Wales 5

Joan and I took a walk on Saturday afternoon along the beach to see the sculpture on the hill. There were several nets drying on the beach.













Here I'm starting up the hill at the end of the beach looking north, we can see the south end of Wales.







The hillside is lushly covered with green stuff.





Here, again, looking north from the hillside we can see the village of Wales from the south. The sculpture was created by Joe Senungetuk, the organizer of the workshop, in memory of his brother Skip. He worked on this with sculptor David Barr from Michigan. Barr's website has a little more on the sculpture:

Arctic Arc consists of two sculpture installations at sites on the Bering Sea (Naukan, East Russia and Wales, Alaska) which are sites of the first human migrations into North America. The sculptures are a peaceful symbol for a border of international tension.

This is the inscription.



A tractor slowly disappearing on the beach.











On the way back we saw a snow bunting, a bird I hadn't ever seen before.

Lisa Returns Property

The ADN headline today is "Murkowski returns disputed land." At least Lisa M. recognizes that some people could see this as a conflict. But apparently she still doesn't completely get it.

Murkowski said it was a heart-wrenching decision because she, her husband and their two sons -- all avid fishermen -- have long sought a place on the Kenai River.

And how is it that Bob Penney made the offer to her and not to me? Is it possible that one factor is that I'm not a US Senator who'd make a nice, useful neighbor? It's the same reason Tom Anderson got all those jobs where he didn't have to do too much.

Selling back the land was a good step. But it doesn't absolve her of any wrong doing. After all, if I rob a bank, and then when the cops appear to be closing in on me, I get remorseful and return the money, they aren't likely to dismiss the charges. It may affect the sentencing though.

On the other hand, I must say in Lisa's and other politicians' defense, people can get pretty ugly venting their anger. I'm sure much of the worst invective comes from people transferring their own self loathing. After all, if the ADN report is accurate, Lisa got bad advice from the Ethics Committee staff.

"Senate ethics says that if the properties are used for personal use, you don't disclose it," she said. She said she disclosed the mortgage for the property but not the transfer, based on advice from Ethics Committee staff.

Murkowski dismissed criticism that she used a Ketchikan bank with close family ties -- she once sat on the board, and her sister is a current shareholder and director. She and her husband received a two-year balloon mortgage known as an "equity lot loan" that can be rolled into a construction loan to build on raw property.

I think we all go to friends we know 'in the business' who we trust and think will give us a good deal. In the case of the bank, I suspect she would have gotten a special deal just because of her family connections to the bank, even if she weren't a prominent politician. Yet this form of 'privilege' where you get deals that aren't available to the average person, is the kind of thing that blinds the privileged to the realities of life of the rest of us who don't have that sort of connection. While I think it is relevant to investigate, I think the personal invective reflects more on those invecting than on Murkowski.


One danger is that people like Cheney and Bush who stonewall every step of the way, who attempt to destroy those who oppose them (ie outing Plame) get off through their bluffing, whereas people who step forward and try to make things right get punished. Though there is nothing in the ADN article that suggests Murkowski thinks she did anything improper. The only thing she seems to be concerned about is the public trust (translation: her electability).

"While Verne and I intended to make this our family home and we paid a fair price for this land, no property is worth compromising the trust of the Alaska people," Murkowski said in a written statement.

And she does fall into blaming her accusers:

"There are those who will do anything to bring down the strength of the Alaska delegation. I think that is a reality. I think what I do is to get up every morning and do the best job I can representing Alaskans. That's what I was elected to do."

Wales 3

On Friday afternoon (still our first day in Wales) we did some writing exercises. Then we broke for dinner. Tony and his wife Joanne prepared reindeer in the kitchen. I'm not going to talk a lot about our Wales hosts and the other workshop participants because in the writing workshop they talked about themselves and the village of Wales, and while they didn't say anything terribly sensitive, there was an agreement that things we talked about are confidential, and it's hard for me to separate out what they might not want shared from what they wouldn't care about. However, we did 'publish' a small book with highlights of what people wrote and that I can share as i go along.





In addition to the reindeer meat, we got to taste walrus flippers cooked in seal oil and locally picked greens also preserved in seal oil While the reindeer was definitely a more familiar type food, the walrus and greens weren't bad.





Here's everythig ready to eat.







Joan and I both enjoyed being right on the beach. I think this was an after dinner walk.





