March 25, 2013 Charles Krauthammer proposes tax reform with a twist. ... tax reform with a twist.

The problem begins with definitions. By tax reform, Obama means eliminating deductions, exclusions, credits of various kinds with all the money going to the Treasury.

That’s radically new. The historic 1986 Reagan-O’Neill tax reform closed loopholes with no extra money going to the Treasury. The new revenue went directly back to the citizenry in the form of lower tax rates.

This is called revenue-neutrality. The idea is that tax reform is a way not to fatten the Treasury but to clean the tax code. It means eliminating special-interest favors and behavior-altering deductions that create waste and inefficiency by inducing tax-preferred rather than market-oriented economic activity. And it introduces fairness by removing breaks and payoffs for which only the rich can afford to lobby.

As a final bonus, tax reform’s lower rates spur economic growth. A unique win-win-win: efficiency, fairness, growth.

Obama’s own Simpson-Bowles deficit-reduction commission offered a variant. First, it identified an astonishing $1.1 trillion per year of these “tax expenditures.” That’s more than $11 trillion in a decade. In one scenario, it knocked them all out and lowered marginal tax rates to just three brackets of 8 percent, 14 percent and 23 percent.

But here’s the twist. Using the full $1.1 trillion annually of newly redeemed “loophole” revenue, Simpson-Bowles could have dropped the rates a bit below 23 percent. But instead it left some of that money in the Treasury, an average of almost $100�billion a year, or about $1 trillion over a decade. It was a reasonable compromise, so reasonable that even the Senate’s most fierce spending hawk, commission member Tom Coburn, signed on.

Now, Simpson-Bowles is not on the table but it could be a model. Obama’s “tax reform” would send 100 percent of the revenue to the Treasury. Reagan-O’Neill sent 0 percent. Simpson-Bowles fell somewhere in between. So should any grand compromise. ...

Andrew Malcolm posts on Biden's hotel bills. Good thing, given sequestration's cuts in spending increases, that the Obama administration has curtailed spending like canceling this spring's White House public tours.

Otherwise, the administration might be in big financial trouble, like the country they're allegedly leading, given the Vice President's recent European hotel tabs.

The cost of the night's London lodging in early February for Joe Biden and his unusually large entourage was $459,388.65. That's right, nearly a half-million dollars, which would be a BFD for anyone who wasn't self-appointed political royalty.

But that's not the worst of it. In Paris, the Amtrak-lover from Delaware ran up another one-night hotel tab of more than a half-million dollars, $585,000.50. They must have hit that mini-bar pretty hard!

The Weekly Standard, which broke the stories of these extremely expensive expense extravaganzas, also discovered the five-star hotel stays at the Hotel Intercontinental Paris Le Grande and London's Hyatt Regency were made through no-bid government contracts. That eliminates any messy money-saving competition and security concerns.

That was Joe's first foreign trip of the second term (only 1,397 days left). He's since made another, to Rome last week for Pope Francis' first mass. ...

Interesting WSJ OpEd on the intelligence of animals. Who is smarter: a person or an ape? Well, it depends on the task. Consider Ayumu, a young male chimpanzee at Kyoto University who, in a 2007 study, put human memory to shame. Trained on a touch screen, Ayumu could recall a random series of nine numbers, from 1 to 9, and tap them in the right order, even though the numbers had been displayed for just a fraction of a second and then replaced with white squares.

I tried the task myself and could not keep track of more than five numbers—and I was given much more time than the brainy ape. In the study, Ayumu outperformed a group of university students by a wide margin. The next year, he took on the British memory champion Ben Pridmore and emerged the "chimpion."

How do you give a chimp—or an elephant or an octopus or a horse—an IQ test? It may sound like the setup to a joke, but it is actually one of the thorniest questions facing science today. Over the past decade, researchers on animal cognition have come up with some ingenious solutions to the testing problem. Their findings have started to upend a view of humankind's unique place in the universe that dates back at least to ancient Greece.

