Dem Spokesman delayed, No accommodation if not here before public testimony

Deborah Williams, here, at this point, to seek and adjustment to your schedule.  The spokesperson for the rights coalition is Jake Metcalf.  He's in the middle of mediation, representing the public safety employees union.  Earliest he can be here today to present is at 2:30, so we are seeking your indulgence until 2:30, which is clearly within your time frame to 7pm.  We apologize, we did talk to Ron and asked for this accommodation.  The only personal allowed to speak on the plan today and he can't be here earlier than 2:30pm

Torgerson:  My plan to run right through and don't intend to change that.  I encourage him to get here.  I don't intend to back up into presentations once we start public testimony.  Not going to accommodate you.

Five minute recess.


Republicans up next.

Alaskans for Fair Redistricting Presentation

 There are more details and explanation at the Alaskans for Fair and Equitable Redistricting website including high resolution maps.
[UPDATE 9:26pm:  I just want to say that is is confusing.  It's my understanding that Alaskans for Fair Redistricting has been around since at least the last redistricting process (ten years ago.)  But now it seems that there is a new group (not sure when they got set up) that calls itself Alaskans for Fair and Equitable Redistricting.  Randy Ruedrich - the head of the Republican Party in Alaska - is associated with Fair AND EQUITABLE, while Fair Redistricting is a collaboration of Labor and Alaska Native organizations.]

12:38pm  Carl Marrs, Vince Beltrami, and Joe McKinnon are testifying.  Again, I've . . .

Marrs:  We do not pair incumbents if possible.  Except for SE Alaska, no incumbents are paired.  Preserves core of those preserving districts, maintinga urban neighborhoods.  Continuing existing relationships with existing officials allows . . .

They are passing out maps.

Attorney asked about the apparent loss of one Native district (from 8 to 7) and whether that is retrogression.  REsponse:  Unavoidable retrogression.

Solve Juneau problems by going to north to Skagway and Haines and Gustavus.  Forces doubling incumbents.  Driven by voting rights act.  In Ketchikan, we take Wrangell, because a predominantly non-Native district. 

Attorney White:  Is your plan basically Juneau's north Juneau plan?
Maybe, we leave Saxman in with Ketchikan and same with Klukwan, though they both have strong Native populations.
McConnochie:  Where's the border between north and south Juneau?
McKinnon:  Near the airport

Kodiak too small for district by itself.  Tie it in with S coastal areas of PW Sound - Cordova, Seldovia, Port Graham,  - surplus population on Kenai Pen. we can do that.

Because there are so many people in here, I can't easily run around to take pictures or get good shots of the slides they are showing.

White:  3.4% deviation - could you make those smaller not considering not pairing incumbents?
McKinnon:  Even with pairing incumbents we could.  But we tried to use main thoroughfares as natural boundaries.  If we didn't do that, we could break out small neighborhoods and balance more.

(l-r)  Marrs, McKinnon, Beltrami

Kenai:  main change move Cooper Landing and Moose Pass into 32.  Tried to keep borders between 33 and 34 as close to current.  A bit of 34 into 35 to make up for other changes in that area. 

1:10pm they're done.  Alaska Dem Party next.

Juneau presents plan for four new districts including Cordova

April 18, 19, 20 there will be public hearings.  I'm behind.  They are all going to the first three Anchorage, Fairbanks, and I think Juneau.


Statewide teleconference May 6, and then they'll set a schedule for meetings and adoption of final plan.  GIS folks will have to do final check, hopefully, by June 4.  We have to June 14, but given need for DOJ pre-clearance, we're hoping to be ready early.

Will go into presentation.  Mayor Botelho first. from Juneau

.  Also Jim Baldwin, consultant for Juneau.  We have two plans.  List of principles we used.  Ultimately, we have used the Board's guidelines, mirroring the priority order the AK SC enunciated in Hickel v SE Conference.

