Why Not Give the Winter Games to Qatar?

In its rush to become as disreputable as FIFA, that other grand international sports organization, the International Olympic Committee, has just awarded the Winter Olympic Games of 2022 to a city that has neither mountains nor snow, Beijing -- which will now become the first location to host both a Summer and a Winter Games.

Will Reporters Without Borders need to change the date and re-issue the following image as 2022 approaches, or will China be a freer nation by then?

The real issue is becoming the fact that no one in a free society right now wants to bid on these games. Boston just ended its 2024 Summer Games bid amid a popular uprising and people in Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Germany, and Poland rejected 2022 bids, leaving Beijing and Kazakhstan as the only options for the IOC.

Retroactive Retirements, Etch-a-Sketches, and Neuralyzers -- so many ways for Romney to dodge responsibility

In case you missed it on Meet the Press this morning, here's the video of Mitt Romney Senior Advisor Ed Gillespie saying that Romney "actually retired retroactively" from Bain Capital in 2002, thereby trying to avoid responsibility for anything that happened while Mitt was CEO there between 1999 and 2002.

#Retroactively quickly became a trending hashtag on Twitter earlier today, with tweets about everything from Seamus Romney retroactively riding inside the car to Mitt Romney retroactively retiring from the Massachusetts Governorship immediately before the signing of Romneycare (one of mine).
 It took on the viral character of that earlier famous Etch-a-Sketch moment started by this remark from another Romney Senior Advisor, Eric Fehrnstrom, on CNN back in March:

Mitt Romney personally offered yet one more metaphor for this desire to induce amnesia in American voters who might notice his flipping and flopping -- the Neuralyzer used by Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones in Men in Black:
 

The real issue here is why Mitt Romney is running from his whole history.

• Why is he running from his Bain experience when his experience as a businessman is his one (specious) argument for why he would be a better President than Barack Obama?
• Why is he running from his major accomplishment as Governor of Massachusetts, the health care act that helped insure many uninsured people and served as one of the models for the program he now refers to dismissively as "Obamacare"?
• Why is he running from Mormon experience as missionary and bishop in the Mormon church? Is he afraid of being connected with the White Horse Prophecy?

And to get back to the specifics of today's claim, if the Romney people on all the Sunday talk shows were saying that he was inactive in his role of CEO at Bain Capital between 1999-2002 because he was too busy working on the Salt Lake City Olympics, doesn't that work against him too?  Shouldn't any high-powered executive applying for the job of President be able to run a Utah Ice Show and a Boston Vulture Capitalism firm at the same time? Doesn't Barack Obama seem like he'd be able to add an Olympics to his portfolio with no problem?

The Olympic Torch Relay : A Proud Tradition Dating Back to . . . Hitler.

Click here for more details about this "ancient" inviolable publicity stunt. Meanwhile, here's a photo from Leni Riefenstahl's famous piece of fascist pornography, Olympia.

Top Ten Reasons the USA Won’t Boycott the Beijing Summer Olympics

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10. We don’t want to imperil our lifeline of cheap electronics, lead-enhanced toys, slightly-poisoned dog food, and piles of other plastic useless crap that keeps our McMansions and Wal-Marts from looking empty.
9. What? And give up our quadrennial chance to maniacally chant “U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!” with our families for two weeks while eating Doritos and staring at prerecorded and edited ping-pong, badminton, and beach volleyball tournaments on the new widescreen HDTV that we bought for the occasion?
8. Has the Dalai Lama's country ever contributed cheap labor, diamonds, or oil to the US economy?
7. This year, American scientists have finally found a way to stay one step ahead in the performance-enhancing-chemical and undetectable-blood-doping wars.
6. A vague fear about Chinese hackers being talented enough to bring down eBay … or Dick Cheney’s pacemaker.
5. We only pick fights with countries that don’t have an air force.
4. It’s our only chance to see Modern Pentathlon on television (even if it’s only in a five-minute montage of the courageous American Pentathlete who placed 45th).
3. There is no Tibetan voting block in Miami, or New Jersey, or anywhere else in the USA.
2. We want to see hour-long Up-Close-and-Personal stories about dyslexic orphans who have fought their way to the top of the international equestrian dressage ranks after being adopted by sympathetic American billionaires.
1. George W. Bush’s balls are only half the size of Jimmy Carter’s.

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but seriously, in addition to the current violence against Tibetans, the 11th Panchen Lama will turn 19 on April 25th. He's been a political prisoner of the Chinese since he was six. But "Hey, it's all about the athletes, and having fun!" Let's not spoil it with any talk of politics. That would be like spoiling this weekend's White House Easter Egg Roll® with talk of innocent minors who were thrown without charges into cells at Guantanamo.

Click here or on the interlocked Olympic handcuffs to check out Reporters Without Borders (Reporters sans frontières) at rsf.org.

And here's a blog I just found dedicated to an Olympic Boycott: Boycott2008Games.blogspot.com