An Editorial/Dale McFeatters, Scripps Howard News Service

Big Bill Hutcheson was a driving and powerful force in the labor movement as president of the United Carpenters and Joiners. He built his union to be a force to be reckoned with in the bare-knuckled days of the 1920s,'30s and '40s. He was every bit the stereotype of a labor boss.

The United States was born in the Revolutionary War, but the nation as we know it today was largely shaped and defined by the Civil War, whose sesquicentennial we begin observing this year.

Something is trying to kill the great trees of America.

The latest is the American ash, which has become the prey of the emerald ash borer whose larvae kill the tree from the inside and when it dies the borers move on to the next tree.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her deputy, Steny Hoyer, stand accused of calling the impassioned, enraged and generally incoherent protesters currently disrupting town-hall meetings as "un-American."

Psychologically, Hillary Clinton faces a demanding fall. If she wants a political future beyond the Senate, the former first lady must not be seen as going less than all out to elect Barack Obama, even though relations between the two camps can charitably described as strained.

It seems to be a law of modern American politics that if there are conventions, there must be protesters.True to that law, the protesters arrived in Denver along with the Democrats.