"flood the zone with shi*t" - Why Courts And Media Don't Seem Adequate These Days

[Bear with me.  I'm trying to pull a number of issues together.  Basically, we need to step back and see the bigger picture rather than get distracted by all the crap the Right is throwing out there.  Their goal is to spew so much nonsense that the system breaks as people try to address it rationally.] 

Choosing labels carelessly  

"CULTURE WARRIORS such as U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) . . ."  LA Times"

There may have been a time when there was something that could be called 'culture war,' but that time is long past.  MTG is not offering anything resembling 'culture' unless the naked quest for power is considered a 'culture' today.  There's nothing here, really, about Christian values, though one could argue MTG represents hijacked Christian values to wrest power.  The attacks on LGTBQ and specifically trans and drag queens is merely a hook to incite the gullible to send cash and votes toward the GOP.  

On the other side are people who merely want to be free to be themselves.  If they take PRIDE in who they are, it's merely because society has vilified them so long and so hard, that they need some validation now and then.  

The media are slow to discard misleading labels, while the Republicans have an automated factory where they produce and distribute new imagery daily.  Where they take left leaning terms and turn them into epithets.  Some journalists are too young even to remember that the correct name is Democratic Party, but the Republicans have flooded the airwaves so long with "Democrat" party that people think that's the name.  

Eastman mulls the economic benefits of letting kids die

"In the case where child abuse is fatal, obviously it's not good for the child, but it's actually a benefit to society because there aren't needed ??  government services ?? for the full course of that child's life."

Rep. David Eastman (R - Wasilla) on the cost savings to the state when abused children die.

Alaska: Rep. Eastman of the family values party says it's actually a net benefit to society when a child dies from abuse & neglect because of the financial burden it would otherwise put on the state budget. pic.twitter.com/NKUOvUZvgf

— ChudsOfTikTok (@ChudsOfTikTok) February 21, 2023

The Republicans in Alaska have rules that oust other Republicans from committees if they don't vote with the party on budgets.  But making a case for letting abused kids die because it saves the state money, well, he has the right to free speech according to the committee chair Rep. Vance (R Homer).  

But, as I write, it seems that the House has censured Eastman over this.  (Thanks Matt Acuña Buxton)

The problem I have as a blogger (and any legitimate journalist has) is dealing with all the jabberwocky  being thrown out there by the Republicans - from DeSantis' shipping of immigrants to New York, banning the teaching of history he doesn't like, and his Don't Say Gay campaign (just a few examples) to the Hunter Biden laptop.  

And that's the point.  Stephen Bannon said to "flood the media with sh*t" and that's exactly what they are doing.  

From CNN

While some of the actors in this circus may actually believe what they're doing, those encouraging people to file all those election challenges and to write all those laws letting kids carry machine guns in public are just "flooding the zone with shit."  Getting people riled up and wasting time on fighting all the shit flying at them.  

Our justice system is based on the assumption that people believe in the Rule of Law and that the vast majority of people will voluntarily obey the law.  Neither our court system nor our journalists are quite ready for large numbers of people rejecting the rule of law or the rules of reason.  

The lawyers were trained to dot their i's and cross their T's, but with Trump and others filing bogus lawsuits and appeals and motions, the courts can't keep up. The public is losing confidence that they will ever be able to bring Trump and his mob to justice. But that's how Trump has stayed out of prison all these years.  The legal system has to retool itself to handle this sort of threat.  Not sure how.  Dominion suing Fox is one option, but so much damage happens before it is settled.  And Alex  Jones declared bankruptcy to avoid the financial consequences of losing his lawsuit.  We need tactics that work with the Right's new weapons.  

Journalists are trained to be impartial to the extent they feel compelled to treat insurrection as a legitimate point of view.  I'd note that some journalists believe they shouldn't vote because that taints their objectivity.  Here's an NPR journalist mulling over NPR's ethics code.  The Republicans are counting on journalists to continue such internal counting of angels.  

Such purity doesn't matter any more (if it ever did) because whatever journalists do, the Republicans will vilify them.  Meanwhile old school journalists will try to respectfully cover MTG's calls for a new confederacy and Eastman's claim that letting abused kids die is beneficial to the state of Alaska.  

Not voting, not declaring one's party, might seem the right thing to do, but I think declaring where you stand openly and then letting readers determine if your personal values color what you write (or say) is the more honest approach.  

In any case, the old rules don't apply to the new political world we're in.  Yes, a lot of voter fraud cases were won.  And a number of January 6 Insurrectionists (yes, that term identifies me as biased, but it was also the conclusion of the courts) went to prison.  But most of the top people are still living, ostensibly, comfortable lives.  (I'd like to think that all the  pending litigation is at least  disturbing Trump's peace.)

We need new tools for dealing with the current manufactured chaos.  How much damage have we had to endure (can we endure) before the deluge of lies is dammed?  

There are perhaps a dozen more threads I could easily follow that give context to what's happening today. 

 It's a psychological barrier to blogging because I know that writing about some discrete issue merely entangles me in Bannon's web.  But people's attention spans are much shorter than they used to be.  Few want to read long attempts to put things into perspective.  I'm not just making this up.

"A recent study by Microsoft Corporation has found this digital lifestyle has made it difficult for us to stay focused, with the human attention span shortening from 12 seconds to eight seconds in more than a decade."

But you can't read too many long articles, let alone books, even with a 12 second attention span.  But if you got this far, you're doing fine.  And should take articles like that with a grain of salt.  Who measured the average attention span in 2000, for example?  No, I'm not going to dig up the actual research report to find out.  It does say that drinking water, exercise, and avoiding electronic devices helps increase attention span.  So go for a walk and don't take your phone.  

My Thoughts On Pro Publica And ADN Summary Of The Bronson Corruption

[NOTE:  This post highlights the ProPublica/ADN report on the Bronson administration.  I've added my own reactions in blue.]

For those in a hurry, summary of  points I make:

1.  Baker, as a private contractor, was NOT a client of the Municipal Attorney and thus the attorney saying he can't discuss the case because of that is incorrect.  And if he was a client of the attorney, then t was more inappropriate as part of the Mayor's team to approach the Attorney.

2.  Assembly should make it illegal for the administration to remove the indemnity clause in contracts without Assembly approval, regardless the value of the contract.  

3.  Media have to do a better job of getting past the facades of politicians (and others in power) to get the public the real scoop on who these people are and what they do.  Local media need to give reporters focused beats and incentives to stay on them to develop reliable contacts who will give them tips.  

Image from the ProPublica/ADN article

ProPublica and the ADN published a long article that pulled together many of the events that have happened in the Dave Bronson administration.  It's worth reading. 

It didn't cover all details, but focused on Larry Baker and the conflicts he had over the Golden Lion because he and other Bronson owners lived nearby.  I hadn't heard about the DOTPF memo being mischaracterized to make it look like the state would demolish the Golden Lion.  It discuss Baker's younger partner Brandon Spoerhase and his attempts to get the Muni Attorney to drop all charges against Spoerhase for violating a restraining order against a woman working in the Mayor's office.  

The article mentions that the mayor did not hire Baker as a Muni employee, but skirted the need for Assembly approval by hiring him as a contractor with three contracts at $29,500 - just below the $30,000 threshold that would require Assembly approval.  The contracts also gave Baker immunity from prosecution, meaning the Municipality would be on the hook for problems he caused.  

They asked then Municipal Attorney Peter Bergt about Baker's interference:

"Bergt declined to say whether Baker pressured him to drop or reduce the city charges against Spoerhase, citing concerns that he could break legal rules protecting confidential communications between attorneys and clients. . .

 “I took very seriously my ethical obligation to my client — the Municipality of Anchorage — and always acted in its best interest.”

My thought is that if Baker as a private contractor, the he wasn't Bergt's client.  The Muni, not a contractor is the client.  So there shouldn't be any attorney client privilege here.  [Of course I'm not an attorney so I'm sure some or even most lawyers might say I'm wrong. ]

[OK.  I've spoken to an attorney friend who first said that Baker, as a private citizen, has the right to contact the Municipal Attorney and try to point out legal reasons why he charges should be dropped.  But, I asked, he's the Mayor's policy advisor, so there's a conflict of interest.  In that case there may be an ethical problem, but probably not a legal one.  Then I went on to read the quotes above.  Then my attorney jumped and said, that as a private contractor coming in to discuss his business partner's charges, he's absolutely NOT a client of the Municipal Attorney.  And if the Attorney thinks he is his client, then there are bigger barriers to him interfering with this case.]

