Articles for Sunday, May 4, 2008
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by
Andrew Travers, Aspen Daily News Staff Writer
Sunday, May 4, 2008
It’s the first day of May. Les Stanton lights a cigarette and peers down a thin curve of eastbound road with story-high walls of snow piled at its sides. A steady stream of sleet pelts him slantwise as windswept pines shiver above. The surrounding snowcapped mountain peaks are barely visible in a freezing haze.
It’s the first day of May . . . on the road to Independence Pass.
Columnist
by Dave Danforth
Sunday, May 4, 2008
Barry Punzal had labored hard for a quarter-century in the sports department at the Santa Barbara News-Press. He won sports editor post in mid-2006, just as the paper was shaken to its roots by a controversy involving the news independence of the paper and its owner, 57-year-old cell phone heiress Wendy McCaw.
Punzal worked to protect the paper’s sports department from the turmoil wracking the newsroom, where several editors had walked out and seven reporters were fired in the midst of the their efforts to join a union.
by Barbara Ehrenreich
Sunday, May 4, 2008
Truckers live in an alternative dimension, at least so I conclude when trying to figure out how to meet up with the convoy of trucks coming into to DC to protest high diesel fuel prices on Monday. JB, aka Mike Schaffner, one of the organizers of the action, calls early in the morning to suggest various highway intersections, and I have to explain there’s no way a pedestrian can be just standing on one the super-highways around DC. We eventually settle on a spot in a desolate area of southeastern DC, but even so, I probably couldn’t have made the connection without the genes of a grandfather who rode the rails. When I hear the honking, low and steady, and see the first trucks rising out from an underpass, I scramble up to a narrow walkway along their route and start waving frantically. Everyone waves back nicely, and about the fifth truck actually stops. It’s JB and I leap aboard.
JB and I have become friends-by-phone in the weeks since I blogged about the first truckers’ protests in the beginning of April, but all I knew about him as a physical presence is that he always wears a black cowboy hat. Its brim is turned down, locating him in Larry McMurtry’s rather than John Wayne’s West, and his eyes twinkle deeply when he smiles, which is pretty much all the time. Everything seems to delight him: Being in DC for the first time, having 250 trucks behind him, the friendliness of the tourists on the street as we inch our way toward the Mall.
by Clarence Page
Sunday, May 4, 2008
After cutting ties with his controversial former pastor, Sen. Barack Obama received a word of sympathy from an unusual place: a Republican.
Former Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee says that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright wants to derail Obama’s bid for the White House for a simple tactical reason: Wright does not want Obama to prove that we’ve made that much racial progress.
by Kathleen Parker
Sunday, May 4, 2008
Of those everyone loves to hate, few can compete with the deadbeat dad for longevity.
How much do we hate him? While we’re counting the ways, Fox TV may try to help America organize its contempt and put a face on this loathsome character.
