Fracking California

I took this picture in a Turkish restaurant where we stopped for a snack as we arrived in San Francisco Thursday. 

Today's New York Times gives some context to it.  

". . . By all accounts, oilmen and farmers — often shortened to “oil and ag” here — have coexisted peacefully for decades in this conservative, business friendly part of California about 110 miles northwest of Los Angeles. But oil’s push into new areas and its increasing reliance on fracking, which uses vast amounts of water and chemicals that critics say could contaminate groundwater, are testing that relationship and complicating the continuing debate over how to regulate fracking in California. . ."

I've got lots of processing to do from the PATNet conference, so I'm just going to give you a snippet of the Times article and you can read the rest at the link if you like.  And here's  SF Bay Guardian article takes a stronger stand (and has a map).  It begins:

Fracking changes everything

It's toxic. It's contributing to climate change. And it's happening all over California — with little regulation

Sunday Morning Mind Stretching

The PATNet conference goes on.  Things end this afternoon and we'll be able to get out into the beautiful San Francisco sunshine.  But meanwhile people are still earnestly discussing how to think about public administration.  

Panel: “Self-Other Relations and Utopian Transformations”


“Progressives’ Utopia: Know Thy Enemy as Yourself”

Amy Gould, The Evergreen State College

In The Art of War, Sun Tzu stated “if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle” (ch. 3). In the 21st century Progressives aretheir own worst enemy. From the Reconstruction era to present day, Progressives create archetypes of utopian governance through bureaucratic systems of dependency on strangers rather than directed cooperation within communities of trust. Using historical and present day examples, the paper will support these arguments through theoretical comparisons of David Farmer’s To Kill the King, Mark Levin’s Ameritopia, and Paul Seabright’s The Company of Strangers. The imagination of Progressives is the site of the struggle for utopian governance.


“Accountability as an Instrument of Power: Lessons from the Louisiana BTOP”
Roy L. Heidelberg, Louisiana State University
Accountability is an essential part of the effort to construct a better world for a diverse community governed by many sovereigns. Democracy was rejected in one of the earliest

commentaries on a utopia in favor of a benevolent dictator in Republic, yet it persists today as the preferred form of governance in many societies, especially the West. To achieve a democracy requires the institution of meta-rules that guide decision making in order to guarantee answerability to the many-headed sovereign and peaceful resolution of conflict. But can we go too far in our intentional designs through accountability? In this case study I argue that the very system of controls intended to ensure answerability to the sovereign provides the edifice for obscuring actions from the sovereign. Instead of promoting transparency, a system of procedural accountability offers actors entrusted by the public the instruments to conceal their actions and intents rather than reveal them."




“Taking Things Seriously in Public Administration: Beyond the Human-Object Dichotomy”
Thomas J. Catlaw, Arizona State University (Thomas.Catlaw@asu.edu)
Thomas M. Holland Arizona State University (Thomas.Holland@asu.edu)

Thomas Holland

Does public administration think about things? This paper argues that public administration’s positivists and constructivists hold objects in generally low regard. Positivists do think much about things at all and constructivists love to police the divide between humans and things, always nervous about reification (thingification). But does it really have to be so bad to be a thing? The point of view in explored in paper is that all objects—computers, animals, plants, buildings, mountains, and languages—exist and that there is no normative hierarchy among them. To this end, we explore developments in contemporary philosophy that seek to develop a “flat ontology”  (Delanda, 2002, 2006) or a

Thomas Catlaw

“democracy of objects” (Bryant, 2011). We then to see how these ideas can help public administration reframe some tradition problems, like agency. Consistent with developments in contemporary philosophy, we call our position speculative realism (Bryant, Srnicek, & Harman, 2011) insofar as it wantonly speculative and metaphysical in its effort to consider the existence of real things and to consider them as real—not just artifacts of human consciousness, construction, and language.






Sarah Surak, "Utopian Visions of Waste/Reimagining a Closed Loop Economy."  [Sarah was added to this panel and I couldn't find an abstract and I would presume to try to write my own.]



