USOC asks Bush to stop using 'Olympics’ (in Kerry bashing web game)

[Rose Siding]

DENVER - President Bush’s campaign failed to respond Friday to a request from the U.S. Olympic Committee to shut down a John Kerry parody on its Web site that uses the word “Olympics.”

The whimsical cartoon game, “John Kerry’s Flip Flop Olympics,” asks players to guess Kerry’s stances on issues. A “judging panel” consisting of Howard Dean and Sens. Hillary Clinton and Ted Kennedy gives players a score based on their guesses.

USOC spokesman Darryl Seibel said the use of the word “Olympics” is barred under a federal law, the Ted Stevens Amateur Sports Act, that makes the USOC the only entity in the United States authorized to use Olympic marks and terms.

“This has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with the responsibilities vested with the USOC by the Amateur Sports Act,” Seibel said.

Seibel said the USOC contacted lawyers from the Bush campaign last week, and again Thursday, to request the game be removed from the Web site.

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6208785/

[Roland99]

1. That's twice the Bush campaign has told the USCO to "Cheney"

[Book Lover]

2. So the * team breaks the law

and the lawyers just ask them to stop? Talk about toothless!

[w4rma]

3. Actual quote: "I’m the commander—see, I don’t need to explain …"

You’re Invited to the War Party (“Bush at War” book review)
By Georgie Anne Geyer

Ever since his Watergate revelations, which helped evict a president and change the United States for all time, for better or worse Bob Woodward has stood as the major force in a new genre of journalism. He talks, wheedles, and, using government officials’ personal ambitions and dreams of political eternity, implicitly threatens his way into the often closed corridors of power—there, he is a master at getting a certain number of figures who try their best to remain aloof and unknown to tell their stories. The proposition, understood if not explicitly spoken, is that this book, as his former ones, will tell the story—you miss out on leave on this journalistic port, fellow, you miss the whole historic ship!
…
First of all, Bush at War is really about the decision-making process in the upper levels of the Bush administration—the White House, the State Department, and the Pentagon—from the exact morning of Sept. 11th. It begins with a profoundly worried George Tenet, head of the CIA and, from all of the space he gets in the book, obviously one of Woodward’s best and favored sources. That very morning, Tenet is wondering about when Osama bin Laden, whom he has been desperately tracking, will strike the U.S. Then “it” happens—and from then onward, the book delineates day-by-day, and sometimes hour-by-hour and minute-by-minute—what supposedly went on in meeting after meeting. From all accounts that I know of, Woodward’s interpretations are exactly right; it is the quotes that are so bothersome.
…
Another time, he says to Woodward, “I’m the commander—see, I don’t need to explain—I do not need to explain why I say things. That’s the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don’t feel like I owe anybody an explanation.”

At still another point after the Afghan war has started, the president says to his staff, “Look, our strategy is to create chaos, to create a vacuum.” And Woodward ends the book with another quote from the president, in which he again reflects the obsessive chaos theory of the neoconservatives surrounding him like sentinels and for whom Iraq has become the sina quo non of political existence: “We will export death and violence to the four corners of the earth in defense of our great nation.” Whew.
http://www.amconmag.com/01_13_03/geyer7.html

[bigtime]

4. why, them dang libruls and thayer laws!

the Olympics are very protective of their trademark, and rightfully so. junior's campaign can't win this. I hope they drag their feet on this one and it becomes yet another embarrassment.

[NYC Liberal]

5. Bush: "What's this 'law' thing I keep hearin' about?"