Cooking Safety Tip

Here's a tip I learned through experience the other day.  If we all learned only by experience, there would be a lot fewer human beings on earth.  Since my blog gets a modest number of viewers, passing this tip along shouldn't affect the world's population much.


The Tip:  When using a potholder that has a cloth loop to hang it from, don't hold the pot (or in this case the pan) with the potholder loop toward the flame.

A Guided Tour Through the Alaska Supreme Court's Redistricting Ruling - Or Hickel Lives On

Remember, you get what you pay for.  This guide, me, is not an attorney.  But I did attend most of the Redistricting Board meetings in Anchorage and I listened in on the Fairbanks court case by phone.  So I'll try to walk you  through the case, offering my understanding and/or speculation of each section.    When I'm quoting the decision directly, I indent and use Trebuchet font.

I posted a quick, first look at the decision on Thursday.  This post will walk through each of the 14 sections of the decision.  For those needing a little background on this, I've posted earlier:

•  Alaska Redistricting for the Masses Part I - Looks at the background information needed to understand the process - the Voting Rights Act and Alaska Constitutional requirements particularly.

• Alaska Redistricting for the Masses Part 2:  The Board Process  - This post gives an overview of how the board carried out its task.

• Alaska Redistricting for the Masses Part 3: The Trial - The Disputed Districts  - This post looks at the disputed districts and the reasons they are disputed.  With maps.

Overview of the Court's decision.  You can see the original here. 


1.  Both petitions for review (one from the Alaska Redistricting Board and one from the plaintiffs who challenged the plan the board made) of the Superior Court decision were granted.

2.  "This case is REMANDED to the superior court with instructions to further remand to the Board to formulate a plan in accordance with this order."

The Board is given the plan  back and told to redo it following the guidelines of the court.


3.  The Board is commended for its hard work.

4.  The Superior Court judge is commended for handling the case quickly.

5.  In Hickel v. Southeast Conference, we considered a Proclamation Plan that, like the Plan in this case, "accorded minority voting strength priority above other factors, including the requirements of article VI, section 6 of the Alaska Constitution.' 3 We cautioned that while compliance with the Voting Rights Act takes precedence over compliance with the Alaska Constitution, "[t]he Voting Rights Act need not be elevated in stature so that the requirements of the Alaska Constitution are unnecessarily compromised.,,4 We then described the process the Board must follow to ensure that our constitutional redistricting principles are adhered to as closely as possible. After receiving the decennial census data, "[t]he Board must first design a reapportionment plan based on the requirements of the Alaska Constitution. That plan then must be tested against the Voting Rights Act. A reapportionment plan may minimize article VI, section 6 requirements when minimization is the only means available to satisfy Voting Rights Act requirements.,,5  [footnotes 3, 4, and 5 didn't copy right]

Basically, (5) references a 1994 case in which the redistricting board then did what the current board did now - focused on the Voting Rights Act (VRA) requirements rather than the Alaska Constitutional requirements.  The court decided that even though ultimately the VRA takes precedence over the Alaska Constitution, the board should have first created a plan that met the Constitutional requirements and then made whatever adjustments necessary to satisfy the VRA.

6.    It is undisputed that the Board began redistricting in March and April of 2011 by focusing on complying with the Voting Rights Act, thereby ignoring the process we mandated in Hickel.    This focus resulted in the creation of five effective Native house districts, one "influence" house district, and three effective Native senate districts. The superior court found that two of these house districts violated the Alaska Constitution and were not necessary to achieve Voting Rights Act compliance. In his petition, Riley alleges other constitutional defects, including one related to the Board's use of excess population from the Fairbanks North Star Borough to complete one of these Native districts. And the superior court expressed unease with the "influence" district created in the southeast and invited us to consider its validity sua sponte.

Key points from 6:

• The Board ignored the process required in the 1994 Hickel decision
• They focused on meeting the VRA requirements of non-retrogression by creating the same number of Native districts as in the 2001 plan. [See Alaska Redistricting For The Masses Part 1 for background on the VRA and the concept of Native Districts.]
• The superior court ruled that two Native effective house districts (37 and 38) didn't need to violate the Constitution to meet the VRA requirements, but they do.
• The plaintiff (Riley) said that the Board took the left over population from the Fairbanks North Star Borough (FNSB) to make district 38. [Every district needs to be very close to 17,755 people so they are all equal and the one person one vote principle is upheld.  The FNSB had enough people for five districts with 8,700 left over.   5500 were added to district 38 and the remainder to district 6 so they would each be as close to 17,755 as possible. They did this on the grounds that it was necessary to configure district 38 this way to meet the VRA, but the superior court said this was not the case. And the plaintiffs argued the excess population should have stayed in one district. More on that later)
• The superior court asked the supreme court to review, sua sponte, the Native district in Southeast Alaska.   From the Legal Dictionary:

  sua sponte (sooh-uh-spahn-tay) adj. Latin for "of one's own will," meaning on one's own volition, usually referring to a judge's order made without a request by any party to the case. These include an order transferring a case to another judge due to a conflict of interest or the judge's determination that his/her court does not have jurisdiction over the case.

