You're an honest, trustworthy and ethical person and employee. So wha about that handful of paper clips/push pins/ballpoints that happen to find their way home from the office?
A survey by Spherion Corp., a recruiting and staffing firm, said nearly one in five office workers took office supplies for their personal use and only 21 percent of them felt guilty about it.
The sordid tragedy of Chris Benoit's murder of his wife and young son and subsequent suicidetook another bizarre turn Friday when a poster to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia apologized for posting information that Benoit's wife was dead 14 hours before her body was discovered.
Investigators had not discovered the bodies Monday when someone altered Benoit's Wikipedia entry to mention his wife's death, authorities said.
The failed immigration bill, combined with tough state sanctions against hiring illegal workers, will make it more difficult for Colorado employers to fill jobs in tourism, agriculture and food service, say the businesses.
Joanne Kelley reports local employers say the doomed immigration compromise forces them to keep working within a system badly in need of a major overhaul, which now likely won't happen until after the 2008 presidential election.
"There's already a terrible labor shortage," said Mike Gilsdorf, president of Colorado Employers for Immigration Reform. "We've just got to fight through it." Gilsdorf predicted overtime costs will rise sharply as businesses try to deal with a tight supply of people to fill certain jobs.
If you don't buy an iPhone today - at the very least over the weekend - you are a shameful excuse for an American. If you're not in line right now, drop whatever you're doing and go get in line RIGHT NOW. Otherwise your family, friends and co-workers will shun you as a failure. If your phone rings this weekend and it's not an iPhone you run the risk of being deported.
So maybe we've quaffed just a bit too much of iPhone Kool-Aid, which is at the center of a marketing blitz that's aiming to convince every American that if you don't have an iPhone by the Fourth of July, the terrorists win.
Coloradans, especially teenagers, are queing up to pay $499 plus service contracts of at least $59.99 per month, reports Jeff Smith. More than a dozen were waiting Thursday at the Apple store at Aspen Grove in Littleton.
The proposed compromise on immigration bill was sent packing to political purgatory Thursday when the Senate slammed the door on a key procedural vote.
The bill's supporters fell 14 votes short of the 60 needed to limit debate and clear the way for final passage of the legislation, which critics assailed as offering amnesty to illegal immigrants. The vote was 46 to 53 in favor of limiting the debate.
M.E. Sprengelmeyer wonders in his Back Roads to the White House blog what impact the vote will have on the 2008 Presidential contenders.
Feeling a little less elbow room lately? Think your neighbors are too close?
You're probably right - or perhaps moderately paranoid. At any rate, Denver is growing, Aurora busted the 300,000 population mark and the corridor north of Denver is the fastest-growing region in the state.
The Census Bureau showed Denver grew by 8,300 residents, a 1.5 percent bump, to about 567,000 people, reports Burt Hubbard.
"Denver is definitely changing on us," state demographer Elizabeth Garner said. "A lot more people are sticking with the city, instead of leaving."
Perhaps the timing wasn't the best. Nestled amid headlines reporting double-digit tuition increases at the University of Colorado comes word that students paid $160,000 to hear former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan.
For that kind of money CU could have paid four years of tuition/fees for a defensive tackle AND a running back.
The amount came as a surprise to several CU regents when it jumped out of a list of speakers and fees from the past school year, reports Berny Morson.
Annan was far ahead of the second-highest-paid speaker, liberal historian and activist Howard Zinn, who received $15,500.
A co-worker said she cried all the way home after dropping off her only child at the University of Colorado for freshman orientation.
And that was the day before the news of the big tuition hike hit. Empy Nest meet Empy Wallet.
Berny Morson reports:
State lawmakers warned Tuesday that middle-class Coloradans will continue to pay higher tuition in coming years as the state searches for ways to fund colleges and universities.The legislature's lean support has left CU and other colleges little options but to raise tuition and fees to cover their rising costs.
Michael Bethel is flanked by his attorney, Michael Lowe, and his wife, Tammy.
Michael and Tammy Bethel have been married for about 20 years which would seem to make them pretty good role models for committment. He's committed to having sex only with her. She's committed to having sex with anybody as long as she tells him about it.