But I would also recommend that the Assembly pass a law that says a contractor cannot have the indemnity clause removed without approval from the Assembly, regardless the dollar amount of the contract..  

The article also quotes Assembly member Quinn-Davis (who also acted as temporary Mayor) about Baker and she responded.  

“Unlike Bronson, he knows he needs to get along with people and relationships matter,” said Assembly member Austin Quinn-Davidson, who filled in as mayor for several months after Berkowitz resigned.

“I like him,” she said of Baker. “I think he relies on that, which is smart. People sort of trusting him or liking him as a person to get things done.”

Getting along with people is a very useful skill.  My thought is how many people use this skill to mask some not so nice behavior as Baker did?  How many people in positions of power do dastardly deeds protected by a nice guy image?  Or other images that suggest competence - clothing, education, purported experience.  This is a call to media and political opponents to do a better job learning and then alerting the world about important background information about the people running for office and serving as corporate executives.  George Santos is only the most egregious example of the media not doing their job in this area.  Except for the North Shore Leader. which wasn't able to get the story a wider audience.  

While we have watched quite a bit of this play out over the last year and a half, we we lacked key details that were revealed by Amy Demoboski when she was fired and sent a nine page letter of accusations.  As a conservative Assembly member who moved over to serve as Bronson's city manager, she had the insider's view of what was happening and because she's an ideological ally of the mayor, her accusations have more weight.  

I mention this because I think 'nice' guys are protected by insiders generally not exposing them as Demboski has done.  

This means we really do need better ways to keep our officials accountable and keep government as transparent as possible.  When local reporters have long term assignments, they have time to build up networks of insiders who give them tips.  Let's hope we can get media outlets to keep reporters on beats long enough to develop these networks.  I'd like to thank ProPublica which is helping the ADN do more long term coverage of major issues.  

One of the issues the article doesn't cover is the crowd of abusive Assembly attendees who made anti-Semitic and anti-LGBTQ attacks in opposition to both COVID regulations and the Assembly's homeless actions.  They were loud and and worked to intimidate Assembly members and the public who did not support their politics.  These were basically stirred up and supported by the group of Geneva Woods neighbors - including Larry Baker - who were opposed to using the Golden Lion Hotel for an addiction center.  

A Lesson In Simple People Power From Sweden, Late 1800s

The Story of Gósta Berling by Nobel Prize winner Selma Lagerlof is the story of people in rural Sweden in the late 1800s.  People deal with evil spirits and the word of God, the beauty and the dangers of nature, and the challenges of making a living in the northern regions of earth.  There are rich people and poor, good and evil, hard workers and lazy.  

It shouldn't be surprising how much human beings then and there are like people here and now.  

The villagers have walked out at the end of the Sunday services in the local church.   Their protest is quiet and simple and effective.  A lesson for us today to think of ways to creatively make our protests known. 

This excerpt takes place in a later chapter called The Drought.  It's late summer and there has been no rain since June.  Crops are dying, forest fires are burning.  People are getting desperate.  All are questioning if it is their behavior that has caused God to withhold the rain.  

"It was a Sunday in August. The service was over. The people wandered in groups along the sunny roads. On all sides they saw burned woods and ruined crops. There had been many forest fires; and what they had spared, insects had taken.  

The gloomy people did not lack for subjects of conversation. There were many who could tell how hard it had been in the years of famine of eighteen hundred and eight and nine, and in the cold winter of eighteen hundred and twelve, when the sparrows froze to death. They knew how to make bread out of bark, and how the cows could be taught to eat moss.

There was one woman who had tried a new kind of bread of cranberries and corn-meal. She had a sample with her, and let the people taste it. She was proud of her invention.

But over them all floated the same question. It stared from every eye, was whispered by every lip: “Who is it, O Lord, whom Thy hand seeks?”

A man in the gloomy crowd which had gone westward, and struggled up Broby hill, stopped a minute before the path which led up to the house of the mean Broby clergyman. He picked up a dry stick from the ground and threw it upon the path.  

“Dry as that stick have the prayers been which he has given our Lord,” said the man.

He who walked next to him also stopped. He took up a dry branch and threw it where the stick had fallen.

“That is the proper offering to that priest,” he said.

The third in the crowd followed the others’ example.

“He has been like the drought; sticks and straw are all that he has let us keep.”

The fourth said: “We give him back what he has given us.”

And the fifth: “For a perpetual disgrace I throw this to him. May he dry up and wither away like this branch!”

“Dry food to the dry priest,” said the sixth.

The people who came after see what they are doing and hear what they say. Now they get the answer to their long questioning.

“Give him what belongs to him! He has brought the drought on us.”

And each one stops, each one says his word and throws his branch before he goes on.

In the corner by the path there soon lies a pile of sticks and straw,—a pile of shame for the Broby clergyman.

That was their only revenge. No one lifted his hand against the clergyman or said an angry word to him. Desperate hearts cast off part of their burden by throwing a dry branch on the pile. They did not revenge themselves. They only pointed out the guilty one to the God of retribution."

“If we have not worshipped you rightly, it is that man’s fault. Be pitiful, Lord, and let him alone suffer! We mark him with shame and dishonor. We are not with him.

It soon became the custom for every one who passed the vicarage to throw a dry branch on the pile of shame.

The old miser soon noticed the pile by the roadside. He had it carried away,—some said that he heated his stove with it. The next day a new pile had collected on the same spot, and as soon as he had that taken away a new one was begun.

The dry branches lay there and said: “Shame, shame to the Broby clergyman!”

Soon the people’s meaning became clear to him. He understood that they pointed to him as the origin of their misfortune. It was in wrath at him God let the earth languish. He tried to laugh at them and their branches; but when it had gone on a week, he laughed no more. Oh, what childishness! How can those dry sticks injure him? He understood that the hate of years sought an opportunity of expressing itself."

The book's copyright is long over and you can read the book at Gutenberg.org or you can listen to a Swede reading it in English at the Internet Archive here.   This chapter is Part II, Chapter XVI.

Apeirogon Part 2: Fighting For Peace In A World Of Fear

Yesterday I gave you flowers, now back to graver stuff. But I think you'll find this inspiring.  

I've posted about Colum McCann's Apeirogon before.  It was not even an appetizer.  Less even than the menu.  And this might be a very light appetizer of a very heavy book.  

I'm going to take you to the crucible.  One of the two key sections that the book is leading up to and then retreating from.  This is section 500 - in the middle of the book. (I'm saying section because chapter isn't right.  Each section could be anything from a line to half a dozen pages.)  After section 500 comes section 1001. Then another section 500 and back down eventually to a second section 1.  

Rami and Bassam have both lost daughters - Rami to a suicide bomber in Jeruselum and Bassam to an Israeli police rubber bullet.  They've lived parallel but totally separate lives.  The narrator gives us glimpses at events, and then we see the events again, but from a slightly different perspective. There are a lot of birds who remind us they've been around much longer than the humans and that we are part of a much larger natural world.  

By section 500 we know Rami and Bassam quite well.  And we've walked through the scenes that led to their daughters' deaths and what happened in the following years repeatedly.  In their respective sections 500, Rami and Bassam put their whole stories together in one long narration each.  It takes place in Beit Jala in the West Bank.  When I went back to reread section 1, it was Rami riding his motorcycle up to the monastery, though I had no idea of how that would fit into the story then    

I'm going to give excerpts from Rami's speech to the people assembled in the monastery because I think it is extraordinary and very relevant to humans around the world and in the US.  

I think these passages are compelling, but readers might not be so inspired they way I've offered them.  But please read the bolded parts at least.

It begins:

"My name is Rami Elhanan.  I am the father of Smadar.  I am a sixty-seven-year-old graphic designer, an Israeli, a Jew, a seventh-generation Jerusalemite.  Also what you might call a graduate of the Holocaust.  My mother was born in the Old City of Jerusalem, to an ultra-Orthodox family.  My father came here in 1946.  What he saw in the camps he seldom spoke about, except to my daughter Smadar when she was ten or eleven.  I was a kid from a straightforward background - we weren't wealthy but we weren't poor.  I got in some trouble at school, nothing big, I ended up in industrial school, then studied art, more or less an ordinary life."

