Bunch

The NJSIAA state basketball tournament will begin on Feb. 28, and nowhere does there appear to be more balance than in South Jersey Group 4. This section probably has more teams with a realistic chance to win the championship than any other in South or Central Jersey. Rancocas Valley would have been a contender, but the Red Devils will be competing in Central Jersey Group 4. Nobody in South Jersey Group 4 is complaining very much about seeing the talented Red Devils elsewhere. One could argue that at least half the 16-team field can't be discounted from winning the title.

THE Daily News continues to put staff writer Will Bunch out there as an objective journalist when his "reporting" is nothing more than conjecture and opinion. His attempt to connect the Arizona gunman to right-wing ideology was laughable. At least do us a favor by including all the facts. Why did he fail to include a report from a former friend who called the gunman a "left-wing loony"? Or that the gunman was registered as an independent? And Bunch's attempt to link the gunman to Glenn Beck is as ridiculous as trying to say that President Obama's metaphorical comment, "If they bring a knife, we'll bring a gun," also somehow, maybe incited this guy to violence.

DON SMOLENSKI'S holidays got complicated about 6:45 Christmas morning. "I took my dog for a walk. I came back and I had an e-mail from [team president] Joe Banner saying that the storm had flipped," Smolenski, the Eagles' chief operating officer, said yesterday from the snow-blasted NovaCare Complex. Smolenski, who was visiting family in Connecticut at Christmas, said he took a few hours to open presents with his wife and two sons, then got back together with Banner to start discussing the implications of yesterday's severe winter storm on the scheduled Eagles-Vikings game.

ATLANTA - You look at the San Francisco lineup and you see a bunch of gamers, baseball lifers, players who know how to win. What you don't see is much star power or postseason experience. Certainly, when you compare the Giants' regular eight with the Phillies' regular eight, there really is no comparison. The Phillies have All-Stars all over the field. The core has been together for three extended postseasons and two World Series. All of which might mean something when the National League Championship Series begins Saturday night at Citizens Bank Park.

YOU WILL FIND a list of songs, cheers and chants on their website, but understand this about the Sons of Ben fan club: They can invent one on the spot, which is a good trait to have when you're singing, cheering and chanting nonstop for 90-plus minutes of a Philadelphia Union soccer game. This is why their founder, Bryan James, is wrong when he contends that his club's devotion to Philadelphia's new Major League Soccer team, which has now surpassed 3,000 members, is "akin to what the Flyers and Eagles fans bring . . . " It's why club member Mark Concannon, who designs the club's various T-shirts, is wrong when he calls the end-zone area where supporters congregate "like the 700 level at the Vet. " They weren't very organized in the old 700 level.

Daily News senior writer WILL BUNCH has been reporting on the rise of the "tea party" movement, the conservative backlash against President Obama and the influence of Glenn Beck and the media for much of the last year, both for the newspaper and on his blog, ATTYTOOD. This week marks the release of his book on the subject: THE BACKLASH: RIGHT-WING RADICALS, HIGH-DEF HUCKSTERS AND PARANOID POLITICS IN THE AGE OF OBAMA, from Harper Books. You can learn more about Bunch's book online at or watch a video trailer for the book at .

Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama By Will Bunch Harper, 354 pp. $25.99 Reviewed by Robert Schmuhl Today's political pendulum swings with such frequency and ferocity that it's no wonder a centrist position seems elusive. Even before Barack Obama had a chance to get settled in the White House, a vocal and vigorous movement was working not only to oppose him but also to orchestrate his downfall. Welcome to the fear-fueled, full-boil anger that Will Bunch portrays in The Backlash . A senior writer at the Philadelphia Daily News and husband of Inquirer staff writer Kathy Boccella, Bunch takes to the road to report what animates anti-Obama Americans.

You can learn a lot by watching 60 Minutes. You can learn even more before it comes on. The other day, while I was waiting for CBS to dust off Andy Rooney so he could stumble through his weekly mind-numbing non sequiturs, I caught a little of the PGA Championship. It was an accident. A lot of drama happened during the final round. Hardly any of that was due to the playoff. Instead, it was owed to a big controversy after Dustin Johnson violated some ridiculous and arcane rule.

By Gerard Shields We were six teenage boys holed up in a Wildwood hotel for two weeks with a Catholic priest. Judging by most of the stories one reads these days, this is where it's supposed to get sordid. But the Rev. William Kirk was not my predator. He was my savior. I was 13 years old when my mother spent a year in the hospital with tuberculosis. My two younger sisters and I recited the rosary every night before a statue of Mary, praying for Mom's return. Yet the question to my God lingered: Why us?

No more than 50 semifinalists will advance after today's second and third rounds of testing in the Scripps National Spelling Bee in the nation's capital. Yesterday, all 273 contenders - including one apiece from Philadelphia, Camden, Lancaster, Bethlehem and Margate, as well as Montgomery, Delaware, Chester and Berks Counties - used computers to take a 50-word test. Today, the students - ranging from age 8 to eighth grade - will spell onstage in two rounds, the first under way this morning, the second televised on ESPN3 starting about 1:15.