Dennis Seidenberg wouldn't mind starting one, the German Hammer is all about starting abusive long distance relationships with goalies. So is Andrew Ference. Adam McQuaid has had recent success finding paydirt while Johnny Boychuck and rookie Torey Krug and are dogs that will smack on anything......and let's not forget about Zdeno Chara, the big, surprisingly agile Czech with the sizzling snap shot.Though the Boston Bruins defensemen are known as physical head-bangers, it is their combined offensive skills that set them apart from the rest of professional hockey and what makes them so dangerous from anywhere in the attacking zone - or from anywhere on the ice for that matter.It is a familiar sight, seeing one of the Bruins' blue liners wind up from the top of the circle and fire a rocket towards the goal, and one has to marvel at their accuracy - and if the goalie is able to turn their shots away, the offensive philosophy dictates that everyone else crashes the net, creating a scrum.Crawford has a sensational goals against average of 1.74 and a save percentage of .935 but, as is almost always the case in sports, the stats don't tell his entire story. Take away the beating that Chicago put on the overmatched Minnesota Wild in the first round, and Crawford has given up 2.20 goals per game and has let two or more pucks get past him in eight of their last twelve games and has a record of 8-4 in that span.By contrast, Boston Netminder Tuukka Rask struggled in the first round against the Maple Leafs, giving up 18 goals in seven games and was hearing the chants for back up goalie Anton Khudobin, but quieted those voices by turning in and 8-1 record since - the only blemish and overtime loss in New York to the Rangers - allowing two or more goals just three times for a 1.40 goals against average.So with goaltenders expected to get stronger and have their teams' backs the deeper they get into the playoffs, Crawford appears to be headed in the wrong direction - which is definitely cause for concern against Boston, a team that has scored more goals in the tournament than any other.The Blackhawks will try to offset the imbalance with some decent defensemen of their own, though they are nowhere near as deep on the blue line as the Bruins.Duncan Keith - he of the "accidental" retaliatory high-stick to the face of Los Angeles Kings forward Jeff Carter for which he was suspended - and Brent Seabrook are top shelf defenders on the first pairing, while Niklas Hjalmarsson and Johnny Oduya team up for the second. The third pairing of defensemen have seen their minutes decrease steadily in the playoffs, Nick Leddy and Michal Rozsival contributing disappointing efforts......all of which has to have the all four lines of the Bruins salivating. The top line of David Krejci, Nathan Horton and Milan Lucic has been phenomenal, all logging double digits in points and Krejci proving himself to be a legitimate superstar with his scoring prowess and stellar two-way play - which is also the calling card for Patrice Bergeron on the second line. He and Brad Marchand have hooked up for scintillating game winners in the past two series......but it is the early April pickup Jaromir Jagr that the Blackhawks must be concerned with. He is a master on the forecheck and has unrivaled puck handling skills and, if history tells us anything about the 41 year old legend, he is due for a major scoring breakout.Tyler Seguin has been invisible for Boston in the playoffs, but he anchors a deceptively dangerous third line while Daniel Paille, Chris Kelly and tough guy Shawn Thornton are master disruptors on the Bruins' energy line. So deep are the Bruins on offense that 10 of their 12 forwards have three or more points in the post season.Where the Bruins fall short, but not by much, is on the power play - and like the Blackhawks, Boston has struggled to get anything going with the man advantage, and the fact that Chicago had the best penalty kill in the western conference this season shouldn't give Bruins' fans much hope for a breakthrough. On the bright side, with Jagr seeming to be hitting his stride, that could easily take a turn for the better.So, Corey Crawford has a big problem, along with the rest of his Blackhawk teammates, as the Bruins play with the style of a mean counter-puncher, absorbing their opponent's best shot, then returning the favor with brutal defense feeding into offensive opportunities.There's nothing fancy about what the Bruins do. There's no trickery, no real grace or subtlties. They win faceoffs, win battles on the boards and pepper the opposing goalie with a barrage of shots.The Bruins are bullies and can wear a team down with brute force, and unless Chicago coach Joel Quenneville can find some way to stem the tide, his charges are going to get abused by the bigger, more physical offensive-minded Boston defensemen......and there should be a parade in Boston in the next couple of weeks, say within 5 or 6 games, as the Bruins dump the Blackhawks like a bad habit.After all, isn't that how most long distance relationships end?Source:http://beantownbrutes.blogspot.com/2013/06/boston-bruins-on-paper-long-distance.html
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Glenn Greenwald guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 16 April 2013 09.52 EDT 
