C.J. Box tackles serious issues in novels that are filled with action and adventure

By Linda Sickler

Savannah Morning News

http://savannahnow.com/

February 6, 2014

Most of the action in C.J. Box’s books — and there is plenty of it — takes place outside.

To some degree, Box is similar to his best-loved character, Joe Pickett, a game warden who finds himself solving mysteries. “I was never a game warden, but I do have three daughters, so I do incorporate that into the books,” Box says. “I’m a pretty avid outdoorsman, and hunting and fishing are a pretty important part of my life.”

Throughout his career, Box has written 15 novels, including his Joe Pickett series, and some stand-alone novels. A native of Wyoming, he lives with his family outside of Cheyenne.

“Open Season,” the first novel in the Joe Pickett series, was included in The New York Times list of “Notable Books” of 2001.

Box won the Anthony, Macavity, Gumshoe and Barry awards for “Open Season,” all in the Best First Novel category.

“Blue Heaven,” Box’s first stand-alone novel, won the Edgar Award for Best Mystery Novel of 2008. He has also won the Prix Calibre 38 Award, presented in France.

When he first wrote “Open Season,” Box wasn’t planning a series. “The subject matter was the Endangered Species Act,” he says.

“Some creatures thought extinct were found,” Box says. “I found that a game warden worked better with that idea than any other protagonist.”

After earning a journalism degree, Box worked for a small weekly newspaper in Wyoming and wrote a column while working on his first manuscript.

“I always wanted to be an author at some point, but didn’t know what that would entail,” he says.

“It took almost 20 years from once I started working on the manuscript to getting a novel published,” Box says. “While I was working at the newspaper, on the side I was working in fiction.”

The subject matter and setting of the novel determine whether it is a standalone or a series book. Box’s newest book, “Stone Cold,” is a Joe Pickett novel that will be published March 11.

“‘Blue Heaven’ had to be set in northern Idaho,” Box says. “That dictated that it had to be a standalone. All my standalones have primarily taken place in places other than Wyoming.

“Most are issue-based in some way or another, about some kind of contemporary issue in the West. I research that issue and incorporate it into the book.

“These aren’t agenda books and I don’t necessarily have a political viewpoint, but I do explore environmental issues, like fracking and that kind of thing,” he says. “It’s pretty easy to find subject matter.”

Even more important than the subject is the writing style.

“In the first few books, it was simply getting a handle on the craft of it to make sure the book is page-turning and things happen when they’re supposed to happen and conclude when they’re supposed to conclude,” Box says. “It takes a while to get into the rhythm of things.”

Characters come next.

“A lot of my characters seem like real persons to me,” Box says. “It’s not like I imagine them talking to me.

“But I certainly know how he thinks and how he would react in given situations mainly because the books have all been told in real time from the first one. Joe Pickett and his family have all gotten older.

“They’ve kind of grown, but changed,” Box says. “I’m a reader, too. I get put off when I read a series where people never really age or have scars from the last book. I can’t buy that.”

After writing in the morning, Box edits what he wrote in the afternoon.

“I do it more by word count than by hours,” he says. “I write a minimum of 1,000 words per day and sometimes I get much higher than that.”

Having a fan base and winning awards is a perk for Box.

“It feels like validation,” he says. “As a writer, it’s a pretty solitary thing. It’s great validation to get an award after a year or two of working.”

When Box meets fans, they are likely to ask about the characters and the issues that are addressed.

“They ask, ‘Did this really happen?’” he says.

Box’s own inspirations include Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Connolly and his favorite author, Thomas McGuane.

“As a stylist, there’s nobody better,” he says. “I read all the time.”

IF YOU GO

What: C.J. Box at Savannah Book Festival

When: 4-5 p.m. Feb. 15

Where: Trinity United Methodist Church, Telfair Square

Cost: Free

Info: www.savannahbookfestival.org

CONTEST

Go to Facebook.com/DoSavannah and enter to win one of four exclusive early printings of the latest novel by C.J. Box, “Stone Cold.” This book will not be released until March 11, so it will not be for sale at the Savannah Book Festival. These four copies can be taken to the event to be signed by the author. All other books must be purchased on site.

Assad’s low-tech WMD: Starvation

By Anne Applebaum, Published: February 6 E-mail the writer

http://www.washingtonpost.com/

Bashar al-Assad, left, Syria president, greets his Iranian counterpart, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Tehran. Photograph: Atta Kenare/AFP/Getty Images

To the modern imagination, there is nothing so terrifying as a high-tech weapon. Our horror movies are filled with crashing planes, engineered viruses and rogue computers that have taken charge of spaceships. Our security nightmares have long been focused on nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. The phrase we use to describe these contemporary horrors, “weapons of mass destruction,” implies something diabolically modern, something so innovative that it can kill thousands in an instant.

