Roll Call Reports On Mary Beth Kepner Discipline

Rollcall reported yesterday:

"FBI Director James Comey told a Senate subcommittee Thursday that an agent faced discipline for conduct related to the investigation of late Sen. Ted Stevens.

Comey was ready for a line of questioning from Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski about the FBI’s conduct in the probe of her former Alaska colleague. Murkowski asked for an update from 2012 on allegations made by FBI whistleblower Special Agent Chad Joy about inappropriate conduct by a fellow agent.

“I did learn about this in the last week and get briefed in detail. The Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) inside FBI did investigate in response and identified an agent who had engaged in improper conduct there, and the agent was severely disciplined,” Comey said. “The discipline has been imposed.”
Comey was sworn-in as FBI director last September, succeeding longtime director Robert S. Mueller. Mueller previously faced questioning at the Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce-Justice-Science about the Stevens case from both Murkowski and then-Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas."

I attended and blogged the three trials in Anchorage.  When Chad Joy's so called "Whistle-blowing" document was released, I reviewed it in great detail.  As I saw it, the charges could be broken down into two categories:

1.  How Agent Kepner ran the investigation
2.  Misconduct involving the handling of information at the trial

I found the complaints about the investigation to be about subjective issues of administrative discretion (things like how close do you get to a source and what information do you tell a source) and not about breaking any clear laws or regulations. [In fact, he never cites any laws or regulations or policies that were violated.]

I would also note that there was nothing in Joy's memo that showed concern that the behavior might result in injustice for any of the defendants.  The 'victim' of her alleged misbehavior was Chad Joy himself.  He complained she told witnesses personal information about him and there was a sense that he was worried things would go bad and he didn't want to be blamed. 

I had no way to judge the allegation regarding what happened with information at the trial, but I was struck that he provided few specifics about what he thought had been done wrong.   The only specific details he gave were about a meeting that Kepner had with their key witness in a hotel room which he used to suggest they were having an affair.  I discussed that allegation in depth in this post. 

And here's a post I wrote in November 2010 trying to understand the general context of the investigation itself.

I mention all this because the media coverage has tended to jump all over Kepner and I see this as far more nuanced.  After all, she's the agent who set up the surveillance of Bill Allen's hotel room that revealed how he was managing key legislators' votes regarding changing oil taxes.  The reporting doesn't ring true with my impressions of the agent I had a few opportunities to talk to in some depth.

I don't know what happened.  I recognize that that the FBI and prosecutors in general often have extraordinary power over most defendants and they do a lot of stuff we don't know about to intimidate suspects into cooperating.  I also know that getting information about white collar crime is extremely difficult and without insider informants almost impossible.  And whenever you use informants, lots of tricky issues arise.  And there was some mishandling of evidence.

But the Ted Stevens team had the money and brainpower to take on the FBI and the DOJ and while they lost in the trial, they did 'win' in after trial maneuvering.

Andrew Longstreth quotes Jeffrey Toobin in an The American Law article about two young Jersey attorneys beating the law firm that defended Ted Stevens.  He writes about Brendan Sullivan:

In court, however, Sullivan is often silent during pretrial proceedings. According to a story repeated in legal circles, a judge once asked Sullivan about his lack of involvement during a hearing. Sullivan pointed at the jury box and said: "I work when they work." Arguing pretrial motions is often the job of his partner, Barry Simon.

Longstreth continues:

"There are no school yard fights," says Toobin, who was the junior member on the North prosecution team, about Simon. "Every battle is nuclear warfare. Everything is prosecutorial misconduct." (Sullivan declined a request to speak for this article. Simon did not return calls.) 

Everything is prosecutorial misconduct.  That's part of the Sullivan strategy. The team is good at defending high profile defendants, for very large amounts of money, and forcing the prosecution to make errors.  That's no excuse, but it does shade the story differently than most coverage. 

It's possible that the main offense Kepner committed was to catch Republican legislators, particularly Stevens.  And to interrupt the oil companies' influence in Juneau.  The infractions Stevens committed are dismissed as minor given all the pork he brought to so many Alaskans, but Kepner's infractions are used to define her and all her accomplishments are dismissed.