Aristotle's idea of the scala naturae, the ladder of nature, put all life-forms in rank order, from low to high, with humans closest to the angels. During the Enlightenment, the French philosopher René Descartes, a founder of modern science, declared that animals were soulless automatons. In the 20th century, the American psychologist B.F. Skinner and his followers took up the same theme, painting animals as little more than stimulus-response machines. Animals might be capable of learning, they argued, but surely not of thinking and feeling. The term"animal cognition" remained an oxymoron.

A growing body of evidence shows, however, that we have grossly underestimated both the scope and the scale of animal intelligence. Can an octopus use tools? Do chimpanzees have a sense of fairness? Can birds guess what others know? Do rats feel empathy for their friends? Just a few decades ago we would have answered "no" to all such questions. Now we're not so sure.

CBS Sports says Florida Gulf Coast University's men's basketball team is the biggest thing in sports. You'll have to wait until Friday for their next game. The funny thing is that they're just as loose off the court as they are on it, full of great stories and quotes, happy to talk to anybody and everybody. And, yes, they're just as blown away by all of this as you are. They admit it and display it.

"Wow," said Florida Gulf Coast's Eric McKnight when I told him his ridiculous and vicious alley-oop was trending on Twitter. Then I told him he and his teammates are the biggest story in sports. Not just college basketball. Sports. All of sports. Including everything.

"Really?" McKnight asked. "Wow. Wow. Wow. This is all very hard to believe."

Perhaps because it's unprecedented.

Florida Gulf Coast made history here Sunday at the Wells Fargo Center with an 81-71 victory against San Diego State that made the Eagles the first 15 seed in NCAA tournament history to advance to the Sweet 16. So now the greatest (and newest) show in college basketball -- Florida Dunk Coast -- is headed to Jerry Jones' Dallas Cowboys Stadium. To play the University of Florida. For a trip to the Elite Eight. And how perfect is this story?

This Atlantic Sun member that didn't hold its first class until 1997 is now an international deal, and not only because it's in the Sweet 16. No, it's more than that. It's the way the Eagles did this, how they got here. With lobs on lobs on lobs on lobs and dunks on dunks on dunks on dunks. Understand, this remarkable run -- which started Friday against Georgetown and continued with this destruction of SDSU -- didn't feel fluky. For 80 consecutive minutes, Florida Gulf Coast was the aggressor, the attacker, way more than merely a so-called low-major getting fortunate by hitting lots of 3-pointers.

That said, they weren't that sharp in the opening 20 minutes Sunday.

McKnight was asked what coach Andy Enfield's halftime speech entailed.

"He [told us we] played like s--- in the first half," McKnight said, matter-of-factly. "Then he brought us all together and told us to turn up. So that's what we did." ...

Washington Post The 50 percent solution by Charles Krauthammer

The proposition that entitlement curbs are the key to maintaining national solvency is widely accepted, though not by many congressional Democrats. President Obama, however, has endorsed it on various occasions. And he could make it happen.

If he wants. I remain skeptical that he does. But national solvency is important enough to test this proposition at least once more. The obstacle is Obama’s current position that entitlement cuts must be “balanced” with new revenue from closing loopholes.

Republicans are adamantly opposed. No more revenues, Mr. President. You got your tax hike on Jan. 1.

Is there a solution? Yes: tax reform with a twist.

The problem begins with definitions. By tax reform, Obama means eliminating deductions, exclusions, credits of various kinds with all the money going to the Treasury.

That’s radically new. The historic 1986 Reagan-O’Neill tax reform closed loopholes with no extra money going to the Treasury. The new revenue went directly back to the citizenry in the form of lower tax rates.

This is called revenue-neutrality. The idea is that tax reform is a way not to fatten the Treasury but to clean the tax code. It means eliminating special-interest favors and behavior-altering deductions that create waste and inefficiency by inducing tax-preferred rather than market-oriented economic activity. And it introduces fairness by removing breaks and payoffs for which only the rich can afford to lobby.

As a final bonus, tax reform’s lower rates spur economic growth. A unique win-win-win: efficiency, fairness, growth.

