Colorado Luis

Pool Picks and Bleg

It's NCAA Tournament time again!  Colorado schools got completely shut out of the mens' and women's bracket, but did anyone notice?  But even with all of our alleged apathy about the college game (at least I was rooting for DU to get that Sun Belt Conference bid), it looks to me like this state is prime territory for NCAA tournament office pool play.

I feel a lot of pressure to repeat last year's pick of Manhattan as a sleeper to get into the Sweet 16.  The pool I play in gives bonus points for selecting upsets, and we all know some double digit team will make it into the third round, but the trick is picking who it will be.  I look at this year's men's bracket and the team that looks most likely to shock everyone by getting into the Sweet 16 is . . . UCLA.  OK, not the most unlikely selection for success, but they are an 11 seed, so it counts.  They've got a lot of freshmen who are only getting better, and they are playing in Tucson's McKale Center, a familiar arena to them and not some East Coast locaton where they might have to play a second round game at 9 in the morning Pacific time.

The truth is, though, that I haven't followed college hoops enough this year to feel tremendously confident.  I'm leaning toward picking Oklahoma State to win it all (I figure North Carolina will be the most popular pick), but I'm not terribly confident about it.  So let me throw it out there.  Who should I pick to win?  What upset special am I missing?  Let me know in the comments.

Saturday Beer Blogging 03.12.05

I'm making plans to visit a friend of mine in Japan this summer.  But is this what I have to look forward to?

    They look like beer, they smell like beer and they taste, well, not entirely unlike beer. But they're made from peas or soybeans and, perhaps most importantly, they're cheap. This new generation of beer-flavored drinks may not be the real thing, but are they the future of Japanese drinking?

    . . .

    Like happoshu before them, these so-called third-category beers take advantage of a preferential tax rate to deliver beerlike flavor without the price tag of a regular lager.

    The emergence of the new drinks owes much to the drop in demand for happoshu--the low-malt beer that was the brewers' first attempt to circumvent Japan's alcohol taxes--when its price went up after a 2003 tax hike.

    Third-category drinks take advantage of a new way round Japan's alcohol taxes, and are selling so well that all the big brewers have had to enter a market created last year with the launch of Sapporo's Draft One--a beerlike drink made from peas, rather than the malt and hops used in normal beer.

Well, I certainly understand the need to get some less expensive beer in Japan.  I remember from my last (and only) trip there, back in 1994, that the cheapest beer (Castlemaine XXXX, imported from Australia) was something like 33 bucks a case.  And one of the worst beers I ever had came out of a vending machine in Osaka.  (It may have been in the machine for too long.)  I know the craft brewing revolution has since spread to Japan, but something tells me I'll be drinking more sake than beer on my visit.

Disgorgement

I don't usually do much blawging because I usually prefer not to spend my spare time reading legal documents.  But when I saw the news that Rick Raymen and Steve Hansen, the Portland, Oregon gay couple whose wedding picture was used in a smear campaign against the AARP had won a temporary restraining order in federal court against the pro-Social Security phase out lobbying group USA Next and one of its consultants, I decided I needed to take a look at their complaint, helpfully made available online (pdf).  (You probably already saw the ad; to help the plaintiffs mitigate their damages, I won't link to it.)  And let me tell you, it's interesting reading.

Looking at it and imagining having to be the attorney that drafts the answer to this complaint, I see some serious dilemmas.  Take this allegation:

    34.  The plaintiffs are patriotic American citizens who fully support the United States military.

The honest answer would probably be something like "Defendants lack information sufficient to form a belief as to the truth of the allegations of paragraph 34."  But . . . this allegation is part of a libel claim, in which the plaintiffs are alleging that the defendants stated that the plaintiffs were anti-military, and that they made that statement knowing it was false or with reckless disregard as to whether it was true or false.  So the "I don't know" answer really ends up helping the plaintiff's case.

But really, it gets even worse than that. 

Colorado Quarter Selection Time

The five finalist designs for the Colorado quarter are in, and none of them is as bad as what I thought they might select: the Air Force Academy Chapel, as a way of fusing religion and the military.  One of the quarters does have a military theme -- honoring the Tenth Mountain Division, which was founded here but later relocated to upstate New York (recently serving in Afghanistan and now in Iraq).  I could live with that one -- it's pretty hard to complain about showing a skier on Colorado's quarter.

Mesa Verde Quarter

The finalists can be viewed here. Really, I think that the most likely choices are the Maroon Bells with large letter "C" and Columbine flower, or the "Colorful Colorado" design (by the way, what mountain is that?).  My personal favorite, as you might expect, is the Mesa Verde design.  Gorgeous mountains plus a reference to Colorado's pre-Columbian history.

As the 38th state, Colorado's quarter will come out in mid-2006, between Nebraska and North Dakota.  The final selection should be made in May of this year.

JFK Highway

Dan Slater has the feel good story of the week:

    As many of you who travel in Southern Colorado can attest, Democrats have had to cope with traveling the "Ronald Reagan Memorial Highway" whenever you drive down I-25 into El Paso County.