7. Because it did not follow the Hickel process, the Board cannot meaningfully demonstrate that the Proclamation Plan's Alaska constitutional deficiencies were necessitated by Voting Rights Act compliance, nor can we reliably decide that question. The Hickel process provides the Board with defined procedural steps that, when followed, ensure redistricting satisfies federal law without doing unnecessary violence to the Alaska Constitution. The Board must first design a plan focusing on compliance with the article VI, section 6 requirements of contiguity, compactness, and relative socioeconomic integration; it may consider local government boundaries and should use drainage and other geographic features in describing boundaries wherever possible. Once such a plan is drawn, the Board must determine whether it complies with the Voting Rights Act and, to the extent it is noncompliant, make revisions that deviate from the Alaska Constitution when deviation is "the only means available to satisfy Voting Rights Act requirements.,,6

Key points of 7:

• The Board didn't follow the process set out in the Hickel decision.  Therefore
• The Board can't show that they had to violate the constitution to meet the VRA
• Nor can the court decide without being able to compare the final plan (with constitutional problems) with a plan that met the constitutional requirements..
• The Board has to make a plan that [This is the crux of what the board must now do.]
• complies with the Constitutional requirements of compactness, contiguity, and socio-economic integration and then
• determine if it complies with VRA, and if not
• make deviations from the constitutional requirements only when they are necessary to meet VRA requirements

8.    The Hickel process assures compliance with the Alaska Constitution's requirements concerning redistricting to the greatest extent possible. The Hickel process also diminishes the potential for partisan gerrymandering and promotes trust in government. We have previously noted that the article VI, section 6 requirements were designed to prevent gerrymandering by ensuring "that the election district boundaries fall along natural or logical lines rather than political or other lines.'"    A redistricting plan that substantially deviates from these constitutional requirements undermines trust in the process.

(8) explains why the Hickel process is important and echoes an argument made by plaintiff's attorney about gerrymandering.  He argued that by requiring compactness, contiguity, and socio-economic integration, the constitution by-passes the need to prove intent to draw the maps for political advantage.  

9.    Cases decided by the United States Supreme Court subsequent to Hickel have made adherence to the Hickel process even more critical. In a series of cases, the Supreme Court has established that under the Voting Rights Act, a jurisdiction cannot unnecessarily depart from traditional redistricting principles8 to draw districts using race as "the predominant, overriding factor."· Following the Hickel process will facilitate  compliance with federal constitutional law by ensuring that traditional redistricting principles are not "subordinated to race.,,10

Again echoing the plaintiff's attorney who argued the Hickel decision (an Alaskan decision) has subsequently been used as a standard in the US Supreme Court making for an even stronger argument for compliance with the standard.

10.    We recognize that the Board is faced with a difficult task in attempting to harmonize the requirements of the Alaska Constitution and the Voting Rights Act. We have previously characterized the redistricting process in Alaska as "a task of 'Herculean proportions,' ,,11 and we do not diminish the considerable efforts made by the Board in this case. But these difficulties do not limit the Board's responsibility to create a constitutionally compliant redistricting plan, nor do they "absolve this court of its duty to independently measure each district against constitutional standards."12
Moreover, advances in computer software appear to have streamlined the redistricting process and reduced the burden felt by the Board in past cycles.13    The Hickel process is designed to "ensure that the requirements of article VI, section 6 of the Alaska Constitution are not unnecessarily compromised by the Voting Rights Act"14; it may not be disregarded for reasons of expediency when drafting a permanent plan.

In (10) the Court seems to be saying:  Yes, we know this is really hard to do, but you have to follow the path laid out by previous Supreme Court decisions.  Besides, you've got better computer programs these days.  
My comment:  I watched them work the computers.  The computer programs give all the numbers, but a person still has to draw the lines.  You can't just give the computer instructions and let it do the drawing itself.  It certainly is easier than before, but it's still laborious.  And I suspect that better tools have raised the bar of what they are expected to perform in a given time period.