But in our obsession with what is terrifyingly new, it seems we have forgotten that there are much older ways to kill large numbers of people. Certainly there is one weapon of mass destruction so ancient and low-tech that it doesn’t even involve gunpowder, let alone the lethal tools we so dismissively refer to as conventional weapons. This method is called starvation.

In medieval Europe, starvation was the de facto consequence of a siege. An army would surround a castle or a walled town, prevent food from entering — and then wait. The inhabitants would grow weak. They would lose their hair and their teeth. They would then surrender, or die in large numbers.

In the 20th century, dictators used starvation not just as a battle tactic but also to murder people who did not fit into their vision of an ideal society. Before resorting to more “industrial” methods, Hitler used starvation to kill Jews: Nazi soldiers shut them in ghettos, closed the doors and shot children who tried to smuggle food in through the sewers. Stalin used starvation to kill Ukrainian peasants: Soviet soldiers confiscated their grain, forcibly removed food from their larders and blocked roads so nothing could reach them. As in the Middle Ages, the Jews of the Lodz ghetto and the peasants of Kharkiv district grew weak, lost their hair and teeth, and then died. Millions of people were thus murdered, without a whiff of sarin gas or a drop of plutonium.

Nowadays, “death by forced starvation” sounds like something from an old newsreel. But it is not. Right now, in the 21st century, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad is once again making use of it. While the international community is haggling over his chemical weapons, the stuff of modern nightmares, Assad is following the example of his medieval and his 20th-century predecessors and deliberately starving thousands of people to death.

Because Assad says he doesn’t want to feed armed rebels, trucks filled with food aid now sit outside the besieged city of Homs, where an unknown number of civilians have had no supplies for many weeks. The effects are the same as they were in the Lodz ghetto. A Dutch priest who has remained inside the city has described people literally going mad from hunger: “Infants are suffering the most. Nursing mothers can’t feed their babies as they are too weak from hunger. We search everywhere for milk, and when we find it we mix it with water.”

At the same time, about 20,000 refugees living in the Yarmouk camp near Damascus are also growing weak, losing hair and teeth, and dying. During the Ukrainian famine in the 1930s, starving people ate insects, leaves and grass to stay alive. In Yarmouk, people are now eating cats, cactus and grass to stay alive. One witness has said that some people there are consuming only water. “Sometimes we do this . . . drink some water with some sugar or some salt and go back to sleep. But when you go to the street you will find maybe the people next door . . . they’re dead.” Here too, the government refuses to let in relief vehicles, on the grounds that “terrorists” have sought refuge inside.

Worse is to come, for as the war continues, the politics of starvation grow more complex. In revenge for the siege of Homs, Syrian rebels have besieged a handful of villages near Aleppo. In other places, government blockades are looser, though everyone knows they could be tightened if need be. In this war, starvation is a particularly useful battle tactic and a political tool. Not only can it help armies growing short of weapons, starvation can literally eliminate opponents. People who are starving — or dead — will not fight back.

Above all, starvation, unlike chemical weaponry, is useful in this war because it does not rise to the highest levels of international concern. A handful of foreign ministers have condemned the use of starvation in Syria, but so far it has not provoked public campaigns or mass media coverage. It has not given rise to a debate about humanitarian intervention. And this is why it continues: For the perpetrators, it’s a slower, safer form of murder than a nuclear bomb. Which doesn’t mean that it is any less lethal for the victims.

Read more from Anne Applebaum’s archive, follow her on Twitter or subscribe to her updates on Facebook.

Read more on this issue:

The Post’s View: Obama has options on Syria; he should use them

The Post’s View: The U.S. must reconsider its failed Syria policy

David Ignatius: In Syria, ousting Assad may be only the beginning

Morton Abramowitz: The U.S. is ignoring Syria’s humanitarian crisis

Elie Wiesel: How to stop the Syria massacre

Freedom for the Job-Locked

Dems’ desperate defense of Obamacare-induced unemployment 

By Jonah Goldberg

http://www.nationalreview.com/

February 7, 2014

It’s only February, but it’s already my favorite word — or phrase, I guess — of the year. (Who knows, by December it may be shortened to “joblock.”) It’s not euphonious or edgy, but it does offer insight into the unreality of the Democrats’ predicament.

The Congressional Budget Office issued a politically explosive report this week, finding that Obamacare will reduce the number of hours Americans work by the equivalent of 2.5 million full-time jobs. This is different from killing 2.5 million jobs, Obamacare defenders are quick to insist. This will be a shortfall on the demand, not supply, side. In other words, people with health insurance will opt not to work in certain circumstances if they know they won’t lose their coverage.

Democrats insist this is a boon. Indeed, many are talking about it as an act of liberation (which reminds me of an eleven-year-old headline from the Onion: “IBM Emancipates 8,000 Wage Slaves”).