He talks about his time in the Army as a young man during the Yom Kippur war.  He went to art school afterward and met his future wife and had four kids.  

"I was doing graphic design - posters and ads - for the right-wing, for the left wing, whoever paid money.  Life was good.  We were happy, complacent.  To be honest it suited me. . .when this incredible bubble of ours burst in midair into a million pieces. It was the beginning of a long cold dark night the is still long and cold and dark and will always be longh and cold and dark, until the end when it will still be cold and dark.

I have told this story so many times, [as the author has leading us to this point] but there is always something new to be said.  Memories hit you all the time.  A book that is opened.  A door that is closed, a beeping sound, a window opened. Anything at all.  A butterfly. 

Then he describes in detail the day his daughter died.  Hearing about a bombing on the car radio and checking mentally where all his family should be that day.  Then calling to be sure everyone is ok. 

More details of what happened that day. Then the funeral.  The people who come to his house afterward - his wife's father was an important person in Israel and there are thousands at the house and in the streets.

"Look, I have a bad temper. I know it.  I have an ability to blow up.  Long ago, I killed people in the war. Distantly, like in a video game.  I held a gun. I drove tanks. I fought in three wars. I survived. And the truth is, the awful truth, the Arabs were just a thing to me, remote and abstract and meaningless.  I didn't see them as anything real or tangible.  They weren't even visible.  I didn't think about them, they were not really part of my life, good or bad.  The Palestinians in Jerusalem, well, they mowed the lawns, the collected the garbage, they built the houses, cleared the plates from the table.  Like every Israeli, I knew they were there, and I pretended I knew them, even pretended I liked some of them, the safe ones - we talked about them like that, the safe ones, the dangerous ones - and I never would have admitted it, not even to myself, but they might as well have been lawn mowers, dish washing machines, taxis, trucks.  . . And if they were ever anything other than objects, they were objects to be feared, because, if you didn't fear them then they would become real people. And we didn't want them to be real people, we couldn't handle that.  A real Palestinian was a man on the dark side of the moon.  This is my shame.  I understand it as my shame.  I know that now.  I didn't know it then.  I don't excuse myself.  Please understand, I don't excuse myself at all."

He continues about how he attempted to go on with his life - brushing his teeth, making posters at work. But thoughts invade.  Killing others won't bring his daughter back.  

"Then about a year after Smadar was killed, I met a man who changed my life.  His name was Yitzhak Frankenthal, a religious Jew, Orthodox, with a kippah on his head.  And you know, we tend to put people into drawers, stigmatize people?  We tend to judge people by the way they dress, and I was certain that this guy was a right-winger, a fascist, that he eats Arabs for breakfast.  But we started talking and he told me about his son Arik, a soldier who was kidnapped and murdered by Hamas in 1994.  And then he told me about this organization, the Parents Circle, that he had created - people who lost their loved ones, Palestinian and Israeli, but still wanted peace.  And I remembered that Yitzhak had been among the thousands and thousands of people that came to my house a year before during those seven days of shiva for Smadar, and I was so angry with him, so confused, I asked him, How could you do it?  Serious, how could you step into someone's house who just lost a loved one, and then talk about peace?  How dare you?  You came to my house after Smadar was killed?  You took for granted that I would feel the same way as you, just because I was Matti Peled's son-in-law or Nurit Peled's husband, you thought you could take my grief for granted?  Is that what you thought?"

". . . I got on my bike and I went to see.  I stood outside where people were coming for the meeting, very detached, very cynical.  And I watched those people arriving.  The first group were, for me - as an Israeli - living legends.  People I used to look up to, admire. . .

But then I saw something else, something completely new to me, to my eyes, my mind, my heart, my brain.  I was standing there, and I saw a few Palestinians passing by in a bus.  Listen, this flabbergasted me.  I knew it was going to happen, but still I had to do a double take.  Arabs?  Really?  Going into the same meeting as these Israelis?  How could that be?  A thinking, feeling, breathing Palestinian?  And I remember this lady in this black, traditional Palestinian dress, what a headscarf - you now, the sort of woman who I might have thought could be the mother of one of the bombers who took my child.  She was slow and elegant, stepping down from the bus, walking in my direction.  And then I saw it, she had a picture of her daughter clutched to her chest.  She walked past me.  I couldn't move.  And this was like an earthquake inside me:  this woman had lost her child.  It maybe sounds simple, but is was not.  I had been in a sort of coffin.  This lifted the lid from my eyes.  My grief and her grief, the same grief.

I went inside to meet these people.  And here they were, and they were shaking my hand, hugging me, crying with me.  I was so deeply touched, so deeply moved.  It was like a hammer on my head cracking me open.  An organization of the bereaved.  Israeli and Palestinian, Jew, Christian, Muslim, atheist, you name it.  Together.  In one room.  Sharing their sorrow.  .  . I cannot tell you what sort of madness it seemed.  And I was completely cleaved open.  It was like a nuclear event.  Truly, it seemed mad."

He tells us he was forty-seven or forty-eight at the time . . .

". . . it was the first time that I'd met Palestinians as human beings.  Not just workers in the streets, not just caricatures in the newspaper, not just transparencies, terrorists, objects, but - how do I say this? - human beings - human beings who carry the same burden that I carry, people who suffer exactly as I suffer.  An equality of pain.  And like Bassam says, we are running from our pain to our pain.  I'm not a religious person, far from it - I have no way of explaining what happened to me back then.  If you had told me years ago that I would say this, I would have said you were crazy." 

All that, so far, is so relevant to the US today.  Whether we are talking about blacks and whites, about rich and poor, about gay and straight, about men and women, about religious fundamentalists and atheists, about Republicans and Democrats.  So many are just objects, caricatures.

But it gets even more significant as we watch people like DeSantis try to ban people from knowing things he doesn't want them to know.  Organizations like Fox reporting fictional worlds as if they were real.  

"Some people have an interest in keeping the silence.  Others have an interest in sowing hatred based on fear.  Fear makes money, and it makes laws, and it takes land, and it builds settlements, and fear likes to keep everyone silent.  And, let's face it, in Israel we're very good at fear, it occupies us.  Our politicians like to scare us.  We like to scare each other.  We use the word security to silence others.  But it's not about that, it's about occupying someone else's life, someone else's land, someone else's head.  It's about control.  Which is power.  And I realized this with the force of an ax, that it's true, this notion of speaking truth against power.  Power already knows the truth.  It tries to hide it.  So you have to speak out against power.  And I began, back then, to understand the duty we have to try to understand what's going on.  Once you know what's going on then you begin to think:  What can we do about it?  We could not continue to disavow the possibility of living alongside each other.  I'm not asking for everyone to get along, or anything corny or airy-fairy, but I am asking for them to be allowed to get along.  And, as I began to think about this, I began to think that I had stumbled upon the most important question of them all:  What can you do, personally, in order to try to help prevent this unbearable pain for others?  All I can tell you is that from that moment until today, I've devoted my time, my life to going everywhere possible, to talk to anyone possible, people who want to listen - even to people who will not listen - to convey this very basic and every simple message, which says:  We are not doomed, but we have to try to smash the forces that have an interest in keeping us silent."

The pages on this blog rarely have such long quoted passages.  But there is nothing I can say that could possibly have more impact than the words the author puts on Rami's tongue.  (The book is described as fiction based on the lives of these two men.   The author, an Irish man who has experienced his own split world, tells us, that two two speeches at the center of the book - the one I'm quoting - and Hassam's - "are pulled together from a series of interviews in Jerusalem, New York, Jericho and Beit Jala, but elsewhere in this book Bassam and Rami have allowed me to shape and reshape their words and their words.") 

This is not a point A to point B book.  It wanders and winds and fills in details, not just of the stories of these two men, but the historical and biological context inform their stories. 

At times, too many times, in the history of human beings, things looked hopeless.  And for hundreds of millions of individuals they were. Yet those who survived eventually picked up the pieces and went on.  Hitler's thousand year Reich didn't last two decades.  The Soviet Union crumbled.  Slavery ended.  Jim Crow ended.  Women got the right to vote.  Russia's three day war in Ukraine is going on four months now.  

Our choice is to distract ourselves until we eventually get ground up (or somehow survive) or we can do as Rami has committed himself to do:  we have to try to smash the forces that have an interest in keeping us silent.

