Professional Cycling VS. Professional Wrestling

I've been a long-time fan of professional cycling. Never miss the grand tours like the Tour de France or the Spring classics. But by following the sport of professional cycling one can learn many things: The spirit of competition, the grandeur of exotic European places and pharmacology terms like: Clenbuterol, Erythropoietin (EPO), Human Growth Hormone and blood doping. A regular fan of cycling these days can rattle off a litany of performance enhancing drugs and techniques that would surely impress their old high school chemistry teachers. It comes with the territory.

And so now it seems that for me the sport of cycling has reached the level of the old World Wide Wrestling Federation (WWF). When broken down and examined, don't our arguments in sport now really just consist of "Is it real or is it fake?".

Before the World Wide Wrestling Federation was finally forced to go before Congress and admit they were "just entertainment" and became the WWE, there was DECADES of speculation. We always suspected but they never admitted it and if a reporter or talk show host asked the question, well they invariably got body slammed and sent to hospital. THAT wasn't fake. That's not to say that the "wrestlers" weren't great athletes or that they didn't really get hurt but did they really beat the heck out of each other like it looked or was the drama of the championship match result real or pre-determined. Was it all just a show?

And so here we are. Is cycling a real sport with purity of participation where the playing field is level and the outcome is up for grabs or is it all a fake where the participants are "endowed" with advantages that make the results less of a crap-shoot and more of a sure thing? Surely they are superb athletes but were they always so talented or did their talent come from another source? With our cycling "heros" denying it's fake for years and then, when up against the wall, come clean and say that everything we had previously believed was true is now a lie? Is there any difference?

And the sponsors, knowing it was really only entertainment all along, will not go away once the cat is out of the bag since people still tune into the NFL, MLB and the NBL et al knowing they're most likely all "enhanced" to begin with. People will watch ANYTHING!

So what we have left is the World Wide Cycling Entertainment (WWCE) with the riders pretending to be clean and the governing bodies pretending to catch them. Each month we're treated to another "drama" of an athlete in jeopardy because they are a suspected "cheat" or in WWF terms, the "bad-guy" sullying the integrity of the hallowed sport. Oh, how we cheer when the bad guy is vanquished and we have a new "white hat" to root for.  It's all part of the entertainment.

And what are you going to do about it, watch World Cup Soccer?  Don’t make me laugh.

Liberal Huntsman Quits Presidential Race, Endorses Romney.

John Huntsman, President Obama's former ambassador to China and the most liberal candidate in the GOP presidential race has announced he is ending his campaign. Huntsman was the odd man out in the GOP contest being the only one in the race who stood to the left of Mitt Romney’s political ideology. But on his way out the door, John Huntsman was gracious enough to throw his support behind Mitt Romney for president.

This dubious honor only highlights a big problem with the GOP this time around. They field the same liberal candidate every election. Sure they have a vote in each state primary but given the fact that the national GOP and the center-right media wing have been in the bucket for Mitt from the beginning AND that he’s been out campaigning for the last four years, it's not a total surprise he's in the lead for the GOP nomination. But the glaring fact of this campaign season is: Mitt Romney is Obama-Lite.

Unless the country is so totally sick of Barack Obama and will just pull the lever for anybody else, I don’t think Mitt Romney is going to beat him in this year’s election. They are too similar. Why vote for a liberal Republican when you can just vote for a liberal Democrat? There’s not much of a difference. Nobody gets elected by being the same candidate as the incumbent. And here is where Mitt Romney fails as a candidate.  

How do you think Mitt is going to handle it when Obama steps up to the microphone and says that not only was Romney-Care, the state of Massachusetts’ stab at Socialized Medicine, the inspiration for Obama’s National Healthcare Plan, it was also the model Congress replicated and that he, Obama, signed into law? How is Mitt Romney going to respond? Can he deny that Romney-Care and Obama-Care are similar plans right down to the mandatory participation rule? 

