Saturday, February 09, 2013

Reptile Man, Soccer Game, And Pigs' Ears




Been busy with the family here.  Last night we went to see the Reptile Man at R's school. 

An hour of aligators and snakes.  The kids really ate it up.   A good way to welcome in the Year of the Snake. 








Today, we went over an hour - car and ferry - to Snohomish for T's soccer game.  It was gray and slightly drizzly the whole time, but I got to walk about 3.5 miles around the track while I watched the game. 



This turned out to be the winning goal was made in the first ten minutes or so.






Then, after a Pho lunch, we went to 99 Ranch in Lynnwood on the way back to the ferry to Kingston.  This is a huge Asian grocery store.  And on the day before Chinese New Year, it was really crowded.  But lots and lots of great things.  

 









Friday, February 08, 2013

Instead Of Writing A Book, Write Letters And Save The Post Office

According to writer Joseph Epstein*, “81 percent of Americans feel that they have a book in them — and should write it.” That’s approximately 200 million people who aspire to authorship.
The Publisher Perspective piece goes on to say most won't.  And given the publishing business can't.

The US Post Office announced the other day that they want to stop Saturday delivery.  I suspect that probably will be ok, unless that is just a step toward cutting off the rest of the week, one at a time.  



So, I'm calling out to the 200 million would be writers to instead write letters.   If each would be writer wrote and sent two letters, at the current rate for a one ounce letter, it would raise $180 million for the post office.  If they wrote two letters a week for a year, it would raise almost $10 billion a year for the post office. 

And if one out of ten letters they wrote were answered, that would raise another $1 billion. 

These could be personal letters to friends and relatives.  Or they could be bits and pieces of their book.  They could send out their book in serial form.  They could make copies of each, sign them all individually, and send them out to five or ten people each time.  Maybe they could get subscribers.

The post office still has beautiful stamps.  We just got a set of the Earthscape stamps above. 

Even if you don't aspire to write a book, you can write some letters to people you care about.  I promise you they will pay more attention to it than to your email.  And they'll still have it in five years. 

I think about the letters I have in boxes downstairs.  Letters from my grandparents written before I was born.  Some are to my father who had made it safe to the US as they were trying to get visas to escape Nazi Germany.  They never got the visas.  They never got out.  I never met them.  But I do have letters they wrote.  There are some from my grandmother written to her sister in the US around 1910.  These are one of the only ways I can directly connect with my grandparents - the words they wrote give me a hint of who they were.  The paper and ink give me a way to touch something they touched. 

Perhaps that's why I'm taking this grandfathering stuff so seriously.  I have no real confidence that this blog will survive for my granddaughter to read it in digital form.  But for the time being, I'm here in real life for her.  

How many of your emails will your grandchildren read?  How many are worth reading?  But pieces of paper with your words on them take more effort and you'll probably say something more significant.  And one of the grandchildren will find them one day and connect to you in a totally new way. 

So write to keep the post office, letters, stamps, and your history alive. 


*I didn't know who Joseph Epstein was, so before posting this I decided to check.  His Wikipedia page talks about a 1970 article he wrote that
"has been identified as a significant turning point in the gay rights movement of the early 1970s"
And not in a good way.  But no one should be held to everything they wrote 45 years ago, though he's a contributing editor for the Daily Standard, which, unfortunately, continues his deleterious view of the subject today.

Thursday, February 07, 2013

Pino's Pasta At Via Rosa 11








Once in a while I go into a shop and immediately know it's special.  That happened here on Bainbridge Island when I stuck my head into Via Rosa.  It looked and smelled just right.  And when we started talking to the owner - Pino Sordello - and we had a long, wandering discussion about mushrooms.  


Pino and customer

You can buy fresh pasta and different sauces to take home and make for dinner.  There's Italian style pizza and lots of other goodies.  

For lunch at the shop we had the soup of the day, a lentil soup like I've never had before. Along with a couple slices of pizza and a baked tomato. 

It's really more for take home.  There are only a couple of places to eat there.   We took home some pasta and his special mushroom sauce for dinner.  So good.    Just look at all the freshly made pasta.



Oh yes, it's in Rolling Bay at 11201 Sunrise Drive NE,  on Bainbridge Island.  At Valley and Sunrise, across the street from the Post Office.

Wednesday, February 06, 2013

Next Redistricting Board Meeting To Discuss Staffing And Strategy - Tuesday February 12,

The Supreme Court has decided that Alaska Redistricting Board needs to start from scratch to create a new Plan (map of the House and Senate districts) for the 2014 election.  The Board has petitioned for reconsideration.  I got an email yesterday that the Board will meet next Tuesday.

