Free Republic

AN ONLINE gay dating service CRASHED seconds after the first Olympic athletes touched down last week due to massive increase in demand. The mobile phone app - Grindr - lets gay men zero in on potential partners nearby using GPRS in their phones. Experts on the site believe the arrival of the Olympic teams on Monday sparked a flood of new customers - and crashed the service in East London. One frustrated Londoner said: "It happened almost as soon as the teams got here. Either loads of athletes were logging on to meet fellow Olympians or were looking to...

NBC wants viewers to know: The kickoff of the London Olympics was just too complicated to watch live. The network is fighting back against intense criticism of its decision to black out the opening ceremony on Friday, instead offering a taped version hours later in prime time. Viewers reacted with disgust when they tried to watch live coverage of the event on TV or online but could only find a few bootlegging sites carrying the feed in the U.S. "We are live streaming every sporting event, all 32 sports and 302 medals," an NBC spokesman wrote in an email to...

The letters ‘NHS’ dazzled in bright red, like some triumphant advert. All around pranced self-indulgent nurses who had volunteered to take a few days off to be part of the ceremony. And how long did this shameful propaganda last for? A whole 15 minutes at the top of proceedings before viewers dozed off to the procession of banana republics and far-flung destinations nobody has ever heard of or even cares for. That such a politically divisive subject was included at all is utterly shocking. Not least because it glossed over the cracks in a system that is creaking at its...

Olympics: Mitt Romney has gotten blasted on all sides for questioning London's Olympic preparation. The overlooked fact is that Romney actually knows how to run an Olympics. You would have thought Great Britain and the U.S. were in a crisis and recalling each others' ambassadors, given the overblown, overwrought windbaggery directed at Romney, who is making his first trip abroad as a Republican presidential candidate, with London as his first stop. Someone asked him what he thought of London's Olympic preparations and he replied there could be reason for concern, citing reports of labor and security problems. See, the London...

The major transitional element of today's London Olympics opening ceremony was a downtempo performance of adoptive sporting anthem "Abide With Me" by Scottish singer Emeli Sandé. The song and accompanying dance were a tribute to the victims of the 7/7 terror attacks in London that claimed 52 victims days after the 2012 Summer Olympic hosts were named. (It's also been suggested the performance was a memorial to the war dead.)

'The British screen and stage actor Simon Ward has died after a long illness, his agent has confirmed. Ward, who was 70, appeared in several films throughout the 1970s and 1980s, including The Three Musketeers. He also starred as Bishop Gardiner in The Tudors and as Sir Monty in the popular BBC television series Judge John Deed. A statement released by his agent said he passed away peacefully with his wife Alexandra and daughters at his bedside. The son of a car salesman from Beckenham in Kent, Ward joined the National Youth Theatre at the age of 13 where he...

LONDON -- A bread baker from Somerset, England, came to London on Friday night to celebrate the opening ceremony of the 2012 Summer Olympics. This is not the start of an old joke. Big-armed and tattooed, Adam Archer wore a sleeveless T-shirt and wrapped a plastic Union Jack around him like a kilt while standing below the alighted Tower Bridge. Waiting. After spending much of the evening traipsing around central London searching for a sampling of the Olympic spirit, he settled on the incandescent bridge. He got turned away at Olympic Park and discovered there weren't big screens at Trafalgar...

A celebration of free healthcare, the trade union struggle, the battle for women's rights and a fleeting lesbian kiss: the Olympics opening ceremony Friday did not shy away from weighty social issues. Unsurprisingly, the show devised by Oscar-winning British director Danny Boyle drew accusations from the British political right that it had strayed into "leftie" issues. Aidan Burley, a lawmaker from Prime Minister David Cameron's ruling Conservative party, tweeted: "The most leftie opening ceremony I have ever seen -- more than Beijing, the capital of a communist state! Welfare tribute next?" He followed that with: "Thank God the athletes have...

Angela Merkel and François Hollande pledged on Friday "to do everything to protect" the European Union's single currency, papering over deep divisions between them over how to tackle the Spanish and Italian debt crisis. The German chancellor and French president issued a joint statement following a crisis telephone call echoing Mario Draghi's promise on Thursday that the European Central Bank would do whatever it took to save the euro. "France and Germany are fundamentally tied to the integrity of the euro area," they said in the statement. "They are determined to do everything to protect it. "Member states, like the...

