Watch the huge Chinese women swimmers who suddenly out of nowhere are setting world records and placing in positions that are nowhere near their historic performances (200 fly tonight -- 1 and 2 both under world record; 100 free #1 but DQ'd for false start).

None looked in the least fatigued at the end of their races... look at their faces compared to those just behind them.

None of them appeared in international meets, where they would have been drug tested, during the two year run-up to the Olympics.

Why?

Because they would have been on the doping test grid.

Instead they train with whatever supplements while off the grid, then are weaned far enough ahead of the Olympics that the regime doesn't show up during the Games themselves.

Remember the East European women swimmers in the '70s?

Remember the fake firework footprints on opening night?

The 9 year-old lip syncher?

Add it all up....

TPM;

...Sargeant is the owner of an oil-trading company that has a lucrative Pentagon contract to supply fuel to the U.S. military in Iraq by way of Jordan -- and he's also reportedly getting sued by the brother-in-law of the King of Jordan over that contract...

...A few months ago, NBC News laid out the facts about the lawsuit in this piece. According to NBC, Sargeant's company, called International Oil Trading Company, has a Pentagon contract worth hundreds of millions of dollars per year to supply fuel, mostly aviation fuel, to the military, which it ships to Jordan and then across the border into Iraq. The company's latest contract is worth $913 million over two years, and the Pentagon confirmed to NBC that it wasn't the lowest bid.

...the upshot is that one of the more prolific bundlers for McCain appears to have bagged a huge contract to deliver fuel to the U.S. military in Iraq, even though he wasn't the lowest bidder for that contract, allegedly by relying partly on a connection in Jordan to deliver it.

NY Times;

The Jordanian business partner of a prominent Florida businessman, who has raised more than $500,000 for Senator John McCain, appears to be at the center of a cluster of questionable donations to his presidential campaign.

Campaign finance records show Mr. McCain collected a little more than $50,000 in March from members of a single extended family, the Abdullahs, in California and several of their friends.

Amid a sea of contributions to the McCain campaign, the Abdullahs stand out. The checks come not from the usual exclusive coastal addresses, but from relatively hardscrabble inland towns like Downey and Colton. The donations are also startling because of their size: several donors initially wrote checks of $9,200, exceeding the $2,300 limit for an individual gift...

...Through Mr. Abu Naba'a's connections, Mr. Sargeant has raised more than $100,000 in contributions from several dozen Arab Americans in California, including the Abdullahs,

Faisal Abdullah, a Palestinian immigrant who works as a director of operations of a window treatment company, identified himself in an interview as the driver behind the McCain donations from his relatives and friends. He sent them to Mr. Abu Naba'a, whom Mr. Abdullah described as an acquaintance.

Mr. Abdullah is an unlikely McCain fund-raiser, admitting he had soured on the Republican Party as a result of President Bush...

H...e told his friends and relatives that the contributions were tax-deductible, something he later seemed surprised to learn from a reporter was not true. Many in his circle appear to have little affection for Mr. McCain but said they gave mostly as a favor to Mr. Abdullah.

Abdullah Makhlouf, the owner of a discount stereo store who is one of Mr. Abdullah's closest friends, and his wife contributed $9,200.

"He's like a worse copy than Bush," Mr. Makhlouf said of Mr. McCain.

When a reporter initially contacted Mr. Makhlouf, he denied giving to the McCain campaign.

After eventually admitting to the donation, Mr. Makhlouf added, "I'm still not going to vote for him."

 Billion-dollar defense Iraq oil contractor bundling McCain money from...???? L'Air du McCain Scandal ;

Harry Sargeant III, a former naval officer and the owner of an oil-trading company that recently inked defense contracts potentially worth more than $1 billion, is the archetype of a modern presidential money man. The law forbids high-level supporters from writing huge checks, but with help from friends in the Middle East and the former chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit -- who now serves as a consultant to his company -- Sargeant has raised more than $100,000 for three presidential candidates from a collection of ordinary people, several of whom professed little interest in the outcome of the election....