I checked with the Board to see if there was any word from the Supreme Court and was told there hasn't been a response or even an indication when there might be one.

In the past, the Court has been pretty quick in their decision making for the Board. It's been month now since the Board filed its petition.  Does the delay indicate that the division among justices in the decision (3-2) has continued and they haven't reached a final decision?  Or is it because the urgency that existed before the 2012 elections is not an issue now and the Court has other cases to decide?  Though this one has big consequences for Alaska.

In any case, if the Board does have to start over again, they're going to need to hire new staff and part of the meeting agenda has budget and staffing discussion.   There's also time allotted for discussing the legal issues, both in the public hearing and in executive session.   Finding people up to speed on the redistricting software and process isn't going to be easy.  It's a pretty specialized field, happens every ten years, and the details for the state change every ten years.  Mary Core has been kept on staff all along, but Taylor Bickford, who was the Executive Director, took a job with Strategies 360.  Taylor was the one who made sure the website was kept up-to-date, so their homepage's most recent announcement is dated June 27, 2012.  The Assistant Director Jim Ellis is now staff for Valley representative Lynn Gattis.


My guess is that unless the Court's decision is released before the meeting (a call to the Supreme Court office got no predictions on when that will happen) the public meeting will be a pretty short. Here's the agenda I got from the Board:

BOARD MEETING AGENDA
Tuesday,  10:00AM
February 12, 2013
Anchorage, Alaska


CALL TO ORDER
ROLL CALL
APPROVAL OF AGENDA
CHAIRMAN’S REPORT
Budget
Staffing
LEGAL REVIEW OF LATEST SUPREME COURT DECISION
EXECUTIVE SESSION:  LITIGATION STRATEGY AND ADVISE FROM COUNSEL
BOARD MEMBER COMMENTS
NEXT MEETING

ADJOURNMENT

Here's the email announcement (the easiest way to find out when they are meeting or doing anything is to get on their email list - at their website right hand column) of the meeting with information on how to livestream it.


February 5, 2013

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Alaska Redistricting Board Meeting Notice
Anchorage, Alaska - The Alaska Redistricting Board will meet at 10:00 a.m. on Tuesday, February 12, 2013 to discuss administrative matters and and receive a briefing from its attorney on the recent Alaska Supreme Court decision.

All Board meetings are public meetings. Members of the public may attend in person at the Board's Anchorage office (411 West 4th Avenue, Suite 302, Anchorage, AK 99501) or listen via live stream at www.aklegislature.tv

 Anyone needing special accommodations is requested to call 907-269-7402 or email info@akredistricting.org
### 

CONTACT: 

Mary Core, Administrative Assistant

Phone:  (907) 269-7402

Tuesday, February 05, 2013

Trolls or People? Commenters Who Push My Civility Standards

"Comments will be reviewed, not for content (except ads), but for style. Comments with personal insults, rambling tirades, and significant repetition will be deleted. Ads disguised as comments, unless closely related to the post and of value to readers (my call) will be deleted. Click here to learn to put links in your comment."
These are the words at the end of each post, above the box where people can comment.  

A troll, as defined by Wikipedia is
"someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as a forum, chat room, or blog, with the primary intent of provoking readers into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion. "
To the extent they actually engage the topic and force people to confront ideas that group think would otherwise keep off a particular site, they serve a positive role.  To the extent that they simply insult and upset folks, they don't. 

I’m lucky.  I don't see many trolls here.  Most commenters stay within the bounds of civility I've laid out.   Nearly all of the comments I get - even the spam - are polite.  If people disagree, they explain, sometimes with a link.

But once in a great while, I get commenters who have a different standard of decorum.  What seems like anger to me might be their normal talking voice.  And my anger may seem calm to them. So my job then is to tease out whether this is just a different standard, an emotional outburst, or an intentional disruption.

I tend to be understated most of the time, relying on readers to recognize that lack of hyperbole and insult doesn't mean I'm not emotionally engaged.  I just don't think disrespect is likely to win over people who disagree with me.  And on basic beliefs, most people aren't going to change anyway.  But much of what we talk about is on the edges of or even beyond basic beliefs, a space where people can more comfortably rearrange their mental furniture.  But only when they are emotionally ready to do that.  That's why being respectful is important - not just polite, but authentically respectful.


END OF CONTEXT, INTO THE BACKGROUND

So, the other day, I got a comment that violated my guidelines.  In my mind, it had ‘personal insults’ and came pretty close to being a ‘rambling tirade.’  Was this an internet assassin or just someone who angrily disagreed?   While I understand that this commenter might simply be a troll who's decided to make someone’s life difficult (the attacks were aimed at another blogger I'd mentioned, not at me) my preference is to address the problems I have with the comment and give the person a chance to clarify.

