Paul Krugman continues to demonstrate that brilliance in one field doesn’t necessarily translate into sound insights into others. He’s upset that some Republicans took pleasure in President Obama’s embarrassment in not landing the Olympics for his adopted Chicago and their cynicism in positioning themselves as the defenders of Medicare in order to fight his health care reform proposals. His explanation for both: “the G.O.P. opposes anything that might be good for Mr. Obama.”

But that’s rather silly. The Olympics matter was one of schadenfreude. I know plenty of people who voted for and continue to support Obama who nonetheless question his hubris and the cult of personality that surrounds him. And the Medicare issue is one of tactics, choosing a politically expedient means to an end.

Moreover, Krugman continues this to Friedmanesque extremes.

How did one of our great political parties become so ruthless, so willing to embrace scorched-earth tactics even if so doing undermines the ability of any future administration to govern?The key point is that ever since the Reagan years, the Republican Party has been dominated by radicals — ideologues and/or apparatchiks who, at a fundamental level, do not accept anyone else’s right to govern. Anyone surprised by the venomous, over-the-top opposition to Mr. Obama must have forgotten the Clinton years. Remember when Rush Limbaugh suggested that Hillary Clinton was a party to murder? When Newt Gingrich shut down the federal government in an attempt to bully Bill Clinton into accepting those Medicare cuts? And let’s not even talk about the impeachment saga.

Reagan won landslide victories and was still opposed by Democrats at every turn, often in vitriolic terms. Who can forget the late Teddy Kennedy’s vicious harangue against “Robert Bork’s America”? And goodness knows, George W. Bush wasn’t exactly treated with kid gloves. Our politics have taken a nasty turn this generation — hardly unprecedented in our history but magnified by a changed media climate — and now it’s Obama’s turn to feel the heat.

The only difference now is that the G.O.P. is in a weaker position, having lost control not just of Congress but, to a large extent, of the terms of debate. The public no longer buys conservative ideology the way it used to; the old attacks on Big Government and paeans to the magic of the marketplace have lost their resonance.

Only because the Democrats have long since embraced the same rhetoric, forcing the Republicans to either adopt extreme positions or be “Me Too.” They’ve done some of both.

Yet conservatives retain their belief that they, and only they, should govern.The result has been a cynical, ends-justify-the-means approach. Hastening the day when the rightful governing party returns to power is all that matters, so the G.O.P. will seize any club at hand with which to beat the current administration.It’s an ugly picture. But it’s the truth. And it’s a truth anyone trying to find solutions to America’s real problems has to understand.

Again, this has been equally true of Democrats when they cycle out of power. It requires blindness or sheer partisan hackery to think what Obama’s facing now is any more ruthless or impolite than what Bush did during his eight years.

CNN is reporting that Chicago has, along with Tokyo, been eliminated from consideration for the 2016 Olympics.   Apparently, Oprah and Obama weren’t enough.

Chicago was eliminated in the first ballot of voting for the 2016 Olympics on Friday, a stunning defeat for the city that was expected to be one of the two finalists. Not even the presence of President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama — nor a long list of celebrities — was enough to help the United States’ third-largest city.

Chicago had seemed to pick up momentum in the last few days, with many International Olympic Committee members seemingly charmed by Mrs. Obama. But when IOC president Jacques Rogge announced the results of the first vote, Chicago’s name was announced.

That’s a breaking news update to this story from earlier:

Looking out at the International Olympic Committee members, President Barack Obama grinned.

“This could be a meeting in Chicago,” he said, “because we look like the world.”

Hoping to persuade the IOC to award Chicago the 2016 Olympics, Obama and his wife led a heartfelt and, at times, very personal plea Friday. Instead of stodgy technical details, discussions of finances or computer-generated graphics, Chicago took members inside the city to show why it should win the games.

Obama spoke of finally finding a home in Chicago after a nomadic childhood. Michelle Obama recounted how, growing up on the city’s South Side, her disabled father taught her how to throw a ball and a “mean right hook.”

Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley invoked the memory of Jesse Owens. “Like so many young people, I was inspired” by the Olympics, the first lady said. “I found myself dreaming that maybe, just maybe, if I worked hard enough, I, too, could achieve something great. But I never dreamed the Olympic flame might light up lives in my neighborhood.  But today I can.”

Well, not anymore.  It’ll be interesting to see the postmortem on this.  The U.S. has hosted a summer Olympics rather recently, Atlanta 1996, and it was viewed as a disaster by many overseas.  Maybe, despite Obama’s pleas, it just wasn’t our turn yet.  Or, maybe, having the president throw his weight behind it so enthusiastically backfired?

UPDATE:  Blame it on Rio.

Finally, South America gets an Olympics. The 2016 Games are going to Rio de Janeiro. In a vote of high drama, the bustling Brazilian carnival city of beaches, mountains and samba beat surprise finalist Madrid, which got a big helping hand from a very influential friend.

Chicago was knocked out in the first round — in one of the most shocking defeats ever in International Olympic Committee voting. Even Tokyo, which had trailed throughout the race, did better — eliminated after Chicago in the second round.

Rio spoke to IOC members’ consciences: the city argued that it was simply unfair that South America has never hosted the games, while Europe, Asia and North America have done so repeatedly. “It is a time to address this imbalance,” Brazil’s charismatic president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, told the IOC’s members before they voted. “It is time to light the Olympic cauldron in a tropical country.”

Clearly, having presidents address the committee isn’t a disqualifier.

John Cole comments on Michelle Obama’s pledge to “take no prisoners” as she helps her husband fight to get the Olympics for Chicago:

You know who else hosted an Olympics?

Hitler.

Just saying…

QED.

“Just because Usain Bolt sets a world record every time he runs doesn’t make the other runners slow.” - Mark Cuban, explaining why income disparity isn’t a problem.

While it’s a great line, it’s actually a poor illustration.  Races and records are zero sum games.  Bolt’s winning the Olympics and setting a new record deprives other runners of gold medals and records.

Conversely, Cuban’s earning a few billion dollars has essentially no impact on future enterpreneurs getting rich.

When I saw the headline “White House lobbies for Olympics in Chicago” at Memeorandum, I was prepared to write about the abuse of power and the bringing of machine style politics to the Oval Office.  One has to read a bit into Ken Vogel’s Politico piece to think otherwise.

The Obama White House is playing an unprecedented role in the bid to bring the 2016 Summer Olympics to Chicago, with top adviser Valerie Jarrett spearheading an effort that draws on the international symbolism of his presidency.

Any president would have an interest in helping an American city win an Olympic bid. But none has been as closely associated with an Olympic proposal as Obama, and the emerging effort by the White House is unusually pointed in its attempt to wrap the campaign around the president and his appealing image abroad — a strategy veteran Olympics watchers say is paying dividends and could result in an enormous hometown farewell party if Obama wins a second term.

“Without Obama in the White House, I would say there would be no chance whatsoever for the U.S. winning,” said Canadian IOC member Dick Pound. “The United States is the only country in this race that has had an absolutely extraordinary transformational experience with the election of Obama, which weighs very heavily in its favor.”

While the initiative is not formally directed by the West Wing, it relies heavily on Obama associates and confidants to raise private capital and seeks to parlay the international goodwill surrounding his election into a victory for Chicago.

Obama himself has recorded two separate videos supporting the bid since his election as president, one for presentation to the General Assembly of the European Olympic Committee in Istanbul less than three weeks after defeating Republican John McCain, and a second that was shown to IOC members during a tour of Chicago last month.

If he were coming into this de novo and using the power of his office to bring to Olympics to his “home” town, this would be unseemly at the very least.   But it appears that the competition is down to Chicago and several cities not in the United States.   Which means, he’s simply trying to leverage his personal popularity around the world to get the Olympics for an American city in preference to a foreign city.   Presumably, leaders of the other countries seeking the Games are doing likewise.

So, pretty much a non-story story, no?

