time 24 minutes

Broncos owner Pat Bowlen introduced Peyton Manning to reporters today at the team's headquarters at a news conference, which was aired live locally and nationally on ESPN2.

The news conference was schedule for 1 p.m. and started about 20 minutes late.

Bowlen said "this is sort of a historic meeting today. We're glad to have two Hall of Fame quarterbacks.

"Our goal has always been to win Super Bowls. Peyton gives us another chance to win a world championship.

John Elway came up next and thanked Bowlen for the chance to get Manning.

"We are fortunate to work for a guy like Mr. Bowlen. Without the commitment of Mr. Bowlen we wouldn't have Peyton here today," Elway said.

Elway

said he thinks Manning has "a lot of great years" to play football.

"My goal is to make Pm the best quarterback to play the game," Elway said. "He's a guy that will make our football team better, just because of the type of person he is," Elway said.

Manning likes Broncos best

Manning thanked the teams he visited, but "In the end, I felt the Broncos were just a great fit. Elway is one of the best quarterbacks to play. Talking football with John, coach Fox and his staff made me realize this is a great place to be."

Making the pick

Manning said he woke up Monday morning and "first called the two other teams that were finalist in the process to let them know I appreciated the time.

"Having my first visit here, I felt very comfortable here. John and Coach Fox felt comfortable, and hopefully that leads to many wins."

Solid staff to join

Manning said he was going to meet today with the training staff and also "I'm going to stay there through the week and get situated."

After meeting with the Broncos staff, Manning said "I knew these guys knew what they were doing and were committed to winning."

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Federal authorities announced Monday night that they are opening a full-scale criminal investigation into the slaying of an unarmed black Florida teenager whose death provoked an outcry from African American leaders and sparked calls for gun-control reforms in Florida.

A Justice Department spokeswoman said in a statement that its Civil Rights Division, in conjunction with the FBI, planned to conduct an investigation into the death last month of Trayvon Martin and to work with local groups in the Orlando area to soothe rising tensions over the matter.

“The department will conduct a thorough and independent review of all of the evidence and take appropriate action at the conclusion of the investigation,” spokeswoman Xochitl Hinojosa said in a statement. “The department also is providing assistance to and cooperating with the state officials in their investigation into the incident.”

National figures such as the Rev. Al Sharpton and members of the Congressional Black Caucus have charged that local authorities have failed to deliver justice for the family of Martin, who was shot by a neighborhood watch volunteer. The volunteer told a police dispatcher that the 17-year-old appeared suspicious.

“I am outraged by the way in which this case has been handled by the Sanford Police Department in Florida,” said Rep. Emanuel Cleaver II (D-Mo.), chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, in a statement issued Monday before the Justice Department announced its investigation. “Those who are meant to protect us and our children have blatantly turned their backs on fairness and justice.”

After an enormously successful campaign to stop the Keystone XL Pipeline from being built, 350.org and numerous allies are gearing up for a major new fight to end four billion dollars in subsidies the fossil fuel industry receives each year.

There’s no way to move to renewable energy sources like wind and solar without ending the subsidies to an industry that’s already earning record-breaking profits: Exxon-Mobil is currently the most profitable corporation in the history of capitalism.

These subsidies are delivered through the tax code but they are essentially no different from government spending programs that provide money directly. As Seth Hanlon explained on Think Progress: “Some of these tax earmarks have been around for nearly a century, and the deep-pocketed industry has successfully challenged previous repeal attempts. But today’s high gas prices and inflated profits have undermined the industry’s argument that their tax breaks benefit consumers. Meanwhile, federal budget deficits have sharpened Congress’s focus on eliminating wasteful government spending—of which oil subsidies are one of the worst examples.”

So, the time is right to challenge the longstanding advantages the fossil fuel industry has enjoyed in this country. If you’re ready to join this fight, sign on with 350. Over the next month, the group will issue a series of alerts designed to ramp up the pressure on elected officials by having them publicly declare where they stand on the question of subsidies.