Cliff Groh, who attended the Stevens trial in DC and believed that Stevens would have been convicted without the evidence that was tainted, in one post cites interviews with jurors who found Stevens not credible.  It wasn't just the recording of Stevens telling Bill Allen

"that the worst they could expect was 'a little time in jail.'” 

I think there's a much bigger story behind all this.  With the prosecutions behind us and Kepner and others in the prosecution team disciplined, the oil companies are once again as cozy with Alaska's governor and legislators as they were before this diversion that Agent Kepner started.. 

Just War and Christianity and Eastern Thought

Matthew Strebe

The basic premise of Matthew Strebe's paper, "Reformulating Warfare:  Just War Theory and Kantian Ethics," was that the theory of just war was created for a very different kind of war than what exists today.


OK, I'm copping out by not giving more details, but I know I wouldn't do it justice.  I should be taking better notes.  I'll check and see if any or all of these papers are online somewhere.



Strebe argues that Kantian ethics better suited to this than utilitarian ethics used in Just War Theory.

Tara Harrington's paper was "Thoughts from a Christian:  Can the World Afford to Practice Wu-Wei When it comes to Our Environment?"


She challenged Lynn White's assertion that  that biblical language about humans dominion over the earth is anti-environmental.







Right now Jacob Land is presenting "Drawing from the Same-Well:  Eastern Thought in Christian Ethics." He's highlighting quotes from Eastern thinkers and the bible.

When I saw Jacob just before this panel, I realized he was the man who was not allowed to carry his backpack on board the plane from LA yesterday.  I thought at the time - when Jacob showed him the backpack fit into the frame they have to test the size of carryons - that the Alaska Airlines rep was being pretty rigid. 

Changing Ed Philosophy in China and Comparison of Aristotle and Xunzu

The first presentation raised lots of issues I've worked on - particularly the conflicts between the rule of law approach to ethics that we pursue that ignores all the other emotional obligations that humans have.

Vivian-Lee Nyitray

I connected to the second for other reasons.




Vivian-Lee Nyitray is the Dean at two Chinese colleges -

Prospect in Chongqin and Taigu in Shanxi - and spoke about introducing more interactive teaching practices in those colleges and her own conflicting moral obligations to her students, her colleagues, and to her mission.  







Having taught in China, I understood her issues of changing the rows of seats into circles so that students were more involved and better able to interact with each other.   

But I only really had to focus on what happened in my class and not try to get other faculty to adopt more participatory teaching methods. 




Though there were some issues that went beyond the classroom - such as how my teaching methods impacted some of the Chinese faculty.  Fortunately, I had support from high in the college and a Chinese teacher who'd studied in the US also worked with me.

Nyitray looked toward Confucian philosophy as a way to work out some of the dilemmas she faced.

Shi Shan

The next speaker,  Shi Shan, was of interest because she's from the university I taught at in Beijing. 










Her presentation made comparisons of Aristotle and Xunzi's definitions of good. 




Unfortunately, trying to blog and listen at the same time is impacting my ability to concentrate sufficiently on some of the papers.



Here's the room we're in.  I know it as the Pub when it first opened here at UAA.  But there was strong local opposition to serving alcohol on campus and so it never has served as a pub.  Now it's called 'the den.' 

 Shi Shan presenting at UAA

"The Good, the Bad, and the Ethical"

That's part of the title of the first paper. 

Bauer and Kelly

I'm at the UAA Undergraduate Ethics Conference in the Pub.  It goes on today and tomorrow and Saturday morning.

This first presentation by Stephanie Bauer and Terry Kelly looked at the conflicts between Ethics and Morality -  a lawyer who has to win and may violate other values to do that.  I'm not going to try to explain what they said, but I'll give you the last couple of slides that summed things up.

I'll let you ponder this.  You don't have to understand it, just let it provoke your brain into thinking.  

I posted the whole program here the other day.  The conference is open to the public and free.  There's a community presentation tonight (Thursday) at East High on ethics and education.  7-9 pm.