Could we under the voting rights act avoid retrogression?  Decision early on, shoud SE Alaksa encompass cordova.  Until 2002 in SC, concluded Cordova inapprorpriate.  Majority of court said it would violate the compactness elecement of Constitution, but acceptible if necessary for avoiding deviation.   There are four ideal house districts.  Total variationslightly over 1%. 


Only endorsed by city and borough of Juneau.  Not others, though we have consulted others.  There is no configuration of the plan that can . . .

I've been video taping but that can't get up that fast.  There would be four districts in Juneau's plan A.  One 'native effective district'.  There will be incumbents running against each other in two house districts, one ok, and one district without an incumbent.  Two incumbent Senators would run against each other.

The room is getting filled up.

UPDATE 10:30pm  Here's a Juneau Empire piece describing meetings in Juneau preparing for this and with more detail for Plans A and B. ]

Live Blogging from Redistricting Board - Valdez and Juneau here in Force

It's March 31.  The last day to present plans to the Alaska Redistricting Board.  The meeting starts at noon and is being teleconferenced around the state.  The fact that it is also open for folks to walk in at the Legislative Information Office in Anchorage wasn't so clearly mentioned on the announcements on the Board's website. 

But people who pay attention to this are aware.  There's a significant contingent from Valdez here - The city manager, city clerk, city attorney, mayor, and economic development director.  (They're mostly on the right.)  John Harris, the former representative from Valdez is also here.  The mayor Juneau is also here. 

The meeting has just started and John Torgerson said there will be five plans presented today, about two and a half hours. 

Adam Trombley's Hero is Dick Cheney, Maybe

13 Anchorage Assembly candidates showed up at a forum at UAA Wednesday night.  Three or four times that many people were there to listen.  Not a whole lot was actually said.  You really had to make gut judgments based on how they spoke and their non-verbal messages.  It was good to see all the candidates, but there wasn't anything that interesting.

Except. . .

There were written audience questions -  read by moderator Channel 2 newsman Jason Lamb - directed at specific candidates.  Adam Trombley was asked who his political heroes of the last 20 years were.  He quickly said, "Dan Quail."  That appeared to be a joke because he asked how much time he had - about 15 or 20 seconds - and he finally said, "Dick Cheney."

Yes, he said Cheney was his hero.  Cheney helped get us into Iraq on false claims of WMD's.  He was part of the group that outed a CIA agent to get revenge on her husband, and helped get his aide, Scooter Libby, out of his prison sentence after he was convicted. Torturing prisoners gave him no qualms.  The list goes on and on.  Here's a link to a Boston Globe article that looks at Cheney in the 1970s.  I realize there are conservatives who would strongly disagree with this characterization, but I'm confident that Cheney will not be a hero in the history books.    That's how I see it. So I thought I should check with Trombley.

Afterward I asked Trombley if he was serious or not.  He wouldn't give me a straight answer.  I don't know what that means. He's a candidate for a local office.  He said his hero is Dick Cheney, and when asked about it afterward, he refuses to answer.  Watch his response and judge for yourself.   Do we want Assembly people who refuse to answer serious questions that get to their values?



[UPDATE April 4:  If you want to judge for yourself if he was joking, his original response to the question is here.]

He is supported by the Mayor Sullivan.  From a poster on Trombley's website:

Adam is the BEST Conservative choice for East Anchorage Assembly. Please join me in supporting Adam Trombley. - Dan Sullivan

Sullivan is the man who ordered the public television in the City Hall lobby to be tuned to Fox News.    So, Cheney could be his hero. 


Just in case you aren't aware that we vote next Tuesday, here is a list of the candidates, including who was and wasn't at the forum at UAA.

I'm going to teach a blogging class for Ole!

Ole! was set up as an extension program from the University of Alaska Anchorage (UAA) originally aimed at seniors I think.  OLE! stands for "Opportunities for Lifelong Education."  But there is nothing on their membership material that mentions age, so it's open to anyone I guess.  There are no tests.  People are there because they want to keep learning.  And I've talked to a couple people who are really excited about some of the classes they've taken.

