I posted about Political CSI Thursday and suggested the folks at the Next Hurrah did that sort of thing. But probably what they do is more like real crime investigators do and Veracifier does more like the tv show - simplifies Political CSI for average folk. Thanks to Kodiak Konfidential for this link on Don Young.
Saturday, August 18, 2007
Friday, August 17, 2007
Seward City Council Member Gets Paid $50K to Fix Damage He Caused
Someone from Seward passed this newsbit along the other day. Not completely sure about all the details here, but this seems to be the general story.
At Monday's City Council meeting in Seward, Councilman Steve Schafer was asked to recuse himself because he had a conflict of interest in the next item. He then went to sit in the audience. The Council then discussed how Shafer's illegally built road over Japanese Creek had dammed up the creek during last October's flood. When the road eventually washed away, the built up debris and surge damaged the city's levee further down the creek.
The resolution before the Council was to require the bridge builder (Shafer) to pay the $100,000 damage to the levee. Normally, members of the audience can speak to an item at the beginning of the meeting for two minutes or at the end for five minutes. Shafer got his two minutes during the public comment period.
However, another council member proposed the rules be suspended so that Shafer could talk to the Council. Shafer then spoke for nearly an hour during which he argued that the engineering of the levee itself was the problem, not his illegally built road. When the rule suspension was over, the Council voted to split the cost of repairing the levee with Shafer. They then agreed that Shafer would do the repairs himself and the city would reimburse him for half the cost.
Now, there are a couple of issues here that seem strange.
At Monday's City Council meeting in Seward, Councilman Steve Schafer was asked to recuse himself because he had a conflict of interest in the next item. He then went to sit in the audience. The Council then discussed how Shafer's illegally built road over Japanese Creek had dammed up the creek during last October's flood. When the road eventually washed away, the built up debris and surge damaged the city's levee further down the creek.
The resolution before the Council was to require the bridge builder (Shafer) to pay the $100,000 damage to the levee. Normally, members of the audience can speak to an item at the beginning of the meeting for two minutes or at the end for five minutes. Shafer got his two minutes during the public comment period.
However, another council member proposed the rules be suspended so that Shafer could talk to the Council. Shafer then spoke for nearly an hour during which he argued that the engineering of the levee itself was the problem, not his illegally built road. When the rule suspension was over, the Council voted to split the cost of repairing the levee with Shafer. They then agreed that Shafer would do the repairs himself and the city would reimburse him for half the cost.
Now, there are a couple of issues here that seem strange.
- It would be interesting to know when anyone has been given an hour to address the Council. Did he get so much time because he is on the council?
- On the other hand, it would seem there should be some sort of due process that would allow Shafer, or any member of the public, a right to air his side of the case before being fined by the city
- And if I understood this right, after causing $100K damage, he's going to end up getting paid $50K to repair the damage. Why didn't the repair work go out to bid?
- If the problem was with the engineering of the levee, why did the City charge him at all?
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Ben's Friends Seem to All Have Money Ties to Dad
Roll Call says that Ben Stevens' new employer got lots of money from Dad.
New Employer of Stevens’ Son Has Reaped Millions in Federal Contracts
By John Stanton
Roll Call Staff
Thursday, Aug. 16, 2007; 3:08 pm
An Alaska-based transportation firm that recently hired the son of Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) has received more than $300 million in federal contracts over the past six years, many of which came from agencies over which Stevens has direct oversight authority in his current position as ranking member of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, federal records show.
Political CSI - The Next Hurrah
On television's CSI (Crime Scene Investigation) investigators gather unlikely evidence and with nifty technology and meticulous computer calculations miraculously find the invisible clues that solve the crime.
Our political situation for many people is like a messy crime scene. We know things have happened, but the evidence is scattered all over the room. Instead of a careful CSI investigation, we get the political spin machines creating the stories that will explain events in their clients' favor.