Studying My Canon Rebel Instruction Manual Flying Over Magnificent Alaskan Views

I have no excuse. If it's clear and daylight as we return to Anchorage, I simply can't stop staring out the window and snapping pictures.

 

We flew up Turnagain Arm right past Girdwood. 

And here's a look back down Turnagain Arm as we came into the airport. 

When we left LA, there were lots of small puffy clouds and I took a lot of pictures.  And they all turned out white.  I'd had it on manual for when we flew in ten days ago at night and the ISO was 3200.  So all my pictures were just white. 

That stirred me to do more reading in the manual for my Canon Rebel.  I still think there are way too many things to remember, but I did go through some of the settings and the options for those settings.  As we got out of the clouds - at the northern end of Vancouver Island - and then started to see the coastal mountain ranges, I took a series of pictures using the mountain setting and then trying out different Ambiance settings.  It's sort of like using different filters.

 If you click on the strip below and magnify it, you'll be able to see the labels better.

Robert Taub - Too Brutal To Name

The pictures grabbed me as soon as I walked in.  It took a second to realize they weren't photos, though they look like they are derived from photos.  The program says 'graphite drawings on Arches paper."   The picture on the left is Abba Kovner, commander  of the Jewish Partisans Organization.

From Jewish Virtual History:

"On the night of December 31, 1941, Kovner read before a meeting of delegates of all Jewish Youth Movements a public announcement:

'Hitler is plotting to destroy all European Jews. Lithuanians Jews will be the first in line. Let us not be led like sheep to the slaughterhouse. It is right, we are weak and without defense, but the only answer to the enemy is resistance!'”

It also says he was born in "Sebastapol, Russia."  In 1918.  Four years before my mom mom was born.

 

This picture did me in.  How evil must you be to shoot a man and the child he's holding?  And I imagine that the shooter had children himself. Or would one day. And they would think of him as their Daddy, never knowing the role he played in this murder.  Or maybe he too got killed a little later in the war.   When I looked for the name of this picture, I found "Untitled - 'Too brutal to name' - Robert Taub."  Perfect. 

This one provoked me to wonder:  How does one spend these moments?  I assumed that those on the ground had already been shot and these men were just waiting for their own bullets.  But I can't match this picture to a title in the list.  And it's possible the others were already dead.  Most of us in the US don't face public violence, don't have to contemplate our imminent deaths like this.  But there are neighborhoods in the US where this does happen.  And there are still way too many parts of the world where law and order evaporates and people go crazy.  Just like this.  And if we aren't careful, this could happen in the US.  I know this because I grew up with parents who lived in a country where it couldn't happen either.  But it did. 

This one is called "Partisans, Ukraine 1943." 

All the pictures are haunting.  A description of the show said that this was personal for Taub and how his grandmother never talked about what happened in Europe.  This history is also personal to me.  My grandparents never got out of Europe, and by various lucky breaks, my parents were able to get out before the war began.  Barely.  Questions about how people could torture and slaughter fellow human beings have filtered through various parts of my brain trying to find ways to construct answers since I first saw the numbers tattooed on the arms of holocaust survivors in our neighborhood in LA.


From Robert Taub's website:  

Much of his work is visually beautiful and poignant, and at the same time confrontational and violent. He has chronicled revolutionary and outlaw movements in the US, Latin America, Mexico and Africa, as well as the fratricidal struggles for power within the Russian Mafia and Los Angeles street gangs. Recently he has turned to the events and consequences that led up to and finalized in Europe's two world wars. A project intensely personal and many years in the making.

There are more pictures from the exhibit at the website.  

I couldn't look at them all too closely.  It was too grim.  This is a collection that should be somewhere, as a whole, where people can see it.  These are not the kind of pictures I would want to look at every day at home. 

Fortunately, I was greeted by a lemon (lime?) tree outside the gallery.  You can see it below, but you can't smell the intense sweetness of the flower which eased me out of the exhibit.

The Lois Lambert Gallery is at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica.

Would Confucius Have Cut The Education Budget?

