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Happy Monday, folks! It’s Laura Ellis with a look at what’s on the SoA agenda for Derby Week!
Today we’re learning more about the life and career of James Winkfield, the last African-American jockey to ride to victory in the Kentucky Derby, in 1902. Why has it been so long? The dearth of African-Americans in modern racing is even more puzzling when you consider that in the first Kentucky Derby in 1875, 13 out of 15 jockeys were black. And that among the first 28 derby winners, 15 were ridden by African-American jockeys. What happened to make horse racing so segregated?
Tomorrow we’ll talk with sports writer and author Ed McNamara about Cajun racing, and why so many of today’s great jockeys hail from Louisiana.
On Wednesday we’re still talking horses, but with a different event in mind. The Alltech FEI World Equestrian Games 2010 in Kentucky will represent the largest equine sporting event ever held in the United States. The games are taking place this fall at Kentucky Horse Park – their first time ever to be held outside Europe. Tune in to learn more about the games, their significance, and what preparations are being made at the horse park.
Thursday is our annual Handicapping the Derby show! Join us to get our experts’ picks on who to put your money on this Saturday. If you’re not guarding them to closely, call and tell us your own secret methods for picking a horse (and ‘fess up if you go by silks color, or let your toddler pick!).
Friday we’ll be rounding out the week with State of the News – apparently news goes on, even during Derby Week.
I got an e-mail about this the other day. Has anyone seen one of these bags?
If you’re walking or driving in Louisville and you see a plastic grocery bag hanging from a lightpost, it’s probably the work of Stu Noland. For the past month or so, Noland has been hanging bags from poles in his neighborhood and marking them with signs bearing the three-arrow recycling logo, hoping that passersby will use them.
“On my daily dog walks I pick up all the litter in the downtown part of Phoenix Hill/Butchertown,” says Noland. “I don’t really mind doing this but I hate carrying trash with me for blocks where there are no trash cans. I call these areas trash can deserts.”
Noland says most of what he was picking up was recylcing, so he started hanging bags. He empties them when they fill up and drops the recyclables off. He’s planning to expand the operation soon and put up more than 40 of the homebrew stations in his neighborhood.
Now, this isn’t an official Metro Government recycling program, and when I first heard the story, I couldn’t imagine that the bags would stay hanging for very long. Noland says he has run into problems.
“People seem to remove the bags occasionally, for example city workers when hanging Thunder signs even though it wasn’t in the way,” he says. “The people at the BBC tap room ripped the sign off the pole, I have had some positive response but I think some people’s initial reaction is that the bag is ugly hanging from the pole. I would say what’s uglier, a recycling station or trash on the ground?”
What are your thoughts? Do you ever put your recyclables in other peoples’ bins? Would you put your cans in one of Noland’s receptacles?
The Courier-Journal has decided not to endorse a candidate in the Republican Primary for U.S. Senate.
The editorial announcing the decision uses a fair amount of space criticizing Rand Paul‘s ultra-small government stance.
Let us hasten to add that this most definitely is not this newspaper’s perspective on how our nation’s government, and our society, should be structured. The 20th Century changes that expanded government’s reach to ensure safer, fairer and healthier lives for all Americans were fruits of a kind of democracy we embrace. And those changes were brought about by both parties, the Republicans under Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, and the Democrats under Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton.
Something changed in America after the Watergate debacle. Dissatisfaction with the changes that brought about the Civil Rights acts of the 1960s, the women’s movement, the environmental movement and finally the push for gay rights — coupled with expensive government programs — has fueled since the time of Ronald Reagan an anger and fear.
Yet Dr. Paul, for all his support of smaller government and his interest in the tax-reduction ideas of the tea partiers, is neither an angry nor resentful person. He’s thoughtful and witty in an elfin sort of way. Yet his candidacy has been embraced by such extremists as former Gov. Sarah Palin, Dr. Frank Simon and the tea party movement.
Trey Grayson isn’t exempt from criticism in the piece, either, and after lamenting the Secretary of State’s response to his challenger, the paper shifts to give a general critique of the GOP’s latest turn.