Runners continue to run towards the finish line of the Boston marathon as an explosion erupts near the finish line of the race Photograph: Stringer/REUTERSThere's not much to say about Monday's Boston Marathon attack because there is virtually no known evidence regarding who did it or why. There are, however, several points to be made about some of the widespread reactions to this incident. Much of that reaction is all-too-familiar and quite revealing in important ways:(1) The widespread compassion for yesterday's victims and the intense anger over the attacks was obviously authentic and thus good to witness. But it was really hard not to find oneself wishing that just a fraction of that compassion and anger be devoted to attacks that the US perpetrates rather than suffers. These are exactly the kinds of horrific, civilian-slaughtering attacks that the US has been bringing to countries in the Muslim world over and over and over again for the last decade, with very little attention paid. My Guardian colleague Gary Younge put this best on Twitter this morning:
Juan Cole this morning makes a similar point about violence elsewhere. Indeed, just yesterday in Iraq, at least 42 people were killed and more than 250 injured by a series of car bombs, the enduring result of the US invasion and destruction of that country. Somehow the deep compassion and anger felt in the US when it is attacked never translates to understanding the effects of our own aggression against others.One particularly illustrative example I happened to see yesterday was a re-tweet from Washington Examiner columnist David Freddoso, proclaiming: Idea of secondary bombs designed to kill the first responders is just sick. How does anyone become that evil?" I don't disagree with that sentiment. But I'd bet a good amount of money that the person saying it - and the vast majority of other Americans - have no clue that targeting rescuers with "double-tap" attacks is precisely what the US now does with its drone program and other forms of militarism. If most Americans knew their government and military were doing this, would they react the same way as they did to yesterday's Boston attack: "Idea of secondary bombs designed to kill the first responders is just sick. How does anyone become that evil?" That's highly doubtful, and that's the point.There's nothing wrong per se with paying more attention to tragedy and violence that happens relatively nearby and in familiar places. Whether wrong or not, it's probably human nature, or at least human instinct, to do that, and that happens all over the world. I'm not criticizing that. But one wishes that the empathy for victims and outrage over the ending of innocent human life that instantly arises when the US is targeted by this sort of violence would at least translate into similar concern when the US is perpetrating it, as it so often does (far, far more often than it is targeted by such violence).Regardless of your views of justification and intent: whatever rage you're feeling toward the perpetrator of this Boston attack, that's the rage in sustained form that people across the world feel toward the US for killing innocent people in their countries. Whatever sadness you feel for yesterday's victims, the same level of sadness is warranted for the innocent people whose lives are ended by American bombs. However profound a loss you recognize the parents and family members of these victims to have suffered, that's the same loss experienced by victims of US violence. It's natural that it won't be felt as intensely when the victims are far away and mostly invisible, but applying these reactions to those acts of US aggression would go a long way toward better understanding what they are and the outcomes they generate.(2) The rush, one might say the eagerness, to conclude that the attackers were Muslim was palpable and unseemly, even without any real evidence. The New York Post quickly claimed that the prime suspect was a Saudi national (while also inaccurately reporting that 12 people had been confirmed dead). The Post's insinuation of responsibility was also suggested on CNN by Former Bush Homeland Security Adviser Fran Townsend ("We know that there is one Saudi national who was wounded in the leg who is being spoken to"). Former Democratic Rep. Jane Harman went on CNN to grossly speculate that Muslim groups were behind the attack. Anti-Muslim bigots like Pam Geller predictably announced that this was "Jihad in America". Expressions of hatred for Muslims, and a desire to do violence, were then spewing forth all over Twitter (some particularly unscrupulous partisan Democrat types were identically suggesting with zero evidence that the attackers were right-wing extremists).Obviously, it's possible that the perpetrator(s) will turn out to be Muslim, just like it's possible they will turn out to be extremist right-wing activists, or left-wing agitators, or Muslim-fearing Anders-Breivik types, or lone individuals driven by apolitical mental illness. But the rush to proclaim the guilty party to be Muslim is seen in particular over and over with such events. Recall that on the day of the 2011 Oslo massacre by a right-wing, Muslim-hating extremist, the New York Times spent virtually the entire day strongly suggesting in its headlines that an Islamic extremist group was responsible, a claim other major news outlets (including the BBC and Washington Post) then repeated as fact. The same thing happened with the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, when most major US media outlets strongly suggested that the perpetrators were Muslims. As FAIR documented back then:"In the wake of the explosion that destroyed the Murrah Federal Office Building, the media rushed — almost en masse — to the assumption that the bombing was the work of Muslim extremists. 'The betting here is on Middle East terrorists,' declared CBS News' Jim Stewart just hours after the blast (4/19/95). 'The fact that it was such a powerful bomb in Oklahoma City immediately drew investigators to consider deadly parallels that all have roots in the Middle East,' ABC's John McWethy proclaimed the same day."'It has every single earmark of the Islamic car-bombers of the Middle East,' wrote syndicated columnist Georgie Anne Geyer (Chicago Tribune, 4/21/95). 