The Vancouver Winter Olympics open tonight with snow and money stories, plus a smart ass red head.

Like many Western Ski areas Whistler's Intrawest development is struggling for lack of green, and proceeding through a Wall Street foreclosure, just as the games kick off. Talk about supporting the Olympic Spirit of amateur athletics!

Freestyle skiing and snowboarding are being hosted closer to Vancouver, at Cypress Mountain - where, curiously they have no snow..

Shaun White, the jaggeresque redheaded snow boarder is a good bet for plenty of US Gold, and should prove to be quite entertaining. Speculation will no doubt continue as to White's supply of green, certainly he is not hurting for the monetary kind.

FWIW, I do hear that semi-legal marijuana is openly available, and used, in Whistler. Personally I remember paddling the Class IV Capilano River **in** West Vancouver (located between Cypress Mountain and Grouse Mountain, hosting the Today show crew) high, only time I did so, with the Canadian National Whitewater Slalom Champ.

Quite memorable, that.

There has been much said about the recent five vote Supreme Court decision equating corporations with persons - including accusing the Five Supremes who voted in favor of this decision of treason.

The Constitution sets explicitly high and narrow standards for this crime, noticeably different from English statute and common law. However, for evidence, the Constitution only requires two witnesses.

New York Times stringer and author Tim Egan (The Good Rain) opines in the New York Times on the steep decline of housing prices in the greater San Francisco 'sprawl' zone. Anecdotally Egan cites the case of Lathrop California, two hours from the Bay Area in the Central Valley. Housing prices there have dropped from a peak of $500,000 to $150,000.

This is an interesting phenomenon, certainly both worthy and timely. But where Egan takes his analysis of this tragedy is truly irresponsible.

First, he implies that the problem in Lathrop and surrounding communities is the model of foreclosure throughout the United States. Then, curiously, he defines such areas as slums in a typical Seattle passive aggressive manner.

The replacement of the 520 bridge debate has been going on for 20 years now, and is making progress, albeit slowly. I can't recreate the gist of that entire debate, complete with engineering and cost data, in a short post, so if you aren't familiar with these issues, this will be hard to understand. If you are somewhat familiar with the debate and wish to understand further, check out the quality project documentation on the Washington DOT site. (A quick aside for those outside of Washington State - if you've ever seen a Husky Football game televised the bridge in the background of the Stadium long shots is 520.)

George Will made an interesting observation on the ABC news program 'This Week' claiming "1/5th of Tea Party folks voted for Obama and 1/3 express support". I quoted this on Facebook and was promptly informed that Will is known to pull statistics out of his ass. As such, I decided to research further. That Facebook friend may well be right, and an analysis of the motivation for the apparent fiction is disturbing.

Here's the clip:

(commenters on the video repeat that question about Will's numbers, but Wikipedia does not.)

Even if this 'analysis' is completely false I do think it is safe to say that Independent Voters, who tilted strongly for Obama in the election, have largely lost favor with Obama. This would include myself, and I am certainly NOT a Palin/Tancredo tea bagger.