House minority leader Nancy Pelosi says the CBO report vindicates Obamacare, because “this was one of the goals: to give people life, a healthy life, liberty to pursue their happiness. And that liberty is to not be job-locked, but to follow their passion.” Pelosi is particularly invested in this view. She’s been mocked for years now for her repeated claims that Obamacare is an entrepreneurial bill because it would let Americans quit their jobs to, among other things, “write poetry.”

I know I’m not alone in thinking that it was totally worth seizing a seventh of the U.S. economy, polarizing Washington, throwing millions of Americans’ lives into turmoil, and forcing millions of others to pay more in premiums and deductibles while spending $1.2 trillion just so we could liberate the Job-Locked Poets! (Whoever seizes that as the name of your new band: You’re welcome.)

Now everyone is taking a bow for freeing Americans from the shackles of employment. “People shouldn’t have job-lock,” Harry Reid declared this week. “We live in a country where there should be free agency. People can do what they want.”

That’s an awkward way of touting a law that compels people to buy insurance even if they don’t want it, during a “recovery” where millions can’t find a job.

Still, it pains me to say Reid has a point. So do other Obamacare supporters when they claim some conservatives are being hypocritical, or at least inconsistent, about the CBO report. Republicans have been arguing for years that the hard linkage between employment and health insurance is a mistake. (It began as an unintended consequence of World War II–era wage freezes.) And Republicans have been offering ways to fix the problem for years. There’s no point in suddenly shouting that “job-lock” isn’t a problem.

But there are some things worth shouting. First of all, according to the CBO, not every lost hour of work is the amateur poet’s gain. Yes, Obamacare lets people keep their health insurance even if they quit their jobs to master iambic pentameter. But the law also raises the implicit marginal tax on people looking for work; the more you earn, the fewer subsides you get. Thus, for many people, the costs of taking on more or better work will exceed the gains. So at least some people won’t feel liberated so much as trapped.

Also, just because Republicans have said that job-lock is a problem doesn’t mean they have to support the Democrats’ solution. I agree with my daughter that she needs a new hobby, but that doesn’t mean I have to buy her a team of lions so she can be a lion tamer.

Representative Paul Ryan and other opponents of Obamacare have proposed reforms that would have made insurance cheap and portable. Democrats said no because their top priority was never ending the tyranny of job-lockage. Rather, they claimed their top priority was to help some 30 million uninsured Americans.

Which is why the real CBO story should be: “That awkward moment when everyone realizes Obamacare was a huge mistake.” The same CBO report projects that by 2024 the number of non-elderly uninsured will be — drum roll, please — 31 million Americans.

And that’s why all of this talk of Democrats as the Job-Lock Liberators is pathetic and hilarious at the same time. Virtually every promise has been broken, every prediction falsified. And now, at a time when millions want work that doesn’t exist, Democrats are claiming victory by trimming the amount of work actually being done.

Hopefully voters will look for ways to liberate these Democrats from the curse of job-lock come November.

— Jonah Goldberg is the author of The Tyranny of Clichés, now on sale in paperback. You can write to him by e-mail at goldbergcolumn@gmail.com, or via Twitter @JonahNRO. © 2014 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

The Gaslight Anthem's 'B-Sides' album enough to appease fans

By Bobby Olivier/The Star-Ledger 
January 30, 2014
http://www.nj.com/entertainment/music

While fans of The Gaslight Anthem clamor for fresh music in 2014, the Jersey boys’ Tuesday release might be enough to sate the diehards for now.

“The B-Sides,” a compilation of covers, live sessions and acoustic outtakes recorded between 2008 and 2011 revisit a handful of the band’s most popular tracks, and land a few clean jabs at some older rock and grunge.

A pair of the group’s most well-circulated songs, 2008’s “The ‘59 Sound,” and “Great Expectations,” each gain a warm, bonfire sing-along intimacy with their melodies tweaked and their electrics unplugged. Singer Brian Fallon’s voice, which is dropped an octave, holds its grit but doesn’t lose pitch or power in the lower register.

A handful of tracks from 2010's "American Slang" are featured as well, but don’t touch the originals quite like the “‘59 Sound” songs.

As for the record’s covers, some snap nicely into place, but others just don’t fit. The oldest tribute chosen, The Rolling Stones’ 1972 single “Tumbling Dice” spins right into the New Brunswick guys’ wheelhouse, and is a fun rework, with Fallon’s tone adding some texture. “Songs for Teenagers,” a punkish, little tune from the band’s lesser known SideOneDummy label-mate, Fake Problems is, honestly, stronger with Gaslight at the reins.

But Pearl Jam’s “State of Love and Trust” gains a little polish and not much else. And “Antonia Jane,” from Canadian indie rockers Lightning Dust misses its piano, which is prominent in the original.