As Alaska's legislature is busy cutting the state education budget and trying to use what public money is left to give to private schools through vouchers, it might be a good time to get a bigger perspective on this.  The University of Alaska Anchorage Philosophy Department with an assist from the campus Confucius Institute is putting on a conference titled "Living Ethically in the Global World." 

The conference is pretty wide ranging and open to the public.  On the first night, there will be a community panel at East High School.   This was planned before the Governor, in his Orwellian way, declared this the "Year of Education."  I'm not sure the question in the title will be answered, but the recipient of the 2013 Confucian Prize will be on the East High panel.  So you can ask him if he doesn't address the issue in the panel.

“The Priorities and Ethics of Educating” Thursday, March 27, 2014 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm Community Panel at East High School Auditorium Panel: Andy Josephson, UAA Graduate and Alaska State Representative (It appears that Rep. Josephson's legislative duties will keep him in Juneau.) Roger Ames, 2013 Confucian Prize Recipient; Maria Williams, Director of Alaska Native Studies at UAA; Ed McLain, UAA College of Education Respondent: Francisco Miranda, UAA Department of Languages

This is actually both the Ninth Annual UAA Undergraduate Philosophy Conference and the UAA Ethics Center's Inaugural Convocation.

Here are some of the paper titles I pulled out of the program:

“Drawing from the Same Well:  Eastern Thought in Christian Ethics” “Yup’ik Culture is also Confucian” “Role Ethics in the Yijing” “Human Rights and Daoism: An Alternative Chinese Perspective” "Confucian Role Ethics for Women: A Response to Roger T. Ames’ Vocabulary” “The Impossible Junzi and Global Ethics” “Eastern Tones:  What Can Contemporary Acoustics Learn from Yin-Yang?” “Taking Responsibility: Toward a Sixth Confucian Relationship (with Notes from my Life as a Dean in China)” “Confucian Revivalism and Its Role in Chinese Society and Education”

You can find the exact times and locations for each of these in the program embedded below.

And here are the Universities that will be represented (in addition to UAA):

Prospect College and Taigu College (Chongqin and Shanxi Province, PRC) Renmin University (Beijing, PRC) Northeast Normal University Belmont University (Nashville, Tennessee) University of California Santa Cruz Loyola Marymount University University of San Diego (California) Hankuk University of Foreign Studies (Yongin, Korea) University of Wales (Great Britain) University of Hawai’i at Mānoa Central Washington University University of San Diego (California) Adrian College

I'd note that the UAA  Department of Public Administration has had a long going relationship with the public administration program at Renmin (People's) University in Beijing and I taught there in 2004. 

I checked and all the panels are open to the public at no charge. Fortunately, we'll be back in Anchorage.   Here's the full program:

Living Ethically in the Global World

And I'd urge people to get off the internet merry-go-round and take a few moments to think about the title of this conference: Acting Ethically in a Global World. What are some of the topics you would explore under that heading? Talk about it over dinner with your parents.

As Michigan Judge Allows Gay Marriage, Good To Remember Alaskans Who Sowed Seeds 20 Years Ago

A federal judge struck down Michigan's ban on gay marriage.  As most breathing Americans know, this is just one more in a string of such decisions in states including Utah, Texas, and Kentucky, and following the US Supreme Court decision last year.

In light of this, it's useful to remember that Gene Dugan and Jay Brause, an Anchorage couple then, sued the State of Alaska over this same issue back in 1994.

From Religious Tolerance:

"The plaintiffs asked that the existing Marriage Code be declared unconstitutional because it violates two rights guaranteed by the Alaska constitution: their rights to privacy (their right to be let alone) and their rights of equal protection. Wagstaff pointed out that there are over 100 state statutes that provide rights and protections to married couples which are not available to homosexuals who live together in a permanent partnership. The Alaska Constitution forbids gender-based discrimination, yet is withholding privileges from Brause and Dugan solely because of they are both male."