Moderator/Discussant
Larry Luton (on the right of the top photo)

Bond Swaps and Occupy Oakland

Two really good talks over lunch going on now at the PATNet conference.

Journalist (and Sociology PhD) Darwin Bond-Graham talked about how during the Occupy time, they managed to politicize public finance by unraveling the complex mechanisms of bond swaps that had Oakland paying Goldman Sachs a billion dollars (sorry I wasn't taking notes, so I may be a bit off here).  He also related how a 1998 bond covered police and fire pensions - and most of the retired police were white and had moved out of Oakland - to the Sierra foothills, Hawaii, etc.  And the relationship between $1billion owed to the pension fund that had to come from the present, basically diverse Oakland population paying to cover the losses on the pension fund.  Here's an article he wrote that gives a lot more details.

And here's a link to his blog that has a lot more stories.

Now Laleh Behbehanian, a graduate sociology student at UC Berkeley is now talking about the experience of Occupy Oakland - how it was organized and run.  About some of the philosophical underpinnings - like taking back public space for the people.  How they used General Assemblies to decide on how and what to do. 

Rather than my trying to capture this I'm going to post a video I've found on Youtube featuring Laleh.

Dystopias - Three Presentations On Conspiracies In US And Lack of Academic Coverage of Them

Here's the panel I'm at this morning.  (Yeah I'm here at 8am - that's 7am Alaska time)

(l-r)Thorne, Good, Wilson, DeHaven-Smith (head), Witt

I've decided the best I can do is give you the abstracts and some pictures.  So here you go. 

Concurrent Session III, Session #1
Saturday June 1, 2013
8:00 am

Panel: "Between Rocks and Hard Places, Dystopias and Utopias: Of Cold War, Camelot, and Beyond”
Cold War hysteria made John F. Kennedy's peace overtures to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev—first in Cuba, then Indochina—into the dystopian nightmares of the military industrial complex (MIC) and its allies. The usage of Kennedy’s assassination to render salient and vivid the MIC’s preferred narrative of an evil other poised against a forever virtuous America, a "City on the Hill", links the deaths of the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and scores of others. We know from the Church Commission hearings the extent to which civil rights activism was tarred with communist hysteria by the machinations of the FBI and its COINTELPRO units. Presumptive dystopian vistas fabricated by state secrecy, counter-insurgent propaganda (the "conspiracy theory" and “red scare” memes) and media manipulation form a clear and coherent pattern of elite usurpation of government authority in U.S. history over the past several decades. Today war mongering and profiteering culminate with the dystopian nightmare of a forever militarized US devoted to Orwellian contradictions, teetering perilously towards the very real nightmare vista William Sloane Coffin limned succinctly: "Hell is truth seen too late." This panel assembles papers that key into topical areas #1 and #2 of this year’s PATNet conference call, examining direct and indirect political and administrative consequences of President Kennedy’s assassination and the legacy of permanent war zeitgeist now inscribed throughout U.S. governing institutions.

Convener: Matthew Witt, University of LaVerne

“The Dystopian Turn in America’s Political Lexicon after the Assassination of President Kennedy”
Lance deHaven-Smith, Florida State University (dehavensmith@earthlink.net)
The assassination of President Kennedy is widely considered to have marked a turning point in American politics and civic culture.  Almost immediately after the assassination, the Kennedy years were described in utopian terms as “Camelot.”   This label was associated with youth, prosperity, progress, and grandeur, and this is how the “Kennedy Era,” as it is now called, continues to be viewed. Eventually looking back, Americans viewed themselves as having lost pride and faith in the nation’s political class, its optimism about the nation’s future, and its trust in government. As scores of polls indicate,

certainly trust in government declined, and suspicions about government conspiracies proliferated.  But how did the president’s assassination cause the civic culture to take this dystopian turn?  Why did the government’s efforts to discredit JFK-assassination conspiracy theories fail? How should government respond to these suspicions today, as the 50th anniversary of the assassination approaches and refocuses attention on the crime?  What are the implications for government action in the future when suspicious political crimes and tragedies occur?  This paper will analyze data from Google Labs’ “n-gram” database to track changes in the American political lexicon in the aftermath of the assassination of President Kennedy. The n-gram database is a set of searchable datasets containing 500 billion words and phrases from 5.2 million books published between 1500 and 2008.  Google’s “n-gram viewer” offers a powerful tool for studying the dynamics of civic culture in response to major events and official accounts.
 