I responded briefly asking Anonymous for some back up and some links to support what I saw as personal attacks on Progressive Alaska blogger Phil Munger. 

Anon's response to my short (I had to catch the ferry) comment was more than twice as long as the original comment and didn’t really address my concerns.

My next brief comment - I was busy this weekend - said there was still no back up and if the commenter continued in the same vein, I’d delete the comment. 

I got one more long comment - posted in three parts.  The tone was ratcheted down and the second two parts raised legitimate questions. 

So, what should I do?  I didn't want to continue the discussion in the comment section.  I knew it was going to be way too long and complicated. Should I just delete and ignore?  But there was a good chance it wasn't a troll, that it was someone seriously upset trying to express their displeasure.   I thought I should give the person the benefit of the doubt and see if we can engage in real conversation. 

Even if I can't find some common ground with the commenter, I can at least try to practice what this blog is about - exploring how we know things - by treating people with respect, while rigorously examining the evidence.  It's not an easy thing for most of us to do and I may not completely succeed.

So, here goes.

INTO THE ISSUES

The whole exchange, up to this point, is in the comments section to a previous post on whether I should write about  Phil Munger’s post at Progressive Alaska reporting that two anonymous sources said the Kulluk damage was greater than the Unified Command has suggested and that the Kulluk might be headed to Asia for repairs.    I’ll take excerpts from those comments, but to get the whole context, you can go read them. It's not too long.

So take this as the next comment on that post in response to Anon’s last three comments (Feb 3, 2013). 

Steve:

Anon,

First, my post was about how to decide whether to report things other bloggers post, things that may not be fully substantiated.  I used Phil Munger's post as an example.  I was letting my readers know
  •  I deliberated about even putting up the post
  • why I decided to post it; and 
  • what I thought about before posting it. 
I tested Phil’s post against Reuters' guidelines to help me decide.  Phil did reasonably well against the Reuters standard (especially considering those aren't common standards for most bloggers.)   My post itself was only partially about what Phil had written.  It was NOT about Phil.  Yes, Phil was mentioned, but really wasn't the main topic.  You chose to attack Phil instead of either what I said or what he said.  I also felt you made very strong charges, but without evidence.  The irony is that the post was specifically about standards for backing up what one writes. 

In your Feb 1 comment you say things (in response to my challenge to give me evidence supporting your claims) like:
"Little support? All the support needed to demonstrate Munger's hackery is on display on his website. The hackery is and has been on display for quite a long time. His own posted assertions that directly contradict his own later postings of newer or successive assertions are glaringly obvious."
That's essentially an attack on Phil without any evidence other than to say "The evidence is obvious for anyone to see."  If it is so plentiful then it wouldn't be hard for you to say, "For example, see this post about X dated ?/?/? (link) and this one (link)."  Then readers can judge for themselves.

Then you write:
"I'm surprised you couldn't find any instances of anyone else discussing the need for heavy lift vessels for the transport of the Kulluk and indications that the repairs need be done in Asia, and specifically in Korea, instead of facilities on the west coast of the US. All it takes is to Google a few key words and you'll see that has been discussed as far back as at least Jan 7."
Well, I found one, dated around January 20 and it didn’t mention Korea.  All you had to do was give a few of these links.  It's your argument, so, in my book, it's your job to supply the evidence, not tell me and my readers to go search the internet. All you had to do was say:  “There are stories here (link), here (link), and here (link). [Later he objects to using links to sites he opposes and I'll address that later.]


You also follow up a comment I made "like all of us, he's [Phil] a complex person":
"As for Munger being a 'complex' person? More like 'has a few too many complexes'"
Cute word play maybe, but it's just another put down which doesn't offer any substantive response to my remark about him being a complex person. 

 
Let’s go to your three Feb. 2 posts. (Again, you can see all the comments complete here) Part 1 begins:

Anonymous
Saturday, February 2, 2013 at 7:14:00 PM AKST
Steve, First, I'd like to make note of an inconsistency in equivalency, or is it simply a lack thereof? After, I'll attempt to speak to a couple of other points.

You made reference to 'harshly' challenging an unstated number of 'charges' Munger has made, I don't see any links or any more easily confirmable evidence of these as yet indeterminate charges which you harshly challenged.

In terms of the discussion here in the comments, I didn’t see the need to link because I’m conceding that you are right on this.  I’m conceding that there are times when Phil makes wild allegations and uses unnecessarily insulting language.  Isn't it enough that I just acknowledge you're right?  Since you already believe this, why do I need to give you further evidence?

