All Blog Posts from Couric & Co.

The most striking thing about the race is how loud it is. Ear-splitting, popping engines pull up to the starting line, and you have to yell to be heard above the din. The men, seated on their sputtering vehicles, are outfitted in helmets and boots and in some cases, knee pads and neck braces. This is a small town - about 200 residents - and close to 25 percent of the town will be racing today. Everyone knows everyone, if they're not blood relatives.

The race starts and they circle the baseball diamond on a dirt track, going 50, 60 miles per hour, and the air becomes cloudy with dust. Now your eyes hurt and your ears ring but you can't stop laughing, because the sight of 50 grown men folded into their John Deere lawnmowers and hurtling themselves at top speed through the park is something you've never seen before.

Jack Renaud is a CBS News producer based in New York. He's attended 12 Kentucky Derbies, but is still waiting patiently to witness his first Triple Crown.

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No one has an answer. Not his trainer, not his owners, not his legion of fans.

No one can tell you exactly why Barbaro, America's tragic Super Horse, affected so many people, so deeply. The mere fact that his baby brother Nicanor (pictured above, being walked by exercise rider Pam Ritter at Palm Meadows in Boynton Beach, Fla.) is about to come to the racetrack for the first time has people in the horse world whispering. No one is saying "Nic" will be nearly as good as his big brother (was Jim Belushi really ever as funny as his brother John?). Well, if even if he's half as good, that will really be something.

But Barbaro's biggest legacy goes beyond the racetrack ...

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At some level, winning on Election Day is nothing more than a numbers game. And much of that game comes down to districts, votes, the electoral college and battleground states.

Think you know which way some of those states will swing? Our politics team has created a nifty new map that not only lets you play with the formula to see the different "ways to win," but also is chocked full of information on the battleground states.

To try it yourself, just click here - or check out the simplified version of the map in the widget below. And don't forget to let us know what you think.

Correspondent Richard Schlesinger contributes to 48 Hours and the CBS Evening News. He is based in New York.

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I am an unashamed animal lover, so I have a sort of love/hate feeling about the horse racing industry.

I think the animals are magnificent but I’ve always had trouble with the business side of the racing world. Bad things happen to horses who don’t measure up or can’t perform any more. So I was eager to talk to Michael Blowen who runs Old Friends, the retirement home for race horses to see how he squares his love of the animals with the reality of the business. Turns out he’s troubled about it too -- and that’s what motivates him to rescue as many horses as he can. You can see how he's doing it tonight on the Evening News.

It is important to remember that there are some responsible owners who do provide for their horses after the animals’ productive years have passed. But Blowen believes there aren’t enough.

His facility is amazing. He has about 20 horses there, many of them you might remember from their glory days. Blowen has this marvelous relationship with them. He knows each one, knows their personalities, and is eager to meet their needs. He uses words like dignity and respect when he talks about what he wants to give these horses.

I left there grateful for the opportunity to meet him (AND the horses!)

CBS News legal analyst Andrew Cohen owns and races horses.There will be no Triple Crown winner in thoroughbred racing this year, again, thanks to a great stretch drive by Curlin in last Saturday’s Preakness Stakes. The big colt blew past Street Sense, the winner of the Kentucky Derby, right at the wire, to the delight of his patrons but to the dismay of racing fans everywhere who are rooting for that one magical horse to take the sport where it hasn’t been in a generation.

That’s the bad news in the horse world. The good news is that it has been a remarkable week for opponents of the barbaric practice of horse slaughter in this country. From Texas, where two slaughter plants were forced to remain closed, to Illinois, where Governor Rod Blagojevich signed into law a measure making it illegal in that state to slaughter horses for human consumption. The new statute in Illinois effectively shuts down the third and last plant in the country that dedicated its operations to killing our horses to sell as food for humans in other countries.

Neither the United States Supreme Court, which turned down an appeal by the Texas slaughterers, nor the Texas legislature, which tabled a bill that might have allowed the plants to re-open, was willing to ride to the rescue of a practice that seems out of a different time and certainly out of place for a nation founded, for the most part, on horse back. And even from Congress the recent news is good. The American Horse Slaughter Prevention Act was voted out of committee in the Senate—last term it passed in the House of Representatives—and should actually become the law of the land before the current legislative session ends in 2009.

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