OK, so much for global warming and carbon emissions. I rode my bike to work so that pretty much takes care of the environment. Tell Al Gore he can dial it back a little.
Great day to ride: cool and overcast at 6 a.m. with only the hint of a breeze. Bicycling is the best way to see and appreciate the city and the South Platte Greenway is a treasure. You can ride all the way from C-470 to downtown and only cross one street - except for the next few months when the Greenway is under construction between Oxford and Hampden.
Our long national nightmare is over. Paris Hilton walked out of a Los Angeles jail this morning, a free woman.
The liberation of Paris ended a shocking miscarriage of justice that reverberated among so many of America's oppressed thin blondes, who feared they too could be persecuted if their publicists forgot to to tell them their licenses had been suspended.
The family of a woman who died in Denver's jail after being injured in a car crash she allegedly caused while driving drunk has sued the city and jail and hospital personnel, reports Julie Poppen.
Hours before 24-year-old Emily Rae Rice died at the Denver jail, she called her mother and complained that she was freezing and couldn't feel her feet.The family claims that on the afternoon of Feb. 18, 2006, a jail nurse told Rice, whom he suspected of being drunk, to "sleep it off." That nurse told Rice to "stop being dramatic" when she collapsed during a prolonged check-in, the suit says. Later that night, Rice's pleas became so urgent that other inmates began screaming and banging on the glass to get guards' attention, but Rice was never evaluated, according to the suit.
By the next morning, Rice was dead.
Jim Sheeler writes obituaries so riveting and poignant it's almost worth dying to be a subject.
The Pulitzer Prize winner for the Rocky's "Final Salute" story is out with his first book, Obit: Inspiring Stories of Ordinary People who led Extraordinary Lives.
Jim will read from Obit, answer questions and sign copies during a public event Tuesday at 7 p.m. in the Rocky Mountain News auditorium, 101 W. Colfax.
In a Linn County (Iowa) straw poll where the favorites were way down and other guys way up, Tom Tancredo was a top tier candidate. He placed third and not to place too much context into the mix, but John McCain finished last, reports M.E. Sprengelmeyer in his Back Roads to the White House blog.
The big winner: Former Gov. Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin (33.1 percent)
Followed by :Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas (30.4 percent)
And: Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado (15.5 percent)
Denver Public Schools' pension plan is faced with such serious debt that it could scuttle savings realized by the expected closure of several schools report Nancy Mitchell and David Milstead.
A Rocky analysis of Denver Public Schools' retirees fund found a tangled tale that includes an $80 million accounting error anddecisions to put short-term gains ahead of long-term financialstability.Today, though, the bill has come due.That means the ongoing and painful process of deciding which city schools should be shuttered could, ultimately, do little to resolve DPS' precarious financial state.
A citizens' group studying the district budget repeats this warning four times in a little-seen 10-page report: "Failure to address the . . . pension plan presents significant risks to the budget; further substantial losses could eliminate all savings created through school closures."
Former Denver City Attorney Larry Manzanares was found dead Friday and the media and prosecutors are being criticized for the way Manzanares' case was presented to the public, report John C. Ensslin and Julie Poppen.
Several friends and colleagues of Manzanares blamed the media in general, and the Rocky Mountain News in particular, for what they felt was sensational treatment of the fact that pornography was discovered on a stolen state court laptop computer found in his possession.Others were critical of Jefferson County District Attorney Scott Storey, special prosecutor in the case, for including the pornography allegations in an affidavit filed to support charges of theft, embezzlement, evidence tampering, computer crime and official misconduct against Manzanares.
Rocky dining critic John Lehndorff puts on his music-guy hat and reports from the 34th annual Rocky Mountain Bluegrass Festival.
Singer and fiddler Alison Krauss performs Saturday at the 34th Annual Telluride Bluegrass Festival. She and her band, Union Station, joined by guitarist Tony Rice, covered songs from Rice's musical career.
TELLURIDE June 24, 2:45 p.m.:
After attending at least 25 – and probably 27, of the 34 annual Telluride Bluegrass Festivals, the event still has the power to stop me in my tracks, make my jaw drop and send a chill rippling up my backbone.
