USA Owns the Winter Olympics Podium

Going into these current Winter Olympics games the host Canadians had built their national program up with the motto "Own the Podium!" for years. But as the games wind down it hasn't been the hosts but their southern American neighbors who have actually dominated the medals podium.

The current medal counts with just a couple of days of competition remaining show the United States with 8 gold, 12 silvers and 12 bronze for a total of 32 overall medals, six more than the 2nd place Germans. Noway is in 3rd place with 19, the Canadians are at 17, and the traditional power from Russia sits with just 13 medals.

It hasn't always been this dominant for the American team at the Winter Olympics. The cold weather games highlighted by competitions in alpine skiing, ice skating, hockey, bobsledding and other competitions across ice and snow have taken place since Chamonix in 1924.

The overall Winter Olympics medal leader of all-time with 603 is Norway. The rugged western Scandanavian nation with great mountainous regions is one of the farthest north in all of Europe. It's hardy and talented athletes are the only in the world to have earned more than 100 gold medals, standing at 106 as of today.

The USA team has accumulated the 2nd most medals in Winter Olympics history with a current total of 491, and their 87 gold medals are also 2nd all-time. But recent years had not been kind to the U.S. winter contingent.

At Nagano, Japan in 1998 the U.S. finished 6th with just 13 overall medals, the same total and the same finish as they had four years earlier at Lillihammer, Noway. In 1992 at Albertville, France the total had been just 11 for a 6th place finish. The last time that the Winter Olympics were held in Canada, at Calgary in 1988, the U.S. team won just 6 medals, tied for 8th place overall. They had won 8 medals at Sarajevo, Yugoslavia in 1984, tied for 5th.

In the Winter Olympics at Lake Placid, New York in 1980, the Americans won a total of 12 medals, finishing 3rd overall. This was the best the team had done in two decades until they came home once again at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. This was the true coming out party for the team. That year the team finished 2nd with 34 total medals, just one behind the Germans.

Four years ago, at Torino, Italy in 2006, the total slipped to 25, but that was still good enough for 2nd to the Germans 29 total. In these current Vancouver games the Americans have finally overcome the German squad, leading them by a 32-26 count with just a couple of days remaining.

The stars for the American men have included the new team all-time leading medalist, speedskater Apollo Anton Ono, as well as his gold medal-winning teammate Shani Davis, skiers Bode Miller, Johnny Spillane and Bill Demong, figure skating champ Evan Lysacek, Gen X ski-boarders Shaun White and Seth Wescott, and the hockey team led by goaltender Ryan Miller.

The talented women's team includes downhill skiers Lindsey Vonn and Julia Mancuso, Gen X skiers and snowboarders Shannon Bahrke, Kelly Clark and Hannah Teter, bobsleigh bronzers Erin Pac and Elana Meyers, and the women's hockey team which finished with the silver medal. Meryl Davis teamed with Charlie White to take the ice dancing silver.

There remain about a dozen and a half medals still up for grabs over the final three days of these games, and the American team has a chance to continue to add to it's leading totals, particularly in short-track speedskating and downhill skiing. In addition, the USA men's hockey team puts it's unbeaten record on the line in the semi-finals vs. Finland this afternoon. A win could set up a sensational gold medal rematch with Canada on Sunday.

All in all it has been a spectacularly successful Winter Olympics in Vancouver for the United States Olympic Committee and Team USA. The host Canadians have been frustrated by not only the medal count, but the embarrassment and tragedy of some poor snow and fog conditions, torch malfunctions, equipment failures, and a death due to an unsafe luge track. Instead it has been the Americans who for the first time have truly owned the podium.

Video: Meet The Press, part 3, Press Reaction Mostly Informative, Discuss Race in 2012 Against Obama

From Denny: This first video talks about the unemployment rate in America and how shocking it is compared to the Bush days is what they implied. First of all, the Bush crowd always lied about their numbers and "disallowed" the GAO from doing its job or publishing publicly their findings.

Bush and Cheney even tried to fire employees of the GAO and then later tried to dismantle the agency because they so hated anyone publishing the truth. Of course, what they never counted on were the CIA desk warriors constantly leaking facts to the press about the Bush and Cheney doings. The media chose to be Bush lapdogs and never ran with all the stories they were so conveniently fed.

So, to promote honest unemployment numbers of today as unusually high is dishonest. Last month over 265,000 Americans lost their jobs and the stat is closing in on 10%. During the last two years Bush bled jobs by the millions and yet his unemployment statistics were only moderate? Come one; who believes that fairy tale?

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At the end of this video is some of the discussion where Maddow pummelled Murphy on Palin as a White Supremacist and he weaved and dodged and later what got edited was his pissy attitude and pouting:

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This came after the show aired and is a web extra. They talked about Republican possibilities against Obama for 2012:

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This is the program video in its entirety as a netcast:

