Joint Press Conference Double Speak

(From RealClearWorld)

Because of the disjointed setup with respective language translators, President Obama's joint press conference with Chinese President Hu Jintao was often interrupted for translations of remarks and questions into both English and Chinese. But it also allowed an opportunity for bilingual speakers to pick up nuances from the original remarks.

Hu, true to form, came well prepared, particularly with numbers and statistics, as befitting a former engineer. He handled all queries comfortably, even though as the head of a one-party dictatorship, he's never obliged to face a blistering free press at home.

On one occasion, Hu did flash noticeable annoyance, even a slight temper, when asked why congressional leaders are snubbing him at the state dinner tonight. He tersely concluded his remarks with "that's a question for him," and pointed to President Obama. It was a moment reminiscent of John McCain's contempt during a debate in the 2008 presidential election when he pointed to Obama and barked "that one."

Hu did not say "President Obama" as the English translator did, and he was not at all amused, even offended by such a snub. And at least partially he blamed Obama because he must have believed that Obama should have held sway to prevent an incident that would be viewed as a colossal "loss of face" for him at home.

Obama, on the other hand, kept his composure and handled the questions deftly, with skillful dancing on the inevitable and contentious issue of China's human rights record. His one light-hearted moment, though, was also lost in translation.

When asked of a potential challenge from Amb. Jon Huntsman for the presidency in 2012, Obama quipped that the fact that he and Huntsman (a former Republican governor of Utah) work so well together has to help Huntsman in the GOP primary. But the Chinese translator did not get the joke and spoke as if Obama meant it sincerely.

The technological problems have to be seen as somewhat of an embarrassment for the White House. With the leaders of the two most powerful countries meeting in a summit, the U.S. appeared ill-prepared for something as simple as a press conference. The quality of the translators (both for English and Mandarin) is also questionable, as both spoke with a slight accent.

Maybe it's time to boost the ranks of fluent Chinese speakers in the U.S. diplomatic corps. These summits with China's leaders will only increase in frequency for the foreseeable future.

UConn Women Not Rivaling UCLA's Streak

(From RealClearSports)

The UConn women’s basketball team isn’t going to top UCLA’s 88-game winning streak.

The Huskies can beat Ohio State on Sunday, Florida State on Tuesday and then win their next 100 games for all I care, but John Wooden’s Bruins will still own the longest winning streak in history.

The longest winning streak in men’s basketball history, that is.

UConn will have the longest winning streak in women’s basketball. And before you get your PC undergarment all twisted up in a knot, let’s just make one thing clear: There isn’t such a thing as a record for all of college basketball. It’s either a men’s record or a women’s, and never the twain shall meet.

Comparing men’s and women’s basketball isn’t like apples and oranges. It’s more like apples and meat loaf.

Would you say Brett Favre’s 297-game consecutive starts streak is an all-time record for all oblong balls sports, obliterating every record from rugby to Australian Rules Football? Of course not, that would be silly.

So why would you insist on merging records of two sports that use different sizes of balls, different timing rules and different measurements within the courts?

Besides that, men’s and women’s basketball have no common lineage or connection; it’s not as if the sports at some point intermingle with each other. Every NBA player at some point of his life played boys' high school basketball, and most of them played men’s college basketball. Exactly zero has ever played girls' basketball or women’s basketball. (And the reverse is true as well: no WNBA player has ever played men’s basketball.)

This is not to diminish what Geno Auriemma and his Huskies have done, far from it. In fact, they should be celebrated for their prolonged excellence. Achieving a winning streak of this length is hard to do in any sport. They deserve every bit of adulation and admiration that are bestowed upon them.

And let’s not marginalize their accomplishment by disparaging their competition. Yes, it’s true that there are very few elite teams in women’s basketball, since most schools field women’s teams out of compliance for Title IX more than anything else. But the Huskies can only beat what’s on their schedule. It’s not their fault if their opponents are not typically up to snuff and tend to get rolled.