 

 

New Season Of Sopranos Debuts At House Jan 6 Insurrection Hearings

 The new season stars DJT as Tony Soprano and his head honchos trying to persuade elections officials to change elections results.  With visits to Arizona and Georgia, threatening phone calls.  It's all there including thugs sent out to intimidate election officials and their grandmothers.  

Here's the full hour long audio recording of the then president's phone call to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia Secretary of State pressuring him to find enough votes to swing Georgia over to Trump.  (They only played a snippet at the hearing.)

Later in the episode we heard from two election workers - mother and daughter - who had been named by Trump and accused of counting fraudulent Biden votes.  These women had T thugs at their homes harassing them.  Even going into the grandmother's house looking to make a citizens arrest of the two women Trump had accused.  Imagine how an older black woman in Georgia might react to a crowd of angry white men breaking into her house.  She lived when lynchings were still happening on a regular basis.  

Here's Faye Moss' testimony:

What the hearing left out - or I just missed - was that these two women have filed two lawsuits over this.

"Protect Democracy, through its Law for Truth project, represents Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Wandrea Moss in two landmark defamation lawsuits. Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss served as election workers in Fulton County, Georgia during the 2020 election. False claims that they engaged in ballot fraud in that capacity have caused them to suffer extensive harassment and threats of physical violence.

The first suit names The Gateway Pundit, a website which the complaint calls “among the leading purveyors of false information in the United States.” Law for Truth has undertaken this representation in partnership with the law firms DuBose Miller LLC, Dowd Bennett LLP, and Kastorf Law, LLC and the Yale Law School’s Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic. The Gateway Pundit, along with its founding editor Jim Hoft, and contributor Joe Hoft, knowingly disseminated blatantly false stories claiming that Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss were involved in a conspiracy to commit election fraud, and continued to publish these untruths long after they were proven to be false. 

The second suit names Herring Networks, Inc., which owns and operates One America News Network (OAN), OAN CEO Robert Herring, OAN President Charles Herring, OAN staffer Chanel Rion, and frequent OAN guest Rudolph Giuliani. The suit alleges that the defendants have knowingly and repeatedly disseminated false information about Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss and their work for the County on election night. In this suit, Law for Truth represents Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss, in partnership with the law firms Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP, DuBose Miller LLC, and Kastorf Law, LLC."

Sitting behind Ms Moss in the opening of the video is Mike Gottlieb, Ms. Moss and her mom's attorney. who has been filing suits for other election workers defamed and attacked.  

Here's a link to the actual suit against OAN.  It was filed Dec. 21, 2021.  

Did the committee not mention these lawsuits to gain greater pity for Ms. Moss?  I don't know.  But I personally feel much better knowing that steps are being taken to punish those who knowingly spread lies like this that cause great harm to people doing their jobs.  Jobs that are fundamental to democracy.  (It was amended in May when OAN OAN retracted its claims about Georgia, Moss, and Freeman.  That's good, but were there no consequences other than the expenses of hiring a lawyer for the harm they've done these women?  And what about the people who harassed them and entered the grandmother's home?  If there are no consequences they become emboldened to do it again.  Our system is failing.)

We need as many strong, upstanding citizens as possible to work and volunteer at voting places in every election to make sure elections are not stolen by the likes of Don Soprano.  

" . . . his father remembered a time when the dead person was carefully wrapped in birchbark and then fixed high in a tree."

 

I'm going to offer you the chapter "Cradle to Grave" from Louise Erdich's The Night Watchman. As I read it my body absorbed, in a new way, the meaning of the Anglo rulers rooting out the traditions, language, and knowledge of indigenous peoples.  And I realized that the GOP and evangelical Christian advocates of rooting out any mention of LGBTQ realities, women's rights, or the true history of the United States, of slavery, or even scientific truths,  rises from the same need to maintain one's own 'truths' by eliminating any competing 'truths.'

Stamping out other knowledge leads to ignorance which leads to total obedience.  Or so these would be tyrants believe. but the human mind has always  been resistant to these attempts.  Though the technology of modern marketing chips away and there are humans who would like to possess technology that controls what others know and think.  

Not only does such annihilation of ideas create obedience to "the one Truth" it delegitimizes the knowledge of the other culture.  This passage also shows us what we lose when we wipe out other cultural knowledge.  

My apologies to Louise Erdrich for quoting such a long passage.  This blog takes no ads and raises no money.  My hope is to share your wisdom and possibly get more people to read your book.  

"Thomas worked on the grave house while Wood Mountain finished up the cradle board.  They were working in Louie's barn because he had all of the tools - the saws, planes, rasps, the splitter, vise, hammer, and the sanding rocks.  Neither of them spoke.  Thomas was using a sharp chisel to dovetail the ends of the boards.  He didn't like using nails in a grave house.  He made a few rafters for the roof and then planed out the necessary shingles.  He'd seen them made with tar paper or bought shingles, but he felt close to Zhaanat as he worked - she had asked him to make the grave house because she knew he did it the old way.  Except, Thomas wondered, was this the really old way?  Biboon said that his father remembered a time when the dead person was carefully wrapped in birchbark and then fixed high in a tree.  It seemed better.  You were eaten by crows and vultures instead of worms.  Your body went flying over the earth instead of being distributed to the tiny creatures living under the earth. This grave house probably came about after they had been forced to live in one place, on reservations.  Mostly, they had Catholic burials.  He wanted to ask Wood Mountain which he thought was better, tree or dirt.  However, Wood Mountain was finishing the cradle board. 

"I suppose we shouldn't tell Zhaanat we were making the grave house and cradle board at the same time," he said to Wood Mountain.  

"You think it could be bad for the baby?"

"I'm not superstitious," said Thomas, although he certainly was.  Just not as bad as LaBatte with his fear of owls and his reading of random omens in everything.  Wood Mountain said that he'd light some sage and bathe the cradle board in the smoke to take the whammy off.

"That'll work," said Thomas. 

From the top of the cradle board, Wood Mountain was using Zhaanat's finest sanding tool - horsetail plant split and glued onto a piece of wood.  It was bringing out the narrow lines in the white cedar.  He had a jar of tea and a jar of vinegar in which he'd left some pennies for a week.  After he'd sanded the wood smooth, he painted the bottom of the cradle board with the tea, which gave it a soft brown color.  He painted the top of the wood with the penny vinegar, which tinged the wood with pale blue including the head guard.  He tied several pieces of sinew to the head guard.  sometimes he found small ocean shells while working in the fields.  Some were whorled;  others were tiny grooved scallops.  He drilled holes in them and hung them from the lengths of sinew. 

"Barnes was saying there used to be an ocean here," he said to Thomas.

"From the endless way-back times."

"Think of it.  Vera's baby will be playing with these little things from the bottom of the sea that was here.  Who could have known?"

"We are connected to the way-back people, here, in so many ways.  Maybe a way-back person touched these shells.  Maybe the little creatures in them disintegrated into the dirt.  Maybe some tiny piece from that creature is inside us now.  We can't know these things."

"Us being connected here so far back gives me a peaceful feeling," said Wood Mountain.

"That's what it's all about," said Thomas.  "And now we're putting another man in the earth.  Maybe a drunk, but he wasn't always a drunk."

"Sometimes when I'm out and around," said Wood Mountain, "I feel like they're with me, those way-back people.  I never talk about it.  But they're all around us.  I could never leave this place."

The United States would be a much healthier and spiritually  richer society today had it not been for the arrogance of white, Christian conquerors who believed they had the right to dispossess the indigenous people of their land and languages and customs.  Or the right to dispossess African slaves of their freedom and their labor.  

But that need for unquestioned power and obedience still lives among many in this nation and in this world.  I have no issue with spirituality and religions that try to guide people to experience their spirituality.  The Bible or Koran and other religious texts as allegory, as fables, that bring people comfort in times of sorrow and decency in times of opportunity, are fine.  But as literal truth to be thoughtlessly obeyed, a religion becomes the tool of authoritarian tyrants and demagogues.  

Trump, among others, gave permission to many to act on these selfish, evil impulses.  We'll get past this, but at great cost.  For those whose lives have been untouched by gun violence or climate change, or racial hatred, your escape is only temporary. Actually we've all been at least indirectly impacted even if we don't realize it.  If we don't overcome the dominance of oil wealth and drastically cut back our use of carbon based products, life will be unbearable for the vast majority of human beings.  And I worry for my grandchildren.

