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Colorado & The Nation

Colorado School Lunches Get Fresh Tips from Antarctica

Chef Sally Ayotte in Antarctica

Last Friday’s Denver Post featured a quick piece on cooking-from-scratch training and tips for food directors in Colorado’s public school districts. How to turn out fresh meals for thousands? The weeklong summer bootcamps sponsored by LiveWell Colorado address the issue head on.

One thing the Post article does not mention is that bootcamp chef Sally Ayotte cut her chops, among other places, at Antarctica’s McMurdo Station. There, she oversaw the kitchen and served as many as 1,200+ hungry staffers, scientists, and visiting dignitaries up to four meals a day during the research station’s peak season.

I asked Sally about Antarctica and the bootcamps.

[Antarctica] has well equipped me to talk with food
service directors about quantity food production of good-tasting and
high-quality food under challenging circumstances!  I share with them
ways to produce large volumes of sauces and casseroles made from
scratch.  I wonder if you knew the McMurdo kitchen produces almost
everything from scratch.

As a matter of fact, I did not know that most of what we ate on the Ice (as it’s affectionately called) was from scratch. Having weathered both the elements and the fare at McMurdo in 2004 and 2005, I can attest that Ayotte is in a pretty good space to whip up fresh solutions for Colorado schools. And at least here she has the benefit of grocery stores, farmers markets, and regular Sysco deliveries to keep school chefs armed with fresh ingredients–and fresh ideas–to feed Colorado’s kids.

Matt Plavnick · June 17, 2010 · 11:17 pm

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KDVR Fox 31: McInnis “Annoyed” by Hickenlooper

After posting a tepid second place at his party’s assembly over the weekend, Denver’s Fox 31 characterizes Scott McInnis as “annoyed” and taking it out on Democratic gubernatorial candidate John Hickenlooper. Gotta enjoy watching Fox play to public favor for fringe candidates (Dan Maes) and poke the establishmentarian McInnis in the eye.

Matt Plavnick · May 26, 2010 · 9:38 am

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Cops Divided over Arizona Immigration Law

Spencer Hsu of The Washington Post has a tidy little article today detailing the rift among police communities over Arizona’s tough new immigration law. Chiefs of police from Los Angeles to Philadelphia–including three from Arizona towns Phoenix, Tucson, and Sahuarita–offer a dissenting view in the face of wide public opinion in favor of the law.*

A group of engaged police chiefs will meet with Attorney General Eric Holder to discuss the law. They’ll likely point to achievements among minority communities in recent years as a chief casualty in nationwide fallout from Arizona’s move.

In 2006, the Major Cities Chiefs Association — which represents 56 U.S. cities — unanimously warned that putting “local police in the crosshairs” of the national immigration debate would undo the success of community policing efforts in recent decades, said San Jose Police Chief Robert L. “Rob” Davis, association president and part of the group meeting Holder.

While Denver is not mentioned in the article, the city has its own stake in the issue. Both major candidates running for governor have come out, on partisan lines, for and against enacting similar legislation in Colorado. This issue, of course, will come into play in Colorado as candidates vie for breakout positions in a close political race.

*AFP, the wire agency behind the Yahoo! News link, does not provide direct survey reporting to support the claim. I’ve got the write-up for you here, and here are Pew’s actual survey questions (.pdf). Additionally, other polls from the same timeframe reveal significant concerns about the quality and depth questions. Gallup took heat for an April poll that asked “Based on what you know or have read about the new Arizona immigration law, do you favor or oppose it?” Media Matters points out:

Gallup polled adults nationally about a law that only applies to one state and that, at the time of the survey, had only really been in the national news for a few days, and assumed people who had “heard” of the new law knew what the law was about? That strikes me as odd.

Indeed, the Gallup poll comes with a disclaimer: “Note that the poll did not attempt to measure actual knowledge about the law or describe the various provisions of the law to respondents.”

Such a poll could be regarded as a measure of media coverage more than a measure of public temperature for Arizona’s specific approach to immigration reform. To be sure, a closer read of the actual Gallup report supports the notion of reading the poll results as an indicator of general awareness that, unscientifically, gets tied to favorability. Heres Gallup’s “Bottom Line”: “Most Americans have heard about Arizona’s tough new immigration law, and they generally support it.”