Taking a page from the Communist Chinese Olympics, the Obama inauguration featured truthy music.  Daniel Wakin blows the doors off this travesty in a NYT exclusive:

It was not precisely lip-synching, but pretty close.

The somber, elegiac tones before President Obama’s oath of office at the inauguration on Tuesday came from the instruments of Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman and two colleagues. But what the millions on the Mall and watching on television heard was in fact a recording, made two days earlier by the quartet and matched tone for tone by the musicians playing along.

The players and the inauguration organizing committee said the arrangement was necessary because of the extreme cold and wind during Tuesday’s ceremony. The conditions raised the possibility of broken piano strings, cracked instruments and wacky intonation minutes before the president’s swearing in (which had problems of its own).

“Truly, weather just made it impossible,” Carole Florman, a spokeswoman for the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies, said on Thursday. “No one’s trying to fool anybody. This isn’t a matter of Milli Vanilli,” Ms. Florman added, referring to the pop band that was stripped of a 1989 Grammy because the duo did not sing on their album and lip-synched in concerts.

Ms. Florman said that the use of a recording was not disclosed beforehand but that the NBC producers handling the television pool were told of its likelihood the day before.

The network said it sent a note to pool members saying that the use of recordings in the musical numbers was possible. Inaugural musical performances are routinely recorded ahead of time for just such an eventuality, Ms. Florman said. The Marine Band and choruses, which performed throughout the ceremony, did not use a recording, she said.

“It’s not something we would announce, but it’s not something we would try to hide,” Ms. Florman said. “Frankly, it would never have occurred to me to announce it. The fact they were forced to perform to tape because of the weather did not seem relevant, nor would we want to draw attention away from what we believed the news is, that we were having a peaceful transition of power from one administration to the next.”

While rather amusing, it’s hard to get too excited about this.  Yes, it’s lame to have world famous musicians pretend to play their instruments when the sound is being piped in.  But what were they supposed to do, really?   I was downstairs working until just before the swearing in but my wife mentioned that the TV people reported that Yo Yo Ma had to use a substitute instrument, because his normal cello was too delicate for the weather.

I will note, however, that the Marine band sucked it up and played despite the cold.

While the liberal media might be cheering for Obama — McCain joked that “it’s going to be a long, long night at MSNBC if I manage to pull this thing off” — their bosses are hoping it doesn’t happen so quickly as to spoil the show.

Paul Friedman, CBS News senior vice president, said he has started to think “about what we could do to augment our Senate and House coverage on election night if the presidential story is over.”

“As to the presidential race, it’s pretty simple: We will try to call a winner in each state as soon as possible after the polls close in each state,” Friedman e-mailed. “If that adds up to 270 for someone before the polls close in the West, there’s not a lot we can do. If there are not enough electoral votes for one man to win it before the Western states close, but we’re pretty sure how they’re going to fall, we will be ready with language which states the obvious without being too obvious. We can’t be in the business of pretending to be stupid.”

Given the amount of information on the Web — including pundits and prognosticators with large followings — it’s simply impossible for the networks to do what NBC does with the Olympics, creating a sense of drama by pretending that they don’t know what they know about outcomes.

While the race won’t mathematically be over until fairly late in the evening East Coast time, if McCain doesn’t win both Florida and Virginia — the results of which could be known quite early — then the rest is just waiting for the inevitable.   The best case scenario for the networks, then, is close races in both those states.  Or, better yet, McCain victories in both states, forcing us to wait for results in swing states further west.

As I suggested over the weekend now that the Games are over and the correspondents happily back from their sojourns in China covering the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, the Western media are singing a somewhat different tune than they were while the games were in progress. L’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audace.

Yesterday a story in the Times of London reported on how water projects for the Olympics overruled the needs of the Chinese people:

THOUSANDS of Chinese farmers face ruin because their water has been cut off to guarantee supplies to the Olympics in Beijing, and officials are now trying to cover up a grotesque scandal of blunders, lies and repression.

In the capital, foreign dignitaries have admired millions of flowers in bloom and lush, well-watered greens around its famous sights. But just 90 minutes south by train, peasants are hacking at the dry earth as their crops wilt, their money runs out and the work of generations gives way to despair, debt and, in a few cases, suicide.