Watching the start of the Olympics in London......Anyone else?

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: I want to go to this Romney business. Romney went to the UK. He's over there for the obligatory foreign trip for presidential candidates. And here is supposedly Romney's big gaffe. This was Wednesday night on the NBC Nightly News with the anchor Brian Williams who said, "In the short time you've been here in London, do they look ready for the Olympics to your experienced eye?" ROMNEY: You know, it's hard to know just how well it will turn out. There are a few things that were disconcerting, the stories about the private security firm not...

Lately, there’s been a rumor swirling around about the current location of the bust of Winston Churchill. Some have claimed that President Obama removed the bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office and sent it back to the British Embassy. Now, normally we wouldn’t address a rumor that’s so patently false, but just this morning the Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer repeated this ridiculous claim in his column. He said President Obama “started his Presidency by returning to the British Embassy the bust of Winston Churchill that had graced the Oval Office.” This is 100% false. The bust still in...

A controversy is brewing over whether the United States might break tradition and dip the American flag at the opening ceremony for the London Olympics. However, the American Legion said to do so would not only violate the U.S. Flag Code, but would also be un-American. Scott Blackmun, the CEO of the United States Olympic Committee, told Reuters they were discussing the matter internally. “We’ve talked about that a little bit and you never know what is going to happen,” Blackmun told the news agency. But later a spokesman for the USOC sent Fox News a statement Blackmun’s comments and...

A Romney campaign official has blasted Boris Johnson, the London Mayor, as an ‘eccentric, odd fellow’ whose public attack on the Republican candidate was ‘unbecoming’ and an indication of his bias towards President Barack Obama. The official said that Prime Minister David Cameron’s ‘wisecrack’ about it being harder to stage an Olympic Games in London than ‘in the middle of nowhere’ – an apparent reference to Salt Lake City, where Romney oversaw the 2002 Winter Olympics – was ‘probably appropriate, albeit awkward’ and unfortunate for Romney ‘Johnson on the other hand lived up to his reputation as an eccentric, odd...

So after seeing the thing for what, two years now? It occurred to me last night that the London Olympics logo looked like puzzle pieces. They even have 3-D shaddow to make them look like you can pick them up and move them around. So I did. And I found a running man! But even weirder, it seem the running man is supposed to be upside-down, on his head. Because only then can you read the "London" pice properly. Oh, and as a check, besides all the exact angles of the piece sides that line up, the word "London" is...

Barack Obama made a trip to Ireland when he became President, and he bragged about the Irish heritage that he has on his mother's side. In his first book, he wrote about visiting Kenya, to celebrate his father's Kenyan roots. Then why is Mitt Romney being given a hard time on his visit to England, when one of his advisers mentioned that Romney is proud of his Anglo-Saxon heritage? Romney should tell his non-Anglo critics that they are guests and freeloaders, living in a country (America) that was founded by Anglo-Saxons. The Irish are cheered when they have their St....

Mitt Romney has been taking some heat in the past few days for daring to question whether London was fully prepared for the 2012 Olympics. The candidate, who was chief executive of the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City in 2002, is due to attend the opening ceremony on Friday before he continues his foreign tour. Speaking to NBC News, he said: "It's hard to know just how well it will turn out. There are a few things that were disconcerting: the stories about the private security firm not having enough people, supposed strike of the immigration and customs officials,...

“Not competing with the Zionist athletes is one of the values and prides of the Iranian athletes and nation,” "Iranian athletes have ever since the glorious victory of the Islamic Revolution been boycotting entire competitions against the Zionist regime athletes and athletic teams, even at cost of losing valuable medals, to protest to the illegitimate occupation of Palestine by that usurper regime and the sixty year massacre, deportation, and siege of its real owners, the Palestinians.”

This silliness has mostly been fun for me, as I suspect, unlike the media, the average American voter couldn't care less about it; however, it does have an element of Obama and the left's ongoing war against success in it. Some are forgetting that, not only does Romney speak with experience and success when it comes to running an Olympics, it was far from America's best moment when it risked botching an Olympics of its own back in 2002.  They can like it, or not, Mitt Romney is largely credited with hauling those, and Salt Lake's ashes out of the...