Here are a few of my favorite moments from this year’s hoedown/gathering/earfest deluxe:
Young mandolin savant Chris Thile opening the festival June 21 with a spot-on performance of a Bach partita. Bach would also guest star when Thile and Edgar Meyer did a duo set and when Mike Marshall delivered a gorgeous solo rendition of Bach’s notoriously difficult Chaconne, an adaptation for the mandolin he’s worked on for almost three decades.
Bill Richardson says he's moving up. Well, what else would you expect him to say? Maybe, "I'm hopelessly mired in the middle of the pack and couldn't get much attention if I set myself on fire."
At any rate, he's gaining ground, the New Mexico Governor told a gathering sponsored by IowaPolitics.com, Drake University and the Rocky Mountain News, reports M.E. Sprengelmeyer on his Back Roads to the White House blog.
On average, American men have sex with seven women in their lifetime, American women have sex with four men. That's what a new survey finds although the numbers could be affected because Paris Hilton has been in jail for a couple of weeks.
Men are far more apt to play the field when it comes to sex, the survey found - 29 percent of them reported having 15 or more female sexual partners in a lifetime, while only 9 percent of women reported having sex with 15 or more men.The survey, released Friday, was based on data collected from 1999 to 2002 for the National Center for Health Statistics, a branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The EPA is considering cutting the amount of ozone allowed in Denver air - and neither environmentalists nor industry is pleased, reports Todd Hartman.
The proposal is based on new scientific findings that show current limits aren't protective enough, both for people with existing respiratory ills and for healthy adults exercising outdoors on high pollution days.The EPA's proposal recommends ratcheting down the current limit of 80 parts per billion over an eight-hour period to 70 to 75 parts per billion, which - if in effect today - would put the metro area in violation of the health standard.
The Bush administration is close to closing the Guantanamo Bay detainee facility and transferring the suspects to other prisons, the Associated Press reports.
Senior administration officials said Thursday a consensus is building for a proposal to shut the center and transfer detainees to one or more Defense Department facilities, including the maximum-security military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., where they could face trial.President Bush's national security and legal advisers had been scheduled to discuss the move at a meeting Friday, the officials said, but after news of it broke, the White House said the meeting would not take place that day and no decision on Guantanamo Bay's status is imminent.
Rep. Ron Paul may be a blip in the polls (more about them later) but his hardcore supporters are pitching a fit about the grave injustice being done to their man, reports M.E. Sprengelmeyer on his Back Roads to the White House blog.
Blogroots darling, Republican Rep. Ron Paul, has been excluded from a candidate forum on June 30 and his fans are burning up "the Internets" pledging to make a show of force."Let's make all the news be about Ron Paul so that (the) event is a side note," someone posted at the digg.com entry on the growing brouhaha.
Mike Littwin has a poll-ish joke about polls on his Fair and Unbalanced blog. Namely, they don't mean much. He cites a Daily Kos blog that compares early polling in 2003 to how things actually turned out.
The American Film Institute isn't budging: Citizen Kane is still its choice for the best American film of all time.
In the CBS special "AFI's 100 Years ... 100 Movies - 10th Anniversary Edition," "Citizen Kane" held the same No. 1 billing it earned in the institute's first top-100 ranking in 1998. There were notable changes elsewhere, though, with Martin Scorsese's 1980 masterpiece "Raging Bull" bounding upward from No. 24 in 1998 to No. 4 on the new list and Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 thriller "Vertigo" hurtling from No. 61 to No. 9 this time.
My top 10:
Midnight Cowboy.
The rest inside ...
The Yankees and Rockies wind up their three-game series at 1:05 p.m. at Coors Field with the Yankees pinning their sweep-avoidance hopes on the ageless arm of Roger Clemens.
So far the most storied franchise in sports history have been victimized by Josh Fogg and Jeff Francis as the Rockies are starting to make believers of the skeptics.
Summer kicks in at 12:06 p.m. and the temperature got a head start on the calendar, reports Kari Craig.
Denver's hot weather isn't going away. Potentially record highs in the 90s are expected to continue for at least another week.CBS 4's Ed Greene's looks for a high of 96 today. The record high for June 21 in Denver is 98 degrees.
Old hippies and aging boomers remember it's the 40-year anniversary of the Summer of Love.
Today's long lines at the Department of Motor Vehicles could one day have a nickname: the good old days.