“Dystopian Crucible:  The Kennedy Assassinations and the Fate of “American Liberalism”
Aaron Good, Temple University
Fifty years after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, this paper reexamines the consequences of the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers.  It finds that rather than being stochastic and ultimately insignificant phenomena, the assassinations were pivotal events with enormous structural effects on American politics in the decades since. Questions examined include the

following: How did the pragmatic ‘eutopian’ project of American liberalism essentially vanish from the American political landscape?  What events were most responsible for the breakdown of the liberal Bretton-Woods international economic order?  Was there a crucible that eventually gave rise to the project for neoliberal globalization, a project that has assumed an increasingly dystopian cast?  How did America’s postwar position as vaguely benevolent global capitalist hegemon deteriorate to the extent that it is now the financially strained, militarily overstretched, neoliberal hegemon that we see today? 



Dystopian Spectacle and the False Flag Mechanism: Dallas, The Gulf of Tonkin, and Watergate
Eric Wilson, Monash University
Abstract: As David Kaiser has recently demonstrated in his magisterial The Road to Dallas: the Assassination of John F. Kennedy (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 2008), the stage-managing of self-induced political crises and states of emergency—the ‘false flag’—became part of the standard operational procedure of the US ‘dual state’ over the course of the Cold War. Discussing Operation Northwoods and its uncanny resemblance to the ‘Cuban angle’ of both Lee Harvey Oswald and Dallas, Kaiser reveals how the Kennedy assassination, even if it were the handiwork of a ‘lone gunman’, can be cognitively situated into the wider networks of parapolitical relationships of the dual state. Whatever the truth of Dallas, the ‘false flag’ was successfully deployed in the Gulf of Tonkin crisis of August 1964, leading to direct and

full-scale US military intervention throughout the entirety of Indo-China. The parapolitical continuity between Dallas and Watergate is given additional plausibility by interpreting the constitutional crisis of the Nixon presidency as a parapolitical attempt to undermine, or at least retaliate against, post-Vietnam peace settlement and detente. The notorious ‘third-rate burglary’ may itself have been a highly singular form of the false flag, signifying the complete undermining of the public liberal state by the shadow deep state. This paper outlines a ‘minimalist’ theory of a conspiracy to assassinate the President; that is, in order for a ‘conspiracy’ to be made out on the basis of the historical record before us, what conditions must have been fulfilled and what is the absolute minimum that must be true? A ‘minimalist’ theory would involve two necessary suppositions: (i) that the murder of Kennedy was a ‘false flag’ operation (the artificial creation of a ‘state of exception’ by the covert agencies of the State to further a foreign policy objective—in this case, the invasion of Cuba); and (ii) that the epicenter of the operation was within the disparate and myriad ‘parapolitical’ networks of Cold War New Orleans (CIA, DIA, NI, Mafia, anti-Castro Cuban networks).

Moderator: Kym Thorne, University of South Australia

Really, there are women at this conference, they play a big role, but I'm afraid the two panels I've covered so far are just men. 
There was another paper scheduled, but the presenter didn't make it.  Judging from the name, I'm guessing missing the presenter is a woman.

