Brat Wins In Virginia With 8% of Registered Voters. Will Cantor Pull A Murkowski?

[Nov. 7, 2014 - results of the general election here.]

By now, anyone reading this, unless they're in South Africa, knows that Republican House majority leader Eric Cantor lost his primary election Tuesday June 10 to David Brat. 

I'm writing this from Alaska and I don't know much about Cantor's district.  I did drive once from DC to Richmond which would have had me driving through a good part of the population center.  But I'm just gathering internet available data as I try to figure out what happened and what it might mean for his district in November and what it might mean here in Alaska. 

Here are the official election results from the Virginia State Government page:

As you can see, there were 65,008 votes cast.  (I don't know about absentee, but this is 100% of the votes cast Tuesday, apparently.)

So, what percent of registered voters in this district is that? 

From Virginia State Board of Elections website has a February 1, 2014 report on the number of registered voters in District 7.

Virginia District 7	2/1/2014
#of Precincts in District	234
# of Active Voters:	473,032
# of Inactive Voters	31,863
# of Total Voters	504,895

I'm sure that somewhere they have this information broken down by party, but I didn't find it and it's not important enough to spend too much time on.  And it was an open primary without much happening in the other races.   I'm just trying to get some ballpark idea of what happened.

If we take the active voters (473,032) in the district, then about  14% of the registered voters in the district participated.  And about 8% of the district's registered voters, voted for David Brat. 

For Cantor, the obvious deficiency was not getting his voters out.  Given the tone of the coverage of this race - "In an enormous political upset . . " for example - Cantor's supporters figured they didn't have to go to the polls.


Nathaniel Downes at Addicting Information attributes the loss to gerrymandering:

"The cause for this major upset boils down to the GOP’s overuse of gerrymandering. By carving out safe districts for their candidates in the general elections, the Republicans engineered a situation whereby fringe candidates within their own party now can cause primary challenges which can not only force out incumbents, it can enable for candidates who would do damage to the nation through their anti-government rhetoric to win seats in government."

The district did change in 2013 - since Cantor's last race - and it seems to have acquired a leg, so to speak, but probably overlaps the old district quite a bit.  But Downes' point is that it's more Republican than it was, not that there are different constituents.  Here are what I found as the old and new district borders:

District 7 Before 2013 Redistricting

Virginia District 7 after 2013

 

What about the Democrat?   They really weren't expecting to be players in November it seems.   The Downes (the guy at Addicting Info) writes:

"The original Democratic candidate for the district, Mike Dickenson failed to file the paperwork necessary to be on the ballot, although there has been some push for a write-in campaign. So, it looks like the field for Virginia’s 7th Congressional District is going to be dominated by the Tea Party and Libertarian candidates this year.
*UPDATE* It turns out that the Democratic Party of Virginia has pushed forward a candidate late yesterday, Jack Trammell. Like Dave Brat, he is a professor at Randolph-Macon College, and has not yet even gotten his campaign website up and running yet. For now it redirects to ActBlue, the Democratic PAC focused on internet fundraising."

Well, there's more than Democrats. Ballotopedia says:

"Brat, an economics professor at Randolph-Macon College, will face Democrat Jack Trammell, who is also a Randolph-Macon professor, Libertarian James Carr and write-in candidate Mike Dickinson, who failed to earn the Democratic endorsement."

So, if all that is correct,

• the Republicans have a Tea-Party candidate, David Brat, who upset the House Republican Majority leader, Cantor 
• there's a Libertarian candidate, James Carr, who presumably would eat into Brat's votes
• a last minute Democrat, Jack Trammel, a fellow faculty member at Randolph-Macon College with David Brat which gives new meaning to "campus politics'
• a write-in candidate who failed to file as a Democrat, Mike Dickenson

Will Cantor Pull a Murkowski?