11.    On remand, the Board must follow the Hickel process. If deviation from the Alaska Constitution is the only means available to satisfy the Voting Rights Act's requirements, the Board must endeavor to adopt a redistricting plan that includes the least deviation reasonably necessary to satisfy the Act, thereby preserving the mandates of the Alaska Constitution to the greatest extent possible.

 By now this should be self explanatory.  It repeats, more succinctly, what was said above in (7).

12.    Because the new plan eventually formulated by the Board may moot the claims raised in this case, we decline to decide them at this time with the exceptions set out in the following paragraphs. If the Board is unable to draft a plan that complies with this order in time for the 2012 elections, it may petition this court for an order that the 2012 elections be conducted using the Proclamation Plan as an interim plan.16    But legislative districts for subsequent elections will be defined by the plan ultimately arrived at by the Board after following the Hickel process.

(12) says that

• since the Board is coming up with a new plan, the problems raised about the first plan may no longer exist, so
• we'll hold off on deciding them now.  And
• If the Board can't do this in time for the 2012 elections (the filing deadline is June 1, 2012, leaving 2.5 months to draw the plan and get it approved), let us know and we can let the original plan stand for this election only.   

13.    We address one legal question raised by Riley: whether the superior court erred in ruling that "the anti-dilution rule cannot be violated if the City [of Fairbanks] cannot support a senate district based on its population." It is undisputed that the population of the City of Fairbanks makes up 89 percent of an ideal senate district. That fact does not preclude Riley's voter dilution claim. Indeed, in Kenai Peninsula Borough v. State, we allowed a group of Anchorage voters making up only 51 percent of an ideal senate district to bring a similar voter dilution claim, indicating that seat underrepresentation .. . tends toward disproportionality.,,17    The superior court's legal ruling was therefore error [sic], and, based on this incorrect premise, the superior court did not proceed to evaluate the merits of Riley's voter dilution claim. Depending on how the districts are redrawn on remand, this issue may or may not recur. But if it does, and a similar challenge is raised, the superior court will need to make findings on the elements of a voter dilution claim, including whether a politically salient class of voters existed and whether the Board intentionally discriminated against that class.18

I don't want to get too mired down in the details of this one.  Basically, as I understand this, the court is saying that the superior court erred in its ruling on Riley's argument that the City of Fairbanks' size (89% of one Senate seat - two house seats combined, thus 35,510 people) entitles them to a single Senate seat.  (The Board's plan split the two City of Fairbanks house districts into two separate Senate seats and created a situation where the two Democratic Senators from Fairbanks were competing in the same district.)  So, the court is saying that if the same situation should arise (I think that means if the City of Fairbanks is split into two different Senate districts) in the new plan, this will be an issue.  In the trial, the Board's attorney argued that this idea of a city not being split had never come up.  The precedent was for a borough, but not a city.  The plaintiff's attorney countered that the City of Fairbanks had always had just one Senate seat and it had never come up because the other two larger cities - Anchorage and Juneau - are in merged boroughs.  That is the city and the borough are the same.  But Fairbanks has both and the City of Fairbanks is in the Fairbanks North Star Borough.

14.    We also address one legal question raised by the Board: whether the superior court erred in ruling that House Districts 37 and 38 did not comply with the Alaska Constitution based on the rationale that "all five of the [Native] effective House Districts have more Native VAP [voting age population] than necessary." Given the under-population of the five Native effective house districts, this particular rationale does not justify concluding that Districts 37 and 38 were not necessary under the Voting Rights Act because, as the superior court elsewhere concluded, "[i]t was not a matter of whether excess population needed to be added to rural Native districts but only a matter of where to access this excess urban population ...."

 The Board's attorney had asked for some instructions should the court not allow districts 37 and 38 to stand.  There were several arguments against the two districts.

• That 38 - by joining the urban population of Fairbanks with the rural population of the Northwest coastal villages -  was not socio-economically integrated as required by the constitution.
• That these Native districts had a higher Native Voting Age Population (VAP) than needed to meet the requirements of the VRA.  Packing is a way to gerrymander, by putting all of a political party in one district (and thus getting them out of a nearby district.)

I understand 14 to be saying that the Court accepts the Board's argument that because so many Native people live in these rural areas, it is hard to find enough non-Native people to reduce the Native VAP in some of these districts.  So while the Court isn't saying they will accept any level of VAP, they are saying they understand the argument for the high Native VAP in these districts and the difficulty of finding excess non-Native population to lower it. 