For $150 a year (starts when you join - three sessions) you can become a member and take as many 'classes' as you can fit in your schedule.  I went to a couple of sessions of Cliff Groh's class on Alaska Political Corruption a year or two ago as a guest speaker.  Some of the people in the class were personal friends of people covered so the discussions were pretty interesting.  That led to a session where I showed slides of Thailand.  I had way too many pictures for that one, but the audience was polite.  I shouldn't be teaching, I should be taking classes.

The Spring 2011 schedule offers a lot of variety.  Things start this week. Here's a sampling:

• OLÉ! Does Broadway: Rodgers & Hammerstein
• Shoots & Leaves: Planning Your Garden
• Climate Change and Anthropogenic Global Warming
• Coming into the Country: Anchorage's Refugee and Immigrant Communities
• Protecting Your Art and Collectibles

And then there's Blogs and Blogging.  You'd think someone who's blogged almost five years should be able to pull this off.  But as I prepare, I realize how narrow my knowledge is.   But here's what I've got in mind.


1.  Objectives:

•  To Gain an Understanding of What Blogs Are and Their Impact
• To be able to explain what a blog is to someone else
• To be able to find blogs online
• To visit a number of different types blogs to get a sense of what this is blogging stuff is all about
• To be able to leave comments on blog posts
• To meet some bloggers and be able to ask them questions about why they blog, what they get out of it, etc.
• To understand how bloggers track their viewers and 
• To know the kind of information you leave behind when you visit blogs (or other websites)
• To Try Out Creating Your Own Blog (Really, this is much easier than you can imagine. If it weren't, there wouldn't be so many blogs.)
• In this part of the class, participants will create a Blogspot blog of their own and publish a few posts including:
• Text
• Photos
• Video
• Participants should also be able to 
• notify Google of their blog and 
• to include a tracking system to know how many people visit their sites.

2.  Schedule

• Weeks 1 and 3 will focus on Objective A - learning about blogs.
• Week 3 will include several local guest bloggers to talk about their blogs while you follow along online.  There might even be time for them to help you with your blogs. 
• Weeks 2 and 4 will focus on actually creating a blog and experimenting with it.

The class will be held in a computer lab, so we should have a good time.  The Week 3 guest class turned out to be one of those opportunities caused by a problem - I was going to be out of town.  But having the other bloggers will really add to the class.  It was hard choosing people to invite, but in the end I tried to get people who do very different things on their blogs.  I've still got one or two people to confirm. 

The FBI is Looking For Some Code Crackers for 1999 Case

People have been getting to a December 2008 post  titled Can You Crack FBI's Code?  today.  Enough to make me wonder if they had put up a new code.

And they have, only this one isn't a game.  But I guess the success of the gamers (someone sent me the answer to the code nine minutes after I posted it) has spurred the FBI to post a real code that they can't figure out.  There were two coded pieces of paper in the pocket of a murder victim in 1999.  Here's the first note:

You can go to the FBI's site to see the whole story and the other note, and to let them know what it says.  I went to the link of the person who solved the 2008 code so quickly and left a message.  Maybe he can do this one in 20 minutes.

Study of Alaska Natives: Eat Salmon, Stay Healthier

An article at Alaska Dispatch reports on a study that compares a population of obese Alaska Natives on the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta with a similar sized population in the Lower 48.  It found the Alaskans had lower rates of adult-onset diabetes and heart disease.

A diet of Alaska salmon rich in Omega-3 fatty acids appears to protect Yup'ik people from diabetes and heart disease -- even when the individuals in question have become obese, according to a recent study that examined eating habits and health in the Yukon Kuskokwim Delta region.
Scientists found that Yup'ik people in general consume about 20 times more of the complex fish oils every year than do people in the Lower 48 states, a subsistence-driven cuisine that may actually shield them from many health problems blamed on obesity, junk food and inactivity.
Y-K residents show similar levels of obesity as the overall U.S. population, yet experience far lower prevalence of the adult-onset diabetes linked to poor diet and weight issues -- about 3.3 percent versus about 7.7 percent.

