Disqus - Latest Comments for gwynethd

Re: Tell us a little about yourself…

Gwyneth Doland — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 19:57:02 -0000

Wow! Aliandra, I sure struck a nerve! I appreciate your reference to ProPublica. I love the work ProPublica does. I'm a huge, huge fan. Honestly, we don't quite have the resources they do, but we're trying. And I think we're doing reasonably well. You say we're entirely old-school-pen-and-paper journalism, and hey, partly that's true. We're journalists--not programmers or web designers or statisticians. But for boring, old-fashined journalists, I think we've done a pretty good job on opening up the political process here with our webcasting and live blogging, don't you?

Re: Weekly Alibi names new editor

Gwyneth Doland — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 19:15:32 -0000

Naw, I'm no genius. But I know one when I hire one!

Re: American Cement permit appears headed for approval

Gwyneth Doland — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 17:36:53 -0000

I didn't go to the meeting on the 12th, but my understanding is that this was a tidying of language meant to bring city wording in line with state wording and that would NOT allow an applicant to make changes outside the scope of the original permit. Am I wrong?

Re: American Cement permit appears headed for approval

Gwyneth Doland — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 17:26:21 -0000

Well, in this case it's pretty difficult to deny a permit because the cement company hired an environmental consulting firm to make sure they've dotted all their i's and crossed all their t's.

And also, in a broader context, because many of the frustrations expressed by neighbors--about the noise and the traffic--may heavily impact their quality of life, but air quality is the only thing the Air Quality Division is allowed to consider when deciding whether or not to approve a permit.

Right now, you're pretty much right. As long as applicants can demonstrate that they're within standards, AQ's hands are tied. What could change? The standards could be tightened. Or the entire process could be changed to combine air quality, noise and traffic...

Re: Liberal phone company uses Rove, donations to Bush to lure customers from AT&T

Gwyneth Doland — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 15:07:07 -0000

Oh, I dunno, Gnarlodious. If we take the Merriam-Webster definition of snark--sarcastic, impertinent, or irreverent in tone or manner--does Rove really fit it? I'm not sure.

My personal observation is that many older people in general, and conservatives in particular, are deeply irritated by sarcasm and snarkiness. (Observations gleaned from 10 years of angry e-mails and phone calls from older readers of my snarky writing.)

Which reminds me of something I read, but didn't report on this week. Pew released a study on the generation gap ("Forty Years After Woodstock, A Gentler Generation Gap.") showing that: "About seven-in-ten adults also believe the older generation is more respectful of others (71%), an assessment that is made by 67% of respondents younger than 30 and 69% of those 50 and older."

Which ties in with my unscientific theory that many older people don't like snark because they think its disrespectful. Which, in the case of CREDO's mailer, it certainly is.

I think younger people more quickly process through sarcasm and snark to the underlying meaning.

Here's an interesting tidbit: Researchers looking at the Colbert Report found that conservatives are less able to detect satire: http://hij.sagepub.com/cgi/...

And here's another interesting tidbit: People with brain injuries and advanced Alzheimers often lose the ability to detect sarcasm. http://www.nytimes.com/2008...

Neither of which prove my theory. Just food for thought.

You can only use your iPhone on ATT--unless you jailbreak it.

Re: What Sarah Palin and the Albuquerque Journal have in common

Gwyneth Doland — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 11:16:36 -0000

Oh, come on, kyleN. We're all bummed that the Tribune is gone, but the sad truth is that content doesn't seem to have much to do with whether a paper survives or not. The Boston Globe and the Philadelphia Enquirer are hanging on by their toenails, and they're two of the best papers in the country. It's not the haters that are bringing papers down, its the paper's failure to adapt to rapidly changing economy and technology.

Re: Rogers was White House aide’s ‘dream’ pick to replace Iglesias

Gwyneth Doland — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 17:21:30 -0000

PuddinHead--
I sincerely hope that you don't believe we can just snatch people's e-mails from their service providers. A) We can't, and B) We WOULDN'T.

Moreover, there's nothing inherently wrong with being a chronic meddler or an opinionated potty mouth. Great examples include well, me, for one.

Re: State Sen. Rod Adair makes an appearance in Rove’s testimony

Gwyneth Doland — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 17:14:07 -0000

Well, PuddinHead, I just don't think that's fair. I've had the opportunity to interview Sen. Adair several times and I assure you he's quite bright. Just objectively speaking, he has a bachelor's in political science and a masters degree in government, and he speaks four languages. During the last legislative session he was a frequent guest on our live blogs, sharing information and opinion from the floor. I thought he was eloquent, insightful, and--now this is a big deal for our legislators--technologically adept.