Obama’s own Simpson-Bowles deficit-reduction commission offered a variant. First, it identified an astonishing $1.1 trillion per year of these “tax expenditures.” That’s more than $11 trillion in a decade. In one scenario, it knocked them all out and lowered marginal tax rates to just three brackets of 8 percent, 14 percent and 23 percent.

But here’s the twist. Using the full $1.1 trillion annually of newly redeemed “loophole” revenue, Simpson-Bowles could have dropped the rates a bit below 23 percent. But instead it left some of that money in the Treasury, an average of almost $100�billion a year, or about $1 trillion over a decade. It was a reasonable compromise, so reasonable that even the Senate’s most fierce spending hawk, commission member Tom Coburn, signed on.

Now, Simpson-Bowles is not on the table but it could be a model. Obama’s “tax reform” would send 100 percent of the revenue to the Treasury. Reagan-O’Neill sent 0 percent. Simpson-Bowles fell somewhere in between. So should any grand compromise.

Before deciding exactly where to locate that compromise, however, we have to decide which deductions to cut, yielding how much revenue. The bad news is that, given all the lobbying and haggling this would occasion, it could take years to work out. The good news is the formula proposed by Harvard economist Martin Feldstein. Before even picking and choosing which deductions should remain permissible, it simply allows no one to reduce his tax bill by more than 2 percent by using any or all of the deductions and loopholes in the current tax code (except charitable contributions).

There should, of course, be separate negotiations over which of the hundreds, thousands, of loopholes/deductions should be tossed out as corrupt or counterproductive rent-seeking. But the 2 percent ceiling means that we don’t have to wait until full tax reform — because the Feldstein formula significantly and immediately reduces the impact of all the loopholes.

Feldstein calculates that his tax reform would yield $2.1 trillion in new revenue over a decade. Now we can cut the pie. Obama wants the government to keep it all. The GOP wants to give it all back to reduce tax rates. Let’s be Solomonic. Divide the revenue in half — 50 percent to the Treasury for reducing debt, 50 percent to the citizenry for reducing rates.

That’s roughly $1 trillion each. Everybody gets something. Republicans unexpectedly get a rate cut, minor but symbolic after having had to swallow the “fiscal cliff” rate hike. The country gets the first significant tax reform in a quarter-century. Obama gets $1 trillion worth of “balance,” his price for real entitlement reform. And if he turns out to be serious about that, we get the Holy Grail — tax and entitlement reform all at once.

Which means a deal that manages to simultaneously promote efficiency, fairness, growth, debt reduction and a return to national solvency. In other words, the best deal since the Louisiana Purchase.

Investors.com Joe Biden's $585,000 hotel bill--for one night by Andrew Malcolm

Goodbye, folks. Wait til you see my mini-bar tab!

Good thing, given sequestration's cuts in spending increases, that the Obama administration has curtailed spending like canceling this spring's White House public tours.

Otherwise, the administration might be in big financial trouble, like the country they're allegedly leading, given the Vice President's recent European hotel tabs.

The cost of the night's London lodging in early February for Joe Biden and his unusually large entourage was $459,388.65. That's right, nearly a half-million dollars, which would be a BFD for anyone who wasn't self-appointed political royalty.

But that's not the worst of it. In Paris, the Amtrak-lover from Delaware ran up another one-night hotel tab of more than a half-million dollars, $585,000.50. They must have hit that mini-bar pretty hard!

The Weekly Standard, which broke the stories of these extremely expensive expense extravaganzas, also discovered the five-star hotel stays at the Hotel Intercontinental Paris Le Grande and London's Hyatt Regency were made through no-bid government contracts. That eliminates any messy money-saving competition and security concerns.

That was Joe's first foreign trip of the second term (only 1,397 days left). He's since made another, to Rome last week for Pope Francis' first mass.

But Biden also managed to continue his now-legendary series of public gaffes. He confused Poland with Portugal in a speech and made the outrageous claim in London that he's spent half of his 70 years of life as a member of the U.S. National Security Council, instead of the four years and two months that's the truth.