....Some of the most prolific givers in Sargeant's network live in modest homes in Southern California's Inland Empire. Most had never given a political contribution before being contacted by Sargeant or his associates. Most said they have never voiced much interest in politics. And in several instances, they had never registered to vote. And yet, records show, some families have ponied up as much as $18,400 for various candidates between December and March.

Both Sargeant and the donors were vague when asked to explain how Sargeant persuaded them to give away so much money.

"I have a lot of Arab business partners. I do a lot of business in the Middle East. I've got a lot of friends," Sargeant said in a telephone interview yesterday. "I ask my friends to support candidates that I think are worthy of supporting. They usually come through for me."

Sargeant's business relationships, and the work they perform together, occur away from the public eye. His firm, International Oil Trading Co. (IOTC), holds several lucrative contracts with the Defense Department to carry fuel to the U.S. military in Iraq.

This is particularly piquant;

...Abdullah Abdullah, a supervisor at several Taco Bell restaurants in the Riverside area, and his wife have donated $9,200 to McCain.

Reached at work, Abdullah said he knows little about the campaign. "I have no idea. I'll be honest with you," he said. "I'm involved in the restaurant business. ..."

....Faisal Abdullah, 49, said he helped organize all of the contributions from members of his family. When he was asked who solicited the contributions from him, he said: "Why does it matter who? I'm telling you we made the contribution. We funneled it through the channel in Florida because that's the contact we had. I was responsible for collecting it."

Hmm... non-voting Abdullahs in America max-ing out their donations to McCain when solicited by the former head of the CIA's bin Laden unit on behalf of a shady company with $1 bill in Defense contracts to provide petrol to American forces in Iraq....

Sally Jenkins has a strong column at the WaPo on all this, we'll see how long they let her stay in Beijing;

The slow strangling death of the Olympics at the hands of the Chinese officials continues. Their Olympic motto of "One World, One Dream" is beginning to take on an ominous tone, what with the gagging of athletes, and the censorship of the press, and the basic all-around stamping out of Olympic spirit. The only vision of the world that's permitted is their own, judging by the fact that gold medalist Joey Cheek was denied admittance to these Summer Games for the following offense: He spoke.Darfur. That's the word that so alarmed Chinese officials that they revoked Cheek's visa, a day before he was to fly to Beijing. We'll see how quickly the Chinese surveillance blocks the word from the Internet, or whether the cops show up and invite me to the departure lounge at the airport for writing it. The Olympics are supposed to be apolitical, Chinese officials continually bray; they will not allow any signs, or protests. And now it seems they've issued another edict: no humanitarians.

...Cheek is just one athlete from Team Darfur who has been denied a visa. Synchronized swimmer Kendra Zanotto, a 2004 bronze medalist, planned to attend the Beijing Games as a freelance journalist, but was denied a visa. Most disturbing, a number of athletes from other countries who belong to Team Darfur have quietly called to drop out of the group in the run-up to these Games, because they were pressured by their Olympic committees to disassociate from the group.

Would you have the courage to speak out on these issues if you were involved in the Olympics?

How about if you were a superstar gabillionaire NBA player?

Apropos of not much, Sally's pop Dan Jenkins (Semi-tough; Dead Solid Perfect) has another hilarious novel out that is about a reverse triple flip with a double twist in political incorrectness compared to the above... The Franchise Babe... say no more...

Those Jenkins are a tough impressive crew....

Now that the Republican slime machine that controls the country is in full sewage mode, and the mainstream media are dutifully slinging it along , the Obama campaign is clearly the national underdog.

That's a good thing as it allows them to play on the visceral emotional favoritism America has for the challenger.

It will be interesting to see if corporate media steps up to challenge McCain's personal cowardice in hiding behind his operatives' sludge ... a complete 180 from everything he's ever stood for as a 'maverick' 'war hero'...

Will he renounce the Bush Torturer-in-Chief policies?

...It is the story of how a small group of determined men and women thwarted international and American law; fought off powerful challenges from colleagues within the Justice Department, the State Department, the National Security Council and the C.I.A.; ignored or circumvented Supreme Court rulings and Congressional resolutions; and blithely dismissed a growing clamor of outrage and contempt from much of the world -- all in the service of preserving their ability to use extreme forms of torture in the search for usable intelligence....