Did he push Karl Rove to help nominate a U.S. Attorney who would be guaranteed to play ball with the state GOP? Well, it sure looks that way. And is that inappropriate? Well, I imagine most people would agree that the top federal law enforcement officer in the state should be honest, fair and impartial. But the truth is that the job is a political appointment. And if the White House was looking for suggestions from Sen. Domenici, then Adair should have sent his thoughts straight to Bocce.

Does the fact that he sent them to Rove, the president's chief political operative, make the whole thing look too...political? Yup.

Re: Bingaman tries to target obesity epidemic in health care reform

Gwyneth Doland — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 15:38:15 -0000

Tough luck. USDA regulates school lunch. If you want to move that to the states, great! The states are doing a better job than the feds, that's for sure.

And you are already paying for this federal issue because Medicare and Medicaid have to cover for the majority of these costs.

So saying you don't want to pay for it is fine, but just telling people to stop eating fried chicken isn't going to change a thing.

This is what I find frustrating about the Libertarian perspective. How do you propose to deal with the epidemic of obesity?

Put school lunch in the hands of the states? OK. I can see that. But what, get rid of Medicaid and Medicare? OK. So then reeeeeally sick people walk into emergency rooms and doctors are morally obligated to help them and then we ALL pay for it because they have to recoup those costs by raising everybody else's rates.

And I know exactly what you're going to say: Let them die. Well you know what, TJ? We just don't do that. Humans as a species do not like to watch each other die. That's why you find 30,000-year-old skeletons with evidence of horrible injuries that healed. We take care of each other when we're sick. It's what makes us human.

Re: Bingaman tries to target obesity epidemic in health care reform

Gwyneth Doland — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 14:29:54 -0000

If only it worked that way! But it doesn't. Overweight children end up being adults who have heart disease.

"The association we found is very straightforward, the higher a child's BMI in childhood from the ages of 7 to 13, the greater the risk of heart disease in adulthood. They increase in proportion to each other."

http://www.time.com/time/he...

It's not just the fried chicken. Obese kids become obese adults.

Parents, schools, communities and governments all have to deal with this problem. Through, yes, personal responsibility, but also making decisions that are better for communities. Serving better school lunches, teaching kids about nutrition and cooking, making kids run around more in P.E., limiting the amount of time spent watching T.V. or on the computer, building more walkable communities and making more bike lanes and bike paths.

Re: Can big government make us thin?

Gwyneth Doland — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 16:35:33 -0000

I love the idea of using more local food in schools! The cost-effective part is the hard part, though.

It's about scale. Food that's trucked in to New Mexico is often the cheapest because it's produced on a massive scale. But most New Mexico growers are small so their prices tend to be higher.

We have had some success with things like apples (and carrots?) that school districts have bought in bulk from New Mexico growers through the Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program that Sen. Bingaman supports.

Which brings me back to my point about the solutions to obesity being complex and small.

The purchase of those apples was made possible by an investment in a huge walk-in cooler that allowed the schools to store the apples and mete them slowly over many months.

A small investment in infrastructure, such as coolers, can help schools buy local produce, and can help convince small rural stores to stock fresh fruits and vegetables.

Re: Can big government make us thin?

Gwyneth Doland — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 16:34:29 -0000

Oh girl! You don't have to tell me about it. In the immortal words of Donna Summer, She works hard for the money! So hard workin', honey! It is true that women who work outside the home still do most of the housework. And that drives me crazy.

But here's something to think about: There are tons of men out there who would kill to stay home and be full-time dads. But they can't. You know why? Because men still make more money than women.

If a family can afford to have one parent stay home, it's almost always the woman, and it's often because her salary is smaller, and therefore more expendable.

If we as a society decide that we want to have families with one parent who raises kids full-time then we are going to have to make some serious changes. How would families be able to afford to do this? Because most can't now.

We would to ensure pay equity for men and women, to allow dads to parent their kids if they want to, and to allow women to pursue their careers if they want to.

We would need to slash the cost of health care, seriously slash it, so that families didn't need two salaries to afford it.

And we would need guaranteed maternity/paternity leave.

Among other things.