There are no trees anywhere around, but there is lots of firewood in the form of driftwood on the beach (see Wales 1 pix) and lots of interesting other things like these dead starfish.














That evening the community center was busy with bingo. There is electricity, though the experimental windmills weren't on while we were there. They are made, I was told, in Kotzebue, a little further north, and when they first tried them the wind was so strong it broke the windmill. There are very harsh winds here.



This picture was from the plane when we flew in.

Congress can enforce its own orders against recalcitrant witnesses

It's amazing what all you can find out reading The Next Hurrah comments. Here Frank Askin, professor at Rutgers School of Law, and director of the Rutgers Constitutional Litigation Clinic, writing in the Washington Post, suggests:

So long as Congress is investigating issues over which it has the power to legislate, it can compel witnesses to appear and respond to questions. That power has been affirmed over and over in prosecutions for contempt.

In modern times, this congressional power has been enforced by referring contempt cases to the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia for indictment and prosecution. That, of course, is the rub. It allows the president to exercise his plenary power under the Constitution to issue pardons "for offenses against the United States."

But no law says that indictment and prosecution by the Justice Department is the exclusive means to enforce congressional prerogative.

Thus, the congressional alternative. Instead of referring a contempt citation to the U.S. attorney, a house of Congress can order the sergeant-at-arms to take recalcitrant witnesses into custody and have them held until they agree to cooperate -- i.e., an order of civil contempt. Technically, the witness could be imprisoned somewhere in the bowels of the Capitol, but historically the sergeant-at-arms has turned defendants over to the custody of the warden of the D.C. jail.

For the complete piece click here.

I'm sorry, I can't help it, he's so egregious

From Scott Horton, Harper's Magazine.

For those of you who missed the testimony of Alberto Gonzales before the Judiciary Committee, I’d recommend making the effort to catch it on a CSPAN rebroadcast. There’s simply no way to adequately describe the whole scene: that creepy, evasive visage, calmly churning out falsehood after falsehood. You have to keep reminding yourself—this man is the attorney general of the United States. He is the physical embodiment of an idea. At this point no one, Democrat or Republican, would argue that he is highly qualified to hold the position he now occupies, that he is the obvious choice among America’s legions of lawyers to be the attorney general. He was chosen and installed as the exaltation of personal loyalty and fidelity over all other traits, especially intelligence, honesty, loyalty to the law and especially the Constitution. Gonzales stands for the willingness to lie and dissemble in order to protect his patron; he is the ultimate and absolute politicization of high office. His selection and installation reflect the values of a tyranny, not a democracy...


Robert Conquest wrote that the Soviet Union was the only nation with a completely unpredictable past. But meet Alberto Gonzales. He was extremely busy rewriting history today, and it now appears that when he raises his hand and swears an oath, there’s no telling which version of the past will appear next. First, he tells us that the trip to see Ashcroft in the hospital has to do with something entirely different from the Terrorist Surveillance Program about which his former Deputy James Comey testified. In doing this, he contradicts his own prior testimony, and he contradicts Comey. At least one person is lying. And indeed, that person has to be Gonzales. The only issue is which of his diametrically opposed statements is the lie...

Tuesday, July 24. All in another day’s testimony for Alberto Gonzales, the worst attorney general in the history of the United States, the man who has come to embody the lawlessness and immorality of the Bush Administration.

For the rest of the list of Gonzales' lies and a few capital offenses according to Horton, click here.

Has Gonzales No Shame?

How did we get here? How is it that Gonzales is still the attorney general? What will the history books say about this administration? Has Gonzales no shame? Has Bush no shame? I recognize that TPM has edited the testimony, but all the various reports on his testimony suggest it is one of the low points of the history of US Attorney General's Office.

Wales 2

That first day in Wales - Friday - after helping Alice get her tent up, we had a late lunch. Here you can see Winton (from Wales) and Eli (from Anchorage.) Eli was the pool manager at the University for years and is originally from Germany. She is now a sculptor and has an outdoor 'studio' along the beach somewhere in Anchorage where she builds natural, temporary sculpture in the manner somewhat of Andy Goldsworthy. And just a part of Barbara's face. She's a writer from New Jersey who has been a museum curator and has done extensive work with Alaska Native art and has spent a great deal of time in Alaska. There were so many interesting people.