As the passage from The Night Watchman shows, the indigenous peoples of North America had spiritual beliefs and physical skills that kept connected to each other and to the earth for thousands of years.  Knowledge the immigrants from Europe could have benefited from if they hadn't tried to wipe it out.  

Outlining The Argument That The Redistricting Board Majority's Last Map Is Gerrymandering

 It seems to me there have been several issues raised, that the judge(s) will have to rule on. [Note: when I use district numbers, I'm using numbers from the November plan, because those are the ones that were used through the court hearings and it's less confusing.]

1.  Does the newest map (and basically we're only looking at four Senate districts at this point) meet the constitutional standards?

This would seem cut and dried, and probably is. But perhaps not.  Here's what the Alaska Constitution says:

§ 6. District Boundaries

The Redistricting Board shall establish the size and area of house districts, subject to the limitations of this article. Each house district shall be formed of contiguous and compact territory containing as nearly as practicable a relatively integrated socio-economic area. Each shall contain a population as near as practicable to the quotient obtained by dividing the population of the state by forty. Each senate district shall be composed as near as practicable of two contiguous house districts. Consideration may be given to local government boundaries. Drainage and other geographic features shall be used in describing boundaries wherever possible.

The Court has at points been pretty clear that if the boundaries of two house districts are touching, then they meet the contiguity requirement.  And while the majority Board members used anecdotes to show their new districts are Socio-Economically Integrated  (SEI), that is not one of the criteria.  Neither is compactness.  But 'communities of interest' is a term that has been mentioned, and 'equal protection'' is also a factor in Senate seats. (For example Judge Thomas Matthews decision pp.31-34 and again on 53-55) 

On page 28, Matthews also wrote: 

"The Alaska supreme Court has defined a “contiguous territory” as one which is bordering or touching.  The Court determined that “[a] district may be defined as contiguous if every part of the district is reachable form [sic] every other part without crossing the district boundary (i.e., the district is not divided into two or more discrete pieces of land)."

In practical terms. HD 22 and HD 9 could be considered two discrete pieces of land.  Except by hiking across miles of unpopulated mountains and valleys, you cannot get from one part of the new Senate district without crossing the district boundary.  Yet that is also the case for the Valdez and Matsu pairing which both the Superior and Supreme Court said was constitutional.  

And while people have argued that 'practicable' should mean that an impassable boundary through the mountains isn't practicable, the other side pointed to court  case language that said having to drive through other districts is not a problem.  The new Senate [House] district that both Courts  approved, pairing Valdez and Mat-Su is a case in point.  

I would argue that in an urban area where there are plenty of much easier boundaries to cross, the courts have left a giant loophole for Boards that want to gerrymander. And the Board's majority walked right through that loophole.

In fact Judge Thomas Matthews quotes from the proceedings of the Constitutional Convention that the Redistricting criteria were meant to make it harder to gerrymander. 

“Addressing the appropriate method of drawing districts, the framers believed that the redistricting criteria of compactness, contiguity, and socio-economic integration were necessary to prevent gerrymandering.  The purpose of utilizing watershed boundaries was to keep communities intact, whereas roads cutting through communities should not serve as boundaries.”  [From Thomas Matthews' decision p. 132]

It would seem that this little paragraph offers a lot to attorneys who want to mine it to argue why the 3B boundaries are bad.  

• the criterion of contiguity as used here assists gerrymandering, it doesn't prevent it
• the joining of people across watershed boundaries unites people not naturally a unit instead of uniting those within those boundaries
• Eagle River's two districts are divided by boundaries that cut through roads.  Pairing them would repair rather than exacerbate this use of roads cutting through communities serving as boundaries

 Making the kind of boundary in the new Senate Seat that combines HD 22 and HD7,  that runs through the mountains and makes residents cross multiple House boundaries to actually get to the other House District in their Senate seat,  makes a mockery of the purpose of contiguity and invites the odd pairing that we get in this case.  Which helps people who want to gerrymander.  

At the Supreme Court hearing on the 2021 plan, Justice Warren Matthews asked if the Board's attorney, Matt Singer, was saying that the ruling that all parts of a borough are SEI means that the Court couldn't rule that there was gerrymandering in Anchorage?  The judge did acknowledge that there were different neighborhoods with different interests within the Anchorage bowl.  

I'd also point out that the Court has endorsed different standards for compactness and deviation for rural and urban districts.  It's easier, in areas with  high population density, to create more compact districts and districts with lower deviations.  I would argue that the courts should breathe life into the words "as near as practicable" in urban areas. 

Ultimately, I think the most likely possibility of contiguity playing a role in overturning the Senate pairings, is if contiguity is just one of many other pieces of evidence that points to political gerrymandering.  

2.  Is the final plan the result of partisan gerrymandering?  

This would seem the more likely reason for the Courts to overturn the final map. In the next week I will flesh out this section.  For now let me outline the kinds of evidence that could be used to demonstrate that gerrymandering is what happened.

A.  The results of the new map - NOT pairing the two Eagle River house seats results in an extra Republican seat in the Alaska Senate.  It also pits two Republican incumbents against each other - both of whom have not cooperated with the Governor as much as he would like. 

B.  The makeup and track record of the Board majority that voted for this map over the vocal opposition of the other two members.   Not only were these Board members chosen - unconstitutionally because they were Republicans - they are also actively involved in Republican party politics and on the side of the Governor within the party.  Both the Superior Court and the Supreme Court have found them guilty of political gerrymandering already in the first map, and so there is already a track record.  Furthermore, the map that was approved was drawn by long time Republican redistricting strategist and former State Republican Party leader Randy Ruedrich.  There is no more partisan player in Alaska.  And then you can compare the majority to the two minority Board members who were appointed by people not affiliated with any party and have no past history of party activities.  

The majority Board members also adopted - in November - a plan for determining rotation of Senate seats that mainly favored Republicans who supported the Governor and punished those who didn't.  While the Board members involved insisted they had no idea who the incumbents of the seats were, it has since come out that they had the names from Randy Ruedrich who had apparently devised the plan. They did this insisting it was random.  When the minority members said, "If it's random, then let's switch the order."  The majority refused.  It wasn't random.  

C.  An objective look at the two proposed maps shows that Option 2 made perfectly natural pairings of House Districts.  The proponents of  Option 3B (the one chosen) had to use the most twisted logic  to justify the maps,  an indication that the reasons they did use were simply cover for the real reason they wanted these pairings - gerrymandering.  

D.  The decision-making process used by the majority was a sham. Judge Thomas Matthews pointed out in his remand order, that the Board members were not subject matter experts on Redistricting.  Unlike a Board with doctors or engineers who have subject matter expertise, the Redistricting Board members were essentially lay persons.  While they did hire area experts for the mapping and for working the census data, and also to review the VRA implications, they did not  hire decision making experts to help them determine what was the best pairing of Senate seats.

That is not to say that they couldn't have done this reasonably themselves.  But they never ever made even an attempt to impartially compare the alternative pairings available to them:  HD 22 and HD 24 versus HD 22 and HD 9.  Instead, they declared HD 24 off limits and only used anecdotal and unverified assertions to justify what they wanted (pairing HD 24 with HD 23 and HD22 with HD 9) and to disparage what they didn't want (pairing HD 23 with HD 17).  This was not an objective decision making process.  This was the justification of what they had already decided on.  And that was pairing D24 with D23 to create an extra Republican Senate seat.    I've covered this at length here.

E.  Public testimony was strongly in favor of Option 2.  Testimony for Option 3B was mostly canned phrases while testimony for Option 2 were more personal explanations of why people preferred Option 2 over Option 3B -  The Board's attorney argued in the Supreme Court that weighing public testimony would turn Redistricting into a political process where parties would rally their forces to show up to testify.  That did happen.  The Republican Board members Singer represented did have their allies rally the Republicans troops.  I've preliminarily reviewed the comments.  Most of the comments in favor of Option 3B fall into three sets of comments that are virtually the same. One set - "I support Option 3B" was sent in by about 40 people.  Another set had about 20 or 30 examples.  