Mr. Grayson seems to have been blindsided by all of this. He seems physically and mentally dazed, and uncomfortable in his own skin as he responds by rolling out extreme right-wing positions. His rapid movement to the far right leaves many wondering what he really stands for.
How different these two men are from the Republican statesmen who once represented Kentucky in Congress — John Sherman Cooper, Thruston B. Morton and Marlow W. Cook. While often adhering to traditional Republican perspective on economic conservatism, they reflected an open-minded, independent moderation — heirs of Henry Clay in fact.
The party of Mitch McConnell has betrayed that legacy and the good people who shaped it. Not surprisingly, Sen. Cook — now in retirement in Florida — frequently supports Democrats.
BBC World News America recently produced this story on the Republican primary for the U.S. Senate, Rand Paul and the significance of his success.
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This post comes to us from environmental reporter Kristin Espeland-Gourlay.
This week, the Ohio River Radio Consortium was all about Earth Day. We sent Consortium reporters to several locations on the day itself to find out how people were celebrating in various parts of the Valley. Turns out, there were events everywhere, of every stripe, for the young, old, and in between.
Why focus so much on it? This Earth Day was the celebration’s 40th anniversary. As we wrote at www.ohioriverradio.org, 20 million Americans came out to protest for better environmental policies on the first Earth Day, and since then it’s gone global. It was a chance, also, to look at how far we’ve come, environmentally speaking, since then, and how far we still have to go. Things really started to pick up for the environment right after that first Earth Day – the Clean Water Act came along, and the Clean Air Act, and more, all major pieces of environmental legislation that have gone a long way toward cleaning up our water, air, and more. But lately, it seems, we’ve been unable to drum up the kind of support needed for such significant environmental legislation, and we’ve seen enforcement of some of what’s already on the books go limp.
As one 10 year old boy told me at an Earth Day celebration in Springfield, KY, “Looks like we need a lot more Earth Days.”
Here’s an update on the Homeless Shelter Task Force, cross-posted with WFPL.
Wayside Christian Mission may legally be able to operate a homeless shelter in downtown Louisville by the end of the summer.
The Homeless Shelter Task Force was formed to address the gap in zoning laws that neither allowed nor prohibited Wayside’s proposed shelter at 2nd and Broadway. The task force’s final recommendation would allow shelters like Wayside’s in commercial spaces like downtown, and does not set a limit for how many shelters can be in a specific area.
“There are not distance mandates,” says Assistant Director of Planning and Design Services Dawn Warrick. “That was something the task force did discuss: whether or not there should be a requirement for a certain amount of distance to be mandated between various facilities.”
Warrick says the task force does recommend the city establish a licensing standard for shelters.
“We do business licensing for all types of activities within the community at this point in time,” she says. “You operate a restaurant, you have a business licenses, you operate a taxi service you have a business license.”
The task force also suggests that shelters operating in certain zoning areas follow specific quality standards. The recommendations now go to the Planning Commission. If approved, they will be sent to the Metro Council for final approval, which could come as early as July.
Earlier this week, The Ville Voice ran a story claiming that Democratic mayoral candidate Greg Fischer was not named one of Inc. Magazine‘s 1990 Entrepreneurs Of The Year, which the post says is contrary to what the candidate says. Later, another post says Fischer did in fact win an award (along with his father and brother), sponsored by Inc. Magazine, Business First, Merrill Lynch and Ernst & Young. Fischer is in the Ernst & Young database as an award winner.
The Fischer Campaign has responded, saying this award is an entrepreneur of the year award from/sponsored by Inc. (among others) and given to the Fischers.
So it appears that no, Greg Fischer did not win the national Inc. Magazine Entrepreneur of the Year award, but he did win an Entrepreneur of the Year award affiliated with Inc. Fischer’s spokesperson says this is in line with Fischer’s previous statements, and the candidate does not claim to have won the national award. The Fischers/SerVend did win a regional Inc. Magazine Entrepreneur of the Year, and the campaign sent scanned pages from a 1990 Business First supplement as proof (see below).
If you read (it’s hard since this is a lo-res copy) the last paragraph of the first page article, it says:
The finalists are in the running for the title of U.S. Entrepreneur of the Year. The national winner will be featured in Inc’s cover story in January 1991.
