Free Republic

Before he headed to Moscow in January 2012 as Barack Obama’s new ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul was itching to get out of government. He had dreams of moving back to Palo Alto. The weather’s nice, his family missed the place. But Obama had come to rely on McFaul, a longtime Russia scholar and the National Security Council’s point man on the country. So he offered him a posting he couldn’t decline. McFaul’s academic specialty is revolution—a detail that Vladimir Putin, hounded by a bubbling uprising, immediately seized on. State television vilified McFaul as the man Washington had sent to...

I watched the young American win the Ladies Ski Halfpipe last night. I saw her celebrate with hugs from friends/competitors. I didn't see the Gold being awarded to her.

Rematch of the epic gold medal game from Vancouver. Winner will face Sweden in the gold medal game. Let's hope the USA can get its revenge.

Change.org, a website that hosts public petitions, crashed Friday morning after a flood of users signed a petition to investigate a controversial Olympic figure skating result. Russia's Adelina Sotnikova won the gold medal in an upset over South Korea's Yuna Kim. After the event, a Change.org petition called "Open Investigation into Judging Decisions of Women's Figure Skating and Demand Rejudgement at the Sochi Olympics" was started by a user named "Justice Seeker." It went viral in a way the website had never seen before. "The petition gained 700,000-plus signatures in just six hours and is sending traffic to our site...

Jimmy Fallon proved Tuesday he wasn't a one-night wonder. The new "Tonight Show" host — oops, star — drew 7.4 million viewers for his second night, more than the combined total for his rivals, David Letterman on CBS and Jimmy Kimmel on ABC. Fallon still had, and will have all this week, the benefit of a lead-in from NBC's popular Olympics coverage.

Just read this and weep for our future. David Wise is at the top of his sport. He’s always smiling among his friends and competitors, however, he’s not like the rest of the field. He is mature. Not to say the rest of the freestyle skiers of halfpipe are not mature, but Wise is mature far beyond his years. At only twenty-three years old, he has a wife, Alexander, who was waiting patiently in the crowd, and together they have a two-year-old daughter waiting for them to return to their home in Reno, Nevada.At such a young age, Wise has...

The Russian punk-protest group Pussy Riot had pledged for months to seek to disrupt the Sochi Olympics, and has begun carrying through on that promise. But the group's latest attempt at a protest was dismantled almost before it began. One day after members of the loosely-connected group were questioned in connection with some suspected thefts at a Sochi hotel, Pussy Riot gathered at a restaurant in downtown Sochi, about 20 miles from the Olympic village. The band attempted to begin performing, but was set upon by whip-wielding Cossack militiamen.

One of the Naval warships assigned to the Black Sea for U.S. protection during the Sochi Winter Olympics ran aground last Wednesday in a Turkish port as it was attempting to refuel. The port was 240 miles from Sochi.

Try as they might, some commentators during the U.S.-Russian hockey game could not muster much credible moral argument for making a comparison between Sochi of 2014 and Lake Placid of 1980. Of course, we all wanted the US team to win this time, just like in 1980. But as part of a larger world morality play, it pales to near nothingness in comparison. President Obama immediately moved to seize a political advantage, sending out a tweet claiming to “never stop believing in miracles.” The president’s grasp of history is self-evidently weak and self-serving. Back then, the joy of the American...

... Through Monday night, a review of the events at the Extreme Park counted at least 22 accidents that either forced athletes out of the competition or, if on their final run, required medical attention. Of those, 16 involved women. The injury rate is higher when considering that the men’s fields are generally larger. The question, a difficult one, is why. The Winter Games have always had dangerous events. But the Extreme Park, as the name suggests, is built on the ageless allure of danger. All of the events there have been added to the Olympic docket since 1992, each...

The guided-missile frigate USS Taylor, one of two ships on deployment in the Black Sea, is being inspected for damage after running aground last week as it was preparing to moor in Samsun, Turkey, a spokesman for the U.S. 6th Fleet said Tuesday. The Taylor was able to moor without further incident, and there were no injuries, said 6th Fleet spokesman Lt. Shawn Eklund. The incident, which occurred on Feb. 12, is under further investigation, Eklund said. The Taylor and the USS Mount Whitney, an amphibious command ship and the 6th Fleet flagship, entered the Black Sea on Feb. 4...