One of the political blogs I keep going back to is "The Next Hurrah." Blogger Empty Wheel (Journalist Marcy Wheeler) leads a group of smart people, many attorneys, who do political CSI. They take court documents, sometimes articles, and other bits of evidence into their blog-lab and break it down into little pieces to figure out what the missing words are likely to be, to find the inconsistencies, and to recreate the whole event. The commenters add sources of new information, ask questions challenging someone's hypothesis, and articulate other possible interpretations. Yes, there is a clear liberal bias - except for their resident mole Jodi - but the basic bias is for logic, consistency, and sniffing out lies.
An Example of Political CSI: Today, House Judiciary Committee Chair John Conyers released notes, including a log kept by FBI Director Robert S. Mueller about the hospital visit to attorney general Ashcroft by Gonzales and others to get him to approve the surveillance program. You can see the actual document here, thanks to TPM's link.
Below, Empty Wheel is parsing FBI Director Mueller's log of the events to see what is implied by what is and is not said. Readers of the blog are assumed to know who all these people are.
Unlike on CSI, just a short snippet won't solve the problem. The real work takes much more work. To see how this analysis continues go to The Next Hurrah.
CSI has become an immensely popular television show. That suggests that there is broad public interest in the solving of puzzles through detailed and painstaking testing of different possibilities. So the real question is how do we make the type of political CSI that's in "The Next Hurrah" as interesting to the general public as CSI the television show is?
I'm not sure. In CSI the tv show, there's a crime and the CSI team is trying to find who committed the crime. This is the basic good guy, bad guy story. Easy for the audience to grasp. They don't have to understand all the technical wizardry the lab techs perform. It's like magic where they quickly flash shots of high tech machines and cool microphotos and presto they have solved the case. Since the audience is rooting for the 'good guys' to catch the 'bad guys,' they're willing to accept that all the technology really did prove the guilt. In fact there is a backlash against the show in the law enforcement field because juries now have unrealistic expectations of what the police should be able to prove. Another criticism of CSI listed by Wikipidia is "the level and gratuitousness of graphic violence, images, and sexual content" which surely helps with ratings.
Actually, on a simplistic level, I think Michael Moore and Al Gore perhaps gave us models of how political CSI could be popularized. You need an interesting and/or compelling narrator who will tell the viewers what is happening. You need some jarring contrasts between what people say publicly and what they do privately, and you need good graphics. It also helps for the narrator to expose some personal story. At this point The Next Hurrah is only aimed at wonks. Others probably would wonder whether these folks aren't counting angels, but I think it is more like the CSI team taking a hair from the crime scene and from that hair identifying the killer. The people want to understand and those who do need to hook up with those who know how to communicate those complex linkages to the general public who don't have the time, skill, or patience to pore over these details.
Our political situation for many people is like a messy crime scene. We know things have happened, but the evidence is scattered all over the room. Instead of a careful CSI investigation, we get the political spin machines creating the stories that will explain events in their clients' favor.
One of the political blogs I keep going back to is "The Next Hurrah." Blogger Empty Wheel (Journalist Marcy Wheeler) leads a group of smart people, many attorneys, who do political CSI. They take court documents, sometimes articles, and other bits of evidence into their blog-lab and break it down into little pieces to figure out what the missing words are likely to be, to find the inconsistencies, and to recreate the whole event. The commenters add sources of new information, ask questions challenging someone's hypothesis, and articulate other possible interpretations. Yes, there is a clear liberal bias - except for their resident mole Jodi - but the basic bias is for logic, consistency, and sniffing out lies.
An Example of Political CSI: Today, House Judiciary Committee Chair John Conyers released notes, including a log kept by FBI Director Robert S. Mueller about the hospital visit to attorney general Ashcroft by Gonzales and others to get him to approve the surveillance program. You can see the actual document here, thanks to TPM's link.
Below, Empty Wheel is parsing FBI Director Mueller's log of the events to see what is implied by what is and is not said. Readers of the blog are assumed to know who all these people are.