The federal Real ID Act, scheduled to take effect next May, the DMV could see a six-fold increase in folks lining up at the door, reports Ann Imse.
That's because all 3.8 million residents with Colorado identification will be required to show up in person to have their photo and documentation checked, instead of renewing by mail, said Debora Jerome, project coordinator for the state driver's license administration.
President Bush wielded his veto pen for the third time - and the second time against federal funding for stem cell research.
Despite public opinion polls showing support for the research, the White House said the veto was a matter of conscience:
This is, certainly not an attempt to muzzle science," White House press secretary Tony Snow said. "It is an attempt, I think, to respect people's conscience on such an issue."
So we've all known New York's billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg was a Republican in name only. He was a Democrat until switching to run for mayor. Now he's claimed the political trifecta by declaring himself an independent.
After some six years as a Republican, the 65-year-old former CEO announced Tuesday that he has left the Republican Party and become unaffiliated in what many believe could be a step toward entering the 2008 race for president.
John Edwards says it's all about electability.
M.E. Sprengelmeyer reports from Iowa:
The way Edwards sees it, if the Democratic Party's 2008 presidential nominee can't help like-minded candidates win in closely contested congressional districts and states where Senate seats are up for grabs, then the progressive agenda will be lost. It's all about coattails.
So let's say God gave you a chance to ask Him/Her one question, What would it be?
The question drew hundreds of responses at St. James Presbyterian Church in Littleton. The 10 most-asked questions will be sermon grist for the next 10 Sundays, Jean Torkelson reports.
10 What's my life all about?
9 Why are some people healed and others not?
8 Will you really forgive me?
The rest inside.
What's the use of living in Boulder and having a lot of money if you can't show it off? And the best way to show it off? Build a bigger house.
Alas some Boulderites are miffed at the cavernous cribs being constructed and new rules are being proposed to scale back their neighbors' house, reports John Rebchook.
At the very least, the rules would make it more difficult - and more expensive - to build homes bigger than a certain size, initially over 2,600 square feet in the mountains and 4,000 square feet on the plains.
He's not in the race yet but Fred Thompson has vaulted to the top of the GOP Presidential pack according to the latest Rasmussen Reports poll.
This is all silly money until Thompson actually joins the fray and starts going head-to-head with Rudy Giuliani, whom he supplanted at the top, Mitt Romney, John McCain and the rest. Thompson's lead is within the margin of error but it is the first time this year that anyone but Giuliani has led the pack.
Vacation - All I ever wanted Vacation - Had to get away.
So sang the Go-Gos in their 1982 pop hit. We all deserve an occasional trouble-free escape from life's stressful routines. Trouble is, our best-laid vacation plans often go disastrously astray:
Hotel rooms that looked good on the Web site but turned out to resemble the hovel occupied by Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy.
Mike Jones says he was used to his clients not being who they said they were.
But when "Art from Kansas City" turned out to be national evangelical leader Ted Haggard, the repurcussions struck deep into the conservative Christian community. After Jones revealed their sexual relationship, Haggard resigned as president of the National Association of Evangelicals and from his mega-church in Colorado Springs.
Jones' book, I Had to Say Something: The Art of Ted Haggard's Fall, details his life as an escort and bodybuilder and explicitly details his meetings with Haggard.
(Photo from allposters.com)
Just thought you'd like a little reminder to slather on the deodorant with temperatures headed into the 90s today:
Denver is 69th in a list of the 100 sweatiest cities in the U.S., according to a study released Monday by Old Spice deodorant maker Procter & Gamble, basing its results on average high summer temperatures.
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I'm glad my driver's license doesn't expire for four years. But maybe I should get in line now.
The state's revenue director says four in 10 people are turned away on their first attempt to get their driver's license, reports Ann Imse. And that's after standing in line for hours.
Rocky columnist Mike Littwin spent time in New Hampshire looking for the 'there' in GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney:
Romney is suddenly very hot. John McCain looks like he's fading, at least for now, under the weight of Iraq and immigration. Rudy Giuliani looks like he's worried about playing in the early primary states. Fred Thompson, the new Republican flavor, has been labeled by candidate Mike Huckabee as the Mighty Mouse candidate. "You know," he says, "here I come to save the day." But Thompson remains unbloodied.