Beyond Mitt Romney’s blind political ambitions that lead him to essentially abandon governorship of Massachusetts to the liberal Democrat, Deval Patrick, this is his albatross: Romney-Care. A plan that started with cost overruns and has been in the red ever since. It is a plan with no oversight and no chance of success in the long run. Nobody is watching who is getting Commonwealth care cards and everyone who asks can get state subsidized healthcare. That includes people who are eligible for healthcare where they work and illegal aliens. All taxpayer funded. Thanks Mitt, thanks a lot.

Mitt Romney is nobody’s candidate but his own. He is not the Tea Parties choice, he is not the Libertarian choice and he’s barely the people’s choice since everybody, the media included, has been looking for somebody else, anybody else, to replace him these last several months. He is a candidate too similar to the president to be a valid choice.  So why is he there? That's right, he's got the money. 

Once he secures the GOP nomination, Mitt’s new campaign slogan can be: “Hold your nose and vote for Mitt!”

No, not very inspiring I’m afraid.  

One Nation, Two Destinies

Come November of this year, the nation will have the chance to determine it’s foreseeable future.

Who among us truly believes the United States will be better off with Barack Obama as president for a second term? Take a moment to reach beyond his Marxist ideology and the people who think they have something to gain from a second term of an Obama regime, who actually truly thinks things will a.) be any different or b.) get better?

That’s right, nobody does. Not even the people who will vote for Obama for a second term actually think things will improve. They will only vote for Mr. Obama because they are hoping they will somehow be protected and who believe they can escape the losses others in this nation will feel and are feeling now. A vote for Barack Obama this November is a wish, a hope and a dream that they somehow can stay on the big government gravy-train because that is what a vote for Obama would be. A vote for Obama means you are going all in on the vast bet that the country will hold together economically until you can get a nest-egg of some sort and somehow protect your family as a political elite in a long-term government bureaucracy ah al North Korea or Post Soviet Russia. 

The music has stopped for us as a nation and we are all out of chairs. We are broke with a capital “L” and are witnessing something along the lines of what our grandparents saw during what will henceforth be called “The First Great Depression”. Will this one be as epic? Will it be of biblical proportions? Perhaps, but the real given is that it is going to happen and we should be prepared for it if we are able. 

The variable in this equation is who will be able to make the changes to get us out of this inevitable mess we will find ourselves in. One direction would be to free the markets, undo the excessive tax burden, draw our resources back home and to free business of their regulatory bonds to allow people to keep what they earn and build a career of achievement and self reliance so that businesses and Americans themselves can prosper. The other is to continue to have an overbearing and wasteful state bureaucracy, double down on “stimulus” spending, continue to have government take care of people while funding the “safety net” and to continue to take money off the top of business to feed the ever growing welfare state. One is a system of investment, risk and possible return the other is a system of tried and true failure.

Today we have a nation that half is dependent on what government provides: Food stamps, Medicaid, Medicare, WIC, Section 8 housing subsidies, School lunch programs, Free cell phones, free computers, free tuition, SSI, Government Subsidized Drugs and now a mandatory National Health Plan. It has been reported that almost half of this nation does not pay any tax toward these big government programs. That leaves the overhead to the rest of the working class. Clearly this cannot go on one way or another. We have a choice this November: Up or Down.

This is the choice that we as a nation have now been given. There is the known and the unknown. We don’t know if a new president and new members of congress will do the things it will take to put our nation on the path to recovery but we do know that the present president and his followers in congress have no intention of straying from the present course of control, mandate and spend money we as a nation have yet to earn and our children have yet to even contemplate.

What we are witnessing once again is a failure of the Socialist system, a system that has failed every time that it has been applied and history is littered with it’s adherents: The Soviet Union, Chavez' Venezuela, Spain, Greece and the state of California. No nation can carry an ever increasing population of takers. The slow creep of expanding government has attached itself to every resource in this nation and we are now groaning under its weight. In this situation we cannot stand and our economy, if not our nation, will pay the price.

So in the not so distant future will we get a chance to witness history at a cross roads. Every citizen in this nation living come November will have a part in determining where the United States goes from here at least in our lifetimes and the next generation.

What an opportunity this is.