Monday 3/1/04, 1700: Meeting with Comey in his office.
This was actually before the meeting at which Comey and Ashcroft decided not to reauthorize the program, which he said occurred on March 4, the same day Ashcroft was hospitalized. That means two things--Comey was not acting AG when the meeting occurred, and that it happened before the final decision was made. Note that Mueller draws a line after this entry, suggesting some kind of separation between this meeting and subsequent meetings.
Tuesday 3/9/04, 1000: Meeting with Fedarcyk, Pistole, Caproni (and perhaps Wainstein and Gebhardt).
These were then all top FBI people, most with a focus on counter-terrorism--Wainstein is now the AAG in charge of Counter-Terrorism. Fedarcyk, who has since retired, was quoted after Mueller's testimony as suggesting Mueller was "throwing Gonzales under a bus."
Mike Fedarcyk, a retired senior FBI official called Mueller's shot at Gonzales a "jawdropper inside the bureau."
Mueller, who was not in the hospital room, spoke to Ashcroft right after Gonzales left and testified he took notes about the incident. Fedarcyk said that appeared to be insurance against a White House counterattack.
"Usually you take notes to protect yourself. He used them to throw Gonzales under the bus. That's huge," Fedarcyk said.
"This is not partisan politics. It's a bold, strategic, calculated move."
Presumably, this meeting served to finalize the FBI position on what they needed from the program, just before Mueller went and represented the FBI's position at a White House meeting on this.
Tuesday 3/9/04, 1200: Meeting at Card's office, VP, [CIA Deputy Director] McLaughlin, [NSA Director] Hayden, Gonzales and others present.
Note that it appears Meuller was there, but Comey was not, which suggest they thought of Mueller, but not Comey, as a key member of National Security policing.
Unlike on CSI, just a short snippet won't solve the problem. The real work takes much more work. To see how this analysis continues go to The Next Hurrah.
CSI has become an immensely popular television show. That suggests that there is broad public interest in the solving of puzzles through detailed and painstaking testing of different possibilities. So the real question is how do we make the type of political CSI that's in "The Next Hurrah" as interesting to the general public as CSI the television show is?
I'm not sure. In CSI the tv show, there's a crime and the CSI team is trying to find who committed the crime. This is the basic good guy, bad guy story. Easy for the audience to grasp. They don't have to understand all the technical wizardry the lab techs perform. It's like magic where they quickly flash shots of high tech machines and cool microphotos and presto they have solved the case. Since the audience is rooting for the 'good guys' to catch the 'bad guys,' they're willing to accept that all the technology really did prove the guilt. In fact there is a backlash against the show in the law enforcement field because juries now have unrealistic expectations of what the police should be able to prove. Another criticism of CSI listed by Wikipidia is "the level and gratuitousness of graphic violence, images, and sexual content" which surely helps with ratings.
Actually, on a simplistic level, I think Michael Moore and Al Gore perhaps gave us models of how political CSI could be popularized. You need an interesting and/or compelling narrator who will tell the viewers what is happening. You need some jarring contrasts between what people say publicly and what they do privately, and you need good graphics. It also helps for the narrator to expose some personal story. At this point The Next Hurrah is only aimed at wonks. Others probably would wonder whether these folks aren't counting angels, but I think it is more like the CSI team taking a hair from the crime scene and from that hair identifying the killer. The people want to understand and those who do need to hook up with those who know how to communicate those complex linkages to the general public who don't have the time, skill, or patience to pore over these details.
Veco Visuals
Here are a couple of visuals to go along with this morning's lead ADN story. Took these last night walking home from dinner. The building is at the corner of New Seward Highway and 36th Avenue.
FBI investigates science contracts awarded Veco
ARCTIC: $170 million in research contracts coincided with support for polar funding by Sen. Stevens.