UConn’s women already own the women’s college basketball streak when they won their 71st consecutive game last March, against Notre Dame. Now they’re adding onto that streak, which should easily reach triple digits.

The fact that the UCLA streak is even in conversation is a disservice to the UConn women. It only draws unfair comparisons between two squads that are not even on the same planet. Fine, if these two teams played each other 88 times, Bill Walton’s Bruins would beat Maya Moore’s Huskies 88 times by at least 30 points each. But that is totally senseless so why even go there?

Why can’t we see what UConn is doing for its own sake? The Huskies are going for their third straight NCAA championship, eighth in the program’s history. Geno will get a chance to finally tie his archrival Pat Summitt for most titles of all-time – in women’s basketball. Those are the records they're chasing after, nothing more and nothing less.

Please leave the four-letter word out of it.

The Shocking Discovery of Media Bias

About a decade ago, while attending graduate school and serving as a teaching assistant, I was asked to deliver a lecture to about 400 students. I happily obliged until I saw the lecture notes:

"Conservative Bias in the News Media."

Huh?

No kidding. And this was at one of the nation’s most prestigious public universities. Let’s just say it’s known by its four-letter name and proximity to Hollywood.

I called an audible, opting for my own notes and delivering a polemic on media bias in the auditorium Eddie Murphy made famous in "The Nutty Professor." I omitted the truly nutty parts from the original lecture notes that blamed the "conservative media bias" on "corporations with their agendas to control the American media companies."

Yes, we all know that GE created MSNBC to perpetuate this vast right-wing conspiracy.

But that lecture (my first and last, as I wasn’t invited for an encore) was a learning experience for me too. I’ve spent over 20 years working in the news media — as an editor, reporter, columnist and now a manager — but that moment crystallized for me why there is rampant liberal bias in newsrooms all across America. It was incubated and bred in those classrooms.

America’s universities, especially elite universities, are the last bastions of progressive liberalism. Shielded by the walls of the ivory tower, professors and lecturers live in a make-belief utopia that has no basis in reality. They impart their own leftist worldview on impressionable young idealists. This is true of nearly all social sciences disciplines, and journalism is no exception.

In past generations, journalists were born and raised on the street — as copy boys, on the cops beat and on the dimly lit high school football fields — and the news business was a trade, requiring not college degrees but enterprise and know-how. Over time, though, journalism has become a domain of the liberal arts, with young aspiring journalists increasingly disengaged from the everyday lives of the common folk and spoon-fed the progressive ideology straight from the classroom to the newsroom.

This is particularly true of the national news media, where pedigree — an education from an Ivy League institution or a brand-name journalism school — trumps all when it comes to hiring practices.

Diversity policies are strictly enforced except when it comes to diversity of thought. It was revealed that the newsroom of Slate voted 55-1 for Barack Obama over John McCain in the 2008 presidential election, shocking only because it wasn’t 56-0.

This bias comes through not just in column writing. Yes, we expect the likes of Frank Rich, Eugene Robinson and Robert Scheer to be mouthpieces for progressive views, and at least they’re honest about that. What’s troubling is that the bias now is very much evident in even your mundane everyday reporting, from just about every mainstream media news organization, such as the New York Times, Washington Post and even the Associated Press. There isn’t a straight lead about anything anymore.

The mainstream media still don’t get why the average reader or viewer is tuning them out. In fact, their reaction to the declining circulation numbers and ratings reveals a contempt for those who really should be their customers.

Recently I had a conversation with someone who’s been in the news business for more than three decades. He expressed his frustration and bewilderment at the success of the Fox News Channel. First, he denigrates Fox’s "fair and balanced" mantra, then he belittles its viewership.

"But Jack (not his real name)," I protest. "There is a good reason why Fox’s ratings far outstrip its competition."

"So does Wal-Mart," he snorts. "What does that tell you?"

"What about Wal-Mart?" I shoot back. "They have lots of loyal customers, just like Fox News, so what’s wrong with that?"

