Olympic Basketball: Dwyane Wade’s e-Diary – What It’s Like to Be an Olympian

  Dwyane Wade will periodically take a behind the scenes look at the U.S. men’s Olympic team from his point-of-view.  Here is his first entry.

Monday, June 30:

Welcome to inside the mind of a 2008 Olympian, Dwyane Wade. I’m speaking of myself in third person, but I want to give you guys the inside track about what’s coming up for the team and how we spent our first weekend together in Vegas.

Now as a U.S. Olympian, you have a lot of obligations to be on time – and I was late for the first team meeting. I was 25 minutes late because I overslept. I had to run a little extra for that and I will make sure I’m on time from now on.

We have a team photo shoot Monday in New York and we did some kind of movie shoot in Vegas where we had to take it back to the early 70s with the poses we did. LeBron (James) was joking the whole time. We couldn’t even stand in a straight line because LeBron was joking, Carmelo (Anthony) was joking and even Coach K (Mike Krzyzewski) cracked a couple of jokes. Overall it was lighthearted day, though our first two-hour practice was a good one Saturday.

My knee is feeling good. I went through my first day with the team and did everything everyone else did at practice. I worked hard to be here today. I have been in the gym five days a week since the first week of May – training, rehabbing conditioning, getting my explosion back for you guys and for me. I want to continue to be the player that some of you guys like and some of you fell in love with.

I’m feeling good and ready to go.

US Tennis Fading: Fewer American Kids Willing To Give Up Social Life For The Sport

  It is arguably the bleakest moment in U.S. tennis history since the sport’s modern era began in the late 1960s.

As Wimbledon enters its second week, no men from the U.S. remain in the singles draw, and just three women — Serena Williams, Venus Williams and Bethanie Mattek — are left.

Heading into the tournament, just three American men and three women were among the top 40 in the respective rankings.

The outlook for U.S. tennis in the years ahead looks even bleaker because there is a dearth of young up-and-coming players. The youngest of the six top Americans, Andy Roddick, is 25, middle-aged in a tennis life. Another, Lindsay Davenport, is a 32-year-old who hasn’t won a major championship since 2000.    Venus and Serena Williams remain dominant, but they too are likely in the twilight of their careers and are often battling injury.

Obama: I Will Not Stand Idly By While Others Criticize My Patriotism

  Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama on Monday, in a major speech on patriotism, criticized MoveOn.org for referring to Gen. David Petraeus as General Betray Us last year.

The Illinois senator said politics too often seems “trapped in old, threadbare arguments” that he called “caricatures of left and right.”

This, Obama added, was “most evident during our recent debates about the war in Iraq, when those who opposed administration policy were tagged by some as unpatriotic, and a general providing his best counsel on how to move forward in Iraq was accused of betrayal.”

Obama did not vote last year when the Senate approved a measure condemning the controversial Petraeus ad.

Obama argued that “given the enormous challenges that lie before us, we can no longer afford these sorts of divisions.”

MoveOn.org, a powerful left-of-center interest group, endorsed Obama in the Democratic presidential race.

“None of us expect that arguments about patriotism will, or should, vanish entirely; after all, when we argue about patriotism, we are arguing about who we are as a country, and more importantly, who we should be,” Obama stated in his speech from Independence, Mo. “But surely we can agree that no party or political philosophy has a monopoly on patriotism.”

Obama also said that he would “never question the patriotism of others in this campaign.” The senator made clear, however, that he would “not stand idly by when I hear others question mine.”

 

Article by Klaus Marre/ Obama criticizes MoveOn.org in patriotism speech

 

http://thehill.com/campaign-2008/obama-criticizes-moveon.org-in-patriotism-speech-2008-06-30.html

Bill Clinton Is Having A Pity Party And Wants Obama To Kiss His Ass

  I don’t take any of it personally, and I don’t take most of it seriously. That’s what happens in politics.”  “If you can’t stand the heat, don’t run for president because it’s a really hot kitchen in the White House, I’ll tell you that much,” said Hillary Clinton at a rally in Eugene, Oregon, on Saturday, April 5, 2008

Hill, please talk with Bill — he’s being a spoilsport, a killjoy and a party pooper.  Remind him of your April 5 comments.

~~

Bill Clinton is so bitter about Barack Obama’s victory over his wife Hillary that he has told friends the Democratic nominee will have to beg for his wholehearted support.

Mr. Obama is expected to speak to Mr. Clinton for the first time since he won the nomination in the next few days, but campaign insiders say that the former president’s future campaign role is a “sticking point” in peace talks with Mrs. Clinton’s aides.

The Telegraph has learned that the former president’s rage is still so great that even loyal allies are shocked by his patronizing attitude to Mr. Obama, and believe that he risks damaging his own reputation by his intransigence.

Clinton Supporter – ‘Intemperate’ And Near Hysterics in Unity

  Unity was spared the banality of unanimity.

Carmella Lewis, with her Hillary T-shirt and Hillary placard, came all the way from Denver to make sure there would be plenty of ambiguity, duality and ferocity in Unity.

Just as Hillary was testing out the unfamiliar familiarity “Barack and me” Friday and talking about “his grace and his grit,” Carmella began loudly booing and waving her sign.

“We want Hillary!” screamed the 57-year-old retired ad saleswoman and Clinton delegate.

“It’s over, lady!” yelled some Obama supporters a few yards away.

Standing between the Sharks and the Jets, David Axelrod took pity on an older friend of Carmella’s who was suffering from aridity in the Unity humidity. The chief Obama strategist fetched a glass of water and brought it to the woman, who was wearing five Hillary buttons.

