Opinion

Liar’s Poker has no place in the Olympic Games

Projections that the International Olympic Committee might include Liar’s Poker on its 2016 agenda is a slap in the face to all that is good and decent in sports today.
Isn’t it enough that so many of our young people have turned to drugs to escape reality? Now the Olympic spin doctors expect us to watch the finest athletes in the world hang around smoky bars, perpetrating mistruths and desperately searching for the perfect, crisp dollar bill with all the right numbers in all the right lines.
We always thought the Olympics were for the greatest amateurs but apparently there is now room for personal profit.
The United States has boycotted other Olympics for less. We need to stand up and be counted but not on the basis of some pile of bills with or without George Washington on it. How can we even begin to think that an athlete from Nigeria might legitimately compete with someone from Brasil when they do not share a common currency?
The men and women from the six continents, who have trained diligently for the one chance to win a gold, do not deserve this moral descent, this crack in the door letting in the sinister forces of these games of chance. It is our fervent hope that the Olympic Committee comes to its senses before this ancient rivalry turns into Las Vegas, or worse.
I’ve got four sevens.

GIVE TAILINGS FUNDS TO THE NEEDY

The Super Funds that continue to trickle into the region should be handed over to the needy. Within this federally designated depressed area there are over 2500 families that currently exist beneath someone’s poverty line.
The funds, estimated to be around $2.5 billion (over ten years) should be diverted and divided between an estimated 5000 households, giving each one $500,000.
They people can then cleanup the tailings on their own. Is it possible to find another use for the byproducts of our glorious mining days? Could the tailings be jarred and sold as souvenirs? Is moving radioactive material really such a smart idea?
Now we realize that our opinion is forcing its way in the back door. The Super Fund bumbling has been a going concern for over 20 years but it is a mistake to continue these expensive cleanups!
If every tourist would simply take one pound of tailings in their suitcase when they leave these valleys we’d have it all gone by 2030. Isn’t that what the feds are doing? Where do they store it all? Then what? Maybe it could be collected and dumped into the ocean like the Syrian chemical weapons of late. Another great idea. Once it is out of here it’s someone else’s problem.
Using innovative formulas developed at the bar we estimate that the area would be free of tailings and other contaminates by about 2080 which is years ahead of the most accepted approximation. Then we can get back to the business at hand—selling condos to people from Oklahoma and Texas.
—-Western Colorado’s Humor Newspaper
San Juan Horseshoe September 25, 2014

“I have a reputation to withhold.”
– Melvin Toole, after skipping out on a motel bill in Lake City, Colorado