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One World, One Dream

There has been much wringing of hands and criticism across the blogosphere and in news print about the Beijing 2008 Olympics being a facade. So let me get right to the point here and state that in my opinion these Olympic Games, as is any Olympiad, were a huge success in all the important ways. Is China a repressive communist nation that subjugates more than enhances the lives of its people? Yes. Does the Chinese government commit human rights atrocities in order to remain in power? Absolutely. Did the Chinese Olympic organizers commit a few slights of hand in order to make Beijing and the Olympic venues and ceremonies look better for the TV cameras than they actually were in person? Sure. But it remains that the International Olympic Committee selected China for these games, knowing that these things were and would be facts. They made the selection just as they made the choices of Los Angeles in 1984, Moscow in 1980, Berlin in 1938, and many other places around the world that have been controversial locations for some nations and political systems. We would like every nation in the world to be democratic, to grant freedom to their people, to open their societies to interact fully with the world. But the fact is that is not reality. China has been a nation and a people for more than 6,000 years. The American experience of 232 years pales in comparison. And though much of the world would like to see reform in the Chinese political system at least to the point of a little more tolerance of varied viewpoints, the answer is not to attack them or isolate them. The answer is to engage the Chinese in any positive way possible, with the hope that exposure over time to the free world will inspire change from within China. These Olympics undoubtedly were a positive step in that regard. A generation of young Chinese have been strongly exposed to the outside world in these past few years, and especially these last two weeks. They will carry this cultural experience with them for decades, and it will affect the way they view the rest of the world. I am no Pollyanna, and do not expect the Chinese dragon to change its stripes overnight, or perhaps even in my lifetime. But neither do I intend to give up on the possibility of a profound change in the Chinese people, and ultimately in their government, no matter that the powers-that-be will return to repression now that the spotlight has lifted. The Olympic Charter itself states that its purpose is "to contribute to building a peaceful and better world by educating youth through sport practiced without discrimination of any kind and in the Olympic spirit, which requires mutual understanding with a spirit of friendship, solidarity and fair play." These Olympics showcased all these aspects, from the victorious joy of Jamaican sprinter Usaim Bolt, the new "World's Fastest Human", the professional pride of American basketballer Kobe Bryant, China's excellent women's gymnast Kexin He, the dominating brilliance of American swimmer Michael Phelps, and so many others. Despite the Russian-Georgian conflict at the opening of the Games, and the looming American political conventions and election battles, these Olympics gave us many reasons to continue to cheer the human spirit. And after all, that is the point of their existence. The 2008 Beijing Olympics theme was 'One World, One Dream", and it says here that despite numerous differences of politics, religion, and culture the dream is still alive. A dream that, for the most part, we can find a way as humanity to co-exist and compete on friendly terms. It is a bit idyllic, but it is a dream that must not be allowed to die.

Islamism Series: The Olympics

This is the continuation of my regular feature
'Islamism Series'. At the bottom of this entry, you can click on the label of that name to read the prior entries.

The 2008 Beijing Olympics began yesterday with the Opening Ceremony, and will continue on through August 24th. For the next two and a half weeks, the athletic dramas of this Olympiad will play out under it's theme "One World, One Dream". But as we have learned in previous installments of the 'Islamism Series', the radical Islamofascists have their own vision of 'One world, one dream' that runs counter to that on display this month in China. The radical Islamists want the world united as one Caliphate under the banner of Islam, run by the Caliph, with everyone either believing in or subjecting themselves to the rule of the Islamists. To this end, every major event held around the world becomes a tempting target for them to flex their muscles, to show that they can and will influence world events by inserting their violent vision into the proceedings if allowed. Particularly since 9/11, every major public event has properly seen a dramatic increase in the scope and cost of the security surrounding those events. From the Super Bowl to political conventions, and everything in between, security is stepped up, and convenience and personal liberties are sacrificed thanks to the terrorists of Islamofascism. Already there have been threats and plots against these Olympics. In an attack that the Washington Post described as being done only by the "ethnic Uighur minority", these terrorists killed 16 police officers and injured dozens of others this week by driving a dump truck into a group of officers who were out for a training jog, then tossing grenades into the police compound. This 'ethnic minority' is Islamic, by the way. The mass media has once again buried this fact from your knowledge under their banner of political correctness. The Uighur militant Islamic group known as the Turkistan Islamic Party released a video coinciding with the Olympics Opening Ceremony in which they showed a burning Olympic logo, an image of one of the Olympic venues exploding, and which included a warning to all Muslims to stay away from Olympic and Beijing-area venues. Among the warnings were calls for Muslims to avoid taking public transportation, and pleas for Muslim peoples to not allow their athletes to attend the games. According to a report by the Bloomberg news organization, China has deployed a 100,000-person strong anti-terror unit for the Olympics, and equipment that includes fighter jets, helicopters, naval vessels, and even anti-aircraft launchers at the main Olympic stadium. Back in January, Chinese officials uncovered a plot to attack the Olympics and confiscated "guns, homemade bombs, training materials and extremist religious ideological materials" during a raid that resulted in the death of two terrorists and arrest of a dozen and a half more. The Chinese government is Communist, and politically repressive, so the show that they are putting on this month with the Olympiad largely masks a host of human-rights problems that should make opponents of America's detainee policy at Guantanamo Bay cringe. But all that the Radical Islamists want is to replace one repressive regime with another, simply changing the ideology from Communism to Islamofascism. So while you are watching the basketball, soccer, track & field, swimming, diving, volleyball, baseball, gymnastics, boxing and other incredible displays of athleticism, and while your chest swells with pride over emerging American Olympic heroes and other human interest stories that emerge, there is another side. Behind the scenes, hundreds of thousands of Chinese and others are working long and hard in an attempt to secure these Olympics from terrorist attacks that have been and are being plotted. Let's wish them the best in that effort against the radical, terrorist Islamists.