Walt Shepperd is a veteran of Central New York's political scuffle, having covered government and politics in Syracuse for more than four decades before being asked for press credentials.
He is the Senior Editor of the City Eagle and the Mayor of Montgomery Street in downtown Syracuse.
Shepperd is also the producer of the The Media Unit, Central New York national award winning teen performance and production troupe.
Samadee is his alter ego. At least that's the rumor.
Zashalise Moore celebrated her 16th birthday performing on stage at WMU, the Media Unit’s multi-purpose downtown studio. She had auditioned for the Media Unit in June, creating the character of Bone, a turf crew chief, for the Unit’s summer tour of Angels with Broken Wings: Starting All Over Again, a local West Side Story for the 21st Century. She didn’t know what to expect when she auditioned, she reflected recently. Maybe the atmosphere of a school play, she thought, or a community theater experience. What she found, she said, was discipline she had never imagined, incredible hard work, incredible fun and a new family...
Sports fans can be delighted by the brutally honest (“They just really stink.”) commentary provided at halftimes and between NBA games by the league’s former star Charles Barclay. They can chuckle envisioning the prospective Alabama statehouse banter when he alludes to the possibility of running for governor of the state where he had All-American impact while playing college basketball at Auburn. But Barclay can catch an occasional funk, distracting from the light-hearted, if piercingly analytical exchanges with Kenny Smith, Magic Johnson and other hoop greats of the past. Most disconcerting, however, was a discussion which focused on the role inherited by Barclay or any prominent American athlete, whether they relish it or not...
Time was running out again for Samadee. Uninvited to the presidential debates after declaring his intentions, and unable to identify an appropriate occasion to announce his candidacy for Congress, he was now forced to focus on the Senior Editor’s observation eight years ago on the primacy of being the first out of the chute in a widely open mayoral race. “Fraught with equal parts clear-cut advantage and potential disaster,” the Senior Editor noted. “Sending out the first fund-raising letter means dibs on money that will not be available to candidates who announce later, and asking for commitments of support from political colleagues often pre-empts their choosing more logical alignments with others...
Although he has qualified to be on the ballot in 45 states, Populist presidential candidate Ralph Nader gets little if any mention riding the morning surf from MSNBC to CNN to FOX. But a respectable contingent of local media turned out for his visit for a press conference at Green Party headquarters and a rally at The Westcott, the old cinema house recently reopened as a multi-purpose entertainment facility. Still the subject of debate as to whether he was spoiler to Al Gore’s 2000 loss to George Bush, Nader polled almost a quarter million votes in New York State that year...
