There's a strict caste system for press passes in Denver. There's the perimeter pass, which gets you inside the general media area, which takes up a large portion of the parking lot to the Pepsi Center; a hall pass which gets you inside the Pepsi Center, but only throughout the concourse; and then there's the super pass, the Floor pass, which gets you in the inside of the arena, where you'd find Michelle Obama giving a speech.

Many media outlets--including us!--only have a handful of the Floor passes, so reporters have to trade off so the Floor Pass and the Hall Pass can circulate around. According to Rick Berke, assistant managing editor of the Times, who was wearing a perimeter pass, that's exactly what the paper of record is doiing. And Gail Collins, with her perimeter pass in hand, was wondering aloud who she could do a trade-off with.

An overheated Times columnist Gail Collins was leaving Media Pavilion 4 and heading to a port-a-potty when she stopped for a few minutes to chat. She said she was going to do some reporting, but she was only going armed with a notebook and tape recorder. 

"I've been carrying around the laptop for 2 hours today wandering through the city," she said. "The laptop is in there, and it's not moving. It stays there for the rest of the convention. I'll be moving, but not the laptop. After walking three miles in the sun—it's a presence in your life you'd like to eliminate."

On June 22, the Times public editor Clark Hoyt had a few words for the Times’ Maureen Dowd for several primary-season columns that disparaged Hillary Clinton. "Even [Ms. Dowd], I think, by assailing Clinton in gender-heavy terms in column after column, went over the top this election season."

So two days ago, current Op-Ed columnist (and former editorial page editor) Gail Collins wrote into Mr. Hoyt’s reader's response column to respond: "When the public editor laces into an opinion page columnist for making fun of a controversial political figure, it sounds like a suggestion that all of us tone things down. I hope I’m hearing wrong.  read more »

And how! The release describes Rosenthal's journalistic background, including stints as a Washington correspondent, Denver bureau reporter and AP sports stringer. It does not mention his earliest connection with the profession--and the Times: his birth, in 1956, to a celebrated young foreign correspondent named A.M. Rosenthal.

In New Orleans, the mayor seemed to assume all that was beyond his control, just like the mayors in the 1960's who let the riots occur.

They said their cities couldn't survive without help from Washington, which proceeded to shower inner cities with money and programs that did more damage than the riots. Cities didn't recover until some mayors, especially Republicans like Rudy Giuliani, tried self-reliance.