Biden also said America has its most open relationship with Britain, apparently forgetting our next door neighbor Canada, which is America's largest trading partner by far and the country that shares the world's longest undefended border, in excess of 5,000 miles.

Biden's profligate spending ways appear to confirm that President Obama's undocumented advance fears of the sequester's severe impact were, indeed, over-heated. Obama canceled public White House tours as an ostentatious display of allegedly necessary belt-tightening stemming from his own idea of the sequester and its required spending cuts.

The Democrat's 1.04 presidential terms have coincided with a marked increase in the country's national debt, up about $6 trillion and now well past $16 trillion total. That's larger than the United States' entire economy. Raising the legal debt limit will be Obama's next loud public fight with the Republican House of Representatives, where Speaker John Boehner's marker is $1 of budget cuts for every $1 of debt increase.

Biden is not the only one spending lavishly. Ten days ago, Obama flew his 747 jumbo jet Air Force One four hours round-trip to Chicago, at a cost of $182,000 per flight hour, not including separate planes for security apparatus. All that for a photo op and a 15-minute telepromptered speech that could have been delivered from anywhere on the subject of -- wait for it! -- reducing our use of oil.

WSJ The Brains of the Animal Kingdom New research shows that we have grossly underestimated both the scope and the scale of animal intelligence. by Frans de Waal

A herd of African elephants drink water at a dam inside the Addo Elephant National Park near Port Elizabeth, South Africa.

Who is smarter: a person or an ape? Well, it depends on the task. Consider Ayumu, a young male chimpanzee at Kyoto University who, in a 2007 study, put human memory to shame. Trained on a touch screen, Ayumu could recall a random series of nine numbers, from 1 to 9, and tap them in the right order, even though the numbers had been displayed for just a fraction of a second and then replaced with white squares.

I tried the task myself and could not keep track of more than five numbers—and I was given much more time than the brainy ape. In the study, Ayumu outperformed a group of university students by a wide margin. The next year, he took on the British memory champion Ben Pridmore and emerged the "chimpion."

How do you give a chimp—or an elephant or an octopus or a horse—an IQ test? It may sound like the setup to a joke, but it is actually one of the thorniest questions facing science today. Over the past decade, researchers on animal cognition have come up with some ingenious solutions to the testing problem. Their findings have started to upend a view of humankind's unique place in the universe that dates back at least to ancient Greece.

Aristotle's idea of the scala naturae, the ladder of nature, put all life-forms in rank order, from low to high, with humans closest to the angels. During the Enlightenment, the French philosopher René Descartes, a founder of modern science, declared that animals were soulless automatons. In the 20th century, the American psychologist B.F. Skinner and his followers took up the same theme, painting animals as little more than stimulus-response machines. Animals might be capable of learning, they argued, but surely not of thinking and feeling. The term"animal cognition" remained an oxymoron.

A growing body of evidence shows, however, that we have grossly underestimated both the scope and the scale of animal intelligence. Can an octopus use tools? Do chimpanzees have a sense of fairness? Can birds guess what others know? Do rats feel empathy for their friends? Just a few decades ago we would have answered "no" to all such questions. Now we're not so sure.

Experiments with animals have long been handicapped by our anthropocentric attitude: We often test them in ways that work fine with humans but not so well with other species. Scientists are now finally meeting animals on their own terms instead of treating them like furry (or feathery) humans, and this shift is fundamentally reshaping our understanding.

Elephants are a perfect example. For years, scientists believed them incapable of using tools. At most, an elephant might pick up a stick to scratch its itchy behind. In earlier studies, the pachyderms were offered a long stick while food was placed outside their reach to see if they would use the stick to retrieve it. This setup worked well with primates, but elephants left the stick alone. From this, researchers concluded that the elephants didn't understand the problem. It occurred to no one that perhaps we, the investigators, didn't understand the elephants.