And here Joe's wife Catherine is talking to Lena. Both Lena and Winton were important participants in the writing workshop. Both have lived in Wales their whole lives and know so much about the history, the natural world, and the social world of Wales.

















There was a picture earlier of Marie on her four wheeler going out to get water. Well, in Wales they still use honey buckets. There's a white bucket with a plastic garbage back in the 'toilet' on the right. When this gets filled, someone has to take it out and dump it.



There are little honey bucket stations all around town. Here is someone coming back from dumping. Think about it. Alaska has a Permanent Fund of savings from oil income (and more recently investments on that income) of $40 billion. This fund pays annual dividends to all the citizens of Alaska. Last year it was around $1000 per person. And yet we have people living in villages that still don't have running water and decent sewage systems.

I'll try to get a little more up each day. My mom and daughter are both here visiting. Yesterday we had a triple birthday party - my daughter, me, and a friend, Alex - and we've got lots to do so I can't do too much at once.

Most of the pictures can be enlarged somewhat by clicking on them.

Wales - 1

Tryying to figure out how to post about Wales, I've decided to let my pictures structure the story and go in chronological order. There are lots of overlapping stories here, but rather than isolate them out, I'll let them unfold (or not) as I experienced them. For the beginning of this Wales trip including maps go to July 18, 2007.

We got the flight go-ahead at 11am on Friday and flew into the Wales airport on a new Beechcraft. Here we are at the airstrip in Wales with our luggage out. Four-wheelers were out at the airport to pick up luggage and we walked the ten minutes to the community center, passing grassy marsh land.


We had to decide where to stay. People had sleeping bags to put in offices in the Community Center, several of us brought tents. Alice, who's from Bethel, wanted to sleep out on the beach, so I went along to see if that would work for Joan too.





On the way we passed Marie who was going a little out of town to a large pond to fill up on water. Wales doesn't have running water. People said they did, but it was chlorinated and the State health people said that wasn't safe. So now they get the same unsafe water, but they have to get it in buckets. Or so that is what I was told.





Alice gave a warm hello to everyone we passed and the warmth was returned by all. A group of kids followed us to the beach. Shawna, the one in the hooded sweatshirt, became a buddy She's also the daughter of Joanne and Tony who were both participants in the writing workshop. Alice got her tent up on the beach, despite warnings by locals that it would get extremely windy and blow away. She piled rocks on all the stakes and in the tent.





Walking back through town to the Community Center after Alice's tent was up. In the end, Tony convinced me to put our tent just behind the community center so we wouldn't have to walk so far.

Back from Wales in Sunny Nome

We spent Thursday night in Nome because Wales was fogged in. There were six residents of Wales who joined the ten of us (plus our workshop facilitator Kim) who came from outside. With Alice (from Bethel) and Joe (from Wales) we had more Alaska Native participants than non-Native.

The people of Wales were incredibly hospitible and we share a lot. I'll blog more and post lots of pictures when we get back to Anchorage, but I'm just taking a moment in the Nome library to get back on. The sun is shining here in Nome. (We only had about an hour of sun in 3.5 days in Wales, that was after the drummers had been practicing for two hours one evening.) It was warm enough that I put on my shorts at the beach and tested the waters of the Bering Sea.

We have a few hours to wander the beaches of Nome and see if we can find a few birds that normally we can't see.

Nome Detour

Flying into Nome - Bering Strait [Norton Sound on the Bering Sea] in the background.




Kim, the workshop facilitator, has a brand new Mac Book so I can keep blogging as long as we have internet connections. Here he is as our luggage gets moved to the Bering Air office.

We checked in, got all our luggage weighed, sat and talked, before finding out that it was foggy in Wales and that we couldn't take off.








Bering Air's bus took us to the Airport Cafe in town which looks like hip coffee shop anywhere for lunch.










Downtown Nome sits right on the Bering Strait.





Then we walked into town to visit Faith's library. Faith is one of the group members who works for the Reindeer Bridge Project, to draw the connections among the Arctic Indiginous peoples who herd reindeer.







Every hour Catherine calls the Bering Air office to see if we can fly.



Right now we're in the visitors center and Catherine is calling places to stay. The weather is lifting somewhat here in Nome. Four o'clock call was a no-go. If we can't fly out at 5pm, we spend the night in Nome.