Mostly, the collection is worth a run-through, but like it or leave it, rehashed tunes are the plate of the day until a new LP comes along.

Obamacare’s Attack on the Work Ethic

Changing people's incentives doesn't make them freer

By Charles C. W. Cooke

http://www.nationalreview.com/

February 7, 2014

There is a point in almost every debate at which the losing party recognizes its predicament and concludes that its only remaining play is to try to corrupt the language. In Texas, pro-choice hero Wendy Davis has begun, risibly, to describe herself as “pro-life”; in his second inaugural, President Obama cloaked the most ambitious statist agenda in a half-century in the patois of limited government and rebellion; and, in my own country of birth, authorities that lock people up for speaking do so in the ostensible name of “respect.” If you can’t beat ’em, confuse ’em.

Yesterday morning, Obamacare’s beleaguered partisans got in on the act, too. Responding to a CBO report that suggested the law would encourage more than 2 million people either to seek less work or to leave the labor market completely, progressives picked up their tricornered hats and their muskets, and started to shout incoherently about “freedom.” In a lovely illustration of the truism that progressives really haven’t the slightest clue what it is that conservatives believe, the Huffington Post’s Senior Congressional Reporter, Michael McAuliff, spoke for the cabal, suggesting ludicrously that,

There’s an irony in the GOP complaining that ACA lets people quit jobs. I mean, what’s wrong with freedom?

To answer a remarkably misguided rhetorical question, there is nothing at all “wrong with freedom.” As Patrick Henry rightly argued, above all other things “liberty ought to be the direct end” of government, for, after that, everything else is mere indulgence. But there is an awful lot “wrong” with using the word “freedom” where it does not apply. After all, it is one thing for a person to choose not to work and to accept the natural consequences of that decision, but quite another indeed for a person to choose not to work because others are being forced to subsidize his well-being. One can reasonably attest that redistributing wealth to underwrite preferred social outcomes is “necessary” or “virtuous” or “kind” or “practical” — or even, more cynically, that it is the inexorable end product of a democratic system in which one man can vote himself the contents of another’s wallet. But one cannot claim that it makes either man “free” — at least not without twisting the word and the concept that it represents beyond all meaningful recognition.

Does the Obama administration really plan to make the case that negative liberty is but a mirage and that, the state of nature’s “forcing” one to work being akin to actual compulsion, the state must step in everywhere to liberate the citizenry from reality’s harsh claims? One suspects not.

At the very same time as the White House and its friends were taking credit for having emancipated the American people from the indignities of having to keep down a career, others seemed to be insisting that the labor market and the government are wholly discrete entities. This isn’t about Obamacare “killing” jobs, the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler wrote, “it’s about workers — and the choices they make.” “Look at it this way,” he explained. “If someone says they decided to leave their job for personal reasons, most people would not say they ‘lost’ their jobs. They simply decided not to work.” To an extent, this distinction is a fair one, although there is a great deal of truth in The Economist’s observation that “a job is an economic transaction between a seller and a buyer of labour, and can be ‘destroyed’ if either seller or buyer walks away.”

Either way, it fails to address the material question, which is, “Why, in this case, will those people ‘decide not to work’?” The answer, of course, is that the intrusive federal action that one party supports and the other opposes has changed the calculation for them. It really is this simple: Before Obamacare, there was a status quo. With Obamacare, the government changed that status quo. As a result of that change, people are making different decisions. One can claim that the change will help to diminish youth unemployment or allow the elderly to enjoy more leisure time or do wonders for the gardening industry. But one can’t pretend that the state doesn’t have full culpability for those different decisions being made. That is a step too far.

Brazen double standards and the corruption of the English language to one side, the important question now is whether the change will be a good one. Unsurprisingly, I am of the view that it will not. On the contrary: Work is a virtue that should be reflexively encouraged. It is the means by which standards of living are grown, human potential is reached, individual lives are focused, positive and negative instincts are channeled, resources are utilized most efficiently, and, above all, by which dignity remains intact. It is the best antidote to personal and national ossification and sclerosis, and the primary means by which our present material comfort was achieved. It is the driving force behind improvement, both real and imagined, in the nation’s mainstream culture. Whatever the ideal role of government in contriving work or wages for those who are without them, we should all presumably be able to agree that if we are going to have an intrusive state, it should be doing precisely the opposite of encouraging people to limit their involvement in work.. (Prudence dictates that I couch this asseveration with a disclaimer: No, I do not consider it the role of government to force people to work against their will, nor to support them if they choose not to. But that is a decidedly different question from whether it should do more to enable them not to work.)