Think about the test from the animal's perspective. Unlike the primate hand, the elephant's grasping organ is also its nose. Elephants use their trunks not only to reach food but also to sniff and touch it. With their unparalleled sense of smell, the animals know exactly what they are going for. Vision is secondary.

But as soon as an elephant picks up a stick, its nasal passages are blocked. Even when the stick is close to the food, it impedes feeling and smelling. It is like sending a blindfolded child on an Easter egg hunt.

What sort of experiment, then, would do justice to the animal's special anatomy and abilities?

On a recent visit to the National Zoo in Washington, I met with Preston Foerder and Diana Reiss of Hunter College, who showed me what Kandula, a young elephant bull, can do if the problem is presented differently. The scientists hung fruit high up above the enclosure, just out of Kandula's reach. The elephant was given several sticks and a sturdy square box.

Kandula ignored the sticks but, after a while, began kicking the box with his foot. He kicked it many times in a straight line until it was right underneath the branch. He then stood on the box with his front legs, which enabled him to reach the food with his trunk. An elephant, it turns out, can use tools—if they are the right ones.

While Kandula munched his reward, the investigators explained how they had varied the setup, making life more difficult for the elephant. They had put the box in a different section of the yard,

out of view, so that when Kandula looked up at the tempting food he would need to recall the solution and walk away from his goal to fetch the tool. Apart from a few large-brained species, such as humans, apes and dolphins, not many animals will do this, but Kandula did it without hesitation, fetching the box from great distances.

Another failed experiment with elephants involved the mirror test—a classic evaluation of whether an animal recognizes its own reflection. In the early going, scientists placed a mirror on the ground outside the elephant's cage, but the mirror was (unsurprisingly) much smaller than the largest of land animals. All that the elephant could possibly see was four legs behind two layers of bars (since the mirror doubled them). When the animal received a mark on its body visible only with the assistance of the mirror, it failed to notice or touch the mark. The verdict was that the species lacked self-awareness.

But Joshua Plotnik of the Think Elephant International Foundation modified the test. He gave the elephants access to an 8-by-8-foot mirror and allowed them to feel it, smell it and look behind it. With this larger mirror, they fared much better. One Asian elephant recognized herself. Standing in front of the mirror, she repeatedly rubbed a white cross on her forehead, an action that she could only have performed by connecting her reflected image with her own body.

A similar experimental problem was behind the mistaken belief, prevalent until two decades ago, that our species has a unique system of facial recognition, since we are so much better at identifying faces than any other primate. Other primates had been tested, but they had been tested on human faces—based on the assumption that ours are the easiest to tell apart.

When Lisa Parr, one of my co-workers at Emory University, tested chimpanzees on portraits of their own species, they excelled at it. Selecting portraits on a computer screen, they could even tell which juveniles were born to which females. Having been trained to detect similarities among images, the apes were shown a female's portrait and then given a choice between two other faces, one of which showed her offspring. They preferred the latter based purely on family resemblance since they did not know any of the depicted apes.

We also may need to rethink the physiology of intelligence. Take the octopus. In captivity, these animals recognize their caretakers and learn to open pill bottles protected by childproof caps—a task with which many humans struggle. Their brains are indeed the largest among invertebrates, but the explanation for their extraordinary skills may lie elsewhere. It seems that these animals think, literally, outside the box of the brain.

Octopuses have hundreds of suckers, each one equipped with its own ganglion with thousands of neurons. These "mini-brains" are interconnected, making for a widely distributed nervous system. That is why a severed octopus arm may crawl on its own and even pick up food.

Similarly, when an octopus changes skin color in self-defense, such as by mimicking a poisonous sea snake, the decision may come not from central command but from the skin itself. A 2010 study found gene sequences in the skin of cuttlefish similar to those in the eye's retina. Could it be: an organism with a seeing skin and eight thinking arms?

A note of caution, however: At times we also have overestimated the capacities of animals. About a century ago, a German horse named "Kluger Hans" (Clever Hans) was thought to be capable of addition and subtraction. His owner would ask him the product of multiplying four by

three, and Hans would happily tap his hoof 12 times. People were flabbergasted, and Hans became an international sensation.