Re: Bingaman tries to target obesity epidemic in health care reform

Gwyneth Doland — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 16:20:17 -0000

<sigh> If I were talking here my voice would be hoarse. TWO-THIRDS OF AMERICANS ARE OVERWEIGHT OR OBESE.

This is not some isolated population of jerks who eat KFC all day. We're talking about children who are fed fried chicken in school because it's part of the USDA school lunch.

Two thirds of Americans is most of us. It's our families, our friends, our coworkers and our neighbors. This is a problem that permeates our society--and our society by twice as much as nearly any other developed nation.

You're paying for the cost of America's weight problem right now. And I know that makes you mad. But you can either keep griping about it AND paying for it or you can ask yourself: Would it be worth our while to cut the fried chicken out of school lunches? Make sure have P.E. class and run around during it?

Re: Bingaman tries to target obesity epidemic in health care reform

Gwyneth Doland — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 12:18:14 -0000

Dave, if you read down through the comments here you'll see that what we've been talking about are specific barriers.

1) Some people in rural areas live so far from grocery stores that they can only shop once a month or so, reducing the amount of fresh produce they can buy.

2) Some people in urban areas have very poor selection in their stores. The grocery store I can walk to from my house, for example, has a much smaller and crappier produce section than the nice store I drive 15 minutes to get to. If I didn't have a car, or I couldn't afford to spend more, I would eat fewer fresh fruits and vegetables.

3) As moms moved into the workplace and schools stopped teaching Home Ec, we've found ourselves in a situation where a lot of people simply don't know how to cook. It takes skill to make cheap food taste good. Think about collard greens, eggplant, spaghetti squash, all these are really good for you but they taste AWFUL if you cook them improperly. Look on the shelves at your grocery store and see what a huge market there is for pre-made food like those cheesy rice packets and tubs of pre-cooked barbecued pork.

4) Cooking takes a lot of time. Buying pre-made food or fast food is...fast. Think of how often you, your friends and your family members eat out or buy less healthy food just because you don't have time to cook.

4) Fresh fruits and vegetables are a lot more expensive than foods that are much less nutritious. We're in the peak of summer now when everything seems cheap, but think of what's in New Mexico stores in February. It's not cheap. Then look at the cheesy rice packets and think of how many items there are on the dollar menu at the fast food restaurants on every corner.

Re: Can big government make us thin?

Gwyneth Doland — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 11:34:21 -0000

Hey, there were some great things about the 50s. But not all of those moms stayed home changing diapers because that's all they wanted. Some women wanted to go to Harvard; they weren't allowed. They wanted to be fire fighters and fighter pilots and partners in law firms and hey, maybe executive chefs! But those jobs were simply not available to them.

Now middle-class American families face a different problem: Many can't afford to have one parent stay at home and raise the kids. They MUST work in order to pay the mortgage and pay for health insurance and save up for college tuition. And when both parents work, that leaves less time for grocery shopping and less time for cooking.

This situation is only magnified in poor families, and especially in single-parent families. Sure, lots of poor moms wish they could be at home teaching their kids how to make bread, but they've got to work.

Bring back Home Ec!

Re: Can big government make us thin?

Gwyneth Doland — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 11:28:34 -0000

But look, there's a crucial distinction here between school lunch, which is a federally controlled program, and other foods in schools, which are locally controlled. Richardson's "Healthy Kids" initiative of 2006 did nothing to change the quality of the actual school lunches, which are, as you say, are regulated by USDA.

It is possible, on a state level, to make those lunches more nutritious, however. In fact, 19 states have set requirements for school meals (as opposed to competitive foods) that are more strict than USDA's, but New Mexico is not one of them.

That report I quoted in my original story recommends that USDA hurry up and revise the school nutrition guidelines to meet the 2005 Dietary Guidelines for Americans. But in the meantime, it's up to the states to whip those lunches into shape.

Re: Can big government make us thin?

Gwyneth Doland — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 12:13:34 -0000

You're talking about two different things. Chips and soda are what are known as "competitive foods," (because they compete with school lunches) and they were largely eliminated statewide in 2006 by Gov. Richardson's "Healthy Kids Initiative."

But school lunches are regulated by USDA, and unfortunately, those guidelines are not strict enough to keep out deep-fried chicken nuggets, and they don't require enough fresh fruits and vegetables. Several other states have implemented stricter rules on their school lunches and New Mexico could do the same. USDA could also make changes to its guidelines.

Re: Can big government make us thin?