Now, if you think that I’m lying, and that haven’t challenged Phil and that I’m just saying that to appease you, well, then I can understand why you might ask for evidence.  If that is your concern, here’s a post where I harshly, for me, called Phil on what he wrote.

I’ve also made comments on Phil’s blog in the past when I thought he’d gone too far.   I did use his blog’s search function to see if I could find some examples, but it doesn’t search the comments.  It's just too long ago for me to remember or to search for.  You’ll just have to trust me.

Another excerpt from your comment:
“Am I correct in perceiving that I'm to be held to a far different standard when it comes to participating in a discussion? You're allowed to be indeterminate or unspecific to a fairly high degree, ...and yet I'm deemed to be held to a different level . . .”
If you read my blog, you'll know that I frequently supply links to supporting evidence.  And sometimes I've even changed what I say because I've found, searching the net, that I was wrong.

In this situation, our discussion was taking place in the comments section of a post. I was  referring to comments you’d made in the comment stream above.  There was only one other short comment by someone else.  I figured a reader could just look up there and see your comments.  Things like:
“you're looking for journalistic integrity or some ethical mores or just plain old honesty from Phil Munger?”
I took that to be a rhetorical question which was essentially saying that he had no journalistic integrity or ethical mores and he was dishonest.  I don’t think my readers failed to find what I was referring to.  Or,
“all Phil does is stand on other people's work.”
I was referring to your comments in the same thread on the same page.  Your two comments totaled about 750 words.  And they were right there above what I had written. You were referring to unspecified posts on unspecified topics in a blog with thousands of posts.  I don’t think there was a double standard here. 

In the 4 pm post, you start to give some examples.  Examples that allow me to see what you're complaining about.  You identify two of Phil’s recent posts - one about the number of military suicides during President Obama's term in office and the other on President Obama's second Inaugural address.

On military suicides you write:
“In a post purporting to claim concern for victims of military suicide, Munger makes the bald faced assertion that our president has not been at all responsive to the problem. The facts are, that those closest to this issue, those in all levels of the military and groups outside of the military, professionals, policymakers, veterans organizations and military family groups, have all very publicly noted that president Obama has done more to address this issue than any other president.”  [emphasis added]
I searched his blog for military suicides and found a Dec. 28 post.  It quotes the Veterans Administration statistics (via another website) on military suicides and then Phil comments on the numbers:
“Obama certainly isn't responsible for each of these deaths, but he is as responsible for the growth of this tragic epidemic as is anyone.  Now that he has been re-elected by Americans, will he do something about it?
I doubt it.”
What you said he said is really a distortion of what Phil wrote.  He doesn’t say “our president has not been at all responsive to the problem,”  He said the president is “as responsible as anyone.”   This is more opinion than fact.  I’m not sure how you can prove something like that, but he is the President and has more authority than anyone else to make sure policies to prevent suicides are followed.  Who might be more responsible? (Please don't say "the soldiers committing suicide.")  It doesn’t mean Obama is encouraging people to commit suicide or that he isn’t concerned about it.  Or that he isn't the most responsive president ever.  (I'm not sure it was an issue of big enough proportion in the past that presidents were called on to do something.  We've never had a such a long war with soldiers repeatedly returning to combat.) 
OK, you could infer from the question about whether he'll do something about it in the second term,  that he'd done nothing in the first term.  But it's hardly a 'bald faced assertion."  Again, it's opinion. 

I think that Phil’s tone often tends to be provocative, and it's a bit ironic that I find myself defending him, but I don't think you characterized his comment on climate change in the Inaugural correctly either.  You wrote:
“Recently, speaking of our president's 2nd inaugural address, Munger very specifically asserted that the president made no mention of climate change.”
What Obama said was:
“We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations.”
Phil didn’t say that Obama didn’t mention climate change.  Phil spent most of the post comparing Martin Luther King's (the Inaugural was on MLK Day) anti-war stance to Obama's.  He lamented that under Obama our military budget is a much higher percent of the total budget than when MLK spoke. 

Specifically, he said:
“Indeed, our pro-war mindset has numbed us to almost too many things to list. Non-response to the real dangers of climate change, degradation of lands and oceans through insane agricultural practices that poison each almost irremediably, decaying nuclear plants and the ticking time bombs of nuclear waste in spent fuel pools, top my list.
Of course, none of these dangers came up in Obama's second inaugural speech today. ”
As I read this, Phil isn't even talking about Obama's speech in the first part.  He's talking generally about the American people.  In the final sentence he specifically says "none of these dangers came up."   It's true, what you say, that Obama did mention climate change in the speech and even promised to do something about it.  But that doesn't make Phil's comment false.  Yes, climate change came up, but "the dangers" of climate change that Phil said weren't mentioned, didn't.