That is, until Oskar Pfungst, a psychologist, investigated the horse's abilities. Pfungst found that Hans was only successful if his owner knew the answer to the question and was visible to the horse. Apparently, the owner subtly shifted his position or straightened his back when Hans reached the correct number of taps. (The owner did so unknowingly, so there was no fraud involved.)

Some look at this historic revelation as a downgrading of Hans's intelligence, but I would argue that the horse was in fact very smart. His abilities at arithmetic may have been flawed, but his understanding of human body language was remarkable. And isn't that the skill a horse needs most?

Awareness of the "Clever Hans Effect," as it is now known, has greatly improved animal experimentation. Unfortunately, it is often ignored in comparable research with humans. Whereas every dog lab now tests the cognition of its animals while their human owners are blindfolded or asked to face away, young children are still presented with cognitive tasks while sitting on their mothers' laps. The assumption is that mothers are like furniture, but every mother wants her child to succeed, and nothing guarantees that her sighs, head turns and subtle changes in position don't serve as cues for the child.

This is especially relevant when we try to establish how smart apes are relative to children. To see how their cognitive skills compare, scientists present both species with identical problems, treating them exactly the same. At least this is the idea. But the children are held by their parents and talked to ("Watch this!" "Where is the bunny?"), and they are dealing with members of their own kind. The apes, by contrast, sit behind bars, don't benefit from language or a nearby parent who knows the answers, and are facing members of a different species. The odds are massively stacked against the apes, but if they fail to perform like the children, the invariable conclusion is that they lack the mental capacities under investigation.

A recent study, tracking the pupil movements of chimpanzees, found that they followed the gaze of members of their own species far better than that of humans. This simple finding has huge implications for tests in which chimpanzees need to pay attention to human experimenters. The species barrier they face may fully explain the difference in performance compared with children.

Underlying many of our mistaken beliefs about animal intelligence is the problem of negative evidence. If I walk through a forest in Georgia, where I live, and fail to see or hear the pileated woodpecker, am I permitted to conclude that the bird is absent? Of course not. We know how easily these splendid woodpeckers hop around tree trunks to stay out of sight. All I can say is that I lack evidence.

It is quite puzzling, therefore, why the field of animal cognition has such a long history of claims about the absence of capacities based on just a few strolls through the forest. Such conclusions contradict the famous dictum of experimental psychology according to which "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."

Take the question of whether we are the only species to care about the well-being of others. It is well known that apes in the wild offer spontaneous assistance to each other, defending against leopards, say, or consoling distressed companions with tender embraces. But for decades, these observations were ignored, and more attention was paid to experiments according to which the apes were entirely selfish. They had been tested with an apparatus to see if one chimpanzee was willing to push food toward another. But perhaps the apes failed to understand the apparatus. When we instead used a simple choice between tokens they could exchange for food—one kind of token rewarded only the chooser, the other kind rewarded both apes—lo and behold, they preferred outcomes that rewarded both of them.

Such generosity, moreover, may not be restricted to apes. In a recent study, rats freed a trapped companion even when a container with chocolate had been put right next to it. Many rats first liberated the other, after which both rodents happily shared the treat.

The one historical constant in my field is that each time a claim of human uniqueness bites the dust, other claims quickly take its place. Meanwhile, science keeps chipping away at the wall that separates us from the other animals. We have moved from viewing animals as instinct-driven stimulus-response machines to seeing them as sophisticated decision makers.

Aristotle's ladder of nature is not just being flattened; it is being transformed into a bush with many branches. This is no insult to human superiority. It is long-overdue recognition that intelligent life is not something for us to seek in the outer reaches of space but is abundant right here on earth, under our noses.

—Mr. de Waal is C.H. Candler Professor at Emory University and director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, both in Atlanta. His latest book, "The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism among the Primates," will be published by Norton on Monday. CBS Sports Little School Is Biggest Story in Sports Florida Gulf Coast -- biggest thing in sports -- gets Florida in Sweet 16 by Gary Parrish

PHILADELPHIA -- The funny thing is that they're just as loose off the court as they are on it, full of great stories and quotes, happy to talk to anybody and everybody. And, yes, they're just as blown away by all of this as you are. They admit it and display it.