Gwyneth Doland — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 10:20:41 -0000

As a former chef and cooking school instructor, I'll tell you: Most people these days can barely boil water. It's a HUGE problem. Do you know why we didn't have this problem 50 years ago? Two reasons, one of which we can change through government, the other we don't want to. First, we offered home ec in schools. All of them. And those classes taught kids how to cook. How many schools offer this now? Very few.

Second, most families had full-time chefs (read: moms) at home showing them how to cook every night. As great as that part of it was, those days aren't coming back.

Re: Can big government make us thin?

Gwyneth Doland — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 10:10:56 -0000

Hey, man. This isn't complicated. And the word they use is "healthier" not "healthy." There's no question that when it comes to school lunches, grilled chicken is healthier than the deep-fried chicken nuggets currently served, and that having an apple on the plate is better than not having an apple on the plate, as often happens.

Second: your point about gallon jugs just reminded me that Albuquerque recently installed some very basic exercise equipment at Tiguex Park. At first I thought it was silly. Who would use these things? And yet every time I go to the park in the morning, I see people using them. And since the park was renovated I see TONS more people there, playing soccer, walking their dogs, riding bicycles. These are the kinds of things that CDC says can change the way we live, which is what's making us fat.

Re: Bingaman tries to target obesity epidemic in health care reform

Gwyneth Doland — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 22:12:26 -0000

Wow, new_mexican. That is some cold S&*^ right there.

Re: Can big government make us thin?

Gwyneth Doland — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 17:31:54 -0000

JoMa, I think we can all agree this is a real crisis. As I wrote earlier today, obesity is costing us $147 billion per year, and it's at least 10 percent of our total spending on health care. And that is not a number that has remained constant. It's skyrocketing. The CDC says obesity rates increased by 37 percent between 1998 and 2006.

This has been a major change, just over the past generation. We're a lot fatter than we used to be, and we're twice as fat as almost every other developed nation. And it's costing us money.

I wish there were a magic pill, but I don't think anybody is suggesting there is an easy answer.

I also wrote today about another CDC report that has 26 recommendations for combatting obesity. Some of them seem simple, like getting the junk food out of schools and making sure that kids have access to affordable, healthier foods.

They recommend that schools offer more physical activities after school (not competitive team sports, but activities you don't already have to be good at in order to do) so that kids spend more time physically active and less time in front of a computer or video game.

Other things are more complicated, like finding ways to make it easier for women to breastfeed for as long as possible. Because there is evidence that some ingredients in breast milk may help prevent childhood obesity.

They also recommend that communities use city planning that encourages walking and bicycle riding.

And that makes sense, doesn't it? Think of how much walking you do now, and what kinds of changes might increase the amount of walking you do. My own neighborhood, for example, only got sidewalks and streetlights about eight years ago. And I live on a busy street. Without sidewalks, folks can't push baby strollers or pull grocery carriers. And without streetlights, a lot of people don't feel safe walking at night.

So I think there are many, many things that we can do to try to address this crisis. No magic pills.

Re: Can big government make us thin?

Gwyneth Doland — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 13:38:32 -0000

Those most at risk for obesity are "the non-rich in a rich society," Bill Clinton said yesterday in his address to "Weight of the Nation," the CDC's inaugural obesity conference.

Blueberries cost $4 per cup. Salmon costs $8 per pound. But blueberry pies cost $.75 and cheeseburgers $1.

When you're struggling to put enough food on the table, unfortunately, the best things cost the most, either in money (blueberries) or in time (cooking dried beans) or expertise (knowing how to cook kale). That's why the poor struggle with obesity more than the rich.

Re: Bingaman tries to target obesity epidemic in health care reform

Gwyneth Doland — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 12:02:48 -0000

Quick question, new_mexican: Is childhood obesity a self-inflicted condition? According to the report I linked to in the story above, one-third of kids in New Mexico are overweight or obese.

Re: Bingaman tries to target obesity epidemic in health care reform

Gwyneth Doland — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 13:46:47 -0000

Aw, come on. Hot dog eating competitions are not responsible for two-thirds of Americans being overweight. We're fat because we eat like crap and sit on our asses all day.

Re: Bingaman tries to target obesity epidemic in health care reform

Gwyneth Doland — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 12:38:43 -0000

I dunno, JoMa. I looked at that photo and thought two things:

1) Huh. Interesting photo. I wonder where it came from. (Remember that writers rarely get to write their own headlines and often don't choose the art that accompanies their stories.)

2) Mmm...muffins.