The point of Judge Thomas Matthews' comments about public testimony was not that the Board should count the comments and then do what the majority 'voted' for, as  Singer argued, but rather was for the Board to hear the concerns of the people and take them into consideration as they created their maps. Then in their explanation of their decision they could explain why certain requests were not followed.  But the Board majority did what their attorney warned about - treated the public testimony as a vote.  When a slew of testimony came in the first day favoring the Bahnke testimony (which was Option 1 and paired the key Senate districts the same way that Option 2 did) then the Republican party sent out emails and social media messages and drummed up testimony that specifically said "I oppose the Bahnke plan".  There was even call-in testimony from Fairbanks saying they opposed the Bahnke plan but that they really didn't know anything about it so they couldn't answer any questions.

Detailed comments - pages long with very specific data that countered the majority Board members' assertions and preferred plan - were ignored.  Such clearly reasoned and fact based testimony was the noticeable exception for Option 3B.  Testimony by the sitting Senators in the districts involved was ignored.  Testimony by former Senators in the district involved was ignored.  Well, not totally ignored.  They twisted that testimony to 'prove' their decision wasn't partisan gerrymandering. Only testimony that favored their predetermined pairings was attended to.  

F.  The Board listened to what the courts said about how they were supposed to act.   They adopted the appearance of following the courts' orders, but only to cover up their actual intentions.  While I covered some of these issues in the points above - things do overlap - I think this is another key point.  The Courts need to see through the facade of following the Court's orders and of false justifications that merely mask the actual intent - in this case gerrymandering to garner another Republican Senate seat.  

G.  Do modern communications technologies make contiguity moot?  This point was argued to downplay the distance between Eagle River and Girdwood and Whittier.  People no longer need to drive the long distances, they argued, because we now can meet via zoom.  People can talk to their Senator by phone or meet with them and others via Zoom.  Perhaps this should be in the contiguity sections because it came up in those debates.  I have several observations:

• There's a significant difference between online participation and in-person participation.  In person you get to talk to the Senator or Representative one-on-one before and after a meeting.  You can also talk with other participants, exchange contact info, form bonds, and connect human being to human being.  That's much harder online and is much less likely to happen.
• Not everyone has reliable, good enough internet service for meeting this way to be viable.
• People argued this only because the Board created an Anchorage borough Senate seat that stretches the distance of the Borough - 87 miles several people testified - and so this argument came up to say it didn't matter.  Not because it doesn't matter, but to bolster the ridiculous pairing of HD22 and HD9 rather than natural pairing of HD 22 and 24.  If we can substitute online meetings for in person meetings as they claimed, then the criteria of compactness and contiguity could be dropped altogether.  One could argue that certain people who live far apart are communities of shared interest and should be allowed to form House and Senate districts.  

One of the people who argued that the various online meeting technologies made the need for geographic proximity moot was Randy Ruedrich.  He made that argument while physically present at the Anchorage Legislative Information Office.  Walking is a little hard for him these days, yet he made the effort to be at most meetings in person, not online.  Because being there in person does matter.  

Conclusions

I expected that there would be a lot of gaps, and there clearly is room for filling in details. For example in this post I haven't discussed how the majority insists that Senate Seat L is a holy union of military interests and that pairing JBER with downtown is sacrilegious.   Even though the Board must have already committed such sacrilege by creating House District 23, which has already paired most of JBER with a big chunk of downtown. There are many more such examples of duplicity in the Board majority's arguments.  Many of those details are in previous posts.  But I did a better job than I expected of outlining the key points that need to be made to prove gerrymandering.  

While it's possible the Board members' emails will show something more explicit, the circumstantial evidence of gerrymandering is overwhelming.  The Board majority put on a show to develop arguments that fit member Budd Simpson's definition of reasonable:  "Reasonable means they had a reason."  A show for the Court that they were following the Court's orders.  Presenting reasons that were factually or logically faulty, or as I argued in the previous post, that bits of facts were wrapped up in lies, didn't matter to them. 

I will try to add more detail in future posts to further support the points I've raised.  And I'll add links to previous posts.  But consider this an executive summary that these additional posts will refer to and add evidence for.    

Anyone who has immediate needs for examples and details, just email me and I'll try to help you out.  

The AK Redistricting Board's Amateur Decision Making Process - Plus Marcum and Binkley Reasons For 3B Votes

In my previous post, I put up the video of the meeting where the three Republican Redistricting Board members go through their reasons for choosing Option 3B.  It also includes Board member Borromeo's rejection of those assertions and a plea to Judge Matthews to just fix the map himself and not remand it to the Board because they aren't going to change.  

In the post prior to that I went through Board member Budd Simpson's reasons for supporting Option 3B - as he laid them out in Wednesday's meeting - and pointed out problems I had with his reasons.  I thought this next post I would do the same with member Marcum's and member Binkley's reasons.  (And I do that as sort of an addendum to this post at the bottom.) But it seemed to be more useful to demonstrate that their reasons do not add up to a good, professional decision making exercise.   And in doing that, try to summarize their strategy so it's easier to understand what they did and what they didn't do, in terms of good decision making.  (But I wasn't quite done with it and so I put up the video of that meeting yesterday instead.)

Using a decision making model allows me to establish the flakiness of how they - in their words and actions - decided that Option 3B was the best option.  Because flaky as it might seem to many, the districts they created, while not optimal, could be considered Constitutional by the courts.  That depends on how they interpret "as contiguous as practicable."  Since other criteria, such as deviation and compactness, are applied more strictly in densely populated urban areas than more sparsely populated rural areas, why shouldn't contiguity be treated the same?  It's much easier to be contiguous in a densely populated area.  Will they see that such an urban/rural differentiation makes sense now?  At least in Anchorage.  

But if the Courts view the maps as basically in compliance with the Contiguity requirement, the other way I see that they might block the map is  by deciding it was politically motivated gerrymandering.  Part of the evidence for reaching that  conclusion is to:

• realize that the Board's decision making was haphazard at best,  simply the application of anecdotal evidence to 'prove' the 3B map was the best, because it's not the best on objective measures
• wonder why the majority fought so hard for Senate pairings that ignore the obvious pairings and force together much less natural pairings and  
• conclude there was an unspoken (by the majority) reason - getting another Republican Senate seat.

So first a brief description of what good decision making should NOT look like from a 1998 Harvard Business Review article, The Hidden Traps in Decision Making:

"So where do bad decisions come from? In many cases, they can be traced back to the way the decisions were made—the alternatives were not clearly defined, the right information was not collected, the costs and benefits were not accurately weighed. But sometimes the fault lies not in the decision-making process but rather in the mind of the decision maker. The way the human brain works can sabotage our decisions."

The article is more interested in the problems with the mind of the decision maker, and while I'm sure exploring the hidden biases in brains of the decision makers would yield fascinating results, we don't have to go there to find serious problems with the Redistricting Board's decision to select Option 3B over Option 2.  

If anyone wants to know what went wrong - and it's clear the decision was wrong from a public interest perspective - we need look no further than

1. the alternatives were not clearly defined, 
2. the right information was not collected, 
3. the costs and benefits were not accurately weighed

Click to enlarge
More detailed maps with the Simpson post

1. the alternatives were not clearly defined, 
1. The Board settled into two map options.  
2. One offered by the East Anchorage Plaintiffs - Option 2
3. One offered by Randy Ruedrich - Option 3B
4. They could have made more, but didn't.
5. The 3B Option chose to 
1. Pair north Muldoon (D20) with south Muldoon (D21)
6. That left D22 as an orphan district (not connected to another district to make a Senate district)
1. The two key options were to connect with D24 (to the north above the map) or D9.  Both were connected to other house districts, so both required at least one more change.  
2. Majority basically decided that 24 was not available because it was paired with 23 and they weren't going to change that.  
7. So the next choice was D9.  

So, basically, the majority had only ONE choice - pairing 22 with 9.  So, no, the alternatives were not clearly defined.  