“Dystopian Denial: How Failure in Public Discourse Fuels the Drug-Security Relationship” 
Laurie Manwell, University of Guelph
Utopia” is inextricably linked with Western hegemony and violence and cannot be productively rehabilitated unless the denial of a dystopian reality is destroyed. Since the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Western "drug-security relationship" has fueled America’s economic and military influence over the rest of the world--notoriously revealed by the Iran-Contra scandal. Collective denial of such “deep state events” (global criminal syndicates) is a way to control information related to drug trafficking, human security, and war policy. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) now emphasizes research “based on a public health and human rights approach,” including “drug prevention, treatment and rehabilitation efforts focused on decreasing vulnerability among at-risk groups, including women, youth, prisoners, people who have been trafficked and people living with HIV/AIDS” (UNODC, 2010, p. 43). Yet collective denial of the “the twin forces of sanctioned violence and drugs” has permitted the metastasis of the “deep state” of which there will be no recompense until “these interactions are publicly exposed and debated” (Scott, 2010, p. 16). If not, we face the looming prospect of “the dystopic future toward which the United States is inexorably heading[…]when ordinary people are threatened with imprisonment for petty offenses while they see elites illegally spying, invading, torturing, and plundering with nearly total impunity” (Greenwald, 2011, p. 273-4). This paper examines the role government and public administration can and should play to subvert contemporary utopian imaginings founded on misleading campaigns linking drugs and violence.

Blogging PATNet Not Like Blogging Other Events

(l-r) Howe, Bevir, Catlaw, Stanisevski

PATNet is the Public Administration Theory Network.  It's the faculty of public administration who have more of an abstract/philosophical bent.  Someone asked if I was blogging the conference.  I thought about it.  This is a conference that always pushes my brain beyond the point where I usually stop.  It's hard work.  The panels I've been to took all my attention to catch 70 or 80% of what was being said.  I need too much time to let this stuff settle to write intelligently about things as it happens.  Plus, I need the breaks to talk with folks.

Right now the head of the Asia Foundation is talking about their work in Asia, which is relatively easy to listen to as I type.  For now though I want to just let you know about the previous session.  I got enough of my blogger mode going to take some pictures and I can tell you the paper titles.

This is the conference that kept me sane and intellectually challenged over the years.  The people here pulled me into the larger issues that underlay the everyday things.  I realize the titles in this panel are particularly abstract.  But these are important intellectual challenges that push the boundaries of what I know and force me to question what I know.  This conference is probably the basic source of the title of this blog. 

Concurrent Session II, Session #2
Friday May 31, 2013
1:00 pm

Panel: “Utopias, Pluralisms, and Modes of Inquiry”

“Interpreting Governance: On Dystopian and Utopian Modes of Knowing”
Mark Bevir, University of California, Berkeley
This paper explores the relationship between forms of knowledge and utopian and dystopian visions. I offer a dystopian view of formal and technocratic knowledge: such knowledge erodes democracy and leads to policy failure, for it privileges experts and ignores the creativity of human agents. Thereafter I turn to the type of knowledge needed to sustain a humanist democracy and the scholarly and political practices associated with such knowledge. I emphasize the importance of an interpretive social science that allows properly for intentionality, historicism, and reflexivity. This interpretivism entails a more decentred approach to public administration – and approach I illustrate by considering work on policy networks and governance. Finally, the paper concludes by discussing the implications of the argument for policymaking: practitioners should adopt: an eclectic approach to data, a suspicion of formal models and frameworks, and a greater role for storytelling.

“Ontology Beyond Typology: Pluralism, Onto-theology, and Afoundationalism in Public Administration”
Thomas Catlaw, Arizona State University
Much work in social science has elaborated the ways in which the “ontological” assumptions of a paradigm, framework, or conceptual scheme are connected to the epistemological and methodological possibilities of those frameworks. Drawing on the work of Alain Badiou, this paper argues that, by and large, efforts to typologize social scientific paradigms share an underlying commitment to ontotheology, or the utopian proposition that Being is One. This paper elaborates the various ways in which this proposition is expressed and argues that this commitment retains a stumbling block to the development of an open, pluralistic approach to social science. The paper presents Badiou’s ontology of the pure multiple as an alternative way of approaching ontological questions and to rethinking the grounds for pluralism in social inquiry."