From Superior Court judge Peter Michalski's ruling:

"It is the duty of the court to do more than merely assume that marriage is only, and must only be, what most are familiar with. In some parts of our nation mere acceptance of the familiar would have left segregation in place. In light of Brause and Dugan's challenge to the constitutionality of the relevant statutes, this court cannot defer to the legislature or familiar notions when addressing this issue." He ruled that "marriage, i.e., the recognition of one's choice of a life partner, is a fundamental right. The state must therefore have a compelling interest that supports its decision to refuse to recognize the exercise of this fundamental right by those who choose same-sex partners rather than opposite-sex partners."

This was not the first such ruling in the US.  Hawaiian courts had also found no reason to ban same-sex marriage.  Thus the last two states admitted into the union, were the first to recognize same sex marriage.  But it wasn't to last.  In Hawaii and in Alaska constitutional amendments limiting marriage to one man and one woman passed and in both states the courts bowed to the new constitutional language.

Alaska's a small state and people tend to know each other.  I've met a lot of people that I write about.  In the case of Brause and Dugan and Judge Michalski, I should say that I know them well enough that I've eaten dinner at their homes.  But that doesn't change the facts that Alaska was on the forefront of attempting to legalize same-sex marriage.  What's different is inside the brains of the American public, including the judges who are ruling. 

In a recent post a commenter challenged my trying to understand the thinking of people with whom I disagree.  This shift in the way people think about same-sex marriage is, for me, evidence that such theoretical speculation pays off.  But, of course, it also needs a lot of other. more action-oriented strategies by many different people. Minds have changed radically in the last 20 years. 

I would note that Jay and Gene couldn't wait for Alaska to change and moved to the UK where they could get married.  And Jay, using the more formal version of his name, Jacob, is a regular and thoughtful commenter on this blog.

I know that each positive court decision helps salve the wounds they received in their battle, which seemed so Quixotic at the time.  They know that their fight in Alaska did help set the groundwork for the victories in recent years.  And it's one of those quirks of life I find so amazing, that they can walk around London (or wherever they happen to be) without anyone knowing the historic role they have played.  But you can read about it in detail at Religious Tolerance.  Judge Michalski is now retired, but he too, can rest easy, knowing that he made a decision back in the dark ages, that would eventually be recognized as the right decision.  And then there's former Sen. Lyda Greene who helped keep Alaska in the dark ages by sponsoring the Constitutional Amendment limiting marriage to one man and one woman.

You can read Judge Michalski's decision here.

Note:  Since I drafted this yesterday and slept on it before posting, 300 couples have married in Michigan before a Federal judge put a stay on further marriages pending appeal. 

Dogs, Long Time Frame, Cloudy Descent - Random SF/LA Shots

There are lots and lots of dogs walking their owners around San Francisco.   Lots of shops have water bowls set out for them and most allow dogs in. 
















The Long Now Foundation was closed as we walked by, but they'll be back in a while.  It's an organization founded by Stewart Brand (of the Whole Earth Catalog) and others.  They're building a ten thousand year clock. 

"The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide a counterpoint to today's accelerating culture and help make long-term thinking more common. We hope to creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years."

Their website has an essay by Steward Brand, of the Whole Earth Catalog and one of the Long Now founders which says this quote from Dennis Hillis helped start the clock project:

 "When I was a child, people used to talk about what would happen by the year 02000. For the next thirty years they kept talking about what would happen by the year 02000, and now no one mentions a future date at all. The future has been shrinking by one year per year for my entire life. I think it is time for us to start a long-term project that gets people thinking past the mental barrier of an

ever-shortening future. I would like to propose a large (think Stonehenge) mechanical clock, powered by seasonal temperature changes. It ticks once a year, bongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out every millennium."

 For me, 1984 was the year we were moving toward.  Then 2001.

We were at the Long Now because we were headed for greens for dinner.  But they were closed for a private party.




I took this shot as we headed back for the car and another place to eat.

 

Talking about about greens, I thought this Plant Exchange idea was worth posting.  Lots of people have too much of one thing in their yards and not enough of other things.  I'd love to see this happen in Anchorage.  Just a spot to bring extra plants and exchange for ones you'd like. 













Our trip to the Bay area was much too brief, but we got to see my son and his wife and other good friends.  And soon we were back over an overcast LA and slipped down through the thin cloud cover. 



