Olympics

I share an important date with former basketball coach the late Don Haskins, March 14, our birthday. Haskins led the then Texas Western Basketball team to the 1966 National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) basketball championship against the vaunted and famed Kentucky Wildcats, led by legendary coach Adolph Rupp. Coach Rupp...

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  • October 13, 2021

Women and people of color had a unique experience that ended yesterday in Tokyo, Japan. The controversial Summer Olympics closed with America at the top of the medal leader board despite some members of the team having barbs and sticks hurled at them from the right-wing.  Lots of conservatives and...

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  • August 9, 2021

In a 5-4 Supreme Court decision supported by conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, Justice William Brennan wrote in part:  [Gregory Lee] “Johnson was convicted for engaging in expressive conduct. The State’s interest in preventing breaches of the peace does not support his conviction because Johnson’s conduct did not threaten to disturb...

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  • June 30, 2021

So much thick-headed media activity this past week. OTOH Chuck Todd panders to the center again, or perhaps it's the college drop-out demographic. x A @MeetThePress fail today: talking about anti-Asian violence and racism – without any Asians on the panel. I can’t imagine MTP having a discussion about anti-Black...

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  • March 22, 2021

Assuming that there will be some violent provocations, we should encourage all deescalation efforts for election week, regardless of the vote outcomes. We’ve now seen the potential for serious planned electoral violence with the attempts on the governor of Michigan and the mayor of Wichita.   We’ve also seen long-term confrontations in...

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  • October 20, 2020

Men’s basketball has been in the Bubble and fittingly (I guess) the women are in the Wubble. Baseball is playing before packed houses of canned noise and football began in earnest yesterday, before empty seats of orange, blue, and green. Boxing and professional wrestling (if you consider that a sport)...

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  • September 14, 2020

North Korea blew up an inter-Korean liaison office building just north of the heavily armed border with South Korea, which may be more for domestic consumption, but also signifies the impotence of US-DPRK diplomacy. Easier to develop disinformation blaming South Korea and the US than the PRC. Trump’s incompetence continues as in the aggregate, any diplomacy with the DPRK...

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  • June 17, 2020

So when four Americans died in Benghazi, Libya, following an attack on our embassy, Republicans spent the next four years acting as if the plague had come to America and the Obama administration had callously ignored it while brushing off the deaths as no big deal. Now, after a plague...

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  • April 9, 2020

Received this e-mail today from former Vice President Joe Biden’s presidential campaign: This is our first of regular newsletters we will be sending around to Team Joe supporters from Vice President Biden. We hope you find this entertaining, informative, and a place to connect with the VP and our team....

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  • March 26, 2020

The New York Times reported this on Friday, but it seems we all missed it: China Spins Tale That the U.S. Army Started the Coronavirus Epidemic It seems that back in October China held Military War Games in Wuhan — a kind of Olympics for armies — and the US...

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  • March 15, 2020

The reality of tomorrow’s Nevada caucus will be in the details of delegate allocation. The meme of “insurmountable delegate lead” could prevail. Meanwhile Trump does a counter-rally in Vegas. x Post-debate poll (Thursday, Feb. 20):@BernieSanders – 30% (+2)@JoeBiden – 19% (0)@MikeBloomberg – 17% (-3)@ewarren – 12% (+2)@PeteButtigieg – 11% (-1)@amyklobuchar – 5%...

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  • February 21, 2020

Signaling that it's going to work hard to elevate Donald Trump during the upcoming presidential campaign, The New York Times recently suggested that Trump and Elizabeth Warren are politically similar because both offer up a version of “populism.” They just do it from different perspectives, the article posited. Specifically, the...

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  • September 22, 2019

Signaling that it's going to work hard to elevate Donald Trump during the upcoming presidential campaign, The New York Times recently suggested that Trump and Elizabeth Warren are politically similar because both offer up a version of “populism.” They just do it from different perspectives, the article posited. Specifically, the...

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  • September 22, 2019

Well, there’s nothing really surprising about this. Trump doesn’t like anyone but Trump, and of course he doesn’t care about education — his or anyone else’s. The Washington Post: Education Secretary Betsy DeVos remains so disliked in certain circles that her very name is a punchline. She mostly lands in...

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  • April 29, 2019

They got caught being soulless ghouls again, and unwilling to withstand another news cycle in which they’re painted (quite accurately) as insensitive toward some of our country’s most vulnerable children, Don and Betsy reversed course, withdrawing their proposal to cut nearly $18 million in funding for Special Olympics. (I mean,...

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  • March 29, 2019

As part of the ongoing project to catalog every awful thing the Trump Administration has done as a reference for future political arguments and whatever few posterity survives to see 2020, here’s everything awful the Trump Administration has done this week. ____________________________________________________________________________ 1303. Used unofficial communication devices to discuss sensitive government...

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  • March 29, 2019

Twice, most recently in 1980, the tiny village of Lake Placid, New York, which has fewer people than my hometown of Westville, Illinois, hosted the Olympic Winter Games. The Winter Olympics are a massive undertaking, with multiple different sports venues needed and a necessity for a relatively large spectator capacity...

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  • February 19, 2019

So dumbass tweeted this about Omarosa reiterating that he used racial slurs on the set of The Apprentice: x .@MarkBurnettTV called to say that there are NO TAPES of the Apprentice where I used such a terrible and disgusting word as attributed by Wacky and Deranged Omarosa. I don’t have...

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  • August 14, 2018

There are only four Olympic sports (not counting sports that are scheduled to debut or re-debut at the Olympics after 2018 or sports that have been discontinued from the Olympics) where the United States has never won a medal of any color. Three of them are Summer Olympic sports: badminton,...

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  • February 23, 2018

I’ll keep this short and sweet, as I had to wake up really early for this and now need to go back to sleep  😉   Here’s the info unveiled today as the first 30 customers received their vehicles: ———————— Versions: 2 (small and large battery pack) Base price per...

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  • July 29, 2017

A Hollywood icon had a senior moment, or several, in the lead up to the most important speech of Mitt Romney’s career. We’ve had a few days now to let the chuckling subside, and wipe tears of laughter from our eyes, and so it’s time to reflect on what this...

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  • September 2, 2012

I enjoyed the Olympics, or what little NBC bothered to air of the Olympics. We were stuck mostly with talking heads and human interest stories. How many times did I see a medal ceremony? I can count them on one hand. It's over until 2014 when we have the next...

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  • August 13, 2012