By the way, the Redistricting Board has posted that they will be meeting March 26 - 31 in Anchorage to work on this.

St. Patrick's Early History

I wish all my friends with Irish hearts a very happy St. Patrick's Day.

I found this video at StPatricksday.com   Trust me.  Just start the video. I promise you it will tickle your heart.  I can promise that, because, I can't imagine that a person who comes to this blog wouldn't like this video. (Note:  this video allows for closed captions, but they are no match for this Irish accent.)

If you need something more detailed, you can try the bio at  Catholic Encyclopedia version that fills in some of the gaps in the video.  Here's a sampling.

In his sixteenth year, Patrick was carried off into captivity by Irish marauders and was sold as a slave to a chieftan named Milchu in Dalriada, a territory of the present county of Antrim in Ireland, where for six years he tended his master's flocks in the valley of the Braid and on the slopes of Slemish, near the modern town of Ballymena. He relates in his "Confessio" that during his captivity while tending the flocks he prayed many times in the day: "the love of God", he added,

and His fear increased in me more and more, and the faith grew in me, and the spirit was roused, so that, in a single day, I have said as many as a hundred prayers, and in the night nearly the same, so that whilst in the woods and on the mountain, even before the dawn, I was roused to prayer and felt no hurt from it, whether there was snow or ice or rain; nor was there any slothfulness in me, such as I see now, because the spirit was then fervent within me.

In the ways of a benign Providence the six years of Patrick's captivity became a remote preparation for his future apostolate. He acquired a perfect knowledge of the Celtic tongue in which he would one day announce the glad tidings of Redemption, and, as his master Milchu was a druidical high priest, he became familiar with all the details of Druidism from whose bondage he was destined to liberate the Irish race.

US Justice and Personal Responsibility: Three Fatal Events, Three Outcomes

Here are three cases that have gotten some publicity in the last month.



Case 1: Mine operators ignore safety regulations,  two mine cave-ins kill nine miners.  No individuals responsible.  (See Washington Post article for details.)

Nine people die in mine collapse.  Company had various violations of safety issues and including not carrying out required actions.  Company pleads guilty to two misdemeanors and was fined $500,000.  No officers of the company face any charges.


There were some other settlements to the families.  The article has all the details.  I'm looking at a broader idea in this post.


Case 2: Rutgers student who secretly videotaped his roommate having gay sex and broadcast it to others, leading his roommate to commit suicide, faces up to ten years in prison. (Boston Globe)





Case 3:  Architect who intentionally put outdoor fire places inside mansion after building, against regulations and after inspectors checked the site, which led to a fire in which two firefighters died, faces involuntary manslaughter charges. (Los Angeles Times)




No cases is simple and there are lots of details that the links offer to the cases.  But common to them all is that people died due to someone else's actions (or inactions.)  In the mine and fire cases, the responsible parties appear to have knowingly violated a law they were responsible to uphold.  They were also people in positions of professional responsibility who stood to profit from their illegal actions, ignoring the danger they were causing others. 


In the student case, it's unclear that the videotaper knew he was violating the law, but he surely was pushing the limits of interpersonal decency and privacy. 


There are lots of questions around these cases:

• How have lobbyists for the mining industry helped to shape laws that shield owners and officers of mining companies from personal liability?
• Are there factors we use to evaluate unintentional death due to another's carelessness?  
• How much could someone, because of education/training, position, legal obligations, should be aware of his actions put others in risk?
• Whether someone has done something (or not done something) against legal orders that caused the death (or injuries)?
• Whether someone has taken action which a 'reasonable' person would assume could lead to serious consequences including death or (in the case of the students) could lead the victim to respond drastically?  
• To what extent can we be responsible for how people 
  
•  How do we deal with the way that modern technology to magnify what in prior times would have had less drastic consequences?  (As in the student's ability to broadcast live his roommate's tryst.)
• How does the political notion of personal responsibility - often bandied about by politicians talking about poor people and petty criminals - actually play out when people's lives are seriously disrupted or ended by carelessness and/or callousness?

Life is complicated.  Laws are written incrementally, without all of them being compared for fairness against all other laws.  And even if there were a commission charged to review all laws relating to people who cause death, the  imbalance  of political and economic power in the US would probably mean those with power would make sure their interests were looked after. 