To be fair, the Pew poll cited provided respondents with more information about the law before asking as to favorability. But it’s worth pointing out that by the time Pew called its 994 survey participants (May 6-12), the Gallup poll had already been released to the media (April 29) and widely broadcast, which arguably may have had an influential effect on the answers.

Matt Plavnick · May 26, 2010 · 9:12 am

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Komen & KFC Team Up Despite Obvious Disconnect

Friends on Facebook are buzzing about the Susan G. Komen Foundation’s partnership with KFC to raise money off the Colonel’s famous recipe. Fifty cents from every bucket goes toward breast cancer research. Only trouble is, fried chicken is linked to obesity and obesity is linked to increased risk of breast cancer and increased breast cancer mortality in postmenopausal women. (From the NCI, see #6.) Crikey.

Scott Henderson gives a great rundown on the caloric impact (varied according to order) of a so-called Komen bucket. Have the Komen folks turned a blind eye? What gives?

Matt Plavnick · April 21, 2010 · 9:34 pm

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Drum: Kill NCLB, Unite a Nation

Last week I wrote about Patrick Ruffini’s discussion of Republicans’ policy failure on health care. If anyone read Ruffini’s whole post, you’d have seen that, never mind his generally sensible takedown of Republican strategy, he wrote some delusional prose about No Child Left Behind.

At the outset of his Administration, George W. Bush set out to neutralize a key Democratic issue, education, with his No Child Left Behind Act. NCLB was a grab bag and not beloved by conservatives for its massive expansion in Federal spending in education, but it did insist on the vaguely conservative principle of accountability.

The merits of that legislation can continue to be debated, but one political outcome is clear. We don’t talk much about education at the federal level these days. There is a sense that the problem was “solved” by NCLB, which is now nearly a decade old. Likewise, no one will try to move welfare reform legislation because the successful 1996 reform law substantively and politically took the wind out of the sails of that issue.

Emphasis mine. The notion that there’s a perception, even a political perception, that education has been “solved” in this country, let alone by NCLB, leaves me completely bejabbered. Ruffini invokes education as the model from which Republicans might have mapped a plan to reach a more politically desirable set of circumstances surrounding health care while Bush was in office. That’s all fine and good, and perhaps Ruffini is on to something in his observation that good-faith Republican policy efforts peel away planks from the Democratic political platform. But invoking NCLB? Seriously?

For days, I’ve been wondering if anybody else caught that and whether I’m the only one who thinks Ruffini is completely nuts in his assessment. Today, Kevin Drum pulls numbers on NCLB and public opinion. Click here for the chart, which is worth the trip.

That’s pretty remarkable. Not only is NCLB massively unpopular a decade after it was passed, but it’s about equally unpopular with both Democrats and Republicans. Everyone hates it. If Barack Obama really wants to bring the nation together, it sounds like deep sixing NCLB completely might be a pretty good way to do it.

Very good, then. If by “solved” Ruffini means that no one favors the Bush education legacy, then we can all agree and call it a day.

Matt Plavnick · April 2, 2010 · 8:48 pm

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Betsy Markey on Sarah Palin, Health Care Reform, and the 2010 Midterm Election

UPDATE: In my haste, I neglected to mention a few simple facts. A) The event was by invitation, with a turnout of 55 people or so. B) I was present on account of a family connection (the hosts are my in-laws). C) While the crowd was mostly made up of Democrats, a few confirmed Republicans attended, and I’m curious to hear their impressions of Markey and her observations. Original post below the break.

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Congresswoman Betsy Markey

Betsy Markey in Loveland

“If Sarah Palin is targeting me, I must be doing something right!”

So said Betsy Markey this afternoon at a fundraiser in Loveland. The congresswoman arrived in high spirits and was happy to disabuse supporters of the notion that her vote in favor of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was politically challenging, despite reports to the contrary.  ”It made sense to me,” she said.

Markey spoke for about 15 minutes and took questions for another 20 or so. She echoed her statements from Saturday, recorded in the Denver Post, that it was time to get out and tell people what’s in the health care bill.

On the topic of paying for it, Markey pointed out that the Senate bill she voted for pays for itself in part with taxes on medical devices and top-tier insurance plans, and not on the backs of small business owners, a big reason for her switch from a no vote on the House bill to her yes vote last week.

