Moseley: Rove's special legacy in Colorado
Daily Camera
Saturday, August 25, 2007
As Karl Rove makes his farewell rounds as President's Bush most pivotal and controversial adviser, it is worth remembering the special stamp he left on Colorado. In 2003, under the leadership of Senate President John Andrews, the Colorado General Assembly launched an assault to redraw Colorado congressional districts so that by concentrating Democrats in Denver and Boulder, five out of seven districts would be securely in Republican hands for generations. The "Midnight Gerrymander," the Denver Post's Bob Ewegen would label it.This was a plan hatched by Karl Rove and Tom DeLay years before as part of the effort to create a "durable Republican majority." Colorado would be the test case, and then Texas would come a year later.
SPEAKOUT: Let's keep Boulder swinging
Rocky Mountain News
Friday, July 20, 2007
On July 3, Spencer Hawkins, a Boulder swimming coach and musician, was perched on a ledge above the deepest swimming hole on Boulder Creek. Others lined up for their turn behind him.
He pulled a rope back and took off sailing into the air and into the cool waters of the creek for the last time. The Boulder Parks and Recreation Department then
swiftly cut it down.
Has Boulder lost its swing?
Apparently so.
People have been rope swinging on Boulder Creek for decades as rite of summer, and cutting it down is another act in a city that is slowly and quietly crushing activities it cannot regulate or
control.
Young Americans volunteer, but don't vote
Business Network
April 14, 1999
There is a growing chasm between civic and political involvement of 18- to 24-year-olds.
Youth turnout in the '98 elections was e lowest ever. According to exit polls, only 12.2 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds voted in recent midterm elections compared with 19 percent in 1994, a decline of nearly 40 percent. Yet at the same time that America's youth are not voting, they are out in the streets making a difference in their communities and volunteering in record numbers. UCLA's 1997 annual survey of college freshmen found that 73 percent of incoming freshmen had volunteered in the last year.
Sex frenzies, and the Super Bowl
By Hunter S. Thompson
My friend Matt Moseley called from Athens and said he was working as a press officer for the U.S. weightlifting team in a secret location called the USA House, less than 900 meters from Acropolis.
“We are right in the middle of town,” he said, “but only the cops know we’re here. We fly no flag.”
“What is the wildest place in Athens?” I asked him. “Where is the weird stuff happening?”
I knew it was a dangerous question for him—considering his happy family back in Boulder—But I asked him anyway.
“I need to know this,” I snarled. “The editors of ‘Playboy’ are pushing me for gossip about orgies.”
“Orgies?” he asked. “Which ones are they talking about? We have group sex frenzies following almost every event, even the ones we lose. The hottest place in town is probably the Bulgaria House. It rocks 24 hours a day. I love the place. One night last week, I had two of my athletes disappear completely after they went to the Bulgaria House. We can’t find a trace of them.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “They will turn up in a few days. But they won’t be of any use to you.”
Which is true, but it is not a pretty story so we won’t get into it now—except to say that I didn’t need a year with the Oakland Raiders to finally grasp the true nature of amphetamine addiction. That gig goes all the way back to Adolf Hitler.
World War II would never have happened if Hitler had never discovered speed. Once he learned how to stay wide awake and utterly dominant for 99 or 100 straight hours at a stretch, his enemies knew they were doomed.
Ah, memories, memories. Where are the snows of yesteryear? Ou sont les neiges d’antan.
Which brings us, at last, to the more solveable horrors of our time, these first queer years of our post-American century.
Whoops. We are wandering. Let us focus once again on what is real in this life, like the Super Bowl—which looks to be like the Colts and the Eagles. Why not? They are two of the speediest teams in the league, and speed will be the deciding factor this year.
“You can teach a kid everything else in the game,” said Al Davis on one wet afternoon in Oakland when he was bitching about Ken Stabler and “Fast Freddie” Biletnikoff, both famously slow on foot. “But you can’t teach speed.”
Al was weird in those days, and he still is. But the Oakland Raiders will suck this year, and so will the Denver Broncos. They both suffer from a lack of team speed, and they both have dysfunctional quarterbacks. No playoffs for these poor bastards. They will struggle. Do not bet on them.
The real NFL season will start on a Thursday night, Sept. 9, somewhere on the outskirts of Boston, when the defending champion Patriots will be strongly favored to once again lay a crippling loss on the Colts, who will once again be three-or-four point underdogs.
Only a fool would bet against New England at home in September. They are riding a 15-game winning streak, and they see no reason to lose any games this year. Bill Belichick has built his perfect winning machine.
Ho ho. Don’t bet on it. There is something out of whack with New England, and their winning streak will end on Sept. 9. The Patriots look unbeatable, on paper; but on the field, they look weak and disorganized. They will lose, somehow, in Indianapolis. That is all ye know, and all ye need to know.
Mahalo.
For Reporter Scum, Olympics Is Scrum
Scribes Battle for Position in The Games of Packed Journalism
By Peter Carlson
Washington Post Staff
Writer
Wednesday, August 25, 2004; Page C01
ATHENS, Aug. 24
Outside, under the bright lights of the Olympic Stadium, the crowd roars as runners approach the starting blocks for the men's 400-meter race. But down here in the bowels of the stadium, a far more brutal competition is already underway -- a no-holds-barred body contact sport that is far too gruesome to be shown on TV.
This is the "mixed zone," an airless subterranean concrete walkway where print reporters line up along a metal fence for a chance to interview athletes as they walk from the track to the room where they must produce a urine sample for drug tests. Space is limited along the fence, and hundreds of sweat-soaked reporters from around the world jostle, shove, elbow and stomp each other, fighting to seize and hold a position where they might possibly hear an athlete stammer out a cliche about God or mom or an injured hamstring.