And how do we deal with structural causes of death - such as when soldiers are sent to war despite their mental instability?  Or medical errors in hospitals?  Or when one nation's economy benefits from another's misery - such as rich countries getting cheap goods from weak labor and environmental laws in poor countries?   When does collective culpability become individual responsibility and vice versa?


Or from people ignoring all these issues because they can?  Until it affects them?  Like the architect and the mine owners and the Rutgers student who suddenly find themselves in the spotlight?  Though the brightness of the spotlights vary greatly. 

Kelly Williams, the Frosting on Superior Donuts

Kelly Williams, II (Franco) after the play

We decided to head down to Cyrano's to catch Superior Donuts before it was gone.  We knew nothing about it.   What a treat it was.  All the acting was good.  But when Kelly Williams, II walked through the door in the role of Franco Wicks, the whole place lit up.   Or, as the actor who played Franco at the Steppenwolf in Chicago says in the video below, "He breathes new life into the neighborhood."

The script was crisp and funny and I found myself totally pulled into the play.  This is the end of the run.  You've got Friday and Saturday evenings at 7 and then Sunday afternoon to see it.  At Cyrano's. 

The playwright, Tracy Letts, won the Pulitzer and a Tony with his previous play August: Osage County, and he had plenty of talent left for Donuts.

Here's a video from the Chicago production at the Steppenwolf including playwright Tracy Letts.   

Schuelke's Ted Stevens Trial Report - Summary and Full Report Here

The Ted Stevens Trial Misconduct Report was made public today.  It's 500 and some pages.  It's the report on the prosecutors conduct in the Ted Stevens trial which led to Obama's attorney general to dismiss the case and verdict shortly after Obama took office.


The report was ordered  April 2009 by the  Emmet G. Sullivan who was the judge in the case.    The report, dated November 14, 2011, was written by Henry F. Schuelke III and William Shields and was released today, despite an appeal by one of the prosecutors investigated, Edward Sullivan, to not release it.

I have had enough time to scan the table of contents - 16 pages worth - and and the Summary of Findings, but not much more.   Here is the Summary of Findings and below  I've uploaded the whole report to Scribd so that I could make it more easily readable here for anyone with time on their hands and/or a burning interest.  I'll try to go through it in the next few days.

Executive Summary

The investigation and prosecution of U.S. Senator Ted Stevens were permeated by the systematic concealment of significant exculpatory evidence which would have independently corroborated Senator Stevens’s defense and his testimony, and seriously damaged the testimony and credibility of the government’s key witness. Months after the trial, when a new team of prosecutors discovered, in short order, some of the exculpatory information that had been withheld, the Department of Justice (“DOJ”) moved to set aside the verdict and to dismiss the indictment with prejudice.

The Government recently discovered that a witness interview of Bill Allen took place on April 15, 2008. While no memorandum of interview or agent notes exist for this interview, notes taken by two prosecutors who participated in the April 15 interview reflect that Bill Allen was asked about a note dated October 6, 2002, that was sent from the defendant to Bill Allen. The note was introduced at trial as Government Exhibit 495 and was referred to as the "Torricelli note." The notes of the April 15 interview indicate that Bill Allen said, among other things, in substance and in part, that he (Bill Allen) did not recall talking to Bob Persons regarding giving a bill to the defendant. This statement by Allen during the April 15 interview was inconsistent with Allen's recollection at trial, where he described a conversation with Persons about the Torricelli note. In addition, the April 15 interview notes indicate that Allen estimated that if his workers had performed efficiently, the fair market value of the work his corporation performed on defendant's Girdwood chalet would have been $80,000. Upon the discovery of the interview notes last week, the Government immediately provided a copy to defense counsel.

Defendant Stevens was not informed prior to or during trial of the statements by Bill Allen on April 15, 2008. This information could have been used by the defendant to cross-examine Bill Allen and in arguments to the jury. The Government also acknowledges that the Government's Opposition to Defendant's Motion for a New Trial provided an account of the Government's interviews of Bill Allen that is inaccurate. See Opposition at 42-43 (Dkt. No. 269).

37

Case 1:09-mc-00198-EGS    Document 84    Filed 03/15/12    Page 49 of 525

Stevens, Motion of the United States to Set Aside the Verdict and Dismiss the Indictment with Prejudice, April 1, 2009, at 1-2 (Dkt. No. 324).

