China has spent millions — perhaps billions — on personnel and infrastructure to accelerate growth in medal-rich sports in which it has had little success.

Americans (and probably other countries who fear that the Chinese will end up at, or near, the top of the medal count in August) will criticize the Chinese effort from various angles. Some will call the Chinese athletes automatons without spirit, slaves to the system, not “true” athletes for whatever reason, and so on. Some are already leveling charges that the Chinese are doping:

Mike Teti, the coach of the United States men’s rowing team, said, “We know they are cheating, but there’s nothing we can do about it.”

That is a very bold statement. Wow. What does Teti know that the rest of the world doesn’t, and why doesn’t he come forward with details to back up that allegation? If he has some evidence of cheating by the Chinese, he should present it. Otherwise, he is only looks combatitive and defensive - like’s he’s preemptively building a case to explain U.S. losses to the Chinese teams in Beijing.  (For the record, I think the Chinese will do well in the sculling events, but not as well in sweep events.)

Whatever happens at this point, you can bet that the Chinese are not going to welcome Teti, nor the American rowing contingent, very warmly.

On a related note, I bet within two years a scandal will emerge involving the price of oil futures, and we’ll find out that the people on the inside of the oil market manipulated prices, just like Enron manipulated the electricity market years back.

Consumers have already taken note, with U.S. gasoline demand down 0.6% this year compared with the same period in 2007, according to the Department of Energy.

The erosion in demand is likely to accelerate if gasoline prices shoot above $6, but a radical cutback in consumption will occur only if high prices weaken the U.S. economy further and contribute to increased unemployment.

So, what happens when gas hits $6/gallon? (IMO, we’re just a couple of years from that price.)  I think at that price, telecommuting and teleconferencing will hit hockeystick growth.  At a corporate level, businesses will probably be more selective when it comes to corporate travel, and will hopefully encourage virtual meetings and teleconferencing. I wonder if they’ll allow their employees more more latitude in telecommuting, too.

I don’t see why not - the technology is here today. For example, yesterday while up here in Tahoe, I took part in a three-way conference call between co-workers in San Francisco and a partner in Oregon. From my perspective, there was no drawback to being here in the mountains, nor for our partner to be in Oregon. All of us used Adobe Connect for screen sharing. It’s a no-brainer to use this technology, and in some ways, it’s faster to set up a screen sharing session between remote meeting participants than to gather a bunch of people in the same office into a meeting room and get a projector set up.

The argument that I keep hearing against allowing gay marriage is that permitting gays to marry a) tramples on the sanctity of marriage, and b) goes against the tradition of marriage. On the first point, I think marriage is only as sacred as the married couple makes it. Remember years ago when Britney Spears got loaded in Vegas and married an old friend of hers, only to annul it a day later? Where was the uproar against the sanctity of marriage back then? Where’s the sanctity in a drive-thru chapels? Etc, etc.

On the second point, let’s not kid ourselves and pretend the institution has not evolved over thousands of years. If marriage had never evolved with the times, here’s what we would still be stuck with:

• Wives would be the legal property of husbands.
• Dowries would be required by the bride’s family.
• If a woman’s father died without male heirs, that woman could be forced to marry her nearest male relative—even if she that meant divorcing her current husband. (That chestnut was around in Ancient Greece.)
• Polygamy would be no big deal.

So let’s be thankful that our concept of, and traditions around, marriage have evolved with our society. I’m sure people in ancient Greece similarly freaked out when women couldn’t be forced to marry a male relative. So let’s all take a deep breath and try to get some perspective.

2:57 p.m., Yeager Airport, Charleston, W.Va.: A steep descent brings Clinton’s plane to Charleston’s hilltop airport. After an appropriate wait, she steps from the plane and pretends to wave to a crowd of supporters; in fact, she is waving to 10 photographers underneath the airplane’s wing. She pretends to spot an old friend in the crowd, points and gives another wave; in fact, she is waving at an aide she had been talking with on the plane minutes earlier.

The article goes on to compare her campaign to a dead parrot in a Monty Python skit. It’s all over, folks. There’s nothing to see here, go back about your business.

BUT IT’S GETTING TOO F-ING EXPENSIVE.

Between jacked up gas bills, tolls, the car insurance premium I paid two days ago, the costs of driving a car are making me seriously reconsider my anti-telecommuting stance. Maybe it’s time to try it one day a week.

What do her economic advisors think of that statement?