Phil at
Alaska Progressive salutes Rich
Mauer's ADN article on the Young-Abramoff connections today. Phil also talks about Dennis Greenia at
Daily Kos whose been working on the Abromovff Scandal for a while now under the name Dengre and whose research has helped Phil in the past and Mauer in this new article.
Phil also links to an
October 6, 2006 post he did on this topic covering much of the same ground.
All this relates to an important theme for me (see the name of this blog) - how people 'know' what they know. One wonders about the Alaskan voters who have elected and reelected Don Young all these years despite all the evidence that his response was to shout like a bully at anyone - including constituents - who asked questions about things like Abramoff and the Marianas.
Thomas Kuhn, the physicist who put the word 'paradigm' (see links to Kuhn in
an earlier post) into the American mainstream, said that scientitists don't discard their old paradigms - even when they know they are faulty - until they have a better one to replace them with. I think that makes sense here.
I remember the evidence piling up that - despite
his denial - Richard Nixon was a crook. Yet he was reelected for a second term. People didn't want to believe that there president was a crook. They didn't want to believe that Viet Nam was a mistake and that the great USA was on the wrong side and was losing. (Some people still think we could have won, whatever that means, but we were politically hampered. But looking back from today, we can see that the whole rationale of our being there - to keep the dominoes of Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Burma, Malaysia, etc. from falling to Communism - was a model of things that did not accurately reflect what was happening.) While there were questions about Nixon, their beliefs overall were being challenged and they didn't have another belief system to switch to.
So, it has taken a while for the American public to lose faith in George W. Bush.
And it seems like forever for Alaskans to lose faith in Don Young.
Radical Catholic Mom raises a point that I didn't think of this morning: the poisonous role on American politics of one issue voting blocks. In this case she cites the Right to Life over everything else crowd for helping to keep Young in power.
It goes to the heart of the whole "vote pro-life only" camp. I received an email ripping me one for even hinting that I could POSSIBLY argue for voting for a "pro-abort" candidate. I responded that it ain't black and white, honey. Don Young and other Republican corrupt, disgusting, anti-life politicians who shamefully used the pro-life vote to continue in office and push through this Mariana Islands deal where women were raped, again and again and again, forced to abort their babies, and then forced to make clothes for the US consumer reflect why the traditional pro-life vote needs to become CRITICAL. WHO are we electing?
If a group is so obsessed with one issue that they are willing to close their eyes to everything else a candidate might do if only he takes a strong stand on their issue, then we get politicians who use those voters to carry out their immoral actions.
The point for me is NOT Don Young, but how we help US citizens to
- understand how to critically evaluate candidates,
- critically evaluate interest groups that urge them to vote based on certain issues,
- see beyond the very short term simplistic promises to understand who they are really putting into power.
I think Alaskans have gotten the point on Don Young. They got the point on Frank Murkowski (who, by the way, gets points on his outraged reaction to the Marianas situation
Murkowski said, he "talked with some Bangladesh workers who had not been paid and who were living in appalling conditions." He also described a young woman taken to Saipan as a minor and forced to work as a prostitute. (from Mauer piece)
though he continued to publicly support Young and according to the Mauer article
Since leaving office, Murkowski has declined to talk about the Marianas issue.
Again, my point is NOT Young or Murkowski, my point is about how voters
- gather the information they use,
- how they analyze that information, and
- how they decide to vote.
Doc is being the vendor here. Fortunately, everything was free.
Here the elders are being offered scented water to ritually wash themselves and bless the younger ones. The man with the white hair is the head of the board of directors of the Northern Development Foundation. 
Then each had the mike for a little while. The man on the right had spoken earlier. He - I'm not sure when - walked from Chiang Mai to (I think) Ko Samui raising money along the way.
The meeting continued today. Here's my boss presenting. 
At breaks I talked to different people about the usefulness of the two days. This gentleman is working on a group trying to start up a foundation to help farmers. For him it was a chance to meet a lot of people with the same interests. 
This man is Karen nationality and he said the usefulness was in understanding the necessity of learning new ways to do things. The old ways will no longer work. But we also talked about Alaska Natives and how they face many of the same problems that the Thai hill tribes (Karen are often put in that category) face. Loss of language, loss of traditional ways of living off the land, others coming into their world and forcing changes, and general loss of their culture and way of life. 
The man on the left is the villager whose house I stayed at when I first went out to a village. The man on the left was the main village speaker at the land reform confrontation in Lamphun.
I left a little before 5pm. It wasn't a waste of time. I have a list of questions, plus I got to connect with people I'd met before. DeLak and Kaew got to see the photos and videos I took in their villages. And some Alaska pictures. But Pet was right - the meetings could be much livlier and have a lot more participation. (Though there was a lot of opportunities to speak, there were also talking heads.) My foot was better than it had been during the night and at the airport, but I thought it was time (since there are only two days left) to get a foot massage at Wat Umong, which I pass everytday. On the way back from the hotel (only about a quarter of a mile past our office, I ran into these cows, something that has never happened before. The massage, I was told, was the best in Chiang Mai. So maybe the could fix my foot. 
I told her in detail about my foot. She immediately attacked my foot and I was in great pain. This was either going to cure me or leave me permantly limping. 
English is hard for Thais - they put tones on individual syllables, while English tones are related to the whole sentence (questions rise at the end, for example); Thai words can end in only nine final consonant sounds (or vowel sounds), so English final sounds are a real challenge. But this guy's English was almost Native level.
It was about a foot long.