By ERIKA BOLSTAD and GREG GORDON
McClatchy Newspapers
Published: August 16, 2007
Last Modified: August 16, 2007 at 10:03 AM
WASHINGTON -- The FBI is investigating the National Science Foundation's award of $170 million in contracts to the oil field services company that oversaw renovations on U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens' home.
The firm, Veco Corp., captured a lucrative five-year NSF contract in 1999 to provide logistics and support for polar research, although it had no previous experience in that field. During the same time period, Veco's top executive managed renovations that doubled the size of the longtime Republican senator's Girdwood home -- the scene of a July 30 FBI raid...
This picture was to show how fire weed can beautify even an ugly parking lot. Only just realized fire weed and a couple of spruce also can screen out a Veco Building almost.
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Is Another World Possible? How Do We Know Reality?
It started this morning listening to "Another" radio station - KWMD, 104.5 or 87.7 on the Anchorage FM dial. Arlo Guthrie singing Alice's Restaurant leading into a story about another alternative radio station - KPFT Houston.
This is coming from Amy Goodman's Democracy Now (Link to KPFT story here)
Then we hear Naomi Klein at the American Sociological Association last week
In this piece she talks about how the radical capitalists have shut down each budding alternative. In 1989 when the Soviet Union fell
She identifies a list of situations when alternatives to the American model were either crushed outright (Allende's Chile) or perverted into capitalist copies (Solidarity in Poland).
Citing declassified conversations between Kissinger and Nixon,
And then a little later on Fresh Air, we hear Eugene Hütz, the leader of Gypsy Punk Group Gogol Bordello. Hütz grew up in Kiev with Gypsy DNA whose family left when Chernobyl blew and eventually made their way to Vermont.
All these stories reinforce that there are possibilities other than the standard model we see on mainstream media. We can have better health care, we can have real citizen involvement in government, we don't have to live lives that that require going into financial debt to Visa to pay for all the necessities of life (that didn't even exist 30 years ago) and time debt to our sleep and families.
We can know the possibilities of better lives if we escape from the ways our ideas are shaped by the fear mongering politicians and corporate media. So go to the links and listen to these ways people are not accepting the status quo.
We’re also joined by Mary Thomas. She is the host of the weekly Zydeco music program on KPFT. The bullet that was fired into the station Monday morning narrowly missed her head.
This is coming from Amy Goodman's Democracy Now (Link to KPFT story here)
Then we hear Naomi Klein at the American Sociological Association last week
We did not lose the battles of ideas. We were not outsmarted and we were not out-argued. We lost because we were crushed. Sometimes we were crushed by army tanks, and sometimes we were crushed by think tanks. And by think tanks I mean the people who are paid to think by the makers of tanks."
In this piece she talks about how the radical capitalists have shut down each budding alternative. In 1989 when the Soviet Union fell
And it was in that moment of flux and disorientation that several very savvy people, many of them in this country, seized on that moment to declare victory not only against communism, but against all ideas but their own...
...if we look back at the past thirty-five years, we see this slamming of the door on alternatives just as they are emerging repeating again and again.
She identifies a list of situations when alternatives to the American model were either crushed outright (Allende's Chile) or perverted into capitalist copies (Solidarity in Poland).
Citing declassified conversations between Kissinger and Nixon,
Kissinger says very bluntly that the problem with Allende’s election is not what they were saying publicly, which was that he was aligned with the Soviets, that he was only pretending to be democratic, but that he was really going to impose a totalitarian system in Chile. That was the spin at the time. The example of a successful elected Marxist government in Chile would surely have an impact on -- and even precedent value for -- other parts of the world. . . The imitative spread of similar phenomena elsewhere would in turn significantly affect the world balance and our own position in it.
And then a little later on Fresh Air, we hear Eugene Hütz, the leader of Gypsy Punk Group Gogol Bordello. Hütz grew up in Kiev with Gypsy DNA whose family left when Chernobyl blew and eventually made their way to Vermont.