Yesterday, my colleague Patrick Brennan took a look at just how much Obamacare does to attenuate Americans’ need to work. His conclusion: “a lot.” Correctly, he writes that “for decades, Americans have tended to work harder and for longer than people do in other countries, which has made the U.S. richer and more competitive — and as our workforce ages and our entitlements get more expensive, encouraging economic growth and labor-force participation is going to become more important, not less.”

This is the economic case, and it is a strong one. But the political and civil cases are equally compelling. Traditionally, at least, the American safety net has been designed to catch those who, for whatever reason, have fallen out of civil society toward the rocks below, but to leave everybody else alone. These days, however, Americans are finding themselves involved with the state as a condition of being alive. The middle-class 36-year-old small-business owner who lives next door almost certainly had nothing much to do with Washington until Obamacare came along. Now? He’s buying his health insurance from a federal website and working out how many hours he can cut back to take advantage of the subsidies. The last Democratic president took concrete steps to mitigate the corrupting consequences of welfare. This one has fought tooth and nail to bring the intractable problems inherent to government aid to everybody in the country, and to transmute the safety net into a smothering, ambient cocoon. How swiftly things change.

Hot Air’s Allahpundit is concerned that the fix is in, and that we will soon witness America follow what Niall Ferguson claimed has been the “decline and fall of the Protestant work ethic in Europe.” “If we’ve reached the stage of welfare-state decadence where it’s a selling point for a new entitlement that it discourages able-bodied people from working,” he wrote, then “there’s no reason to keep going. We’ve lost, decisively.”

You will find no arguments here. Economically, politically, and spiritually, such an outcome would be disastrous. Nevertheless, the Washington Post’s left-leaning Dana Milbank refreshingly believes that quite the opposite is likely to happen. The CBO’s report, Milbank contends, “is grim news for the White House and for Democrats on the ballot in November”:

This independent arbiter, long embraced by the White House, has validated a core complaint of the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) critics: that it will discourage work and become an ungainly entitlement.

Progressives who are scratching their heads and asking themselves why conservatives who are “pro-business” and who have long wished to decouple health insurance and employment aren’t thrilled at recent developments might do well to heed their own advice. “George W. Bush,” Barry Switzer one quipped, “was born on third base and thought he hit a triple.” The implication of the joke: How you get somewhere matters. They are right, and so, herewith let it be resolved: Being forced to buy products is not the same thing as choosing to; leaving work because Uncle Sam is helping you out on the side is not the same thing as electing to leave without assistance; and winning the fruits of success without the hard work that has traditionally served as a prerequisite is no victory at all. We deserve government that recognizes these truths. Will we get it? Time will tell.

— Charles C. W. Cooke is a staff writer at National Review.

Sochi: Putin’s Games, win or lose

By Jerry Sullivan

http://www.buffalonews.com/sports

February 6, 2014

Vladimir Putin holds the torch with the Olympic flame during a ceremony in Moscow's Red Square last October. Photo: EPA

SOCHI, Russia — Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, was recently profiled in a book titled, “The Man Without a Face.” The author, Masha Gessen, tells how the former KGB officer rose to power on the flawed premise that he was the ideal man to present his country’s progressive, democratic agenda to the West.

In 2007, Putin traveled to Guatemala City and showed Russia’s best face to the world. He delivered an impassioned speech to the International Olympic Committee on behalf of his country’s 2014 Winter Olympics bid. Putin spoke in three languages, including English, which he rarely does in public.

Putin’s arguments were persuasive enough. In a close, controversial vote, the IOC awarded the Games to Sochi, a city in the southernmost part of Russia, over Salzburg, Austria, and Pyeongchang, South Korea.

When the choice became official, Putin said it “wasn’t just a recognition of Russia’s sporting achievements, but a judgment of our country.”

Skeptics, and there are many, judged the choice as another reflection of a corrupt, politicized Olympic culture. But one thing is clear. These are seen as “Putin’s Games,” his chance to display Russia’s standing in the world, to flash its economic and sporting might a quarter century after the USSR’s fall.

But to some, they are also “Putin’s Follies,” an ill-conceived and executed expression of his hubris and ambition. Putin and other officials insist the Games will go off smoothly and be a triumph for Russia. But critics say he got more trouble than he bargained for.

In the runup to the 22nd Winter Games, Putin faced a torrent of issues:

First, there was the wisdom of holding them in Sochi, a sub-tropical beachside resort on the Black Sea that was a vacation retreat for leaders of the old Communist regime. You see palm trees along the coast, not snowmen.

The average temperature in February is about 44 degrees. It was pushing 50 last week. Sochi, a city of about 370,000, is the only place in Russia where it doesn’t normally snow. It is the warmest city to host a Winter Games. The weather is so balmy they had to import and stockpile snow from Finland.

The cost of these Games is estimated at $51 billion, more than all other Winter Olympics combined. It’s four times the original budget, about seven times more than Vancouver four years ago. The organizers spent roughly $9 billion on a 30-mile highway connecting the coastal and mountain venues.