Part of me thinks Phil’s regular complaints about Obama are tiresome.  But part of me knows that Obama gets far more pressure from the right.  Critics on the left, like Phil, give him ammunition to say, "I can't do that or my own party members will fry me." I first saw how this worked during the Vietnam war.  The most extreme protesters, like those who poured blood on draft board records, made other protesters seem reasonable in comparison. 
 
You write further on this:
“The fact is, Obama made very implicit and unmistakable mention of a promise to address climate change. Ah, but the facts don't mesh with the false narrative Munger wished to promote in his 'construction', so his false assertion was that the president ignored and did not even address climate change. “
I often read something and then when I go back I realize that it didn’t quite say what I thought.  You’re right, Obama made an (I think you meant) explicit and unmistakable promise to do something about climate change.  But Phil didn’t didn’t say, as you portray it, that “the president did not even address climate change.”  He said the we all are “non-responsive to the real dangers . . .” and that "none of these dangers came up in Obama's second inaugural speech."

It's hard to write clearly and unambiguously.  Readers have an obligation to read carefully, especially before they publicly complain about what they read. Phil could be clearer.   I could be clearer usually too.  And so, Anon, could you.   I can see how someone could take ‘non-responsive’ and interpret it to say that Obama “didn’t respond” and then slide over to “he never mentioned. . .”  Even when someone is perfectly clear, many readers read what they expect to see instead of what someone actually wrote. 

That’s why it’s important to supply the examples.  If you had actually quoted what Phil said, you might have recognized that Phil didn’t quite say what you accused him of saying.

OK, I think I’m beating a dead horse now.  But getting the details right is important in disputes like this.  It's also what makes them so tedious for many. 

The third part of your Feb. 2 comment raises your reluctance to link to sites you don’t wish to promote.  I understand your sentiment here.  I've had the same concern.  Not so much for blogs like Phil's, but for true hate group websites.  I’m not sure your concern is still totally valid. My understanding is that since Google found that spammers put up comments specifically to get their clients’ websites higher ranking, Google has stopped using such comment links in their calculation of web ranking.  And they even penalize some.

I don’t know how that affects links that non-spam commenters might make.  But you needn't have put the links in.  If you just put the URL, Google wouldn't count it.  Readers could cut and paste.  Or you could give dates and topics of posts so readers could find them. 

Besides,  I wasn’t asking so much for links to Phil’s posts which I later could find once you gave me topics.  I was really asking for links to the sites you said talked about the damage to the Kulluk and its possible relocation to Asia.

It's your turn Anon.  I'm sure you'll find problems with my response.  And try to keep in mind my comment guidelines.  

[Disclosure:  I met Phil while blogging the political corruption trials in 2007 and 2008.  He'd read my blog and introduced himself.  He's been unfailingly supportive and generous to me, even when I've criticized him.  He's got lots of knowledge about a number of disparate topics.  But he certainly doesn't follow my comment guidelines on his blog.  But it's his blog and he can follow his own heart there.  I'd note that his post I referenced was quite carefully written and Anon had no comments about it except to say that others had already posted the same points.  But he didn't tell us where.]

Monday, February 04, 2013

Snow Birds





For you folks in Anchorage, some of our geese are spending the winter in the Puget Sound area. 

Saturday, February 02, 2013

So Much To Learn












Inside this featherweight lump of flesh, cradled on my arm, ebbing and flowing with my breathing, a human being is exploring her body, figuring out how it works.  So many parts and pieces to master.  An arm flails.  Gurgling sounds from the belly.  She’s in there, emerging into awareness of this body.   And the body itself is still unfinished.  Her lips move up and down.  The mouth opens a little, now a lot.  The head moves seeking a nipple.  When none is found a soft cry calls out.

Later, satisfied and back on my arm,  An eyelid opens to a slit.  Then closes again.  Now  wide open.  What does she see?  Whoops, her eyeball rolls up leaving a white orb before the lids close. 

Is there any more challenging adventure than mastering one’s own body?  Gaining control of the arms and legs. Slowly gaining full consciousness, bit by bit.  Making sense of the light hitting the eye and the sound waves coming in through the ear holes?  Shaping the involuntary chirps into intentional sounds and then words? 



I look down at her nose and lips and eyes and cheeks and wonder who this little girl is and who she will become.  My daughter’s daughter.  A new being that only my wife and I and two others we only met a year ago call granddaughter.  I watch in wonder as she awakens into life and begins to take control of her body parts, so very slowly, day be day discovering new secrets.  Almost two weeks now I’ve had my heart lightened by her tiny body resting against me. 