Our investigation revealed that, in addition to the failure to disclose Mr. Allen’s statements on April 15, 2008, that he did not recall speaking with Mr. Persons about Senator Stevens’s requests for bills and that the value of VECO’s work on Senator Steven’s home in Alaska was $80,000 (and not $250,000 as alleged in the indictment), other, significant Brady/Giglio information was intentionally withheld, including the following:

•    Mr. Bottini and Mr. Goeke withheld and concealed significant exculpatory information which they obtained from Robert “Rocky” Williams, a prospective government witness, during pre-trial witness preparation interviews in August and September 2008;

•    Mr. Bottini and Mr. Goeke withheld and concealed significant impeachment information regarding Mr. Allen, their key witness against Senator Stevens, which was obtained from Bambi Tyree by another federal prosecutor during an unrelated prosecution in July 2004; and

•    Mr. Bottini failed to correct materially false testimony given by Mr. Allen during his cross-examination in Stevens which Mr. Bottini knew at the time was false.

The information withheld from the defense would have significantly corroborated the trial testimony of Senator Stevens and Catherine Stevens, his wife, on the central issue in the case, supported defense attempts to expose Mr. Allen’s CYA testimony as a recent fabrication, and provided additional grounds to impeach his credibility and to question the integrity of the prosecution itself. See United States v. Boyd, 55 F.3d 239, 241 (7th Cir. 1995)(“The gravity of the prosecutors' misconduct . . . may support, but it can never compel, an inference that the prosecutors resorted to improper tactics because they were justifiably fearful that without such tactics the defendants might be acquitted.” (citations omitted); United States v. Remington, 191 F.2d 246, 251 (2d Cir. 1951)(“Evidence of efforts to suppress testimony of evidence in any form like the spoilation of documents is affirmative evidence of the weakness of the prosecution's case.”)(footnote omitted).

Sen Ted Stevens Trial Misconduct Report

Since I sat through most of the three trials in Anchorage that led up to the Stevens trial in DC, I have some thoughts about the four prosecutors I witnessed here who are the subject of the report -  Joseph W. Bottini,  James A. Goeke, Nicholas A. Marsh, and Edward P. Sullivan.   The other two, Brenda K. Morris and  William M. Welch III, were not involved in the Anchorage cases.  I am getting more than the normal number of hits today for my post on Nicholas Marsh's death and also for observations on Mary Beth Kepner, the FBI agent in charge of the investigation.

Alaska Supreme Court Sends Redistricting Plan Back To Board

The most significant consequence of the decision, as I read through it, is that the Alaska Redistricting Board must go back and redraw the redistricting plan starting with the requirements of the Alaska Constitution AND THEN make any necessary adjustments to also make it comply with the federal Voting Rights Act.

The Board's strategy was to start with the Voting Rights Act requirements (because they believed, probably correctly, that this was the hardest part) and the resulting plan - acknowledged by the Board - did not comply totally with the Alaska State Constitution.

The Board did this on the advice of their attorney who early on said that the federal Voting Rights Act took precedence over the state Constitution.  While this is true, the Supreme Court pointed out that in Hickel v. Southeast Conference, a 1992 decision following the redistricting process in 1990 Census, the Court set out a procedure for redistricting boards to follow which began with a plan that was in compliance with the Alaska Constitution.

Specifically, the Court ordered:

1. "The Board must first design a plan focusing on compliance with the article VI, section 6 [of the Alaska Constitution] requirements of contiguity, compactness, and relative socioeconomic integration; it may consider local government boundaries and should use drainage and other geographic features in describing boundaries wherever possible."  [emphasis added]
2.  "Once such a plan is drawn, the Board must determine whether it complies with the Voting Rights Act and, to the extent it is noncompliant, make revisions that deviate from the Alaska Constitution when deviation is "the only means available to satisfy Voting Rights Act requirements."

I'm posting this - what I think is the most significant immediate impact of the decision - now to get it out and I will follow up with a post the goes through the whole decision later today. 

[UPDATE 9:08am:  I should have mentioned that the court did allow for the possibility of using the Board's proclamation plan (the one the court wants redrawn) to stand for the 2012 election if the Board cannot get a new plan redrawn in time.]

I would note that  both parties told me they thought the decision would be back within ten days.  The oral arguments were heard Tuesday, March 13.  The decision is dated Wednesday,  March 14!
 

Three of the five sitting justices had been on the last redistricting case, one had been on the last two, so they were familiar with the legal issues.

The whole decision is here.  It's only seven pages.

[I'd also note that the report on the prosecutorial misconduct in the Stevens case came out today, so  I'll be busy.]