There are well-documented reports of corruption, not uncommon to modern Russia. Boris Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister, reported that as much as $30 billion had been funneled to Putin’s pals in business. Gofur Rakhimov, the man credited with swinging the IOC vote to Sochi seven years ago, is reportedly a major figure in the world heroin trade.

Putin says it’s all an exaggeration. But there’s no disputing that he made things worse for himself last year by passing a law that banned “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations,” making his Olympics a target of protests by the international gay community.

Several world leaders will decline to attend the Games because of it. President Obama won’t be here. He made a statement by placing three openly gay athletes (Brian Boitano, Billie Jean King and Caitlin Cahow) among the delegation in the U.S. Olympic contingent.

Worst of all, of course, is the looming threat of a major terrorist attack, which has discouraged many tourists from coming and hurt advance ticket sales. There were three suicide bombings in Volgograd, which is 400 miles from Sochi, in December, leaving 34 dead.

Putin’s Olympics will take place 300 miles over the Caucusus Mountains from Chechnya, site of two bloody civil wars and an Islamist insurgent hot spot. Chechnya is the home of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects.

On Jan. 7, Sochi and its immediate suburbs were put in lockdown by a security initiative. More than 50,000 police and soldiers will be on duty in a so-called Ring of Steel. The U.S. will have a strong security force. It will seem like an armed camp in Sochi.

Many American athletes have decided not to have their families accompany them to Russia. Ryan Suter and Zach Parise, Minnesota teammates who are on the U.S. men’s hockey team, told their families to stay away. So did Sabres defenseman Henrik Talllinder, who plays for Sweden.

“I think just because of the security and all the threats,” Tallinder said. “I think it’s wiser for” his wife and for him. “Then I can relax a little bit more.”

“If anything, it’s going to be secure,” said goalie Ryan Miller. “It’s not going to be like Vancouver, where everybody was wide open in a big, free city where you could go see. The good thing is people are scared of Putin. I know I am. So I’m going to behave myself.”

There’s speculation that along with being the most expensive Olympics, it could also be the biggest party. It’ll be tough to top Vancouver, but the Russians have waited a long time to host their first Winter Games. Despite the problems, there’s sure to be a sense of celebration and nationalistic pride.

Dmitry Chernyshenko, committee chief of the Russian organizing committee, said nine days ago that Sochi was “fully ready” and would deliver a safe, well-run Olympics. As of Monday, several of the media hotels were still not fully operational, but why quibble?

“History will be made,” Chernyshenko said.

History is always made at the Olympics, regardless of the surrounding issues. On Friday at 8:14 p.m. (to mark the year 2014), the Opening Ceremony will signal the official start of the Games. The torch will arrive, having visited Europe’s highest mountain, the North Pole and the International Space Station.

Eventually, it gets back to the sports, which unite people from all nations and keep fans absorbed in the sports and the personal stories of the athletes. Cut through the issues and this has a chance to be the best and most competitive Winter Olympics ever held.

There are an estimated 3,000 athletes from a record 88 nations competing in 98 sports, an all-time high. The IOC, continuing its effort to draw in a younger and more diverse audience, has added new events and significantly expanded the presence of women in the Games.

Slopestyle (both ski and snowboard), which is soaring in popularity, will make its debut for men and women. So will snowboard parallel slalom and ski halfpipe. The IOC has added mixed relays in luge and biathlon, and a figure skating team event. The women ski jumpers will be included after a long battle that made its way into the courtroom.

Amateurism is a faded notion here, like Communism. Permitting professionals has allowed Olympic athletes to compete into their athletic primes and beyond, creating a platform for more mature performances and compelling international rivalries. There are big names here:

Shaun White, a two-time gold medalist in snowboard halfpipe and the biggest name in his sport, is seeking his third straight gold in halfpipe.

Kelly Clark, the winningest snowboarder of all time and a former U.S. gold medalist in halfpipe, is back for a fourth Olympics.

Bode Miller will be competing in his fifth Olympics at age 36. Jaromir Jagr, who was on the Czech team that won hockey gold with Dominik Hasek in 1998, will be in his fifth Games; he turns 42 next Saturday.

Shani Davis, a two-time gold medalist in speedskating at 1,000 meters, looks to become the first American man to win gold in three Winter Games.

Kim Yu-Na of South Korea will try to become the first woman to win repeat gold in women’s figure skating since Katarina Witt in 1988.

Evgeni Plushenko, who has won medals in three straight Olympics, is back for a fourth and hoping to win again at age 31 in his native Russia.

Steven Holcomb is back to defend U.S. gold in the four-man bobsled, but without Buffalo native Steve Mesler, who retired to work full-time on Classroom Champions, his educational outreach program for kids.