    Well, thanks to Rep. Dorothy Butcher and Sen. Abel Tapia, we now have our own -- and longer -- stretch of highway to be proud of. The Legislature last week named the stretch of I-25 extending from the Pueblo-El Paso County line to the New Mexico border the "John F. Kennedy Memorial Highway".

Ha!  Many times I've driven through Colorado Springs thinking, "We should get the City and County of Denver to name I-25 the Bill Clinton Freeway just to piss off the wingers!"  This is even better -- because it actually happened.

Relax

I don't share Ralph's sense of dismay over the apparent victory by Pat Waak over Chris Gates for Colorado Democratic Party chair last weekend.  I don't think Gates was really responsible for the party's big wins last November -- chalk that up to a combination of Ken Salazar's coattails and the efforts of Jared Polis, Pat Stryker, Tim Gill and Rutt Bridges to help finance the effort to take back the state legislature, plus of course the arrogance of the Republicans who acted like they didn't live in a swing state.  So it's hard to see this too much like firing the coach who just had a great season.  Besides, the Nuggets fired Jeff Bzdelik after a winning season and that seems to have worked out pretty well for them.

I'm not worried about Gates' loss for the same reason I didn't think it would have been so horrible if Howard Dean didn't win the national party chair election.  It's not as if Dean (or Simon Rosenberg) was going to turn Republican or stop working to build the party if he didn't win the chair race, and I doubt we'll see any drop off in commitment to the Democratic Party from Gates losing, either.  And if Waak winning makes some Democrats who currently feel excluded have a sense of ownership of the party, it could turn into a net plus by helping unify the party.

I'm even less concerned about Bob Beauprez entering the race for governor.  First, his announcement immediately puts the 7th CD into the leans-D column for 2006.  And I don't think Beauprez is the best candidate the Republicans could field in the governor's race.  Rather, he gives Dems yet another chance to split rural voters from the GOP.  Everyone just needs to be reminded repeatedly that Beauprez is a Front Range Real Estate Developer Who Wants To Build Dams To Help His Front Range Real Estate Developer Friends.  By Taking Water From The Western Slope, Arkansas Valley And San Luis Valley To The Front Range.

You have to at least pretend to be an environmentalist to win statewide in Colorado, and I don't see Beauprez as very convincing in that regard.

Udall vs. Owens?

I just want to say I think it's ridiculous for people to be announcing their candidacies for elections that are over three years away.  But with Mark Udall announcing today that he is foregoing the 2006 governor's race in favor of a run for Wayne Allard's Senate seat in 2008, we have a pretty good idea already of who the ultimate candidates will be -- even if, as Udall may expect, Allard decides not to run for a third term.

That's because we've got a lame duck governor who is widely believed to want "national office," but doesn't really seem like presidential material now that he has presided over one of the worst election cycles the Republican Party has experienced in Colorado in a long time.  A senate seat would not be beneath Bill Owens, and I think he will still have the clout to clear the GOP field in 2008.

There are a couple of ways to look at an Owens-Udall matchup.  If you want to look at it in terms of positioning on a political spectrum, Owens has already shown he can pose like a moderate while acting like a right winger.  Udall is pretty acceptable to the liberal Democratic base (if anyone has a reason why this shouldn't be so, please speak up) and I am sure the media will be falling over themselves to say he needs to "move to the center."  If you look at things this way, Owens might have an edge (at least in perception) but he may have to be more out of the closet about his right wing ways to placate 'wingers who are still pissed off about his pulling the rug out from Bob Schaffer in the GOP senate primary last year and who are uncomfortable with Owens' family situation.

Or, if you want to take the Western Democrat view of things -- which candidate is more comfortable in jeans and boots -- Udall has the clear edge.  He is a real inland Westerner, not a transplanted Texan, and although he lives in Eldorado Springs at the edge of the metro area, he has a much better grasp of rural Colorado and its issues than the hopelessly suburban Owens.

It could come down to a question of who the swing voters are.  Owens got elected the first time by going hard for the southeastern Denver suburbs in a battle royal with Douglas County's Gail Schoettler that sometimes seemed to have been fought entirely between Belleview Avenue and Castle Rock.  (He then rewarded that area with extra highway lanes and light rail.)  Last year, the Salazar brothers (or Ken at least) won with a different strategy -- treating the suburbs as just as polarized as Denver, Boulder and the Springs and going for the rural vote as the swing vote.

I think people who view Udall as just the guy who represents Boulder are making a big mistake.  Boulder just isn't that big of a city, and for Udall to win so comfortably he has had to campaign hard in the mountain parts of his district.  Granted, that includes a lot of the ski country that is more Democratic than, say, Montrose, but he is getting lots of hands on experience with rural issues to go with that comfortable, jeans wearing mountain man image he's got working.  And "comfortable" is a word I would never use to describe Bill Owens.

It could be an interesting race -- in three freaking years.  Of course, a lot could happen between now and then.