When asked about abortion concessions made to get the Stupak bloc on board, Markey acknowledged that the current bill is messy. “It’s not good,” she said. “It goes too far. If you want health insurance and you want abortion coverage, you have to write two checks.” Markey expressed optimism, however, that the concessions were fixable through future resolutions. She went on to point out that the bill funnels money to Planned Parenthood and community clinics for health services–and pro-choice Democrats love to point out that greater health services access for women reduces abortions–and it forces insurance companies to quit treating womanhood as a preexisting condition.

Markey was similarly optimistic that future resolutions will allow for an evolving public option, whether through the public insurance exchanges established in the bill or through a Medicare buy-in act along the lines of the bill introduced by Florida Democrat Alan Grayson.

The talk was not all health care, however. Looking ahead, Markey pointed to major legislation pending on financial regulation and energy, and she also mentioned her reelection campaign. Here she trumpeted the party meme that if Republicans want to run on repealing health care, let ‘em. She thinks that by November, voters will be more interested in jobs and the economy, and they’ll have had a chance to see some good from the health care bill. In the end, she believes, those factors will determine the outcome of congressional races, not health care alone.

Matt Plavnick · March 28, 2010 · 9:01 pm

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Republicans Dissect Their Health Care Strategy

Via Yglesias, Patrick Ruffini dissects Republicans’ failure in the battle over health care policy.

On health care, I have no idea what our basic guiding principle is. Seriously, I don’t.

We have tried ineffectively to stretch free market rhetoric to health care without appreciating that health care is already too far removed from a free market for the analogy to make sense. Real markets are sensitive to price. Health care isn’t. The insurance companies hide the cost of actual care from the consumer.

. . . A well-developed Republican health reform effort could have addressed the high cost of health care — actually the most glaring issue in our system — in a way that would have served as a kind of tax cut for the already insured. And in lowering costs, we could have covered the people who wanted health care but couldn’t afford it — the nub of the uninsured problem.

Ruffini concedes that Republicans “brought a knife to a gun fight,” but the metaphor actually misses the point Ruffini works so hard to make. Democrats laid the ground work for a policy debate, heaving sheaf upon sheaf of data, assessment, and conclusion upon the table. In their favor, in this case, was the general awareness among Americans that our current system isn’t all that hot.

Republicans meanwhile tried–and arguably succeeded, at least on this point–to recast the battle as one of politics, rather than policy, and they simply said “No.” But before the real political battle could be redefined, Republicans needed to neutralize the policy debate, and they never did. That’s at the heart of Ruffini’s observations, and as such, he could have pointed out that Republicans brought an orange to a gun fight. In other words, by refusing to engage even an iota on the policy at hand, Republicans ginned up for a fight but left all their weapons at home.

Matt Plavnick · March 26, 2010 · 3:25 pm

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Denver Post, Justice Dubofsky to AG Suthers: Just Let it Go

The Denver Post Editorial Board, which has been critical of health care reform, has called on Colorado’s Attorney General John Suthers to drop the lawsuit to repeal the individual mandate. So has former Colorado Supreme Court Justice Jean Dubofsky. Meanwhile, governors in Wisconsin and Washington have told their AGs to let it go. It’ll be interesting to see how long Suthers finds it more politically expedient to press on rather than acquiesce gracefully.

Matt Plavnick · March 25, 2010 · 5:14 pm

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Pissy GOP Cuts Senate Business Hours

UPDATE: CNN reports that Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, was also blocked from working, unable in this case to conduct a hearing with a U.S. military commander flown in from Korea.

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It’s no secret that Republicans are unhappy with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. But cutting the U.S. Senate’s hours of operation in retaliation is inexcusable. Not only was Mark Udall unable yesterday to address pine beetle problems in the West, but Claire McCaskill was unable to conduct hearings on police contractors in Afghanistan.

I suppose for all this we can thank John McCain: “There will be no cooperation for the rest of the year.” It doesn’t matter to the GOP that pine beetles and Afghan police contractors are each pretty serious issues in their respective regions, nor that they have absolutely nothing to do with health care. Classy.

Matt Plavnick · March 24, 2010 · 6:16 pm

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Yes We Can, with Guest Appearance by John Boehner

I wouldn’t have thought this video could get more poignant. John Boehner proves me wrong.

Matt Plavnick · March 24, 2010 · 10:51 am

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