Vernor Vinge - A Fire Upon the Deep






I can't recall reading any science fiction since I read Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age and then Snow Crash.


Both those books are huge and incredibly rich in detail, great characters, and mind-stretching ideas. 

Really good science fiction - like Stephenson's - is just good literature.  I found though that much science fiction is good in one area - new worlds, new tech, different takes on human life, good story line -  or another, but often just one area and the characters are often flat.  Women now have much stronger roles than they used to, but character development is often secondary.  Of course, all of this is based more on past reading of science fiction, so I don't read much these days.  Things could have changed a lot.  I know, for example, that strong women characters play a much bigger role in science fiction today than in the past.  I stopped reading it except by strong recommendation, since I couldn't keep track of what was really good.

My daughter gave me this one to read when I was looking for a book in her place.   I've been reading large chunks of pages and then having to put it down so I can do other things.  It's not even close to Stephenson, but it offers some interesting ideas - like the packs which live live in small clusters of individuals that share each others' minds.  It was published in 1992 and every chapter seems to have one or two newsgroup posts.  I read newsgroups in 1992, so that means he was using a technology of the period, not really pushing it out into the future.  Though the importance of data in the economy is a central theme of the book, which is still something most of us haven't considered to the level that he takes it.  Much of the time I'm not completely sure what is happening, though I know enough to be able to follow along.  I don't really knowwhat the title means, but maybe it will become clear by the end.  Though I'm over 500 pages into the book.  So far, the story plot has been fairly predictable, but, again, the book isn't finished.  If there are surprises at the very end, I'll add to this post. 

Friday, February 01, 2013

What's At Stake If The Redistricting Board Starts Over?

[This is the fifth post following up the Alaska Redistricting Board's petition to the Alaska Supreme Court Decision to reconsider its decision telling the Board to start the whole redistricting process over for the 2014 election.  The other posts are listed and linked at the bottom.]

The Alaska Supreme Court has ordered the Alaska Redistricting Board to start over again and once more divide up Alaska into 40 House and 20 Senate districts for the 2014 election.   The Board has petitioned the Court to reconsider its decision.  What all is this all about and what's at stake?  There are two main parts:

  • Form over Substance
    • The Board's Task
    • The Court's Task
    • What Happened?
    • Form Over Substance?
    • My Conclusion
  • Impact Of Redoing The Plan From Scratch
    • A Lot of Work
    • Should the job be given back to the Board?
    • Impact on the balance of Democrats and Republicans in the legislature
    • Impact on voters' connection to their legislators 


Form Over Substance?

The Board's petition charges the Court with substituting form for substance.   Is that the case?

The Board's Task

The Board's job is to divide the state into 40 House and 20 Senate districts.  Each House district should have as nearly as possible 17,755 people based on the 2000 Census.  Additionally there are some state constitutional requirements - compactness, contiguity, and socio-economic integration - and there are some federal requirements based on the Voting Rights Act (VRA).  The VRA required the Board to preserve Alaska Native voting effectiveness, which, in practical terms, means they had to have the same number of districts as before in which Alaska Native voters had enough population to choose the candidate of their choice.  (Here's a previous post that goes into it in more detail.)

The VRA requirements take precedence over the Alaska Constitution, so if the Board can't draw lines that meet the VRA requirements without having to compromise the Alaska Constitution, then it's the Constitution that gets short changed.

Given this, the Board set out to first create the Alaska Native districts and then work out the rest of the districts.  They turned in a plan that they claimed met both the VRA and the Alaska Constitution.

The Court's Task

The Court's job is to make sure that the Alaska Constitution hasn't been violated by the new redistricting plan.  The Court recognizes that the VRA takes precedence, but based on a prior Alaska Supreme Court decision, ordered the Board to follow the "Hickel Process."

The "Hickel Process" requires the Board to start out by making a plan that meets the Alaska Constitution.  Then, if that plan does not meet the VRA requirements, the Board should make the fewest changes necessary to comply with the VRA.  The Court's rationale is that they need a benchmark to determine if the constitutional deviation is the least possible.  So, if they see the constitutional map first, then they can compare that map with the new map to see what changes the Board had to make to also comply with the VRA.  They argue that by starting with the VRA, the Court can't do its job of determining if the deviations from the Alaska Constitution are as minimal as possible.

The "Hickel Process" is also seen as a way to minimize political gerrymandering.  The Board has to show why it's done what it did.  And, as I heard during the process, the idea behind the "Hickel Plan" has been adopted by other states for this very reason.

What Happened?