In between these two Chinas stands a cordon of roadblocks and hundreds of security agents deployed to make sure that the one never sees the other.

The water scandal is a parable of what can happen when a demanding global event is awarded to a poor agricultural nation run by a dictatorship; and the irony is that none of it has turned out to be necessary.

The combination of authoritarian iron fist, corruption, and incompetence portrayed in the story is somewhat different from the false front the Chinese leadership put on the Games but all too reminiscent of the actual story behind the story.

Today Der Spiegel Online takes note of the contrasts in these Games:

On the inside, in the so-called Accredited Zones, these Olympic Games were perfect. The images of these perfect games circled the globe, accompanied by postcard pictures of pagodas, terracotta warriors and graceful Chinese girls. Against the story told by this picture book, criticism of the games seemed like little more than sour grapes.

But on the outside, in the city of Beijing and throughout China, the lives of ordinary people went on. A number of changes in those lives have taken place, to be sure, but they are still lives led under the watchful eyes of the government. In this China, those disagreeable to the government are simply removed, staging a protest remains a criminal offense, public celebrations are frowned upon and all roads make wide detours around restricted zones guarded by soldiers — zones that include Tiananmen Square in Beijing.

Gentle chiding, indeed. In fact Spiegel’s harshest criticism is for the IOC:

Where is the Olympic movement — what is the status of sports — in these times of ongoing suspicions of doping, suspicions that were only heightened with every win by Jamaican sprinter and each additional gold medal won by American swimmer Michael Phelps? How much more commercialized can sports become? And what happens to the athletes when the world becomes all but obsessed with keeping track of the medal count?

“There are two grand delusions in sports,” says Thomas Bach, one of the four IOC vice presidents. He is a powerful man and a potential candidate to succeed Jacques Rogge as the organization’s president. He wore a tracksuit to our meeting in the Olympic Family Lounge inside the Olympic Village. “The one delusion,” said Bach, “is that sport has nothing to do with money. And the other one is that it has nothing to do with politics. Both lead to unnecessary and sometimes disastrous debates.”

Bach is the sort of person who, when asked difficult questions, begins by saying: Let’s not kid ourselves. When asked about the IOC’s prediction that China would change for the better after the games, and that it would “open up” politically, he said: “Let’s not kid ourselves. We, as the IOC, cannot change an entire society.”

Rather different than the tune they were singing when they awarded China the Games. Frankly, that strikes me as somewhat patronizing.

In a generally glowing op-ed on the Games, former French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin notes that same nexus between politics and sports—that the Games have reinforced China’s national cohesion:

La mobilisation de la population chinoise, avec les succès du patriotisme sportif, a naturellement renforcé la cohésion nationale du pays, ce qui était un objectif évident des dirigeants chinois, notamment au lendemain du terrible séisme du Sichuan. La cohésion, troisième succès.

Clearly, it’s impossible to remove the nationalism from the world’s premier international athletic event. But should the IOC be in the business of bolstering autocratic regimes as allowing China to host the Games clearly has done?

I’ll make the futile pitch I make every four years: it’s long past time to give the Olympics a permanent home, preferably in Greece near the place where the original Games were held more than 2,000 years ago. It will never happen, of course. All those IOC officials being wined and dined by countries eager to host the Games.

I am a fairly recent convert to the sport of swimming. I’ve gotten into it as my son has gotten more involved in the sport. Tonight Michael Phelps has become one of the greatest, if not the greatest, Olympians of all time by  becoming the only Olympian to win 13 gold medals over the course of his swimming career (6 in Athens in 2004 and so far 7 in 2008).

Tonight Phelps tied Mark Spitz’s record of 7 gold medals in a single Olympics and he still has the 4×100 medley relay where the Americans are so dominant that about the only way they won’t win gold is if they are disqualified during the event. Even more amazing, he’s has won 6 of his 7 gold medals in this Olympics in world record times.  Granted, the world records he has been breaking have been his own, but still an amazing feat.