'Whatever we are doing to destroy Mideast terrorism, the chief terrorist threat against Americans, has not been working,' declared the New York Times' A.M. Rosenthal (4/21/95). The Geyer and Rosenthal columns were filed after the FBI released sketches of two suspects who looked more like Midwestern frat boys than mujahideen."This lesson is never learned because, it seems, many people don't want to learn it. Even when it turns out not to have been Muslims who perpetrated the attack but rather right-wing, white Christians, the damage from this relentless and reflexive blame-pinning endures.(3) One continually encountered yesterday expressions of dread and fear from Arabs and Muslims around the world that the attacker would be either or both. That's because they know that all members of their religious or ethnic group will be blamed, or worse, if that turns out to be the case. That's true even though leading Muslim-American groups such as CAIR harshly condemned the attack (as they always do) and urged support for the victims, including blood donations. One tweeter, referencing the earthquake that hit Iran this morning, satirized this collective mindset by writing: "Please don't be a Muslim plate tectonic activity."As understandable as it is, that's just sad to witness. No other group reacts with that level of fear to these kinds of incidents, because no other group has similar cause to fear that they will all be hated or targeted for the acts of isolated, unrepresentative individuals. A similar dynamic has long prevailed in the domestic crime context: when the perpetrators of notorious crimes turned out to be African-American, the entire community usually paid a collective price. But the unique and well-grounded dread that hundreds of millions of law-abiding, peaceful Muslims and Arabs around the world have about the prospect that this attack in Boston was perpetrated by a Muslim highlights the climate of fear that has been created for and imposed on them over the last decade.(4) The reaction to the Boston attack underscored, yet again, the utter meaninglessness of the word "terrorism". News outlets were seemingly scandalized that President Obama, in his initial remarks, did not use the words "terrorist attack" to describe the bombing. In response, the White House ran to the media to assure them that they considered it "terrorism". Fox News' Ed Henry quoted a "senior administration official" as saying this: "When multiple (explosive) devices go off that's an act of terrorism."Is that what "terrorism" is? "When multiple (explosive) devices go off"? If so, that encompasses a great many things, including what the US does in the world on a very regular basis. Of course, the quest to know whether this was "terrorism" is really code for: "was this done by Muslims"? That's because, in US political discourse, "terrorism" has no real meaning other than: violence perpetrated by Muslims against the west. The reason there was such confusion and uncertainty about whether this was "terrorism" is because there is no clear and consistently applied definition of the term. At this point, it's little more than a term of emotionally manipulative propaganda. That's been proven over and over, and it was against yesterday.(5) The history of these types of attacks over the last decade has been clear and consistent: they are exploited to obtain new government powers, increase state surveillance, and take away individual liberties. On NBC with Brian Williams last night, Tom Brokaw decreed that this will happen again and instructed us that we must meekly submit it to it:"Everyone has to understand tonight that, beginning tomorrow morning early, there are going to be much tougher security considerations all across the country, and however exhausted we may be by that, we're going to have to learn to live with them, and get along and go forward, and not let them bring us to our knees. You'll remember last summer, how unhappy we were with the security at the Democratic and Republic conventions. Now I don't think we can raise those complaints after what happened in Boston."Last night on Chris Hayes' MSNBC show, an FBI agent discussed the fact that the US government has the right to arrest terrorism suspects and not provide them with Miranda warnings before questioning them. After seeing numerous people express surprise at this claim on Twitter, I pointed out that this happened when the Obama administration exploited the attempted underwear bombing over Detroit to radically reduce Miranda rights over what they had been for decades. That's what the US government (aided by the sham "terrorism expert" industry) does in every single one of these cases: exploits the resulting fear to increase its own power and decrease everyone else's rights, including privacy.At the Atlantic, security expert Bruce Schneier has a short but compelling article on how urgent it is that we not react to this Boston attack irrationally or with exaggerated fear, and that we particularly remain vigilant against government attempts to exploit fear to impose all new rights-reducing measures. He notes in particular how the more unusual an event is (such as this sort of attack on US soil), the more our brains naturally exaggerate its significance and frequency (John Cole makes a similar point).In sum, even if the perpetrators of Monday's attack in Boston turn out to be politically motivated and subscribers to an anti-US ideology, it will still be a very rare event, one that poses far less danger to Americans than literally countless other threats. The most important lesson of the excesses arising from the 9/11 attacks should be this one: that the dangers of overreacting and succumbing to irrational fear are far, far greater than any other dangers posed by these type of events.