“Khōra: An Inquiry into Polytopian Philosophy”
Dragan Stanisevski, Mississippi State University
The proposed paper examines polytopian philosophy as an envisioning of plural societies (many-places) that could be both utopian (no-place) and eutopian (good-place) (Landi, 1536, in Tucker, 2003). The paper first looks at polytopia through Kristeva’s lens as a philosophy of inclusion (1977, 1984, 1993, 1994). The paper then connects polytopian philosophy to Derrida’s (1995) discussion of Plato’s khōra. Khōra is a space that is simultaneously an evading receptacle and an erasure and as such does not give an established architecture, but it allows an opportunity to deliberatively participate in the process of co-creation of polytopian narrative(s) of societies to be (Derrida and Eisenman, 1997, pp. 35-36). Polytopian philosophy enables us to think of possibilities of better societies where differences could meet again and again without imposition of ideological absolutes (see Mannheim, 1936).

Moderator/Discussant: Louis Howe, University of West Georgia

The folks listening

Louis Howe did a great job as moderator, giving a seemingly rambling, but clearly well thought out, set of comments and reactions and questions for each presenter.  He was self-deprecating and funny in the lowest key possible way.  And as, he said, this was a really challenging set of papers. 







I don't think I can blog too much of the conference.  This is far more challenging than blogging, say, the legislature or the redistricting board. 

I Needed A Break

Last night I took a break and walked around the block and took some pictures.

 Some jade plant leaves.

 

Not sure what this flower is.  It's in a large leafy tree.  Anyone know?

A hummingbird resting in a tree.  It had been checking out the red flowers above.

An ice plant flower, mostly closed for the night.

Hibiscus

Here's The Superior Court Decision - Short and To The Point: "Poor Alaska"

Here's Judge McConahy's ruling. 

Superior Court's Redistricting Ruling

I've read the court filings and the judge's ruling.  Was the Board unfairly treated?  Or is the Board the problem?  As a close observer of the process since it began, it's my sense that Board chair tends to be fairly stubborn.  There's also a strong pressure to make sure the plan protects the Republican majority in the Senate which enabled the oil companies to get their $2 billion a year tax relief.  And the Board doesn't like anyone telling them what to do. 

The Board's attorney, Michael White's style in his briefs is confrontational.   He rarely allows for any ambiguity - his opponent is flat out wrong, his position is unquestionably right.  His response in this case wasn't much different from that.  Yet I can't help but wonder what he really thinks about his argument?  Does he really believe it?  Or are these the marching orders he got from the Board? 

The basic issues in the case were:

1.  Should the Court set a faster schedule for completing their Proclamation Plan?  (The Plan is the redistricting plan for the state.  Our 2012 elections used an interim plan that included some districts that were ruled unconstitutional.)

2.  Is the Board required to have public hearings on the final Proclamation Plan?

Others were raised in support of these, but the judge narrowed his ruling to these two questions.  In both he gave a resounding 'yes.'  Though he did not give the Board any specific timeline or deadline.

Below are just a few of my thoughts on this.  You can go to each of the four documents submitted to the court at Wednesday's post on this.

Scheduling

On the schedule, the Board's response allowed no possible other right interpretation.

“Beyond complying with the Open Meetings Act, the Public Records Act, and Article VI, Section 10 of the Alaska Constitution, the Board has the discretion to conduct its proceedings in a manner that it believes best facilitates the formulation of a new redistricting plan that is in compliance with the Supreme Court’s December 28, 2012 Order.  The Plaintiffs’ baseless arguments to the contrary have already been rejected by this Court.”

When I read this Tuesday, I thought about other situations where courts have intervened and told other agencies how to do their jobs.  School integration came immediately to mind (and Judge McConahy used that example in his ruling) as well as mandating the release of prisoners to relieve overcrowding of prisoners.  It seemed to me if the Court felt that the Board's schedule would lead to another election with an interim Plan, they really would have to intervene.



I was particularly struck by this argument by the Board:

“The Board is fully aware of its constitutional obligations as well as the deadlines it must meet in order to complete its work and allow for judicial review of that work in time to implement its Second Amended Proclamation Plan for the 2014 elections, and it will, as it has done in the past, act accordingly.”  (Emphasis added.)