"Well, that’s exactly it," comes the smirking reply. "Fox News’ viewers are mostly those people."

Those people. Can you hear the disdain?

Those who live in flyover country instead of the Hamptons. Those who went to State U. instead of Harvard and Cornell. Those who learned Spanish from their co-workers instead of their nannies and housekeepers. Those people.

The mainstream media are losing those people as their companies circle the drain. Yet they wonder why.

(Written for a Tea Party Event)

Tom Friedman Is Right About China (and U.S.)

(From RealClearWorld)

It's not everyday that I agree with what Tom Friedman says about China. Typically, he goes there, gets starry eyed, and starts extolling all the virtues of the Chinese Communist Party.

His column today wasn't quite that. And he was 100 percent correct on why China gets things done whereas the U.S. no longer does.

This was right on the money:

Studying China’s ability to invest for the future doesn’t make me feel we have the wrong system. It makes me feel that we are abusing our right system. There is absolutely no reason our democracy should not be able to generate the kind of focus, legitimacy, unity and stick-to-it-iveness to do big things — democratically — that China does autocratically. We’ve done it before. But we’re not doing it now because too many of our poll-driven, toxically partisan, cable-TV-addicted, money-corrupted political class are more interested in what keeps them in power than what would again make America powerful, more interested in defeating each other than saving the country.

Once upon a time the U.S. did build Interstate freeways that traversed the entire continent. Dams that regulated water flow and generated power. Skyscrapers that were the envy of the world. And all that was done in a free society and under democratic governance.

(Just the other day a friend and I joked about the L.A.-to-San Francisco bullet train, something that's been "in the works" for more than 20 years and yet not a single rail has been laid. We concluded that our grandchildren will still be talking about it 50 years from now.)

Nothing gets built anymore in the U.S. - other than sports stadiums. Too much red tape. Too many lawyers. Special interest groups. Unions. By the time an environmental impact study was done, a new one has to be commissioned. In the meantime, China just finished adding another thousand miles of high-speed railway.

Another valid point Friedman made about China is its leadership. The top of the CCP leadership chain is frighteningly competent. To rise to the pinnacle in China these days, you can't do it with catchy slogans or being the son of a former president.

Hu Jintao is an engineer by trade. Wen Jiabao a geologist. The fifth-generation CCP leaders have even more diverse backgrounds after a generation dominated by engineers. Many have PhDs and a great number of them are now foreign-educated.

But Friedman does miss a point (perhaps on purpose). With a near-homogeneous population (91 percent Han Chinese), China doesn't have diversity issues; and its benevolence toward minorities is purely lip service.

In the Chinese view, somewhat tinged with racism, the U.S. and the west are being dragged down by their minority populations and racial strife. But the reality is that it's not the blacks and Latinos that are impeding progress in the U.S., as the Chinese are wont to believe (a same attitude held by the Japanese, especially when it was booming in the '80s), it's the diversity-driven politics that are long on sensitivity but short on competitiveness.

That's part of the recipe for the hamburger that may ultimately do the U.S. in.

Top 10 Most Significant Sports Owners

By Samuel Chi
Special to Page 2

George Steinbrenner's reign as the New York Yankees' owner came to an end with his death Tuesday. He's being eulogized as one of the most successful -- and controversial -- owners in all of sports.

While the Boss was obsessed with winning, he was also a bombastic showman until his final years. In Steinbrenner's honor, Page 2 presents our list of the most significant owners in sports history, all of whom won on the field and made more news off it:

10. Al Davis: Commitment to excellence. Lawsuits. Leisure suits. The last of Al's three Super Bowl victories came in January 1984, and his fashion sense and playbook seem to be frozen at about the same time.

FULL ARTICLE

Spain's Top 10 Moments in Sports History

By Samuel Chi
Special to Page 2

Why did Spain's players stubbornly refuse to sing their national anthem before taking the pitch against the Netherlands in the World Cup final?