Lolo Jones, who competed in two Summer Games as a hurdler, was chosen for the U.S. two-woman bobsled in a controversial decision.

Wang Meng, a four-time gold medalist in short-track speedskating, carried high hopes for China until a training injury knocked her out of the Games.

The U.S. men’s hockey team is back for another run at gold, with such familiar faces as Miller, Phil Kessel and two Western New Yorkers, Patrick Kane and Brooks Orpik.

The Canadian and American women are eager to resume their long-standing rivalry in women’s hockey. The Jamaican bobsled team is back and determined to perform respectably.

The Americans have come a long way from the dark days of 1988. After a poor Olympic showing in Calgary, a U.S. commission was formed, led by the late George Steinbrenner. They decided the U.S. needed more resources and money. In 1992, not a single American won a gold medal. But with the advent of professionalism and extreme sports, things soon got better.

Four years ago in Vancouver, the U.S. finished atop the list with a record 37 medals, nine gold. The Russians are a different story. Their fortunes began to decline along with the Soviet regime. Russia hasn’t led the Winter gold medal count since 1994, its first year as a separate nation.

In 2010, the Russians were an embarrassing 11th in medals. The once-proud hockey team got blitzed by Canada, 7-3, in the quarterfinals.

There is enormous pressure on the Russian athletes to do well on home soil and illuminate Russia’s resurgence as a world power, as Putin intended.

“The Olympics are probably the most important thing for Russians than any other athletes in the whole world,” said Alex Ovechkin, whose determination to play for Russia helped prod the NHL to take part.

Russian sports officials were predicting great things a year ago, but they have toned down their expectations recently. But if they win a pile of medals and stave off any terrorist catastrophe, the Games will be remembered as a triumph for Putin.

“Other teams will come here to win or lose,” Vladimir Cherkasov, manager of Sochi ice rinks, said recently at ESPN.com. “We will win, or we will die.”

email: jsullivan@buffnews.com

Free the Keystone Pipeline

Obama is full of talk about cutting red tape on job- and energy-creating projects, but it’s just talk.

By Jonah Goldberg

http://www.nationalreview.com/

February 5, 2014

Welcome to the “year of action.” In last week’s State of the Union address, the president vowed to do whatever he must to help the economy, even if that means working around Congress: “What I offer tonight is a set of concrete, practical proposals to speed up growth, strengthen the middle class, and build new ladders of opportunity into the middle class. Some require congressional action, and I’m eager to work with all of you. But America does not stand still, and neither will I. So wherever and whenever I can take steps without legislation to expand opportunity for more American families, that’s what I’m going to do.”

The White House has touted the fact the president has a “phone and a pen” and he’s not afraid to use them.

The president also vowed to cut red tape, and not for the first time. In 2013’s State of the Union, he insisted that “my administration will keep cutting red tape and speeding up new oil and gas permits.” And in 2012: “In the next few weeks, I will sign an executive order clearing away the red tape that slows down too many construction projects.”

All of this was in the wake of Obama’s 2011 executive order requiring the elimination of “redundant, inconsistent, or overlapping” regulations. The administration had hailed the order as an “unprecedented” move to boost growth. In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journaltouting the order, the president wrote: “We’re also getting rid of absurd and unnecessary paperwork requirements that waste time and money.”

Laymen might have the impression that the president wants to cut red tape and take action on job-creating infrastructure, particularly oil and gas projects.

The fools.

On Friday, the State Department issued a much-awaited study on the Keystone XL pipeline. It found that there would be a negligible effect on climate change — the president’s only expressed reservation about the project, which would create thousands of construction jobs and generate billions in tax revenue.

In fact, the study concluded that if the pipeline from Canada is not built, it could result in a significant increase in greenhouse-gas emissions. That’s because the alternative means (trucks, rail, etc.) of transporting the fuel — which Canada says will be pumped no matter what — are more carbon intensive than a pipeline.

So we’re a go, right? Au contraire, White House chief of staff Denis McDonough explained Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press. The State Department study is but “one of many important inputs into the process.” Other departments get to weigh in. Which ones? Well, almost all of them, it seems: Defense, Justice, Interior, Commerce, Transportation, Energy, and Homeland Security, plus the Environmental Protection Agency. Those poor saps at Housing and Urban Development must feel like chopped liver.

But it gets funnier. “What the president’s role is now is to protect this process from politics,” McDonough said, “let the experts, the expert agencies, and the Cabinet secretaries make their assessments both of the study . . . as well as its impact on the national interest.”

It all sounds so reasonable. The only problem is that the Keystone XL pipeline has been under constant study since the U.S. extension was proposed in 2008. Friday’s State Department report — weighing in at eleven volumes! — was initiated for political purposes. In 2011, after extensive study, State called the pipeline the “preferred alternative.”