1. [This loose 1. is here because I haven't figured out how to do lists that I can break for a moment and then continue on Blogger.  I even tried to make them white so you can't see them, but they are independent.  There will be more at 3.  If anyone has a suggestion I'm listening.]
2. the right information was not collected, 
1. The only information that the Board collected in any sort of organized way in the whole process was related to maps.  They used the census data and the Autobound software organized that data for the Board
2. The Board collected anecdotes, personal preferences, justifications, but did not pursue collecting data that would help verify which of these vague notions about the Senate seats was accurate
3. The Board was given more anecdotes, personal preferences, and justifications via the public testimony (I've offered a methodology for evaluating that here)
4. The Board received some actual data and information via the public testimony 
5. The majority did not study the data and information that came in.  Rather, they picked things that supported their preference and ignored data that didn't (example:  JBER students going to ER High School.  They cited Lance Pruitt's assertion that ER High School wouldn't exist without JBER.  They ignored Denny Wells statistics that showed more JBER residents live in areas of the bases zoned for West High and Bartlett.  And they never compared how many D9 students went to high schools in D22 or vice versa.)
6. This was a giant gap for the Board.  While they hired technicians for the technical mapping data gathering and organization, the only other professional decision making expertise used for evaluating how well they met the non-numerical criteria for redistricting was to hire the VRA expert. Most of that debate was hidden from the public and I'm guessing led Marcum to pair D22 with D20 because the VRA expert said pairing D22 with D21 (north Muldoon) wouldn't work because of the diversity of that district.  That would have been the majority's ideal pairing because it would have forced popular Democratic Sen Bill Wielechowsk into an Eagle River district.  But that's speculation on my part.  What's key is that they did not remotely follow the three steps of decision making outlined in the excerpt above.

1. 
   
2. 
   
3. the costs and benefits were not accurately weighed
1. The majority never compared the two basic options which were:
1. Pairing  22 and 24  versus pairing 22 and 9
2. Instead, they
1. took pairing 22 and 24 off the table from the beginning and
2. thus made it impossible, in their minds, to pair 22 and 24
3. used anecdotal information to argue the benefits of pairing 22 and 9
4. used anecdotal information to argue why 23 could not be separated from 24
5. used anecdotal information to argue why 23 could not be combined with 17 
6. only looked at data that favored what they wanted and disfavored what they didn't want
3. I say anecdotal because there were reliable or valid numbers available to evaluate,  that could be put into tables that neatly outlined factors that would help them compare how well each pairing met the constitutional criteria. (Actually the only criterion for Senate seats is contiguity, but that didn't stop them from talking about socio-economic integration (9SEI)when they thought it would help their cause.  They pointed out the primacy of contiguity when the proponents of Option 2 discussed SEI.
4. They never gathered objective numbers to fill into the non-existent cost/benefit chart (in this case perhaps advantages/disadvantages chart)

This was not professional decision making.  This was just marshaling claims and assertions to back up a decision that clearly had already been made:  To keep Senate seat L (D23 and D24) intact.  

Why all this effort to pretend that pairing D22 with D9 was the only option they had?  And was far superior to D22 and D24?    And what was the problem with pairing D23 with D17 ( downtown)? In Marcum's words, "Choosing option 2 is an intentional attempt to break up that natural pairing [23/24].  JBER should be with Chugiak." 

But these aren't dumb people.  

The only explanation that makes sense to me is one that the Court already found them guilty of:  political gerrymandering.  The proclamation plan would have given them (and Eagle River) control of two Senate seats.  The Court specifically broke up one of those (D21/D22).  Pairing D22 with D21 gave Eagle River control over a Senate seat that was half a swing district. Pairing D22 with D24 would force them to give up control over another swing district. (D23)  Eagle River would end up with just one solidly red Senate Seat.  So they had to pair D22, not with the obvious match Eagle River seat D24 - a perfect Senate seat by all the normal criteria - but with D9, across the mountains and with no adjoining neighborhoods.  And that would force pulling D9 apart from D10, another reasonable community of interest.  

And that's what they did. Since this doesn't make logical sense from a redistricting perspective and they had to manipulate data to pretend that it did, one has to ask why?   

Is it possible there is another explanation?    Given the attempted gerrymandering the first time around and the fact that this time the three Republican Board members teamed up to support a map made by Randy Ruedrich and voted for that map over the strenuous objections of the other two Board members, it's pretty compelling.  

Addendum:  Based on my notes from the Wednesday, April 13, 2022 Board meeting.

Board Member Bethany Marcum's Reasons for supporting Option 3B

[Board member's comments in black, mine in red]

Marcum:  I’m very uncomfortable with Option 2 because it moves JBER and links it with D17.  It makes the least sense for any possible pairings.  Downtown is the arts and tourism center, that's not what makes up JBER.  It is used to wake up?? the military community.  Choosing option 2 is an intentional intent to break up that natural pairing.  JBER should be with Chugiak.  

It was hard to sit through these comments without putting my hands over my face.  She’s just pulling words and ideas out of the blue here.   Let’s look carefully at the majority’s defense of 3B strategy.  

The first step is to assume the Chugiak/Eagle River(24) and JBER/Government Hill (D23) Senate district is untouchable.  That’s because this is the last district left for them to pull an extra Republican Senator from.  In the same way that the courts found linking (ER) D22 and south Muldoon (21) was political gerrymandering because it ‘cracks’ D21, this pairing ‘cracks’ D23.  

How?  Eagle River is solidly White, comfortably middle class, and Republican, Trump Republican.  It’s the voters who elected Lora Reinbold  and Jamie Allard.    D23 is, in general, lower income, and far more diverse.

Both Simpson and Marcum refer to D23 as the JBER district although 1//3 of the population does not live on JBER.  Other factors:  many military either don’t voter or they vote in their home states.  The JBER precincts had fewer people voting in the last few elections (including 2020) than the non-JBER districts even though they outnumber them 2-1.   So this is a perfect district to pair with a strongly Republican district.  Higher income white neighborhoods have a higher voting percentage than lower income diverse neighborhoods, so Eagle River will dominate Senate races.  As has been pointed out at different times in this process, when a Muldoon house district was paired with ER in the 2011 redistricting process, a popular Senator, and the only black in the State Senate at that time, was handily defeated by ER voters.  

It would appear the Republican majority of the Board is working hard to keep this district for themselves.

So, basically, they start out by putting it to the side, not even to be considered, as they look for a partner house district for a D22 Senate pairing.

But D23 is NOT just JBER.  It’s 1/3  off base, Downtown-adjacent neighborhoods.  

And if JBER and downtown are so different they can’t be paired, why did the Board  make a house district that does just that:  puts downtown in with JBER?  You can’t have it both ways.  It was ok as a house district, but not as a Senate District?

And none of the majority have considered the reverse problem of lumping Government Hill folks in with Eagle River.  If it’s bad one way, then it should be bad the other way.  But that doesn’t help their case.

I’ve been listening to the Redistricting Board debates since December 2020.  I don’t recall people talking about Downtown as the arts and tourism center of Anchorage before and I’m not sure why she thinks the military have no interest in the arts.  They don't go to the museum? They don't go to the Performing Arts Center?  She didn’t mention that downtown is probably the bar/tavern center of Anchorage too because she knows it would be harder to keep a straight face saying the young soldiers don’t spend time in the downtown bars.  

While Marcum has taken umbrage when people have characterized her intent, she has no problem jumping to the conclusion that pairing D23 with downtown is an intentional attempt to break up “the natural pairing” of JBER and Chugiak/Eagle River.  See, it’s just such a natural pairing that it’s off the table when we make these adjustments.  And I suspect that Marcum has convinced herself of this.  The problem is that pairing D22 with D24 is the most natural pairing to be had.  It’s not just me saying that.  Lots of people did, including Dr. Chase Hensel and Dr. Phyllis Morrow.  Dr. Hensel was the expert witness for the East Anchorage plaintiffs.  The two submitted about six pages of testimony about why the two ER districts were a community of interest, the crux is this:

“Because a large data set informs the question of whether and to what degree a population constitutes a community of interest, it can be a judgment call as to where the boundaries of a community of interest lie. In the Eagle River case, however, there is no question: all the signposts point in the same direction.”    

You can read it all in the public testimony listed for April 7-April 8 on pages 327 - 332.  

In that same file there is testimony (pp. 312-316)  from Doug Robbins who offers a long list of references to “Chugiak Eagle River” by the Municipality, by businesses, by Eagle River organizations, to make the point that we all know that Chugiak Eagle River is the most natural pairing.  

Marcum:  Looking back at E Anchorage lawsuit.  Challenged K and L.  L - 23/24, not found to be invalid.  Both are proposals we are not considering.  Both addressed K issue the same way.  It’s what the E Anchorage plaintiffs wanted, satisfactory.  Those individuals still very involved pushing one plan over the other.  Why are they investing themselves in this?  I have to conclude there is political motive.  

