Sports At Politics

Now, that the 2018 Winter Olympics, which was held last month, and 2018 Winter Paralympics, which was held earlier this month, are over, I'll wrap up the final part of this three-part review of Pyeongchang 2018 with some closing thoughts. For the second time ever, the Americans led the Paralympic medal count by both most total medals and most gold medals. In the Pyeongchang Paralympics, American athletes won 13 gold medals, 15 silver medals, and eight bronze medals, for a total of 35 total medals. Unusually for the Americans, a lot of the American Paralympic medals that were earned in Pyeongchang were earned in the sports of cross-country skiing and biathlon. A major highlight of the Paralympics for the Americans was when the American sled hockey team won its third consecutive Paralympic gold medal in an overtime thriller of a game against the Canadian team. While nearly all of NBC's television coverage of the Pyeongchang Paralympics aired on cable channels NBCSN and the Ol...

I proudly endorse Liuba Grechen Shirley for the Democratic nomination in the 2nd Congressional District of New York! Liuba is a progressive community organizer from Amityville, New York who is running for the U.S. House seat currently held by Republican Peter King, who has largely been a rubber stamp for far-right President Donald Trump. Liuba supports many progressive ideas, including a $15/hour minimum wage, paid family leave, Medicare for All, the Iran nuclear deal, cutting wasteful defense spending, and protecting the environment. Liuba is supported by a number of Democratic and progressive individuals and organizations, including former Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley, tennis legend Martina Navratilova, and Long Island-based progressive organizations like Suffolk Progressives and Bay Shore Women's Huddle.

Disgraced former NFL player O.J. Simpson, who was convicted of armed robbery and kidnapping by a Nevada court in 2008, publicly claimed that NFL player Colin Kaepernick "made a bad choice" by taking a knee during the national anthem to protest racial injustice in America while a player for the San Francisco 49ers: O.J. Simpson, whose murder trial tugged at racial tensions across America, says he believes football player Colin Kaepernick "made a bad choice" when he decided to keep kneeling during the national anthem to protest police brutality. "I think Colin made a mistake," Simpson told the Buffalo News this week in his first substantial interview in a decade. "I really appreciate what he was trying to say. I thought he made a bad choice in attacking the flag." That is a giant load of hypocrisy from O.J., and he knows it. Also, Colin Kaepernick didn't make a bad choice by taking a knee during the national anthem as a form of political p...

In this second part of my three-part series reviewing the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang County, South Korea, I'm going to review how NBC and its co-owned cable and satellite television channels, such as NBCSN, CNBC, and USA Network, covered the Pyeongchang Games. While I'm normally very critical of NBC's Olympic coverage, including their coverage of the Pyeongchang Games, NBC didn't do as terrible of a job as I expected them to do, and there were even some aspects of their coverage that I liked. Criticism of NBC's coverage (and, in one instance, of how a NBC affiliate handled NBC's Olympic coverage) will appear in bold text, praise of NBC's coverage will appear in underlined text, and aspects of NBC's coverage that I have mixed thoughts about will appear in italic text. As a general rule, NBC's coverage, particularly during the primetime block on NBC itself during the Games, tends to be overproduced and overhyped , and NBC seemed more interes...

The free market can be greatly influenced by public opinion and large-scale political movements, such as the pro-gun control movement led by the courageous survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Florida. In many cases, the free market can be more easily influenced by political movements than politicians can be influenced by them. Case in point: the decision by Dick's Sporting Goods, a chain of sporting goods, hunting, and fishing stores, to stop selling assault weapons and high-capacity magazines at its stores and toughen the requirements to purchase firearms from all of its stores, including raising the minimum age to purchase a firearm from Dick's Sporting Goods to 21 years of age. Dick's Sporting Goods is under the same ownership as the Field and Stream store chain, so their new policies regarding gun sales apply to Field and Stream stores as well as Dick's Sporting Goods stores. Additionally, Walmart, which sells firearms at many of thei...

The XXIII Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang County, South Korea were, in my opinion, one of the best Winter Olympics ever held. The South Koreans did a fantastic job of hosting the games, the Games were a major diplomatic and geopolitical victory for South Korean President Moon Jae-in, and there were plenty of surprising results and close finishes during the Games. Given that my own foreign policy views tend to be very isolationist by American standards, a lot of people reading this blog post would find it surprising that I have a strong interest in the Olympics. The Olympics are pretty much the only major exception to my isolationist foreign policy views because I view the Olympics as a sporting event instead of a diplomatic event like the World Economic Forum in Switzerland or events of that nature. Also, I take this opportunity to apologize to the Shibutani siblings and the rest of the U.S. Olympic figure skating team. I claimed in a blog post before the Games that the U.S. wasn...