots of money selling pickups. Has the Car Designer in Chief, a.k.a. the president, considered the possibility that what he calls "the cars of tomorrow" will forever be that?
His administration cannot be faulted for failing to do well what cannot be done well -- industrial policy, wherein the political class, with negligible experience in commerce, flounders. The administration can, however, be faulted for trying. The government's wallow in the automobile industry, under this and the previous administration, merits a hockey coach's evaluation of his team: "Every day you guys look worse and worse. And today you played like tomorrow."
georgewill@washpost.com
Climate Change's Dim Bulbs
By George F. Will
The Washington Post
Thursday, April 2, 2009; A21
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Fervent. 1. Hot, burning, glowing, boiling.
-- Oxford English Dictionary
"Fervently" is how America will henceforth engage in talks on global warming. So said the president's climate change negotiator Sunday in Germany, at a U.N. conference on reducing carbon emissions. This vow was fervently applauded by conferees welcoming the end of what the AP news story called the Bush administration's "eight years of obdurate participation" in climate talks.
Reducing carbon emissions supposedly will reverse warming, which is allegedly occurring even though, according to statistics published by the World Meteorological Organization, there has not been a warmer year on record than 1998. Regarding the reversing, the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change has many ambitions, as outlined in a working group's 16-page "information note" to "facilitate discussions." For example:
"Tariffs can be lowered to grant special preference to climate-friendly goods, or they can be maintained at high levels to discourage trade in GHG- [greenhouse gas-] intensive goods and services." The working group says protectionism "in the service of climate change objectives" might virtuously "shelter domestic producers of climate-friendly goods." Furthermore, using "border carbon adjustment," a nation might virtuously "impose costs on imports equivalent to that [sic] faced by domestic producers" operating under a carbon tax. Or a nation with a cap-and-trade regime regulating carbon emissions by domestic manufacturers might require foreign manufacturers "to buy offsets at the border equal to that [sic] which the producer would have been forced to purchase had the good been produced domestically." Cynics will see only potential for mischief by governments, including the U.S. government, using such measures to give a green patina to protectionism. Meanwhile, the U.S. government is having its own problems with one "climate-friendly good" that might not be. Last week, the New York Times front page carried this headline: "The Bulb That Saved the Planet May Be a Little Less Than Billed."
The story recounted some Americans' misadventures with the new light bulbs that almost all Americans -- all but those who are filling their closets with supplies of today's incandescent bulbs -- will have to use after the phaseout of today's bulbs in 2014. (You missed that provision of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007?)
A San Francisco -- naturally -- couple emerged from Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth" incandescent with desire to think globally and act locally, in their home. So they replaced their incandescent bulbs with the compact fluorescents that Congress says must soon be ubiquitous. "Instead of having a satisfying green moment, however," the Times reported, "they wound up coping with a mess."
Although supposed to last 10,000 hours and save, the Times says, "as much as" $5.40 a year in electricity costs, some bulbs died within a few hours. Some experts, reports the Times, "blame the government for the quality problems," saying its push to cut the bulbs' prices prompted manufacturers to use inferior components.
Furthermore, some experts have written a guide saying the new bulbs require "a little insight and planning." The Times says that "may be an understatement."
The bulbs, says the Times, "do not do well in hot places with little airflow, like recessed ceiling fixtures," and some do not work "with dimmers or three-way sockets." And: "Be aware that compact fluorescents can take one to three minutes to reach full brightness. This is not a defect."
Well, if you say so. Because all fluorescents contain mercury, a toxic metal, they must never be put in the trash, so Home Depot and other chains offer bins for disposing of dangerous bulbs.
Driving to one of these disposal points might not entirely nullify the bulbs' environmental benefits. Besides, the Times summarizes the Environmental Protection Agency's helpful suggestions for coping with the environmental dangers caused when one of these environment-saving bulbs breaks:
"Clear people and pets from the room and open a window for at least 15 minutes if possible. Avoid vacuuming. Scoop up larger pieces with stiff paper or cardboard, pick up smaller residue with sticky tape, and wipe the area with a damp cloth. Put everything into a sealed plastic bag or sealed glass jar. In most cases, this can be put in the trash, but the EPA recommends checking local rules."