The mixed zone combines the worst aspects of a rugby scrum, a mosh pit and the New York subway at rush hour. It is a place that confirms all the worst stereotypes about reporters -- they are pushy, they are obnoxious and their personal hygiene leaves a lot to be desired, at least here.
In the mixed zone, the unruly battle the unwashed for a chance to hear the inarticulate utter the inaudible.
"It's nasty, it's smelly, it's stinky, it's rude, it's vile and a lot of the stuff that goes on here would get you arrested out on the street," says Bob Padecky, a veteran Olympics reporter for California's Santa Rosa Press Democrat. "Half the people in here, if they've ever showered, it's been a while."
Padecky's on a roll. He's just emerged from a cacophonous, malodorous mob in the mixed zone and he's eager to vent.
"You feel like you're getting battered by hurricane-force winds that have just blown through a garbage dump," he says. "You smell something bad and you're pretty sure it's not you. But you figure you should take a better shower tomorrow because you're picking up a whiff of Belarus."
Actually, mixed zones are not all bad all the time. Sometimes, they can be downright inspiring. You watch as athletes from three nations stand side by side giving interviews in three languages, and your heart swells with pride at the brotherhood of man. But then some lout with a press pass slams an elbow into your gut to get to a guy who finished seventh in a semifinal heat, and you want to wipe out his entire nation with a nuclear strike.
All Olympic events have mixed zones and most, if truth be told, are fairly peaceful. Go to a preliminary event of an obscure sport and you can engage in long, civilized discourse with an athlete. But at the major events -- swimming, gymnastics, track and field -- mixed zones are mob scenes.
The mixed zone at the recently concluded swimming competition carried an added whiff of danger: The combination of metal fences, electrical cables and pool water in close proximity caused much speculation that the entire aquatic press corps could suddenly be electrocuted with a boom that might blow out the Athens power grid.
But that didn't happen, and those reporters have lived to see another day, another mixed zone -- like this one here in the hot underbelly of the stadium, where a scrum of scribes battles to get close enough to hear Allyson Felix, the American who just won a preliminary 200-meter race, reveal the philosophical underpinning of the U.S. track team:
"We're just trying to do the best we can" Squashed against the fence in front of Felix is Matt Moseley, who is taking a beating as he holds two tape recorders up to Felix's mouth. Moseley is a volunteer working for the U.S. Olympic Committee Web site. His job is simple but tough: He's supposed to hang on the fence at the start of the mixed zone and get a quote from every American athlete who passes by. Then he hands that tape recorder to a colleague, who runs off to type the quote into the team Web site, while Moseley does the same thing with another athlete, another tape recorder.
"Last night, I was crushed for 5 1/2 hours, but I didn't leave this spot," he says. "There are moments of complete boredom, and there are moments of sheer panic when the winner of a big race comes in and every journalist surges forward and it's like being at a Who concert."
Moseley is no stranger to the discreet charms of the press corps. In real life, he works as a press secretary to Democrats in the Colorado state Senate. But Colorado political reporters are gentlemen compared with the international sports press.
"Politics isn't as brutal," he says. "In politics, the press is highly controlled. They won't squash you up against a barricade."
Also, political reporters don't stink -- at least not literally.
Actually, the problem isn't a lack of bathing. Given a chance, most reporters will generally bathe nearly as often as civilized people. The odor problem here is a laundry problem. Reporters don't have time to do laundry, and Greek hotels charge 6 euros -- about $7.50 -- to launder a shirt. That kind of money can cut into a reporter's all-important alcoholic beverage budget. Consequently, even reporters who squeeze in a shower tend to cover their clean bodies with dirty clothes. In this weather -- it's been in the 90s and sunny almost every day of the Olympics -- that can get funky.
"It gets pretty ripe," says James Christie, a veteran reporter for the Toronto Globe and Mail. "If you haven't been able to do your laundry, then you're just warming up what's on there already."
Reporters from all countries have been known to throw an elbow or stomp on a foot, so it's hard to handicap who would win the gold for sheer brutality in the mixed zone. Who gets complained about depends on whom you talk to and which event you're at.
On Monday night, it's the Americans who are swarming into the mixed zone, charging the fence like it was the beach at Normandy. American runners have just swept the 400-meter race --taking first, second and third -- and everybody in the huge American press corps wants to hear what these guys have to say. The pack at the fence is pressed six bodies deep. Consequently, latecomers -- people who actually watched the event in the stadium instead of grabbing a spot in the zone and seeing it on TV -- are shoving toward the fence like fullbacks fighting a goal-line stand.
"Are you going to be able to hear anything?" an American in the back yells to a colleague about three bodies from the fence.
"I don't know," the colleague replies with a shrug. "It depends."
For several minutes, no athletes appear and the only action in the room is reporters squeezing and shoving for position along the fence.
Now here comes a real live Olympian. From fiveor six bodies back, you can see the top of his head. The huddled masses surge toward him like Vegas women mobbing Tom Jones. Dozens of reporters stretch to hold their tape recorders near his mouth -- a move that puts their armpits right in their rivals' faces.
By now, several athletes have arrived and they appear to be speaking, although you can't hear a word unless you're in the first few rows.
"I heard something about breaking down stereotypes," one reporter announces, "but I couldn't hear it."
After a few minutes, the athletes move on, heading for their urine tests, while the reporters try to piece together what was said. Somebody wrote down the first part of the dialogue, but the rest is illegible. Other folks got various pieces on tape. They huddle, building a complete quotation by consensus, assembling it from shards, like archaeologists re-creating a piece of ancient pottery.
Watching this process, you begin to wonder: Has it always been like this? Did reporters covering Lincoln's Gettysburg Address work this way?
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