REALLY?!  "As it has done in the past?"  The facts are indisputable that the Board was unable to complete its Proclamation Plan in time for the 2012 election and we had to settle for an Interim Plan which was seen as unconstitutional. 

One of the issues the Court pointedly did not rule on was the idea of waiting until the Shelby County v. Holder case is decided by the US Supreme Court.  It's nearly June and the Court will most likely decide the case in the next 30 days.  However, there is no reason that the Board has offered that to me would justify waiting.  And there seems no legitimate reason to wait.

The Hickel Process that the Court has said the Board must follow requires the Board to FIRST come up with a redistricting plan that meets the Alaska Constitutional requirements.  Then, and only then, should they consider the Voting Rights Act requirements.  They are waiting on the Shelby County decision on the hope that it will remove the requirement for pre-clearance of their plan by the Department of Justice. 

But because the Hickel process requires them to use the Alaska Constitution first, there's no reason why they couldn't have begun back in March.  Or February.  Or January.  If the US Supreme Court maintains the pre-clearance requirement, the Board would at least have done the first part of the process.  They would have created a map of the districts using only the Alaska Constitutional requirements.  The next step would be to make the most minimal adjustments necessary to also meet the Voting Rights Act.

If the US Supreme Court decision results in eliminating the need to get pre-clearance, then the Board would be done.

But this does raise other issues.  Even though they wouldn't need pre-clearance, they would still have to meet other sections of the Voting Rights Act.  But those other sections, if I understand it right, require proof of intent, whereas section 5 only looks at the outcome compared to benchmark districts from the past and doesn't concern itself with intent.  Short of documents or public statements, it's very hard to prove intent. 

Will the Board, freed of pre-clearance requirements, gut Native representation?  The Board's Response raised the issue of not having to meet the seven benchmark Native districts. Do they have some strategies for redistricting if they are free of the pre-clearance requirement?

There are no legitimate reasons to wait for Shelby that I can think of, but the Court didn't rule on these arguments directly.  But the general ruling seems to suggest he didn't think much of the Board's argument for waiting.

Public Hearings

On the second issue - whether a public hearings are required - the Board argued that while the Board hadn't decided whether to hold public hearings (where the the public can testify, as opposed to their regular board meetings where the public can attend but not talk), it was at their discretion because such hearings are not Constitutionally required.   The judge succinctly disagreed.

The Constitution clearly required the Board to have public hearings before they finalized their plan.  Since they are developing a completely new plan, even if the Constitution doesn't specifically say that "if the first plan fails they need to do public hearings again," it would seem to thwart the intent of the Constitution to not have public hearings.

Yes, as the Board argued, they had lots of public hearings already.  But not on the new plan.  And it doesn't make administrative sense to not have such hearings.  Local people can let the Board know obvious mistakes that locals see that the Board wouldn't see.  This allows a lot of simple things to be corrected.  But they might also see politically motivated quirks that the Board would rather not have people discovering.   Not having hearings increases the likelihood of court challenges.  I realize these challenges are inevitable, but there will be more issues raised and possibly more people raising them if there are no public hearings and the obvious problems aren't worked out before the Plan is final.


Conclusions

It would seem that the Board should be moving as expeditiously as possible.  They should have the first step of the Hickel process done and be waiting to do the second step - comply with the VRA - as soon as the Shelby County case is decided.

Why might they be taking their time?  To make it harder for people to see and review what they do?  That would be consistent with cutting out public hearings.  Or, as the Petersburg Plaintiffs hypothesized, to let the interim plan stay in place for the 2014 election too?

Maybe they just have a different sense of time and urgency than I have.  But when I saw their arguments, I just saw, well nothing that was a strong case.  And the judge apparently didn't either.

They also should be pursuing the idea of public hearings.  They don't have to do the ridiculous schedule of visits all over they state they did last time.  Much of that can be done through telecommunications.  And their hearings should involve much more information about the maps the Board proposes to the communities before the fact, so people can study them and make informed comments.