Niveolian Art

Aside from the aesthetics, there has to be something useful here, some story embedded in the layers of snow and dirt, some story about the winter of 2011-2012.  Like the story embedded in the rings of trees and, perhaps more obviously, the layers of a glacier. This is the exposed face of the pile of (plowed from the road, I assume) snow left exposed after the sidewalk was cleared.

Here you can see the path I walked, protected from cars by this wall of snow and grit.  

On the other side, it was almost as though the snow were trying to escape from its cage.  Some amorphous creature oozing through the bars. 





Some new words I learned for this post:


dendrochronology

niveolian 

Keller's Privatize Our Schools Bill - No! No! No! No!

Rep Keller at ALEC Presentation Feb 2011

[Reader Alert:  This is a topic I feel strongly about and sometimes that affects how I present the content.  Also there is a lot of background I don't have time to put in here.  So, if you have a problem with anything, comment or email and we can continue the discussion.]



The Alaska Dispatch has an article today on Wes Keller's HB 145 to create "scholarships" for parents to use state money to send their kids to private (including religious) schools in Alaska.

Keller's from the same part of Alaska that gave us Vic Kohring and Bill Stoltz (who most recently has refused to release a bill from committee for a house vote - already passed by the Senate - to give state funding for school meals for the low income kids).

Keller is also a member of ALEC - the Koch brothers sponsored organization that prepares model legislation for state legislators and whose agenda is basically to make government as marginal and ineffective as possible.  Here's an early (2005) piece of model legislation called Parental Choice Scholarship Program Act posted at Heartland Institute (an organization similar to ALEC which champions free enterprise and believes global climate change "is basically irrational, ideological, and profoundly anti-science" - if you want to learn more, contact Rep. Gatto, he goes to their meetings) which cites "ALEC staff."

I posted about an ALEC meeting in Juneau last year - Keller was one of four legislators who sponsored ALEC and attended.  The others were Rep.Carl Gatto (Wasilla), Rep.Tammie Wilson (North Pole), and Sen. Fred Dyson (Eagle River.)

ALEC Materials at Juneau Presentation

From a Nation article posted at Susan Ohanian.org

"Public schools,” ALEC wrote in its 1985 Education Source Book, “meet all of the needs of all of the people without pleasing anyone.” A better system, the organization argued, would “foster educational freedom and quality” through various forms of privatization: vouchers, tax incentives for sending children to private schools and unregulated private charter schools. Today ALEC calls this "choice"--and vouchers "scholarships"--but it amounts to an ideological mission to defund and redesign public schools.








There's lots that's been written exposing ALEC's agenda.  Basically it seems to be set on making government as ineffective as possible so that businesses can do whatever they want - gut labor laws, environmental regulations - and to give government assets and infrastructure over to the private sector.  This bill is a case in point.


Sec. 14.31.030 of  HB 0145B gives schools that lose students to the 'scholarships' and fall under the required 10 students [UPDATE: an issue in many of Alaska's small communities] to keep a school open, two years to operate.  Then, as I read this, the private school can petition to take over the school. 

Sec. 14.31.030. Effect on districts. (a) A school that, as a result of the program, has an ADM of less than 10 but five or more shall be treated as if the school had 10 students for a two-year period following the date on which the ADM is reported to be less than 10 but five or more for purposes of calculating state aid under AS 14.17. In this subsection, "ADM" has the meaning given in AS 14.17.990.
(b) If requested by a participating school, a school district that receives a payment under AS 14.31.020(b)(1) shall enter into a lease agreement with the participating school for space controlled by the school district if
(1) the lease is offered with reasonable terms; (2) the space that is subject to the lease agreement is available; and (3) the agreement is consistent with applicable state law.

In Sec. 14.31.035  the Education Department is to pay the 'scholarship' directly to the private school.

Sec. 14.31.035. Departmental duties. (a) In implementing the parental choice scholarship program, the department shall (1) obtain from the participating school a count of the number of participating students in the program; (2) make scholarship payments directly to the school quarterly after receiving proof satisfactory to the department that the student claimed under a scholarship attends the school on a full-time basis;

I feel very strongly about public schools.  It's the place in the United States where people can become Americans, where they mingle with people whose beliefs are not totally like their own family's.  There is a lot wrong with American public schools and I can make lists of the problems just as well as anyone else, but the answers lie in fixing how we deliver public education, not destroying it.

People complain about the polarization of US politics.  I would argue much of that has to do with the balkanization of schools into more and more specialized private religious school programs where students are taught that their group's truth is the only one.