The first step is this petition, designed to show Congress how important this issue is, and to alert every member of Congress that an army of concerned citizens are taking this issue very seriously. As Bill McKibben says in this stirring video message, “This fight is a lifetime fight.” Join the battle now.

Just before the vote, McConnell took to the senate floor and praised the lead sponsors, Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Jim Inhofe (R-OK) for their bipartisan effort. “They have worked together in a collegial way to bring us to this point on the highway bill,” he raved.

Moments later, McConnell joined 21 other Republicans — and no Democrats — in voting against the bill. The House is expected to take up a similar version in April, rather than the far inferior House Republican version.

In early March, the Laborers’ International Union of America launched a radio and mail ad campaign aimed at prodding Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) to pass the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act, a highway and transportation bill.

Their ads, focused on Kentucky and Ohio, included children singing “America’s bridges falling down, all around the country,” to the tune of the song “London Bridge is Falling Down.” A narrator warned:

The average age of a U.S. bridge is 45 years, dangerously close to the life span of 50 years. More than a quarter of our bridges are structurally deficient or functionally obsolete. Because of tight budgets, bridge maintenance is in jeopardy. and if Republican leaders in Congress have their way those budgets will get cut even more. Text “Bridge” to 69866 and let Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell know we need a real highway bill to save our bridges and our lives.

This got the attention of McConnell’s staff, who posted a refutation on his campaign website. McConnell professed his support for the highway bill and slammed Laborers for its support of Democratic candidates and the “radical” Occupy movement.

“Contrary to the assertion in the ads,” McConnell’s staff claimed, “Senator McConnell has been working to pass the highway bill in the U.S. Senate, which is currently slated for a vote on final passage next week.” A McConnell spokesman also told a Louisville, Kentucky radio station that the minority leader was working with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) to pass the highway bill.

Just before the vote, McConnell took to the senate floor and praised the lead sponsors, Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Jim Inhofe (R-OK) for their bipartisan effort. “They have worked together in a collegial way to bring us to this point on the highway bill,” he raved.

Moments later, McConnell joined 21 other Republicans — and no Democrats — in voting against the bill. The House is expected to take up a similar version in April, rather than the far inferior House Republican version.

McConnell’s office did not respond to a request for comment on why he voted against a bill he’d pledged to support and no explanations were apparent on his senate or campaign websites. But it would certainly appear that the Republican leader owes the Laborers an apology.

WASHINGTON — For more than two years, a handful of Democrats on the Senate intelligence committee have warned that the government is secretly interpreting its surveillance powers under the Patriot Act in a way that would be alarming if the public — or even others in Congress — knew about it.

On Thursday, two of those senators — Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado — went further. They said a top-secret intelligence operation that is based on that secret legal theory is not as crucial to national security as executive branch officials have maintained.

The senators, who also said that Americans would be “stunned” to know what the government thought the Patriot Act allowed it to do, made their remarks in a letter to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. after a Justice Department official last month told a judge that disclosing anything about the program “could be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security of the United States.”

The Justice Department has argued that disclosing information about its interpretation of the Patriot Act could alert adversaries to how the government collects certain intelligence. It is seeking the dismissal of two Freedom of Information Act lawsuits — by The New York Times and by the American Civil Liberties Union — related to how the Patriot Act has been interpreted.

The senators wrote that it was appropriate to keep specific operations secret. But, they said, the government in a democracy must act within publicly understood law so that voters “can ratify or reject decisions made on their behalf” — even if that “obligation to be transparent with the public” creates other challenges.

“We would also note that in recent months we have grown increasingly skeptical about the actual value of the ‘intelligence collection operation,’ ” they added. “This has come as a surprise to us, as we were initially inclined to take the executive branch’s assertions about the importance of this ‘operation’ at face value.”