UPDATE (James Joyner):  Phelps has been truly remarkable.  He’s certainly in the “Greatest Olympian of All Time” conversation.  He’s absolutely dominated his sport over two Olympiads and swimming in so many events in rapid succession against, in many cases, athletes specializing in one event and thus not nearly as fatigued, makes his achievement that much more remarkable.

On the other hand, the medal count isn’t dispositive.  Swimming is the only Olympic sport where it’s possible to win so many medals.

The great Al Oerter won gold in discus in four consecutive Olympiads — a span of 16 years — and set world records each time.  But there’s only one gold per Olympiad in that sport.

Carl Lewis was dominant in sprints and the long jump in three Olympiads and still didn’t achieve Phelps’ medal count.

And then there’s Eric Heiden, who won five golds in speed skating in the 1980 Lake Placid winter games.  Not only was that every single medal in his sport, but he dominated both the sprints and the distance races, winning at 500, 1000, 1500, 5000, and 10000 meters.  That’s the equivalent of winning the 100 meter dash and the 10k in sprinting, which is simply unthinkable.

None of this is to take anything away from Phelps.  It’s just worth noting that others are at least in the conversation for Best of All Time.

UPDATE (James Joyner): Phelps got his 8th and final gold medal of the Games last night, swimming the second leg of the 4×100 Medley Relay, and his 7th world record of this Olympics, breaking Spitz’ immortal record.  It should be noted, in fairness to Spitz, that the 50 meter freestyle was not an Olympic event in 1972.  Spitz would almost certainly have won an 8th medal and set an 8th world record had he been presented with the opportunity.

John Tierney and Megan McArdle argue that we should let athletes use whatever performance enhancing drugs they want since some will cheat regardless of the rules and because our definition of “fair” competition evolves over time.

The response to that, though, is obvious: many of these drugs are dangerous and legitimating them all but mandates them.  John, an early commenter on Megan’s post, puts it nicely:

The problem with doping is that it filters down to the lowest levels of competition. If you told me that I could take a drug that would allow me to win a gold medal but it would take a couple of years off of my life, I might do it and even if I didn’t I wouldn’t blame someone who did. But once you allow doping, the choice is made for everyone. It means that you have to dope to compete at the Olympics. But of course you are not born an Olympic athlete. You start at lower levels. If you allow doping for swimming in the Olympics, that means that all of the college athletes and post college athletes who compete for the spots on the team will also be doping. If there are some athletes in college who dope, that means all the athletes in college will dope if they expect to compete with the ones who do and so forth until finally one day you have people doping to play high school sports.

Tierney’s other point is harder to dismiss:  Because the cheaters are always ahead of the testing, all competition takes place under a cloud of suspicion.

The journal Nature, in an editorial in the current issue, complains that “antidoping authorities have fostered a sporting culture of suspicion, secrecy and fear” by relying on unscientifically calibrated tests, like the unreliable test for synthetic testosterone that cost Floyd Landis his 2006 Tour de France victory. Even if the authorities manage to correct their tests, they can’t possibly keep up with the accelerating advances in biology. Some athletes are already considering new drugs like Aicar and GW1516, which made news recently when researchers at the Salk Institute used them to quickly turn couch-potato mice into treadmill champions with new, strong muscles.

Of course, abandoning testing will lead to more, not less, suspicion that people are doping.  Perhaps, though, people wouldn’t care if the rules were changed so that it would no longer be “cheating” to take these drugs.  But, again, that essentially forces 14-year-olds with Olympic dreams to become lab rats.

Image: Cartoon Stock

Cernig is outraged at the sex-obsessed American press.

I am now officially disgusted with America’s insular and navel-gazing punditry. En masse and on a bipartisan basis the media, commentators and bloggers have decided that the Edwards Affair story is more important than events in South Ossetia. What happened, folks, did your minds cloud over at contemplation of events beyond these hallowed shores?