Romney, meanwhile, is running as the successful CEO Republican; in other words, the one who's not George Bush. The one who likes to talk more about trade with China than death in Iraq. But if he's hot, he's no hotter than the attention he's getting, most of which follows a familiar story line - similar to the one that closely followed another recent Massachusetts presidential candidate.
And so, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen writes that Romney is so "counterfeit" that if "he were a coin, a vending machine would spit him out," and Time columnist Joe Klein writes "there isn't the slightest hint of courage or conviction in his stump act." You get the center-left conventional wisdom on Romney as the plastic candidate.
And John McCain's campaign reportedly owns a mittvsfacts.com Web site. McCain says now he won't use the Web site, but he'll still point to Romney's, uh, inconsistencies.
Does this rock look like Elvis Presley?
It does to Lynn and LaDell Alexander, who discovered the image as they were rinsing off some river rocks gathered near their vacation home in Estes Park, reports Justin Coons.
The names of at least 15,000 suspected illegal immigrants were turned over to federal authorities under terms of a new state law during the last six months of 2006, reports Burt Hubbard.
And then ...
Law enforcement officials debate whether the new law is having its intended effect. hey said they doubt the enhanced reporting has led to any more deportations of criminal illegal immigrants..
Al Gore says the agreement by world leaders to limit greenhouse gases was a "disgrace disguised as an achievement."
The dedicated climate crusader, whose 2006 global warming documentary won an Oscar, said leaders at last week's G8 summit in Germany had not risen to the challenge to respond to what he calls a "planetary emergency."
Gore also said he hoped to push climate change to the front of the 2008 Presidential campaign, but likely not as a candidate.
The aftermath of Hamas' armed takeover of Gaza was marked by looting crowds but only sporadic violence.
Violence, which came despite a Hamas offer of amnesty for Fatah, was sporadic. Gaza's streets, deserted in the past week of fighting, were crowded with cars, pedestrians and triumphant fighters with the Islamic militant group.
Those of us of a certain age - and some of our kids - got our first science fix from Mr. Wizard, who died this week of cancer at age 89.
Don Herbert taught a generation of youngsters staring at black-and-white TVs that science was fun and brought real kids into the studio to help with experiments we could do at home.
The sultry young lady coos into the phone: "Hey B, it's me. If you're there pick up, I was just watching you on C-SPan (sigh) anyway, call me back."
So goes the opening of I Got a Crush ... on Obama, a new video spoofing Barack Obama's rock-star appeal that's drawn tens of thousands of viewers since it debuted earlier this week on its home site barelypoltical.com, You Tube and other viral video sites.
Father's Day is Sunday and all of us dads deserve to be pampered and shown due deference ("Hey dad tell us again how tought it was for you when you were a kid").
Share a story about your dad: Why he's worth honoring, what he taught you, how he shaped your life and what you're planning for Father's Day.
My dad is 83 and in fading health the last year. I was able to get back last fall and take him to his last Purdue football game, a Saturday ritual for us from the time I was in sixth grade through high school. It's funny how you remember the little things: the day he bought me my first good baseball glove, our long-standing (to this day) joke from a Ma & Pa Kettle movie about plunking the bottom of the collection plate to make it sound like you'd dropped some money, the funny asides he still occasionally makes, buying a red Mustang convertible when he was 72 - then buying another one when he was 78.
Marshalltown, Iowa, the small city that hosted visits by four presidential candidates in a span of 10 days, is changing. A rapidly-growing Hispanic population has exacerbated tensions in a city that now mirrors the ethnic face of America.
M.E. Sprengelmeyer reports:
During the 1990s, there was a more than ten-fold increase in Marshalltown's Hispanic population. Folks mostly from the states of Michoachán and Guanajuato, Mexico, were drawn by higher-paying jobs at the meat packing plant and the promise of a safe, small-town environment where they could raise their families.Over the decade, the city's Hispanic population went from 248 to 3,265, helping to make up for a slow, generation-long decline in the city's white population. By the year 2000, Marshalltown had 26,009 residents and almost exactly the same proportion of Hispanic residents as the rest of the United States, 12.6 percent.