...No one knows how many people were rounded up and spirited away into these secret locations, although the number is very likely in the thousands. No one knows either how many detainees have died once in custody. Nor is there any solid information about the many detainees who have been the victims of what the United States government calls "extraordinary rendition," the handing over of detainees to other governments, mostly in the Middle East, whose secret police have no qualms about torturing their prisoners and face no legal consequences for doing so.

This vast regime of pain and terror, inflicted in the name of a war on terror, rests in large part on the untested belief of a few high-ranking leaders in Washington that torture is an effective tool for eliciting valuable information. But there is, Mayer persuasively argues, little available evidence that this assumption is true, and a great deal of evidence from numerous sources (including the United States military and the F.B.I.) that torture is, in fact, one of the least effective methods of gathering information and a likely source of false confessions.

Probably about when he stands up to Daddy Rove's racist campaign tactics.

Reminds me of Weekend at Bernie's ... the Rovers standing  up the dead McCain doll with the age-old race-bating fear props....

Will the Cowardly Lion ever show any courage?

And a coward until he disavows his campaign's race-baiting. 

...Mr. Obama has to endure these grotesque insults with a smile and heroic levels of equanimity. The reason he has to do this -- the sole reason -- is that he is black.

So there he was this week speaking evenly, and with a touch of humor, to a nearly all-white audience in Missouri. His goal was to reassure his listeners, to let them know he's not some kind of unpatriotic ogre.

Mr. Obama told them: "What they're going to try to do is make you scared of me. You know, he's not patriotic enough. He's got a funny name. You know, he doesn't look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills, you know. He's risky."

The audience seemed to appreciate his comments. Mr. Obama was well-received.

But John McCain didn't appreciate them. RACE CARD! RACE CARD! The McCain camp started bellowing, and it hasn't stopped since. With great glee bursting through their feigned outrage, the campaign's operatives and the candidate himself accused Senator Obama of introducing race into the campaign -- playing the race card, as they put it, from the very bottom of the deck.

Whatever you think about Barack Obama, he does not want the race issue to be front and center in this campaign. Every day that the campaign is about race is a good day for John McCain. So I guess we understand Mr. McCain's motivation.

As is every Republican who doesn't publically disavow this hate-campaign.

McCain has promised honesty and integrity.  His Rove-driven campaign is spewing hate and lies.

He's a coward to hide behind his handlers.

That's completely contrary to his self-image;

"I had promised to tell the truth no matter what," McCain wrote in the book. "When I broke it, I had not just been dishonest, I had been a coward, and I had severed my own interests from my country's. That was what made the lie unforgivable."

Will the honest warrior override the cowardly pol?

I've had a hard time explaining to my 15 year-old son why McCain's Rove staff is running a personal hate campaign against Senator Obama (the 'trash-talk express'), rather than running the policy-focused, positive campaign McCain promised.

My  son made the insightful association between these right-wing politics of hate and the shootings in Tennessee (add Tancredo to the short list of the guilty, please). (Fox continues to refuse to cover the murders)

I have tried to explain that the right wing in this country has always run on fear and hatred, and that their current efforts to attack Senator Obama's most positive attributes (his worldwide popularity and his race) are the same Swift Boat tactics they used to smear war hero John Kerry vs. draft-dodger Bush.

He also asked why the corporate media parrots all these attacks rather than, for example, explicating Senator Obama's remarkable speech before 200,000 in Berlin. (or today's inconvenient fact -- that the Joint Chiefs -- and McCain -- have come out in agreement with Senator Obama's proposals for Iraq and Afghanistan).

That was a little harder to explain... Though it's simple for even the mainstream media to figure out the story -- McCain himself is completely unhinged from his campaign which is now entirely Rove/McCarthy operative-controlled.

I've seen these gutter politics from Republicans so often now that I"ve simply decided to have zero tolerance for Republicans (though i was one, once). 

They've ruined America as much as this great country can be hurt the last eight years, and are hell-bent on continuing the disaster. 

So, I'm very sorry, my many GOP friends -- it's your fault and I'm holding you accountable. 

You  can start to address this by paying back my family's share of this year's $600 billion federal deficit you created.