The Court should [showed] its impatience with the Board.  What will it take from the Board to have the Courts step in and set up their own process for getting this done?  It's happened in the past.  And this Board is being pretty confrontational with the Courts.  

Superior Court Apparently Unimpressed By Alaska Redistricting Board's Arguments

From the Fairbanks News Miner:

Superior Court judge orders Alaska Redistricting Board to get to work pronto

 From the Anchorage Daily News:

Judge scolds Alaska Redistricting Board

 

We flew from LA to San Francisco today so I haven't gotten hold of the decision yet, but you can see what the Fairbanks and Anchorage papers had to say at the links above.   And for more background and detail about the runup to the decision you can look at my previous post which gave an overview of the court filings.

Alaska Redistricting Board - Riley and Petersburg Ask For A Schedule and Public Hearings, Board Says to Court: Don't Interfere

The Alaska Redistricting Saga continues. It's a little difficult to keep up with this, and I'm not sure I have everything, but here are some court documents that have been filed recently concerning the Alaska Redistricting Board's process for creating a third, and hopefully final, Proclamation Plan (redistricting plan) for the rest of the decade.  (I said third, but I guess it depends on which ones you count. The Board references a second proclamation plan. There was the original and the amended original.  There's also the interim plan that was in place for the 2012 election.)

This post will give an overview of the four documents I've gotten hold of that were filed in May with the Alaska Superior Court.  Then I'll try to go through each of them individually in separate posts.  In the meantime I've posted all four on Scribd and for those who are impatient, and can't sleep, you can look there.  I've linked them at the bottom of this post.  

Background

Their first plan was rejected and they were told to follow the Hickel process.  That means, briefly, that they need to design a plan using the Alaska Constitution's guidelines first.  Then, if necessary, they must make the minimal adjustments necessary to comply with the Voting Rights Act. The last plan was rejected and their next one - the Amended Plan - was also rejected, but was used, with some little changes, as the Interim Plan for the 2012 election because there wasn't enough time for another round before the election. 

In December, the Alaska Supreme Court told them that the Interim Plan that was used for the 2012 election had to be redrawn from scratch.  A couple more appeals and orders from the Court have repeated this order. 

The Board hasn't done much lately.  They had a meeting in February.  They met again in March to select a new Executive Director, but after they were forced to hand out the resumes of the candidates they decided to not hire an Executive Director.  So two plaintiffs have filed with the Superior Court to get the Board moving.


The May Court Filings in Superior Court

The original plaintiff - Riley - May 15, 2013 -  filed a motion with the Alaska Superior Court in Fairbanks

1. to give the Board a schedule that will insure that there will be enough time for Voting Rights Act clearance and for the almost certain lawsuits that will be filed to all be resolved in time for the 2014 election.  At the very latest, that means May 2014 so that the Board of Elections can do its job and so candidates will know the districts they will run in.
2.   to require the Board to hold public hearings before they finalize their plan. 

The City of Petersburg  - May 15, 2013 -  whose original filing was consolidated with Riley before Petersburg dropped out, has filed asking for the same things as Riley - a schedule and a requirement for public hearings. In addition they asked the Court to set a deadline by which the plan should be completed.

The Petersburg's motion is much longer and detailed than the Riley motion, with lots of reasons listed for each request. 


The Alaska Redistricting Board Response - May 22, 2013 - rejects the claims of both Riley and Petersburg.  The Board's two major points were:

A.  It is within the board’s authority to set its administrative schedule and the Board fully intends to comply with the Supreme Court’s order to have a final plan in place for th 2014 elections. 

1.  The Board is an independent constitutionally established entity whose administrative schedule this court has already recognized it does not have the authority to mandate.
2.  The Board has not yet actually adopted a timeline for completion of its work, but if it should follow the Board chair’s draft timeline, that timeline provides more than sufficient time for judicial review of its new plan.
3.  The Board’s decision to wait for the US Supreme Court Decision in the Shelby County Case is rational and reasonable.
4,  The Board’s second amended proclamation plan is not subject to new litigation challengers or full blown litigation.