Since the Board began the plan with first the Alaska Native districts so it would comply with the VRA, the Court had no original Constitutional plan to compare it against.  I would note that the Board's attorney didn't mention the "Hickel Process" to the Board as a requirement they had to meet and appears to have been taken by complete surprise that the Court used it in its decision.   Now, he clearly knew about the court case - Hickel v. Southeast Conference.  Two of the 2010 Redistricting Board members are mentioned as plaintiffs in the case.  But it appears that none took the "Hickel Process" instructions in that case to apply to their work. Possibly because they assumed a constitutional amendment in 1998 changing the redistricting process made it irrelevant.

In sending the plan back to the Board to be redone, the Court did not evaluate whether the districts in the plan were constitutional or not.  The Board argues in its petition, and two of the Court members seemed to agree in their dissent, that if the districts in the plan were constitutional, then it doesn't matter if they did the Native districts first or not.  That would only matter if there were unconstitutional districts.

That assumes, however, that the districts are all constitutional and I would argue that a few of them are not - they are definitely not compact.  I'm not sure one could draw a plan for Alaska in which all districts met a strict definition of compact because there are parts of the state with lots of land and few people.

Form over Substance?

I think the Court's logic about needing a benchmark against which to measure the degree of deviation from the Constitution is sound.

But I also have doubts that, practically, a Board could come up with the best possible map (ie meets VRA and has the least possible deviations from the Alaska Constitutional requirements) by drawing its first map only thinking about the Constitution and not thinking at all about the VRA. The Court has written "the Board ‘painted itself into a corner’ by leaving only a few blank areas on the map."  I would argue the same thing would happen if they did a constitutional map first without any consideration of where the Native districts might go.  The VRA requirements are so different from the constitutional requirements, that to ignore them would likely have the Board end up with a map that would require far more constitutional deviation to adjust at the end.

That said, I think that the VRA can be a cover for the Board to gerrymander districts.  My observation of how the Fairbanks districts were originally determined leads me to believe that they used their VRA districts as an excuse to claim that their clear political tampering with the Fairbanks districts was an unavoidable "ripple effect" of the Native district.  In court, the plaintiffs showed that this was not the case.  

My Conclusion
  • The basic notion of the "Hickel Process" is logical, but
  • Drawing the constitutional map without any consideration of the VRA could lead to worse plans than not using the Hickel process 
  • If the Court were to review each individual district and find them all constitutional, then I would say that requiring the Board to start over using the "Hickel Process" was form over substance
  • I don't think they would all be constitutional

Impact Of Redoing The Plan From Scratch


A Lot Of Work 

I couldn't tell you how many hours the Board met, but I have 164 posts labeled "redistricting."  They met much of March 2011 through May 2011, in Anchorage and flying all over the state to meet with people.  They had several court hearings and met again in Spring 2012 a number of times to respond to the court decisions.   There are five Board members from different parts of the state, plus about four staff members. 

If something has been done wrong, the amount of work to fix it shouldn't be the issue.  But how much of a difference will all this work make?  And will the difference benefit the state or do more harm than doing nothing?

Should The Job Be Given Back To The Board? 

The Board certainly understands the job facing them and the technology for doing it.  They should be able to do this much faster than they did the first time round.  But even though this process has a major political impact, the first round had relatively little media attention and I suspect there could be less this time around. 

The current Board is made up of four Republicans and one Democrat.  The Democrat, appointed by the Supreme Court Chief Justice, is an Alaska Native who focused on the Voting Rights Act and did not otherwise appear to watch out for Democratic interests on the Board.  Nearly all, if not all, the significant votes on the Board were unanimous.  Her participation certainly helped the Board reach out to Alaska Natives, but since the Board knew that no Plan could proceed without the Department of Justice approval, they already were concerned about meeting the VRA requirements.

Short of having an evenly balanced Board, I don't see how partisanship can be prevented.  But such a Board might also be stalemated.  And such a Board means little in a state where Non-Partisan (no party affiliation) and Undeclared (no party declared)  make up the largest block of voters.

One Alaska Democratic representative, Les Gara, claimed  that the Court's decision to hand the redistricting task back to the Board would give it a chance to further increase the Republican legislative dominance it gained in the 2012 election:
"Now the Supreme Court has ruled this board can rewrite every district, after seeing how its 2012 plan performed. That lets the board members re-gerrymander lines in those districts where races were closer than they predicted, even if those districts are legal."
I don't know what options the Court has if it finds the plan unconstitutional.   I don't know under what circumstances the Court could dismiss the constitutionally established Board to create another body.  Past redistricting board processes have involved court appointed masters to finalize plans, but I understand that this happened when time was critical and the result plan was only an interim plan.

The only check on partisanship comes when the Court reviews the plan that the Board proposes.