All these stories reinforce that there are possibilities other than the standard model we see on mainstream media. We can have better health care, we can have real citizen involvement in government, we don't have to live lives that that require going into financial debt to Visa to pay for all the necessities of life (that didn't even exist 30 years ago) and time debt to our sleep and families.
We can know the possibilities of better lives if we escape from the ways our ideas are shaped by the fear mongering politicians and corporate media. So go to the links and listen to these ways people are not accepting the status quo.
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
And Here's the Rain
Video shot about 24 hours after the picture in the previous post of the Ring. So at least this time it was true: "Ring Around the Sun Means Rain Coming Soon."
Ring Around the Sun Means Rain Coming Soon
When we walked out of the Bear Tooth last night at 8:15pm there was a ring around the sun. According to Meteorologist Jeff Haby
WEATHER FOLKLORE: "A ring around the sun or moon, means rain or snow coming soon"
APPLICABILITY: This lore most commonly works in the cool season and in the mid-latitudes. Mid-latitude storm systems and fronts are more common in the cool season. It is also applicable to tropical storms and hurricanes since there are thin high clouds around the periphery of the storm system.
ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION: As an upper level disturbance approaches or warm front approaches the clouds tend to start off as high clouds. Over time the clouds gradually lower and thicken. Near the source of the greatest synoptic lifting is where precipitation and thick clouds are most likely. The sun or moon will no longer be visible once the clouds thicken too much.
The ring around the sun or moon is caused by ice crystals within thin cirrus clouds. The refraction causes light to shine into a ring. Cirrus clouds are generally the first layer of clouds that are seen as a storm system approaches.
PITFALLS: a. Cirrus clouds not associated with a storm system will produce the ring also. In these cases precipitation may not occur.
I'd say he's hedging his bets a bit there, and even though this isn't the cool season or mid-latitude, this morning's sky does look like there might be some rain.
Monday, August 13, 2007
Ikiru v. Comedy of Power
Comedy of Power at the Museum last night was disappointing. Here's an excerpt from the blurb:
COMEDY OF POWER is inspired by the real-life story of examining magistrate Eva Joly, whose seven-year investigation into charges of fraud and bribery at the French oil company Elf Aquitaine was described by The Guardian as "the biggest and most scandalous fraud inquiry in Europe since the Second World War.
Tonight we went to the Bear Tooth and had no idea what we were going to see, only that it was Monday night Foreign/Art film night. After the first minute I realized we'd seen this 1952 Akira Kurosawa classic on DVD at home.
The black and white Ikiru showed us a bureaucrat who spent 30 years of his life stamping documents and as a cog in the system who maintains his job by doing nothing. When he learns he has up to six months to live, he realizes he hasn't lived, and with the help of a few strangers, figures out what he needs to do. In 2 1/2 hours we go through questions about the meaning of life, an analysis of the post War Japanese bureaucracy, come to understand this man who as his last act, fights the bureaucracy he's been part of to help some neighborhood women build a park.
Comedy of Power in contrast squandered its two hours leaving us wondering how did this investigator manage to pull off whatever it was she pulled off (it was never quite clear what got accomplished.) We really didn't learn much about any of the characters or what was going on. How could a one woman office with an assistant who we learn at the end was a spy do all the work needed to bring down giant corporate executives working closely with politicians - including her boss? After spending a week at the Anderson trial here, I know that just that relative small case took a lot of people to gather and organize all the data.
But Ikiru I highly recommend. Its story about human beings is timeless and one everyone should read now and then.
Sunday, August 12, 2007
604
According to a very reliable source, Room 604 of the Baranof Hotel in Juneau will get a name change. When one of the hotel managers found out a group wanted to use the Veco corruption suite for a fund raiser a while back, he said no. The group was offered a different, more public room, but the infamous suite wasn't going to have 100 or more people squeezed in disturbing people on the floor at a time when the hotel was full. The hotel management doesn't want to promote the room's notoriety. There's no interest in cashing in on Alaska's most famous hotel room, in fact they are even planning on renumbering rooms soon.
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