Sure, neighborhoods segregated by race and income also produce similar effects in public schools.  It's a problem.  The disparity between good and bad schools is a problem.  But private schools, that can refuse to serve the problem students - whether the 'problem' is behavioral, learning disabilities, physical disabilities, or cross-cultural differences - are NOT the answer.  Especially for-profit private schools whose top priority is profit.  (Remember those financial institutions we recently bailed out?)

No Child Left Behind is part of this attack on public schools.  The testing was set up to label public schools as "failing" to turn the public against public schools and susceptible to voucher programs that would let them take public money and spend it at private schools.

Well, now they are calling the vouchers "scholarships."

I call them subsidies to private businesses.

I did a post in December on how the right wing attack on public education is also happening at the higher ed level.

Alaska Supreme Court Hears Redistricting Board Petitions

This John Hoover otter, part of a larger carving, which greeted me  as I got off the elevator on the Fifth floor to go to the Supreme Court, looks a bit the way I feel as I try to figure out how to deal with all my notes from today.

I have lots of reactions, but I haven't had time to review the notes and organize my thoughts into more than rambling yet.

Some specific things I observed:

• Plaintiff Michael Walleri opened at 1:30 with a clear and polished delivery.
• Retired Supreme Court Justice Warren Matthews joined the four sitting justices (Justice Morgan Christian has departed to take a seat on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals)
• Both parties to the case said they didn't know Justice Matthews was going to be there until he walked out.  Some speculated he was there because of his experience with the 1990 and 2000 redistricting cases.
• The justices actively asked questions of both attorneys and to my untrained ears (this was my first time attending a Supreme Court case) they seemed to need more justification from the Redistricting Board's attorney, Michael White, than from Walleri.  



(l-r) Justices Winfree, Matthews, Carpeneti, Fabe, Stowers

• The justices seemed to have detailed knowledge of the legal precedents (three justices had been on previous redistricting cases) - particularly the Alaska Supreme Court cases - but I couldn't help but wonder how well they could assess from the record the attorneys' claims about possibility of meeting both the Voting Rights Act requirements and the Alaska Constitutional requirements.  
• While both sides were initially given 45 minutes, with questioning from the justices, things stretched out and the court was adjourned about 3:20. 
• Board's attorney White asked the Justices, should the not overturn the trial judge's ruling on districts 37 and 38 to give the board instructions because they were at a loss as to how to do that without making things worse.  
• Both sides seemed to believe there would be a decision in ten days or less and the case would be remanded to the trial court.  

Each side focused on the parts of Judge McConahy's decision that rejected their arguments.  The Board accepted the need to redraw districts 1 and 2 in Fairbanks, but vigorously objected to the finding that required redrawing districts 37 and 38.

Michael Walleri address the court

The plaintiffs argued that splitting the City of Fairbank's two districts into separate Senate seats violated the proportionality requirement.

Most of the focus, it seemed to me, was on house districts 37 and 38. 

A basic issue throughout the whole redistricting process has been whether it was possible to meet both the  federal Voting Rights Act (VRA) requirements AND the Alaska Constitutional requirements. There was a lot of questioning about whether the board should have first made the plan comply with the Alaska Constitution and then, make variances (to the constitution) as necessary to comply with the VRA.  The Board's attorney White, vigorously argued that it was impossible  to meet both standards and starting with the state requirements would just be spinning your wheels.

Michael White addresses the court

There was also questioning on whether the Department of Justice (DOJ) really would have rejected a draft plan that met the constitutional requirements but paired native Senator Hoffman of Bethel with Senate President Stevens (non-native).  Walleri argued that if they truly had a native effective district, then it was Stevens, not Hoffman, whose seat would have been in danger.  After White repeated that the DOJ had been focused on whether native incumbents were paired, he was asked by Justice Matthews if they distinguished between pairing two native incumbents and a native and non-native pairing. 

Was the Board required to first make a plan that met the Alaska Constitutional requirements and then, if necessary, make variances as needed to also meet the VRA?
Even if they had to make variances to a plan that met constitutional requirements, wouldn't that plan at least then serve as a benchmark to see that variances were necessary?
Why did the Board begin with the VRA requirements instead of the Alaska Constitutional requirements?


 I've written more than I expected and there are still many points I've left out.  For those who have trouble sleeping, I'll attach my notes from the courtroom.

As usual, there's this WARNING:  the notes are my feeble attempt to capture what was said.  They are NOT at all transcripts, but they're what you'll have to make do with until transcripts are available.


Alaska Supreme Court Redistricting Board Case March 13, 2012