Maybe someone can enlighten me as to why the story of yet another politician who ran as a Loyal Family Man but was unable twice to gain the highest of offfices being revealed as a lying hypocrite unable to keep it in his pants is remotely as newsworthy as a full-on war between one of the world’s great powers and a nation which is a vocal ally of the USA. Because I admit I’m utterly perplexed by the allocation of priorities here.

I almost wrote a variant of that post this morning, whilst looking for updates on the Georgia story and noting that the Edwards story dominated the front page of the Washington Post’s website.  I went to the NYT website, though, and saw that the Georgia story was well covered there and, lacking a hook, let it go.

While Cernig and I are generally on the opposite sides of issues, I respect his integrity so decided to give the story another looksee.  It turns out that, while there’s no doubt that the Edwards story is getting major play, the Russia-Georgia-South Ossetia story is getting far, far more.  Indeed, even the Olympics is getting more coverage than the Edwards story.

The screencap at the top right of this post is from Memeorandum.  As of this writing (6:37 Eastern Saturday evening) even the blogosphere has made Georgia the top focus [a marked contrast from 7:40 am, when, as Cernig's link shows, the top two-thirds of the page was dominated by Edwards coverage].  I say “even” because it’s a relatively hard story to opine upon, in that almost every political blogger already knew who John Edwards is and understood the concepts of lying and adultery.  Conversely, most are catching up on the Russia-Georgia-South Ossetia story.

I went to Newseum, which archives the front pages of virtually every paper in the world, to get a broader sample of the mainstream papers.  I was pleasantly surprised.

The major national papers all gave more prominent treatment to the Russia-Georgia clash than Edwards.

The New York Times:

The Washington Post:

The Wall Street Journal:

Even the conservative Washington Times, which presumably has no love for Edwards, did so:

My hometown paper, the Anniston (Alabama) Star did, too:

Indeed, the only paper I checked that played the Edwards story first — and rightfully so — is the Charlotte Observer, the major paper in Edwards’ home state.

I tend not to watch much television news but I presume that the 24/7 coverage skewed towards the Edwards scandal.  But that’s, no pun intended, a sexier story.

I must admit, I’m surprised by this outcome.  The publishers of papers around the country chose to highlight a story that was very unlikely to sell papers over one that would.  Let’s face it, the average person is much more interested in celebrity sex scandals — and this one has plenty of good angles to it — and not than in foreign policy.  Much less conflicts over obscure secessionist areas.

Let’s face it, most Americans were only vaguely aware until yesterday that there’s a second place called Georgia.  I have my PhD with a specialization in national security policy and would only be somewhat more informed about this conflict than the man on the street if I hadn’t been surrounded for the past several months with smart people who study European politics for a living.

A bizarre and shocking crime has turned the opening day of the Olympics into tragedy.

A knife-wielding Chinese man attacked two relatives of a coach for the U.S. Olympic men’s volleyball team at a tourist site in Beijing, killing one and injuring the other on the first day of the Olympics on Saturday, team officials and state media said. The man then committed suicide by throwing himself from the second story of the site, the 13th century Drum Tower just five miles from the main Olympics site.

The brutal attack shortly after midday was all the more shocking because of the rarity of violent crime against foreigners in tightly controlled China, which has ramped up security measures even more for the Olympics.

The stabbing came only hours after what by many accounts was the most spectacular opening ceremony in Olympic history and it has already dampened some of the enthusiasm.

One would hope.

UPDATE:  The team won their first match only hours after learning of this tragedy.

The team took the court Saturday after learning of the stabbing death of Todd Bachman, father of former Olympian Elisabeth Bachman McCutcheon. He was attacked by a knife-wielding man at a popular tourist site in Beijing. Her mother was seriously injured by the attacker, who jumped to his death from a balcony of the Drum Tower, an ancient landmark the Americans were visiting.

“It’s hard to put it in words,” a tearful U.S. player Logan Tom said after the match. “That’s not something that’s supposed to happen.”

[...]

Bachman McCutcheon is the wife of U.S. men’s indoor coach Hugh McCutcheon.

Megan McArdle offers a defense of Americans from the charge that Americans are only interested in Olympic sports in which Americans are strong medal contenders, noting that we’re a large country with established team sports loyalty and so forth.  It’s all true.