Because the famous Marcha Real, perhaps the oldest national anthem in the world, has no words. The joke is that, had there been lyrics to the melody, gunfights might break out over the singer's preferred regional language.

But Sunday's overtime victory has made Spain whole; it's now one nation under the FIFA World Cup Trophy. The Catalans, Basques and Castilians are united by the greatest sporting triumph of their nation.

FULL ARTICLE

Tiger Should Just Get a Divorce, Now

(From RealClearSports)

Dear Tiger:

Some of your celeb friends are worried about you. They're wondering if you're getting sound advice.

Well, we know we can reach you even if you turned off all your phones - because you're gonna read this. So here's the best piece of advice for you:

Get a divorce, now.

(And come back play some killer golf.)

Your marriage is beyond saving. There have already been reports that Elin wants to end this thing. You should agree with her and let her go. She's really the only victim here (and maybe your kids) and she's suffered enough.

It's obvious your marriage at this point is in a shambles. Elin is furious at your betrayal, but we get the feeling that you haven't been a happy camper for some time, either. More than a few of your flings have mentioned that you're miserable, and we suspect they're not all lying.

Maybe you rushed into this marriage thing because your handlers wanted it to burnish your image or you felt it was the right thing to do. But you're at a point where you can't carry on like this. Remember, a sham marriage only works if there is equal utility for both sides (see Clinton: Bill and Hillary). That's not the case here.

So here's what you need to do:

We're pretty sure you have an iron-clad pre-nup, and since you live in Florida, you're probably in good shape. But you should be magnanimous: Give Elin 100 mil as a parting gift. For good measure, send her $1 million a month for child support.

If she wants the new digs in Jupiter Island, let her have it. The same goes for "Privacy" the boat, the Gulfstream, whatever. You can always get new ones.

Ending your marriage is the best thing you can do right now. Your sponsors are jumping off your wagon. Your approval rating is sinking faster than Obama's. But the one thing you can't allow to take a nosedive is your standing as the world's best golfer.

The biggest threat to your future well being isn't your crumbling marriage, but this accusation that you're associating with a doctor who is tainted by HGH and PED. People will eventually forgive you for running around on your wife (it's America, after all), but they, and what's left of your sponsors, will abandon you in a heartbeat if you turned out to be a cheat on the playing field.

Steiny's response to the New York Times on the question of Dr. Galea was beyond amateurish (did he really think the NYT would get off your back because he asked them to "give the kid a break?" Didn't he learn in PR school about the Pentagon Papers and how that worked out for Nixon?). You're gonna have to come out and do some damage control on your own. You'll have to stand in front of the press throngs and cameras, and deny any and all of this, unequivocally.

But you don't want to do that until your infidelity mess is squared away, which is understandable. That's why getting a divorce, like tomorrow, is a must.

Divorces don't end careers, in sports or otherwise. Lance Armstrong and Andre Agassi did OK after their first marriages broke up. Ronald Reagan became the leader of the free world even though things didn't work out with Jane Wyman. We could go on.

And after getting a divorce, you can feel free to play the field if that's what you want to do. Then whoever you're sleeping with is just gossip, not a scandal. It also doesn't mean you have to stop being a father. Given that you have complete control of your schedule, you can spend as much time with Sam and Charlie as you're willing.

Get this thing done. Stop groveling to Elin. That's just so not you and besides, she deserves so much better anyway. End it amicably (put in a mutual no-disparagement clause so nobody will get an idea about a book deal down the road). But most of all, quickly.

Come back to do the one thing you love to do more than any other: Play golf. The only way you're going to redeem yourself is on the golf course. At the end of the day, your legend will be about catching and passing Jack, not how many times you were married and how many skirts you chased.

You just need to be decisive. Act quickly and do it with no regrets. That's perfectly within your character.

To quote one of your former sponsors:

Go on, be a Tiger.



Sincerely,


Your Real Friends