Worrywarts wonder what will happen when a lazy or careless, say, 10 percent of 300 million Americans put their worn-out bulbs in the trash. Stop worrying. What do you think? That Congress, architect of the ethanol industry and designer of automobiles, does not think things through?
georgewill@washpost.com
The Washington Post
Thursday, April 2, 2009; A21
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Fervent. 1. Hot, burning, glowing, boiling.
-- Oxford English Dictionary
"Fervently" is how America will henceforth engage in talks on global warming. So said the president's climate change negotiator Sunday in Germany, at a U.N. conference on reducing carbon emissions. This vow was fervently applauded by conferees welcoming the end of what the AP news story called the Bush administration's "eight years of obdurate participation" in climate talks.
Reducing carbon emissions supposedly will reverse warming, which is allegedly occurring even though, according to statistics published by the World Meteorological Organization, there has not been a warmer year on record than 1998. Regarding the reversing, the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change has many ambitions, as outlined in a working group's 16-page "information note" to "facilitate discussions." For example:"Tariffs can be lowered to grant special preference to climate-friendly goods, or they can be maintained at high levels to discourage trade in GHG- [greenhouse gas-] intensive goods and services." The working group says protectionism "in the service of climate change objectives" might virtuously "shelter domestic producers of climate-friendly goods." Furthermore, using "border carbon adjustment," a nation might virtuously "impose costs on imports equivalent to that [sic] faced by domestic producers" operating under a carbon tax. Or a nation with a cap-and-trade regime regulating carbon emissions by domestic manufacturers might require foreign manufacturers "to buy offsets at the border equal to that [sic] which the producer would have been forced to purchase had the good been produced domestically." Cynics will see only potential for mischief by governments, including the U.S. government, using such measures to give a green patina to protectionism. Meanwhile, the U.S. government is having its own problems with one "climate-friendly good" that might not be. Last week, the New York Times front page carried this headline: "The Bulb That Saved the Planet May Be a Little Less Than Billed."
The story recounted some Americans' misadventures with the new light bulbs that almost all Americans -- all but those who are filling their closets with supplies of today's incandescent bulbs -- will have to use after the phaseout of today's bulbs in 2014. (You missed that provision of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007?)
A San Francisco -- naturally -- couple emerged from Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth" incandescent with desire to think globally and act locally, in their home. So they replaced their incandescent bulbs with the compact fluorescents that Congress says must soon be ubiquitous. "Instead of having a satisfying green moment, however," the Times reported, "they wound up coping with a mess."
Although supposed to last 10,000 hours and save, the Times says, "as much as" $5.40 a year in electricity costs, some bulbs died within a few hours. Some experts, reports the Times, "blame the government for the quality problems," saying its push to cut the bulbs' prices prompted manufacturers to use inferior components.
Furthermore, some experts have written a guide saying the new bulbs require "a little insight and planning." The Times says that "may be an understatement."
The bulbs, says the Times, "do not do well in hot places with little airflow, like recessed ceiling fixtures," and some do not work "with dimmers or three-way sockets." And: "Be aware that compact fluorescents can take one to three minutes to reach full brightness. This is not a defect."
Well, if you say so. Because all fluorescents contain mercury, a toxic metal, they must never be put in the trash, so Home Depot and other chains offer bins for disposing of dangerous bulbs.
Driving to one of these disposal points might not entirely nullify the bulbs' environmental benefits. Besides, the Times summarizes the Environmental Protection Agency's helpful suggestions for coping with the environmental dangers caused when one of these environment-saving bulbs breaks:
"Clear people and pets from the room and open a window for at least 15 minutes if possible. Avoid vacuuming. Scoop up larger pieces with stiff paper or cardboard, pick up smaller residue with sticky tape, and wipe the area with a damp cloth. Put everything into a sealed plastic bag or sealed glass jar. In most cases, this can be put in the trash, but the EPA recommends checking local rules."
Worrywarts wonder what will happen when a lazy or careless, say, 10 percent of 300 million Americans put their worn-out bulbs in the trash. Stop worrying. What do you think? That Congress, architect of the ethanol industry and designer of automobiles, does not think things through?
georgewill@washpost.com
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