B.  While the Board has made no decision on whether it will hold public hearings on its second amended proclamation plan, it is clear that the Alaska Constitution does not require public hearings on remand.

There are lots of details backing this up, which I'll try to outline in the following posts.

Finally,
Petersburg - May 24, 2013 - filed a reply to the Redistricting Board's response.

A.  The Board’s Authority to set its timelines
“Petersburg Plaintiffs recognize the Board’s authority to prescribe its own timeline.  However, this authority is by no means absolute and is directly limited by the Board’s obligation to comply with the Supreme Court’s Order that the final plan be adopted before the 2014 elections.”

 It goes on to raise their fear that there will not be enough time and the 2014 election will be held using the current interim plan, which, they point out, the Supreme Court has said, includes unconstitutional  districts in SE Alaska, where Petersburg is.

“B.  The Board should not postpone the Redistricing Process until a decision in Shelby County, AL v. Holder, Att’y Gen., et al., No. 12-96 (November 9, 2012)”

C.  The Board Should prepare for and expect lengthy judicial review
[The Board, in its Response, argued that “the Board’s second amended Proclamation Plan is not subject to new litigation challengers or full blown litigation.”]

“D.  Public Hearings Are Required”

[Note:  I've had trouble with the capitalization - Blogger changed all the title caps in the sections from the filings.  Further I can't cut and paste from pdf's I have.  I'll trust that this won't bother anyone too much.]

You can read each of the documents at the links below:

May 15:  Riley Plaintiffs Motion For Order Establishing Deadlines And To Holding Hearings on Final Plan

May 15:  [City of] Petersburg Plaintiffs' Motion for Adequate Timeline and Public Hearings on the Final Redistricting Plan

May 22:  ARB’s response 20 pages plus exhibits (total 36 pages)
Defendant Alaska Redistricting Board’s Consolidated Opposition To Riley Plaintiff’s Motion For Establishing Deadlines And To Holding Hearings On Final Plan And Petersburg Plaintiffs’ Motion For Adequate Timeline And Public Hearings On the Final Redistricting Plan

May 24:  Petersburg Plaintiffs’ Reply to Defendant Alaska Redistricting Board’s Consolidated Opposition to Riley Plaintiffs’ Motion For Order Establishing Deadlines on Final Plan and Petersburg Plaintiffs’ Motion for Adequate Timeline and Public Hearings on the Final Redistricting Plan

I'm Guessing It's Child Car Seats, Not 50 Shades of Gray, That's Increasing Bondage Popularity

There are articles around, like this one, that credit Fifty Shades of Gray with an increase in bondage.    But after watching my grand child being introduced to her car seat, I think there are other explanations.

Essentially, I'm suggesting there needs to be research in the correlation between child car seat restraints and the popularity of bondage.   When I first had to strap my grand child into her car seat - she hated it and I thought it was pretty restrictive myself.

My own kids weren't covered by any laws requiring them to be in such restrictive devices.  Yes, there was an infant seat, but it didn't involve their arms and legs in such a restrictive manner.

The various state laws came into place from 1978 to 1985.  If we say 1985, it means that people today, 28 and under, are the people that first grew up spending a good part of their time strapped down tightly. 

From Safe Ride News' detailed history of child car seat legislation:

1978: First child passenger safety law passed in Tennessee, requiring parents to put their infants and young children in CRS that meet the current federal standard (FMVSS 213). Becameeffective in 1979. Legislative effort begins in other states. . .

1985: Final state passes child passenger safety law. All states plus District of Columbia and Puerto Rico have requirements, but many have limitations, such as applying only to

parents or guardians or allowing lap belt use as an alternative for very young children.

All are primary laws (allowing police to stop a vehicle for the violation).

 Maybe Fifty Shades got people going, but I'm betting that book just tapped into a generation that's been in bondage since infancy.