Olympics soon to be upon us, so let's celebrate the athletes and their achievements

Oh and why in hell did they take the torch over the border and into the USA?

Paid for, thank you very much, by the taxpayers of Vancouver. More than any other project in recent Olympic history, the $1 billion residential complex represents the risks that urban governments face when trying to host one of the world's biggest parties. The city planned to invest about $47 million in the project back in 2006. However, cost overruns and the recession forced Vancouver to step in and bail out the private developers who were charged with financing the project. The city avoided the humiliation of welcoming the world with a half-built Olympic Village, but at a great price: in early 2009, new Vancouver mayor Gregor Robertson declared that taxpayers were "on the hook" for the $1 billion project. "What ended up happening was that the city became a bank for private-sector development," says Mark Cutler, director of Olympic Village Development for the Vancouver Organizing Committee, the body that is operating the complex during the Games.So even on the eve of the opening ceremonies, a moment when most host cities are glowing with pride, many residents are rankled. "People are ferociously upset about the Village," says Shaw. The spectacle has created a cruel irony: as the Olympic athletes enjoy the good life - free food, spacious rooms - in a taxpayer-financed housing complex, just a few blocks away sits Vancouver's Downtown Eastside neighborhood, site of some of the most acute poverty in North America. Homeless people and drug addicts hole up in back alleys; one church alone shelters 300 people on any given night. The neighborhood also hosts the first supervised heroin-injection location in North America. "For the city to let that occur while building the Village - that's the height of irresponsibility," says Shaw. Vancouver has set aside 250 of the 1,100 Village units for low-income residents, though some people fear that the city will be forced to put even those on the market to refill its coffers.

Boycott the Olympics and the TV Stations that broadcast.

The 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow were boycotted in protest of the Soviet Union's invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. Then-U.S. president Jimmy Carter announced the boycott in February 1980, and Canada and dozens of other countries soon followed suit. In his state of the union address that year, Carter made the case against the Soviet war:

"The vast majority of nations on Earth have condemned this latest Soviet attempt to extend its colonial domination of others and have demanded the immediate withdrawal of Soviet troops. The Muslim world is especially and justifiably outraged by this aggression against an Islamic people. No action of a world power has ever been so quickly and so overwhelmingly condemned. But verbal condemnation is not enough. The Soviet Union must pay a concrete price for their aggression."

Thirty years later, it is the United States, Canada, and the other NATO countries that are occupying Afghanistan. Instead of a boycott, the Vancouver 2010 Olympics are being used to promote militarism in general and Canada's role in the occupation of Afghanistan in particular. Who will make these invading countries "pay a concrete price for their aggression"?

I see now - if you support the Olympics you are a racist. Good thinking there.