The dispute centers on what the government thinks it is allowed to do under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, under which agents may obtain a secret order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court allowing them to get access to any “tangible things” — like business records — that are deemed “relevant” to a terrorism or espionage investigation.

There appears to be both an ordinary use for Section 215 orders — akin to using a grand jury subpoena to get specific information in a traditional criminal investigation — and a separate, classified intelligence collection activity that also relies upon them.

The interpretation of Section 215 that authorizes this secret surveillance operation is apparently not obvious from a plain text reading of the provision, and was developed through a series of classified rulings by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

The letter from Mr. Wyden and Mr. Udall also complained that while the Obama administration told Congress in August 2009 that it would establish “a regular process for reviewing, redacting and releasing significant opinions” of the court, since then “not a single redacted opinion has been released.”

Members of a spiritual band are suing The Durango Herald, accusing its Arts and Entertainment Editor Ted Holteen of sending an allegedly threatening email to the group’s booking agent prior to a show it played last July in Durango.

The lawsuit, filed Feb. 22 in U.S. District Court in Arizona, seeks damages in excess of $1.3 million. The plaintiffs accuse Holteen of making threats, inflicting emotional distress and targeting band members because of their religious beliefs.

The four plaintiffs are members of a spiritually based community supported by Global Community Communications Alliance, a church based in Tubac, Ariz., according to the lawsuit. The band performs songs with spiritual lyrics conveying the community’s message.

Herald Managing Editor Don Lindley said the Herald will defend the lawsuit.

“We have referred this matter to our attorneys, and we expect them to defend it,” he said.

Holteen declined to comment for this story.

According to the lawsuit, Holteen sent an email to the band’s booking agent from his Herald email account July 8. In the email, Holteen was critical of the band’s musical talents, mocked its use of spiritual names and expressed hope that band members suffer bodily harm or death.

“If there was a hell I’d wish you to burn there for eternity, but since no such place exists, I can only hope that you suffer horribly painful deaths,” he wrote.

The email was sent in reply to an email from the band’s booking agent sent to Holteen offering to help arrange an interview with band members if Holteen wanted to write a story.

The email was sent June 9, and Holteen replied on July 8 – the day the band was scheduled to play at the Fort Lewis College Concert Hall in Durango.

The booking agent was “very shaken up,” the lawsuit says, and forwarded the email to the band members. The band members found the email to be painful, traumatic and distressing, the lawsuit says.

A trumpet player showed the email to the spiritual leader’s bodyguard, “who viewed the message as a serious threat of violence,” the lawsuit says.

The spiritual leader notified the Durango Police Department which referred the matter to the Fort Lewis College Campus Police. An officer viewed the email and assured there would be heightened security for the concert, the lawsuit says.

A band member tried to obtain a restraining order against Holteen prior to the show, but no judge was immediately available to issue an order, the lawsuit says.

The band performed its show July 8 in Durango.

But the spiritual leader canceled the band’s previously booked shows in Denver, Santa Fe and Phoenix. The tour was canceled based on concern for the safety of the band and the spiritual leader’s family, the lawsuit says.

Each of the four plaintiffs is seeking in excess of $75,000 in compensatory damages. In punitive damages, they collectively are seeking $1 million.

NASCAR, best known for pushing the speed envelope, has launched a new traffic safety campaign with a sustainable twist. Rather than focusing narrowly on strategies to help drivers to look out for their own lives, the campaign deploys a broad message of taking responsibility for the safety of others. According to a press release launch, the campaign's mission goes far beyond road safety to encourage "personal responsibility for our planet and its people, especially teens."

The mix of racing and planet-saving may seem like an odd paring, but NASCAR has a green track record and other organized sports such as baseball and football have increasingly taken it upon themselves to bring the green message to their fans. In fact, according to NASCAR, racing fans may be at least slightly more receptive to adopting sustainability-related actions than the general public.

