So a British tabloid buys an exclusive photo of the greatest Olympian of all time smoking a bong and the world goes freaking nuts.

The News of the World tabloid ran a story today showing this photo of Phelps, 23, allegedly taken on November 6, 2008, weeks after the Beijing games, at a house party near the University of South Carolina campus in Columbia.

News of the World

Michael Phelps puffs a bong: So what?

The tabloid proclaimed:

“THIS is the astonishing picture which could destroy the career of the greatest competitor in Olympic history.

“In our exclusive photo Michael Phelps, who won a record EIGHT gold medals for swimming at the Beijing games last summer, draws from a bong.

“The glass pipes are generally used to smoke cannabis.”

Well, duh!

The over sensationalized headline?

What A Dope

Considering the fact that our current president admitted smoking pot and snorting cocaine in his youth in a book, that former Vice President Al Gore and Bill Clinton both admitted smoking marijuana, although Clinton claimed never to have inhaled, and considering that George W. Bush and his wife Laura were stoners and Bush himself was a coke-head, even the normally staid Associated Press asks if Phelps should be given a break.

Does embattled Michael Phelps deserve a break?

Read the rest of this entry »

Nowhere are changes needed more in the Department of Justice than in Alabama, where former Governor Don Siegelman still awaits word from the Eleventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta and a Congressional investigation in Washington, D.C., on the fate of his political prosecution.

The New York Times carried a story Sunday about seismic shifts going on in the Justice Department to reverse course from the Bush years, when the department was turned into a political hit wing of the White House under Bush’s political adviser Karl Rove.

The Justice Department, probably more than any other agency (in Washington), is bracing for a broad doctrinal shift in policies from those of the Bush administration, department lawyers and Obama administration officials say.

Eric H. Holder Jr., whom the Senate is expected to confirm on Monday as the nation’s 82nd attorney general, plans to take the oath of office that evening to demonstrate a quick start, which will include overseeing the creation of a new detention policy for terrorism suspects.

The civil rights division, which had been reshaped in a conservative direction under President George W. Bush, is ripe for sharp change, as well, according to the Times, and expectations are that the division would be restored to its historic role of largely enforcing prohibitions against racial and ethnic discrimination.

Under the Bush administration, the division significantly diminished its involvement in those areas and shifted resources to fighting instances of religious discrimination.

Ridiculous. One of the cases under review will provide a much needed opportunity to have a court assess the Bush administration’s domestic wiretapping program, an issue of much concern to this news organization for the past three and a half years.

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