The hitch is that environmental groups stupidly made the pipeline a litmus-test issue for climate seriousness. And so Obama’s EPA ordered a do-over that conveniently punted the decision until after the presidential election.

According to the Pew Research Center, the overwhelming policy priority for Americans in 2014 is “strengthening the economy” (80 percent of respondents) and “improving the job situation” (74 percent). Dealing with global warming ranks second to last (29 percent).

But by all means, let’s hear more talk about this being the year of action with heroic penmanship and red-tape cutting. Because it appears talk is all we ever get.

— Jonah Goldberg is the author of The Tyranny of Clichés, now on sale in paperback. You can write to him by e-mail at goldbergcolumn@gmail.com, or via Twitter @JonahNRO. © 2014 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Photo: Reuters

Today's Tune: Dwight Yoakam - Little Sister (w/ Eddie Shaver)

Our Wasted Effort in Afghanistan

Steve Chapman|Feb. 3, 2014 7:00 am

http://reason.com/

Soldiers quickly march to the ramp of the CH-47 Chinook helicopter that will return them to Kandahar Army Air Field on Sept. 4, 2003. The Soldiers were searching in Daychopan district, Afghanistan, for Taliban fighters and illegal weapons caches. The Soldiers are assigned to Company A, 2nd Battalion, 22nd Infantry Regiment, 10th Mountain Division. U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Kyle Davis.

The United States government and the Taliban don't agree on much, but they have found one point of convergence: Both think someone needs to get a hose and put out the flames engulfing Hamid Karzai's pants.

The Afghan president has often criticized the Americans for carrying out drone strikes that kill innocent bystanders. But over the past year or so he has started blaming us for things we didn't even do. He has gone from understandably prickly to irrationally hysterical.

Last month, he welcomed Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel to Kabul by publicly accusing the U.S. of collaborating with the Taliban in bombings that killed 17 people. "Those bombs that went off in Kabul and Khost were not a show of force to America," he announced. "They were in service of America."

His latest claim goes further, accusing the U.S. of actually mounting insurgent-like attacks against his forces. "Karzai has formalized his suspicions with a list of dozens of attacks that he believes the U.S. government may have been involved in," reported The Washington Post. "The list even includes the recent bomb and gun assault on a Lebanese restaurant in Kabul, one of the bloodiest acts targeting the international community in Afghanistan."

American commander Gen. Joseph Dunford Jr. called the charge "ludicrous." We have to assume that Dunford coordinated his response with Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid, who said the group has taken credit for many of the incidents because "those are attacks that have genuinely been carried out by our forces."

In Karzai's mind, Barack Obama has obvious motives for this brazen treachery. One, relayed to the Post by an anonymous Karzai aide, is distracting everyone from the civilians killed in American air strikes. Another is undermining Karzai because he is too protective of his people.

Then there is the most powerful of all: our desire "to keep foreigners longer in Afghanistan," as Karzai puts it. He evidently is laboring under the misimpression that we have sacrificed more than 2,000 lives and vast sums of money because we enjoy occupying a poor, inhospitable, violence-prone country with which we have almost nothing in common.

In his State of the Union speech Tuesday, Obama saluted Army Sgt. Cory Remsburg, who "was nearly killed by a massive roadside bomb in Afghanistan." But, the president noted, "he's learned to speak again and stand again and walk again—and he's working toward the day when he can serve his country again."

If so, we can hope his country will find better purposes than propping up a regime headed by someone who sounds as hostile and extreme as our declared enemies in Afghanistan.

Remsburg's sacrifices were made in support of an ally that tied for the most corrupt on Earth in Transparency International's latest rankings. A new report by the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, The New York Times said, warns against continuing to provide hundreds of millions of dollars a year in development support when "none of the 16 Afghan ministries could be counted on to keep the funds from being stolen or wasted."

It's hard to see the value of our mission there when our partners are so impervious to our best efforts. The Special Inspector General reported that we have gotten a pitiful return on a $200 million literacy program for the Afghan army. The exceedingly modest goal—getting all of the Afghan soldiers to read at a first-grade level and half of them to read at a third-grade level—turns out to be "unrealistic" and "unattainable."

Just inducing the soldiers to stick around is often impossible. Their current attrition rate is between 30 and 50 percent. The Afghan army "is actually far from ready for transition at the end of 2014," warned Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington last year. The national police, he concluded, are worse.

With the best of Afghan leaders, it would be hard to overcome all these deficits. Instead, Afghans as well as Americans are stuck with Karzai, who negotiated a deal to keep some U.S. forces in the country after this year but has refused to sign it. The longer he waits the harder it will be to make the arrangements so we can stay, laboring to turn failure into success.

Here's another option: We could acknowledge that there are some things even the world's sole superpower can't do, and fixing Afghanistan is one of them.