The new campaign makes more sense if you think of it in the context of green driving. The goal of green driving is to be more environmentally responsible behind the wheel by saving fuel and reducing tailpipe emissions, but road safety is a significant secondary benefit of green driving basics: no speeding, tailgating or weaving, and avoiding jackrabbit starts and stops.

Rush Limbaugh’s show has never sounded so bleeding-heart liberal as it did this week, when commercial sponsors bailed and were replaced by the United Negro College Fund, Feeding America, the US Department of Health and Human Services and other nonprofits and governmental agencies. In fact, of the eighty ads running Friday on the online stream of Limbaugh’s flagship station, WABC in New York, seventy-one were public service announcements and three were station promos. According to Media Matters, one of the six remaining paid ads was from an advertiser who had asked for it to be pulled.

Now some fifty national advertisers—more if you count locals—have pulled their ads from Limbaugh’s show to avoid being associated with his attacks on Sandra Fluke as a “slut” and “prostitute.” Rushbo is so radioactive right now that even some PSA freebies are running away from him. The American Heart Association wrote in an e-mail to Bloomberg.com, “It is our practice to be a content-sensitive advertiser, and in light of the current controversy, we will be asking WABC to no longer utilize these unpaid PSAs.”

So it’s been a bad week for Rush. Though maybe not quite as bad as CNN, MSNBC and some blogs have made it sound. They all reported that on Thursday WABC suffered more than five minutes of dead air time where ads were supposed to have run on Limbaugh’s show, leaving the impression that radios across Gotham fell into real radio silence.

But it wasn’t quite as simple, or as satisfying, as that. The five minutes and thirty-three seconds of dead air (distributed over four commercial pods in the three-hour show) occurred, as Media Matters reported, only on WABC’s online show, not on the station’s broadcast.

The dead air, however, was indeed caused by the flight of Rush’s sponsors. Explaining what happened, one radio insider told me, “If advertisers are asked to pull [that many] ads, the system is experiencing something it hasn’t experienced before.” That is, the software’s algorithms couldn’t handle the replacement of so many regular spots with PSAs in the time before transmission.

I asked Michael Harrison, publisher of the trade magazine Talkers if this was the largest exodus ever of radio advertisers. “It’s hard to rank because it’s hard to say how long it will go on,” he says. But in terms of that many advertisers bolting in so brief a period, he says, “This is the biggest.”

“Here’s what matters: how many listeners start to pull out,” Harrison continues. “Then there’s a problem for the future. We suspect that his audience is increasing now. The irony is that Limbaugh’s advertising is probably worth more than ever. But unless you believe that the American advertising industry has a high bar for standards and taste, then there will [eventually] be more advertisers coming on. We’re talking about nobody advertising on the number-one show in the business. How likely is that?”

Harrison, who describes himself as politically neutral and interested only in the health of the broadcast industry, adds, “The worst thing that could happen is that advertisers will gang up on Limbaugh and he’ll end up on satellite or streaming only. If this accelerates to where it severely hurts Limbaugh and thereby all of terrestrial radio, including many stations that play liberal hosts, it will be another nail in the coffin of terrestrial radio.”

But for now, at least, Limbaugh’s stain appears to be spreading mainly to other right-wing talkers (as well as some of the cruder shock jocks). Some ninety-eight advertisers have asked that their ads appear nowhere near Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck, et al., according to Radio-info.com. The website published a memo from Clear Channel subsidiary Premier Networks that listed advertisers (including Ford, GM, Toyota, Allstate, Geico, Prudential, State Farm, McDonald’s and Subway) who, as the memo states,

specifically asked that you schedule their commercials in dayparts or programs free of content that you know are deemed to be offensive or controversial (for example, Mark Levin, Rush Limbaugh, Tom Leykis, Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity). Those are defined as environments likely to stir negative sentiment from a very small percentage of the listening public.

Of course, if it really was so very small a percentage, this would not be a big problem for talk radio. And Rush would not be spending so much of the time on his program raising support for the United Negro College Fund.