I’d have to go back and review the East Anchorage plaintiffs’ suit before commenting on what it did or didn’t do.  

 I have learned over the years that people often project their own thinking and actions on to others.  The Supreme Court found the majority Board members had politically gerrymandered the map.  And so with no proof offered other than they are proposing Option 2, Marcum concludes it’s political.  I’m guessing that she knows that her preference against the common sense pairings, is for political reasons, then opposing her choice must also be for political reasons.  There are other reasons to do things, like fairness and equity in voting.

I didn’t gerrymander.  Here’s why I support pairings.

Courts ruling on Senate K - key response created Muldoon Road district.  

When you put 20 and 21 together, you are left with 22 empty.  The only pairing is D9.  

This is exactly what Simpson said.  The other part of Eagle River (D24), what is known by so many organizations and people as Greater Chugiak and Eagle River, is not an obvious pairing?  Only if you’re locking D24 with D23.  The rational way to proceed is to look at the two adjacent districts - D24 and D9.  When you do that and measure the pairings by every criteria (other than political advantage) then the obvious choice is D24 and D22.  And since it is so obvious, Marcum and Simpson have simply taken that option off the table.  D24 and D23 is a done deal, end of discussion.  So all that is left is D9.  

That leaves 10 without a partner.  ???  That leaves 14 stranded and requires a new pairing.  Take two primary midtown roads.  Four remaining districts 23/24   17/18 same as current    11/12  no changes.  15/16   four changes that result from responding to court ruling and four that remain the same.  

In comparison, Simpson had a set of points and arguments that he went through.  Like Marcum, pairing D22 with D24 was never an option.  So there were never any comparisons of that pairing with the D22/D9 pairing.  Because everything they said about how compatible D22 and D9 are - non-urban neighborhoods, mountainous, wild life encounters (as though those don’t also happen in the Anchorage bowl), fire and snow, service areas for roads - all that is true and a much better match with D24 than D22, as former ER representative/senator Randy Phillips testified.

So let’s move on to Chair John Binkley’s reasons.

Binkley:  Thank you Bethany.  My position.  Then the second round.  Outpouring of public testimony.  Shows me Alaskans are engaged.  Seven different public hearings.  Heard from 100 Anchorage residents.  Heartening that Alaskans care.  People are supportive or opposing one of the other. We step back it’s our job to replace Sen K  - concerned with our pairing of 22 and 21.  Heartening that both proposals repaired that.  It is noteworthy that is how we solved the problem.   

No dispute with them on the process. 

Heard from people that  D22 and D24 should be paired.  Those people are articulate about how ER Chugiak, Peters Creek are closely tied together.  But as Budd pointed out earlier, the two Republican Senators and former Sen President all testified they should be together.  There are factions in the Republican Party who think they should be paired.  Budd mentioned another member of the administration.  Also supported 22 and 24 together.    I take it seriously and those are legitimate moves by people

Let’s give him points for even talking about the D22 and D24 option.  He did not rule it out from the get go.  He likes to ramble a bit and seems to have gotten off the prescribed talking points.

But also heard similarities between 22 and 9.  Both more rural, larger lot sizes.  Single family homes.  Served by road service districts.  Share the Chugach state park.  Close to mountains, deal with wildlife, wildfire danger.  Could be important.  Most house districts are compact and larger districts large rural districts on the outskirts.  Also heard that ER and Hillside were once in a single house districts - met a higher standard.  

The judge said that the Board members’ simple preference doesn’t outweigh the preponderance of public opinion.  Binkley has given us NO hard data to support his feelings about this.  There is no serious comparison of the two possible Senate pairings.  Just words with little or no factual support.  And in the past Eagle River didn't have a big enough population to form two house seats so the population was shared with other house seats.  

I'd also note that nine of the 2021 map districts border Chugach State Park either directly or border other park land that spills into the park.  And no district in town is more than 15 minutes from Chugach State Park.  

JBER in District 23 one of the most compelling.  Extends from D23 into D24.  If underlying house districts different it could have been done differently.  

The only one who recognizes something about how D23 was drawn.  But he doesn’t explain what he means.  Perhaps if they hadn’t made the district 1/3 off base, downtown adjacent?  He also doesn't mention that Government Hill in D23 extends from D23 to D17 (downtown).

Really active and retired military reside in 24 and have that connection to 23.   Direct highway connection Arctic Valley and closer to town.  Also heard testimony to JBER and N Muldoon.  Also legitimate.  Not an option presented to us.   

He’s saying here, I think, that he heard compelling testimony that pairing the JBER with N. Muldoon was another option, but it was “not an option presented to us.”   Excuse me?!  You are chair of the Board.  It’s the Board’s job to create the maps.  Why didn’t you pursue that option yourself if you thought it viable?  Are you saying the Board’s hands are tied? Unless someone else offers an option they can’t entertain it?  

But, of course, the East Anchorage plaintiffs’ preference was to pair the two Muldoon districts, so they didn't  offer it to you.  And the other option was a map which both member Marcum and Randy Ruedrich prepared independently (according to Marcum.)  But if you start with the assumption that  the D24 and D23  pairing is untouchable,  then it wouldn’t be hard to come up with the rest of the maps exactly the same.  

I don’t find compelling the idea of JBER with downtown Anchorage. For 13 years I’ve had a condo here and  been in that district for work and with Alaska RR and in my experience the downtown area part of D23 is dominated by professional services.  

Hearing this, member Borromeo jumped in and said something like, “You deferred Anchorage to Marcum because you said you didn’t know Anchorage well, and only now you are telling us you had a condo in Anchorage for 13 years?

Just moments before Marcum said that Anchorage is the arts and tourism center of Anchorage.  Now it’s portrayed as dominated by professional services.  But no data, no statistics to back up either claim.  Just feelings, personal experience in the past.  I’m not saying that there aren't art galleries and a museum downtown or that there aren’t professional services.  But why does this make the district incompatible with the Base?  There actually wasn't much testimony from the base.  The only person I recall is retired Air Force doctor Felisa Wilson and she said people on the base use their nearest gates and the base should be connected to the part of Anchorage nearest their gate.

Military is a community of interest

Did everyone notice how all three pointed out the commonalities between the pairings they favored and the lack of commonalities between the pairings they opposed?  And how they are long on rhetoric and short on documented evidence?   

I’d point out one more thing.  They’ve spent a lot of time saying that every part of Anchorage is socio-economically integrated to dismiss such comments for house districts and senate pairings they opposed.  But now that’s pretty much their whole argument.  Even though Socio-Economic Integration is a criterion for House districts, but not Senate districts.  Though the related concept of community of interest is considered in Senate districts.

I believe we have two good options.  I’m more comfortable with Option 3B.  I plan to support.

"I feel more comfortable with", not, ‘the preponderance of evidence clearly shows 3B is the plan to support.”  Because the preponderance of evidence goes the other way.  And they did their best to not have any sort of direct, professional comparison of the two key options:  22/24 ER and 22/9 ER/Hillside.

I’d make one final point:  Although the Board members cited the extensive public testimony, there was no serious analysis of that testimony.  I offered a methodology for that there.

Nor did the Board do any serious evaluation of their options.  The Option 2 folks seemed to have gathered more specific reasons.  The Option 3B people, even Simpson’s organized list of reason - had sound bytes and talking points that were based on personal preference rather than any hard data that compared the potential Senate pairings.  And as I said, early on, their strategy was to

Claim Senate District L (23 and 24) as a done deal, the ideal pairing that shouldn’t be touched.

They claimed D23 as the JBER district, even though 1/3 of the district lives off base around downtown and other north Anchorage neighborhoods.  

So their only option left is pairing 22 with 9.  

Me again in black.  There are just so many details that could be added in.  As it is, I'm trying the patience of all but the most obsessed redistricting folks.  The mass of data makes it hard for people who haven't followed closely to see the forest for the trees.  

[UPDATE April 18, 2022, 6pm:  Someone did text me some suggestions for getting into the html code to make my own fix for the numbered list.  Thanks!   Also someone sent to me:  

"Must Read Alaska" is written by a former Republican Party Communications Director in Alaska and runs a sensationalist right wing blog on Alaska politics even though now she apparently lives in Florida.  While Board member Simpson said the fact that some Republican current and former Senators opposed Option 3B proved 3B wasn't partisan, Ms. Downing's headline here seems to acknowledge the obvious.]