You can read the rest of the Dispatch article here.  And if you're brave you can read an abstract of the original article from the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition with the serious title of:

Associations of obesity with triglycerides and C-reactive protein are attenuated in adults with high red blood cell eicosapentaenoic and docosahexaenoic acids.

But, take this with a grain of salt (no, that's not good for your heart either) since, as the article points out, experts in the past have argued whether something is or isn't good for people to eat.

Alaska public health officials and national diet gurus sometimes clashed in the 2000s, with previous federal guidelines cautioning people against eating too much fish due to potential exposure to mercury, and Alaskan experts urging as much salmon as the plate might hold.

I don't believe there are simple one-to-one cause and effect relationships in health.  Many factors come to play.  I would imagine that the differences in rural Alaskan life and urban Lower 48 life include a lot of other factors that may be part of the health differences.  Maybe the researchers considered all that.  


And there's also a discussion  in the article about whether eating wild game in general is healthier than the beef Americans consume.


A final note: the article mentions they consulted with local elders before doing the study.

With the support and consultation of village elders, the scientists tested and interviewed 1,003 adults and teenagers spread among 10 southwest Alaska communities between 2003 and 2006 in pursuit of a public health mystery: How were certain people who ate the high-fat diets of traditional subsistence foods able to remain so healthy despite being overweight? [emphasis added]

The Alaska Native Science Commission has a protocol for researchers doing research on Alaska Natives that requires such community involvement in how the research is conducted  to protect communities from the of exploitation of past research.   For example,  the principles include:

1. The community must be involved as a full partner in all aspects of the research. Continuous consultation and collaboration should characterize the partnership.
2. The strengths and culture of the community, including community researchers and staff as well as material resources, must be respected and utilized whenever possible.
3. Written permission must be obtained from the partners before beginning the research projects.
4. Permission from all individuals participating must be obtained prior to collecting personal information.
5. The confidentiality of all individuals must be respected. If necessary, the community involved may choose to remain anonymous when reporting the results.
6. All research results, analyses and interpretations must first be reviewed by the partners to ensure accuracy and avoid misunderstanding.
7. All data collected belongs to the community and must be returned to the community.
8. The partners must all be involved in making decisions about the publication and the distribution of all or parts of the research results.
9. The community must agree to the release of information.

One thing just leads to another.  This started out about salmon and health, but everything is interconnected.  

"The moment one learns English, complications set in." And other First Lines of Novels.

 StumbleUpon led me to  100 Best First Lines From Novels .  Are they really the best?  That's a fruitless debate.  But they're a good challenge to any writer - even bloggers - to think about how they put words together.  OK, now that I've totally blown my own first line here, let's start over again.

His fingers curled up and stopped typing after reading the 100 Best Fist Lines. 

It won't win any awards, but it's better than the actual first line of this post.  (Fist was a typo, but seemed to fit.  I keep losing letters from it. i . . .)



There are lots of good first lines, but this one spoke to me loudest as I went through the list.

41. The moment one learns English, complications set in.

I want to read that book.   I recently posted on the impact of one's language on how one knows and thinks.  It's a fundamental area of inquiry in this blog whose must basic theme is how we know what we know.

You'll have to go to the link to find out who wrote this one and the others.

Here are a few others:

20.  Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. 

I read #20 last year. 

28. Mother died today.

38. All this happened, more or less

45. I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.

54. A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.

63. The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up

66.  "To be born again," sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, "first you have to die.

Some are pretty easy to figure out:

5. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.

14. You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.

So, fellow bloggers.  After you write that first line of your next post, go back and figure out what your point is and how you can say it brilliantly.

Looking for an Alaskan Artist?

There's a lengthy directory of Alaskan artists  at Artists Alaska.   Here's what the top of their main page looks like.

They say they're still building the list, so if you know people who should be on it you can go to this page.

For instance, I don't see Sue Kraft in the Juneau list.