"Wow," said Florida Gulf Coast's Eric McKnight when I told him his ridiculous and vicious alley-oop was trending on Twitter. Then I told him he and his teammates are the biggest story in sports. Not just college basketball. Sports. All of sports. Including everything.

"Really?" McKnight asked. "Wow. Wow. Wow. This is all very hard to believe."

Perhaps because it's unprecedented.

Florida Gulf Coast made history here Sunday at the Wells Fargo Center with an 81-71 victory against San Diego State that made the Eagles the first 15 seed in NCAA tournament history to advance to the Sweet 16. So now the greatest (and newest) show in college basketball -- Florida Dunk Coast -- is headed to Jerry Jones' Dallas Cowboys Stadium. To play the University of Florida. For a trip to the Elite Eight. And how perfect is this story?

This Atlantic Sun member that didn't hold its first class until 1997 is now an international deal, and not only because it's in the Sweet 16. No, it's more than that. It's the way the Eagles did this, how they got here. With lobs on lobs on lobs on lobs and dunks on dunks on dunks on dunks. Understand, this remarkable run -- which started Friday against Georgetown and continued with this destruction of SDSU -- didn't feel fluky. For 80 consecutive minutes, Florida Gulf Coast was the aggressor, the attacker, way more than merely a so-called low-major getting fortunate by hitting lots of 3-pointers.

That said, they weren't that sharp in the opening 20 minutes Sunday.

McKnight was asked what coach Andy Enfield's halftime speech entailed.

"He [told us we] played like s--- in the first half," McKnight said, matter-of-factly. "Then he brought us all together and told us to turn up. So that's what we did."

Boy, did they ever.

What followed was a fascinating 20 minutes that captured the nation's attention, overshadowed the Marshall Henderson Show that was airing at the same time and solidified FGCU as a story for now and forever. The Eagles led by as many as 19 in the second half, thanks to what ended up being a 23-point effort from Bernard Thompson. They never stopped running, never stopped attacking, never stopped trying to toss lobs and wreck rims, which had the sellout crowd of 20,125 mostly non-FGCU fans standing and cheering and high-fiving each other.

"We're all about having fun ... and we like to get the crowd involved," said Florida Gulf Coast guard Sherwood Brown, who finished with 17 points and eight rebounds. "Over the course of the game, the whole crowd started to get behind us even if they are not from Fort Myers. Or, as I like to say, 'Dunk City.'"

Yes, Fort Myers is now Dunk City.

That's what this coach and these players have created.

They are 14 lightly recruited prospects led by a man who was, before Friday, more famous for the model he married than for anything he'd done on or off the court. Now they're stars, every

last one of them. And how in the world did Florida Gulf Coast only finish second in the Atlantic Sun and lose twice to a Lipscomb team that went 12-18 this season?

"They're our kryptonite," Florida Gulf Coast's Eddie Murray joked. "We're just glad we don't have to see [Lipscomb] in the Sweet 16."

Murray is a local product, by the way.

He graduated from Bishop Verot High in Fort Myers.

He was raised a Gators fan.

"I was a Florida fan before FGCU even existed," Murray said. "I loved watching Al Horford and Corey Brewer and all those guys play. They were fun to watch."

And did UF ever recruit him?

Did Murray ever even get a form letter?

"No. No chance," he said with a laugh. "Not for basketball."

And yet, next Friday -- in our nation's most breathtaking dome -- Murray and his teammates will square off against Florida, against Billy Donovan, against a bunch of players who were all more heralded coming out of high school. This tournament, as usual, has provided a storyline no reasonable person could have anticipated.

"That is going to be a great deal," McKnight said. "It's going to be so much fun because we'll have a chance to prove who's the best in Florida."

And who is the best in Florida?

"FGCU," McKnight answered. "FGCU."