Impact on the balance of Democrats and Republicans in the legislature

This was mentioned in the previous post.  I have no doubt that if the Board had been dominated by Democrats, the Senate bi-partisan coalition would not have been broken in the last election.  There are several Senate districts that were changed in ways that were unnecessary except to impact the balance of Republicans and Democrats.

I see no reason to believe that Rep. Gara's prediction of even further benefit to Republicans wouldn't occur in the next round unless the Court decided to consider political gerrymandering, which is illegal.


Impact on legislators and voters' connection to their legislators


The dissenting opinion on the Supreme Court, while agreeing that the Southeast districts should be revisited, argued against redistricting the whole state. One issue they cited was the impact on voters.
. . . it is highly desirable that election districts not change, or change as little as possible, from one election to the next during every ten-year census cycle. Redistricting inevitably generates significant political disruption and voter confusion, and gives rise to charges of partisan and ad hominem gerrymandering. It results in the truncation of four-year senate terms to two-year terms when there are substantial changes in a Senate district. Further, redistricting may place two incumbents in one district, thus resulting in the inevitable defeat of one of them. In addition, redistricting may cause incumbents to lose the core of their constituency. (p. 33)
The whole process of redistricting is highly disruptive.  Asking the Board to revisit the whole state, including the many districts that are clearly constitutional, unnecessarily invites uncertainty and mischief.



These are the thoughts of an observer of this process.  There's a lot I don't know, but I don't see too much discussion or debate on this so I figure I should at least raise some issues for people to think about, learn more about, and discuss. 


I've written four other posts in response to the Board's petition to the Supreme Court's December decision:


1.  Alaska Redistricting 2010-2013 Overview
2.  Fact Checking The Alaska Redistricting Board's Petition To The Supreme Court
3.  Redistricting Board Petition To SC - Part 2: I Can't Figure Out A Sexy Title For This 
4.  Did the Alaska Supreme Court Violate Separation of Powers as the Board Petition Asserts?






Thursday, January 31, 2013

More Than Babysitting - Egypt, Trees, and Birds

Besides babysitting, we did get to stop at the library Saturday morning for a Great Decisions film and speakers on modern Egypt.  A former State Department official moderated and two Egyptian speakers - Marwa Maziad, an Egyptian journalist and fellow at the Middle East Center of the U.W. Jackson School of International Studies.

Marwa Maziad and Tarek Dawoud
Tarek Dawoud is a graduate of Cairo University Computer Engineering department, Tarek came to the United States from Egypt in early 2001 to work in the Software industry.  Tarek currently serves as the president of the Washington state chapter of CAIR (Council on American Islamic Relations) and  as a board member of the Islamic School of Seattle as well as a member of the Interfaith and Outreach Committee at Masjid Ar-Rahmah in Redmond.

Larry Kerr, the moderator,  was a Career Member of the Senior Foreign Service for over 25 years after leaving the US military.

Essentially, Marwa and Tarek  both felt that the video made the Mursi government seem much more stable, moderate, and capable than it is.  Both see lots of issues today, but were hopeful for five years from now.


The room was packed - about 60 people [It turns out there were 75 according to Kathleen Thorne who runs the program and supplied me the names and background information on Tarek and James.]  I don’t think there more than a handful (excluding the speakers) under 40.  I’m not sure what that means - I suspect that it has more to do with their time schedules and young families than their interest in the topic. 






We also drove out to Port Gamble.  A town whose architecture was copied from Maine where the settlers came from.  While it had a saw mill once, it seems to be mostly a tourist spot today.  Everything was labeled like this tree. But I see it's still hard to read, so here's what it says:

"It was in 1640 that the "Earl of Camperdown" in Dundee Scotland growing on the floor of his elm forest.  He grafted it to a Scotch Elm and it took hold producing the first Camperdown Elm.  The Scotch Elm is the  only root mass the Camperdown Elm will grow on.  The tree is a mutant and cannot self produce. Every Camperdown Elm tree in the world is part of the original and they must be grafted onto a Scotch Elm tree to get started.  When the graft starts to grow, the Scotch Elm branches are cut off leaving only Camperdown Elm.  This magnificent tree depends on humankind to keep it alive as a species."

A Tree A Day suggests it wasn't the Earl himself who is responsible:
"An astute head-gardener grafted it onto a Wych elm, or Ulmus glabra (there is some controversy involving Ulmus hollandica). What was produced was a sprawling canopy that gave rise to this cultivar's other name, the Umbrella elm."


We've also been seeing some birds we only see in the summer in Anchorage.  A few worth mentioning -  buffleheadsAmerican widgeons, and one of my favorites, the varied thrush.