Last week, a day before the Winter Olympics began, The New Republic’s Julia Ioffe took Western journalists to task for gleefully tweeting about the state of Sochi’s hotel—the broken elevators, the urine-colored tap water, the knob-less doors—writing that “a lot of this complaining does smack of some pretty fantastic schadenfreude.” She has since amended her assessment, criticizing the Russians for their "paranoid projection." But I can hardly blame them if they've been reading the Wall Street Journal, whose prolific off-the-slopes coverage makes no effort to conceal the marching orders given by the paper’s assignment editors: Mock the hosts. Even before...

There are those who are champions on courses of competition. Then there are those who are victors in their caliber of character, too. In our often wayward world, the latter ought to be given not just a gold medal but a golden crown. Being dead last is never fun. I would imagine that it is particularly painful if you've trained like a world champion, traveled halfway around the world and are competing at the Winter Olympics. Roberto Carcelen of Peru was racing in a 15-kilometer cross-country skiing event. One unique hurdle he had, however, was that he was competing with...

Sochi's more than 20,000 Muslims helped build the infrastructure and stages for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Russia, where Muslim athletes from a range of participating nations will compete within these multi-million-dollar stadia, slopes, and structures, vying for gold and the glory that comes with Olympic victory. However, for Muslims in Sochi, the rampant Islamophobia has cast a shadow of concern and danger during these Olympic Games. Coverage of the Sochi games mentions Islam and Muslims exclusively in the form of terrorist threat , head-scarved " black widows ", and, the familiar conflation of religious observance with national security concerns....

SOCHI, Russia (AP) — An Italian gay-rights activist says she was detained by police in the Olympic host city after being stopped while carrying a rainbow flag saying "Gay is OK" in Russian. Vladimir Luxuria, a former Communist lawmaker in the Italian parliament who has become a prominent transgender rights crusader, said on her website and Twitter feed that she was held for several hours Sunday before being released. It was not known if she was charged with any offense. Her website published a photograph of her after her release. Before her arrest, she tweeted: "I'm in Sochi. Greetings in...

They've spent four years training for the chance to win Winter Olympics gold, so spare a thought for these athletes who have come a cropper on the snow and ice in Sochi. Britain's Rowan Cheshire has posted a pictured of her injuries on Twitter after becoming the latest freestyle skier to be injured at the Sochi Olympics. Cheshire was knocked unconscious after falling heavily on her face during a training session at the Rosa Khutor Extreme Park. The 18 year-old, who is due to compete in the ski halfpipe, is understood to have remained unconscious for several minutes after crashing...

While that hockey win over the Russians might have given us a nice morale lift the numbers don't lie- the Americans have unfortunately slipped to 7th place in overall medals at the 2014 Winter Games, this after a record-breaking dominance at Vancouver last go-round. We're all but mathematically eliminated from any kind of top finish already. You knew we were in trouble from the minute they rolled-out those collegiate-grunge opening ceremony outfits that Ralph Lauren came up with... and what's up with Pee Wee Herman in the announcers' booth? This Olympics so far has far too much of the dreadful...

Is that a bar fight? A Nascar race? An unusually aggressive pep rally? No — It’s Olympic curling! And there is screaming. So much screaming. Why? Well, it’s simply how teammates communicate with each other as they guide the stones, sweep by sweep, to the bulls-eye. But, for some, that's not immediately apparent: How do people understand curling? Like actually... What is it? Why are they screaming? Are those swiffers? Aren't they cold in tshirts? — Jennie McGowan (@jenniemac44) February 16, 2014 To understand the method behind the mayhem, one must first know the rules of curling. For starters, players...

Sometime after 9 p.m. local time on Monday night in the Sochi suburb of Adler, Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir will step on the ice for what will be their final Olympic skate of a memorable career. What the two spoke about the day before, after a near perfect rendering of their short program, will come back into play at this moment – their moment. “We sat in the kiss and cry and looked at each other and said, 'It doesn’t matter,' because that [short program skate] was the moment we wanted to have,” said Moir. It doesn’t matter. It...

Does Putin know about this? The Adler Arena at Sochi, venue for Olympic speedskating, was hit by a feline attack.