They announced we'd be on the ground in 15 minutes.  I thought we were further away than that, and once we got over the opening of Marina del Rey, we wandered around the LA airspace and finally landed in 20 minutes.  But it took another 20 minutes before we got a place to park. 




Here's one last shot I took as we meandered around LA waiting to be cleared to land.  A freeway interchange. (As you can tell, I used the little camera.  We were cutting down on what we carried on this trip and my bigger camera was on the don't take list.)

I found myself trying to trace all the connections from one direction to another.  I see how you can switch from the vertical freeway to the horizontal freeway and go either direction.  But I only see a way to turn right from the horizontal freeway to the vertical one.  There's a little something above the loop on the right and below the one on the left, but I can't figure out what they're for. Maybe they go down to a street below.   My other camera would have made this all much clearer.  (No I don't even know what interchange this was.  You can see park area below, and there was a lake on the upper left.)

The Christian Nation Myth

There were four candidates in the 1912 US presidential election.  In Nonbeliever Nation, David Niose uses that election as a benchmark to show that the impact of the religious right on the 2012 election was not really part of the American tradition.  He quotes each of

the four candidates.

Woodrow Wilson, whom he describes as the most religious of the four: 

"Of course, like every other man of intelligence and education I do believe in organic evolution.  It surprises me that at this late date such questions should be raised."

Theodore Roosevelt:

"Thank Heaven I sat at the feet of Darwin and Huxley."

William Howard Taft:

"I do not believe in the divinity of Christ," he wrote in an 1899 letter, "and there are many other of the postulates of the orthodox creed to which I cannot subscribe."

Eugene Debs:

"I don't know of any crime that the oppressors and their hirelings have not proven by the Bible."

Niose argues that secularism was the position of most politicians, Democratic, Republican and other until the rise of the Moral Majority in the late 1970s.  They, he writes, have skewed politics back into the idea of the US being a Christian nation.  In contrast to the 1912 candidates he offers some quotes from 2012 Republican hopefuls.

"Today, a full-century after the era of Roosevelt and Wilson, we routinely see presidential candidates assure voters that they are doubtful of the theory of evolution, pandering to a large segment of the electorate that believes the world is just a few thousand years old.  Rick Perry, for example . . . lucidly conveys America's intellectual decline by expressing his views on evolution this way:  "God may have done it in the blink of the eye or he may have done it over this long period of time, I don't know."  Evolution "is a theory that's out there,"  Perry explained, but it "has some gaps in it."  The Texas chief executive is by no means an anomaly, as other major political figures, such as Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, and Mike Huckabee, have made a point of emphasizing their refusal to accept evolution theory, and even former president George W. Bush favored teaching creationism, disguised as so-called intelligent design, in public schools."

 Niose is arguing in the book that, in fact, a significant portion of the US population does not believe in a diety, but they have not identified themselves as secular.  Thus statistics suggest that the US is a much more religious nation than it really is.  This includes the 20% that answer "none" or "don't know" when asked what religion they are.  It also includes those people who do not practice a religion or believe in a religion, may still identify with the religion they grew up with, and might say "Catholic" or "Methodist" if asked. 

He points out that just 15% of the US population would be 50 million people, which would be more than the combined total of Methodists, Lutherans, Pentecostals, Presbyterians,  Jews, Mormons, and Muslims.

His goal is to get secular Americans to identify as such to demonstrate a) that the US is NOT a Christian nation, as argued by the religious right, and that there are many secular Americans, and b) to get make secular Americans a potent political force to counter the power of the religious right.  Secular Americans aren't out to attack other religions, but to stand up for their own rights and to prevent the fervently religious from using government to enforce their own religious beliefs on others. 

I'm only about a third of the way into the book, but I thought I'd share this much for now.  It's a topic that I wrote about last November when my attention was caught by the tornado survivor who responded on national television to Wolf Blitzer's question about thanking the Lord for surviving, by saying, after a pause, "Well, actually, I'm an atheist."  I realized how prejudiced the US is against atheism when I found myself surprised that they hadn't cut that part out of the broadcast. 

David Niose is identified as the President of the American Humanist Association.