More fundamentally, though, I reject the premise that Americans’ America-centric view of sports is problematic.  As Sir Paul McCartney, a Brit, put it some years back, discussing another subject altogether, “What’s wrong with that, I’d like to know?”

I’m a pretty big fan of American football.  I try not to miss an NFL game involving the Dallas Cowboys or a college game involving the Alabama Crimson Tide.  But given the opportunity, I’ll watch any other NFL or major college game that’s on.  Even the Arena League will get a few minutes of my time if I stumble on a game.  Ditto Canadian football. Or Brett Favre throwing warm-up to high school kids.

I’m a casual fan of baseball, meaning I’ll watch a game in which I have a rooting interest.  I used to watch pretty much every Atlanta Braves game that aired, which was to say pretty much every Atlanta Braves game played, until moving out of their coverage area and, especially, getting married.  But, even when I was rabidly watching the Braves, I never watched a non-Braves game unless it was the World Series.

The same is true of basketball, except that I’ve never really had a team.  I tend to follow particular athletes, from Julius Irving to Larry Bird to Michael Jordan.  I caught quite a bit of Jordan’s career, especially.  I’ll watch college ball, too, once the tournament season starts, but don’t really mind missing a game.  If I’m in a pool or a team I’ve got some reason to care about is alive in the tourney, I’ll catch those games, too.

Were it not for the Olympics, I would quickly forget that archery, badminton, BMX racing, canoeing, cricket, croquet, diving, equestrian, fencing, handball, judo, modern pentathlon, rowing, sailing, shooting, synchronized swimming, table tennis, triathlon, water polo, weighlifting, and (real) wrestling existed as sports.  To say that I’m even a casual fan of any of those events, on their own merits, would be an overstatement of tremendous magnitude.  So why, exactly, should I suddenly get interested in it every four years lacking a rooting interest?

The same, incidentally, is true of non-Olympic periodic sports, like the World Cup.  If Team USA is alive, I’ll watch out of the corner of my eye.  If they advance to the late rounds, my interest will pique.  Once the red, white, and blue is done, though, so am I.

Demonstrating the public relations prowess for which they’re known, Chinese authorities detained the White House press corps for nearly three hours upon its plane landing in Beijing.

The flight crew of the Northwest Airlines 747 had been expecting to park at a VIP terminal, but after landing was instead directed by the control tower to a normal international gate.

White House officials would say only there were “logistical problems” getting clearance to unload the aircraft. The flight crew was told the Chinese were insisting that all luggage be inspected.

Typically, the White House press charter receives the “custom of the port,” meaning reporters, photographers and camera crews are able to get off the plane right after landing, board buses and head to their hotels and work areas while U.S. State Department officials process immigration and customs details.

For whatever reason, I was until now unfamiliar with this custom. Then again, one presumes that people with passes to follow the president around have been rather thoroughly screened.

Am I surprised by this incident? Not at all.

UPDATE: Retired diplomat John Burgess provides some interesting background on this practice in the comments.

Photo: White House Correspondents Association

This story is a few days old now, but Noah Shachtman’s post is the first I’ve seen it:

Chinese elite anti-terror police officers are wheeling into action ahead of next month’s Beijing Olympics on two-wheeled scooters.  Members of the country’s armed police unit practised on the Segway models that have been re-named ‘Anti-Terror Assault Vehicles’ in the eastern province of Shandong.

Officials have bought 100 Segways and painted some in military camouflage to patrol airports and sporting venues during the Games.

In one drill, police posing as terrorists held ten badminton audience members hostage, ’shooting dead’ four ‘hijackers’, capturing two and defusing a mock car bomb.

A picture is, they say, worth a thousand words.  Perhaps more in this case:

Noah quotes someone named RYP,  “Ya gotta love a country that turns a Segway into a tool of oppressing the masses.”  That’s a great line although, in this case at least, it appears that they’re actually providing necessary security services.   Even police states have a legitimate requirement for police, after all.