This amenity did not stop the disunity. Carmella and her friends continued to cry, “Nobama!” “We love you, Hillary!” and “We need Hillary!” as Barack Obama sat onstage on a stool behind his former rival, his finger studiously at his lips.

Carmella was not impressed with all the kissing, laughing and whispering that Hill and Bam were diligently doing for the cameras, so that the moment could produce, as Obama press aide Robert Gibbs put it on “Larry King Live,” “a great picture.”

When it was Obama’s turn to speak, Carmella announced loudly, “I wish I had ear plugs.” Then, as Obama tried to ingratiate himself with the Hillary partisans in the crowd by saying that because of the New York senator, his daughters “can take for granted that women can do anything that the boys can do and do it better and do it in heels,” Carmella put her fingers in her ears.

As Obama tried to curry favor with Hillary, looking over at her sensible, sturdy shoes and marveling, “I still don’t know how she does it in heels,” Carmella tore up a tissue and stuffed it in her ears.

When Obama pandered with a line about how he wouldn’t “perpetuate a system in which women are paid less for the same work as men,” she put her hands over her tissue-stuffed ears.

“Maybe she’d like what she heard if she listened,” sighed Axelrod.

When Obama talked about moving beyond “all the petty bickering,” as Hillary robo-nodded at his side and CNN’s Candy Crowley applied pre-broadcast lipstick above her, Carmella glared at people applauding.

Afterward, Carmella got her idol to autograph her sign, telling the smiling Hillary, “You’re going to be the next president.”

Obama Supporters Change Their Names To Hussein

  Emily Nordling has never met a Muslim, at least not to her knowledge. But this spring, Ms. Nordling, a 19-year-old student from Fort Thomas, Ky., gave herself a new middle name on Facebook.com, mimicking her boyfriend and shocking her father.

“Emily Hussein Nordling,” her entry now reads.

With her decision, she joined a growing band of supporters of Senator Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, who are expressing solidarity with him by informally adopting his middle name.

The result is a group of unlikely-sounding Husseins: Jewish and Catholic, Hispanic and Asian and Italian-American, from Jaime Hussein Alvarez of Washington, D.C., to Kelly Hussein Crowley of Norman, Okla., to Sarah Beth Hussein Frumkin of Chicago.

Jeff Strabone of Brooklyn now signs credit card receipts with his newly assumed middle name, while Dan O’Maley of Washington, D.C., jiggered his e-mail account so his name would appear as “D. Hussein O’Maley.” Alex Enderle made the switch online along with several other Obama volunteers from Columbus, Ohio, and now friends greet him that way in person, too.

Mr. Obama is a Christian, not a Muslim. Hussein is a family name inherited from a Kenyan father he barely knew, who was born a Muslim and died an atheist. But the name has become a political liability. Some critics on cable television talk shows dwell on it, while others, on blogs or in e-mail messages, use it to falsely assert that Mr. Obama is a Muslim or, more fantastically, a terrorist.

“I am sick of Republicans pronouncing Barack Obama’s name like it was some sort of cuss word,” Mr. Strabone wrote in a manifesto titled “We Are All Hussein” that he posted on his own blog and on dailykos.com.

So like the residents of Billings, Mont., who reacted to a series of anti-Semitic incidents in 1993 with a town-wide display of menorahs in their front windows, these supporters are brandishing the name themselves.

“My name is such a vanilla, white-girl American name,” said Ashley Holmes of Indianapolis, who changed her name online “to show how little meaning ‘Hussein’ really has.”

How The Internet Rumor That Claims Obama Is A Muslim Started

It is incredible that rumors that are complete fabrications and full of false information which can potentially ruin a person are read by some and then conveniently used as factual source material and is then republished without ANY research that substantiates that the  original information is true or correct therefore continuing and passing on the propaganda from person to person. Incredible.

The e-mail landed in Danielle Allen’s queue one winter morning as she was studying in her office at the Institute for Advanced Study, the renowned haven for some of the nation’s most brilliant minds. The missive began: “THIS DEFINITELY WARRANTS LOOKING INTO.”

Laid out before Allen, a razor-sharp, 36-year-old political theorist, was what purported to be a biographical sketch of Barack Obama that has become one of the most effective — and baseless — Internet attacks of the 2008 presidential season. The anonymous chain e-mail makes the false claim that Obama is concealing a radical Islamic background. By the time it reached Allen on Jan. 11, 2008, it had spread with viral efficiency for more than a year.

During that time, polls show the number of voters who mistakenly believe Obama is a Muslim rose — from 8 percent to 13 percent between November 2007 and March 2008. And some cited this religious mis-affiliation when explaining their primary votes against him.

As the general-election campaign against Sen. John McCain has gotten underway, Obama’s aides have made the smears a top target. They recently launched FightTheSmears.com to “aggressively push back with the truth,” said Obama campaign spokesman Tommy Vietor, and go viral with it. The Web site urges supporters to upload their address books and send e-mails to all of their friends. ”

But long before this, Allen had been obsessing about the origins of her e-mail at the institute, which is most famous for having been the research home of Albert Einstein. Allen studies the way voters in a democracy gather their information and act on what they learn. She was familiar, of course, with the false rumors of a secret love child that helped sink McCain’s White House bid in 2000, and the Swift boat attacks that did the same to Democrat John Kerry in 2004. But the Obama e-mail was on another plane: The use of the Internet made it possible to launch anonymous attacks that could reach millions of voters in weeks or even days.

As an Obama supporter — she had met the senator while she worked as a dean at the University of Chicago — it made her angry. And curious.

“I started thinking, ‘How does one stop it?’ ”