In Alaska, when Sen. Lisa Murkowski lost the primary in 2010 to Joe Miller, there was a little known Democrat on the ballot to oppose Miller.  Murkowski was able to rally the economic resources of the Alaska Native corporations, and sufficient Democrats voted for her on the grounds that Scott McAdams, the Democrat, couldn't win, and Murkowski was far better than Miller.  She also got lots of Republican votes though official national Republican money stuck with the primary winner.

I don't know enough about Virginia's district 7 to be able to have a clue what might happen if Cantor decided to fight for his seat back.  Given that Brat won with only 8% of the registered voters, and given the Murkowski precedent, I'm sure it will be tempting.


What Does This Mean For Alaska?

My guess is that Joe Miller is a happy man tonight and that his Tea Party supporters will be energized.  The thought that Brat was outspent by Cantor almost  50 - 1, will motivate supporters of a lot of financially marginal candidates.

But Virginia's 7th Congressional district is only about 100 miles long and not nearly as wide.  You can drive to any house in the district in a day at most.  Campaigning in Alaska is much more expensive.  We have state house districts bigger than the whole state of Virginia.   And many villages aren't on the road system.  Hell, our state capital isn't on the road system (but you can get there by ferry.)  Unless you have a pilot's license or a friend who does, getting around the state is very expensive.  

I suspect that the coalition that elected Murkowski will reelect Begich in the end, especially if Miller is the Republican candidate again.  The big national conservative money is pushing relatively recent Alaska Dan Sullivan in the US Senate race, but Begich is a tenacious and savvy campaigner. 

Wielechowski/French Challenge Governor; Plastic Gyre and Kobuk at Museum - Preview Post

I rode through the light drizzle this morning to check on the press conference being held by Rep. Bill Wielechowski and Sen. Hollis French challenging the governor to stand by his claims.  It was scheduled at the Legislative Information Office which doesn't have any walls at the moment.  I thought that would make an interesting backdrop and I needed to get on my bike and get some exercise.

In this post I'll just give a preview of future posts.

Here are the two legislators at their red oil barrel.  Basically, they said the governor has been pushing SB 21 as legislation that would increase oil production and state revenues compared to the previous tax structure ACES.

Sen. French and Rep. Wielechowski showed in the charts the governor's own agencies' predictions that production and revenue will go down.

They challenged the governor to call a legislative session to pass legislation that says, "If by 2018, SB 21 does not increase oil production by 1 barrel or increase revenue by $1, then ACES would be applied to oil companies retroactively."

I'll put up more details and some video later.

Since the rain had gotten a little more serious by the time I got out of the meeting, I decided to stop at the museum and give it a chance to lighten up a bit.  I'd been wanting to see the GYRE exhibit - about the plastic continents floating in the Pacific - anyway.

WOW!  Everyone should go.  I'll put up more, but here's sneak peek.

 Scientific information of the GYRE is there, but the key is that artists have been invited to do pieces to help bring this issue home.


This "Present From The Pacific"is part of a much bigger piece by Steve McPherson.  I chose the lego pieces to highlight because it  should resonate with most people.  These are items found in the sea or washed up on beaches, packaged into gifts.



This exhibit will be here for the summer - then it travels the world.  We're the first city to see it.  Take the kids.  Don't put it off until September, you might want to go back.

And, of course, this does relate to the press conference I'd just been at, because . . .


. . .well of course, the vast majority of today's plastic comes from petroleum.

I'll have to go back and see if the museum made that connection.  I didn't see it there.

Another exhibit I almost missed because it's all by itself on the top floor is a series of photos of the Kobuk sand dunes and some explanation of how scientists today are studying the dunes to get clues about the sand dunes of Mars.

Kobuk Sand Dunes from photo at Anchorage Museum

And then I got back on my bike in something a little more than a drizzle and made my way to the bike trail which is so incredibly beautiful now, even in the rain.  Flowing down the green trail on my bike seems to cleanse me of the detritus of civilization (like the plastic gyre).

Cartoon Imitating Life

Well, that's what the best cartoons do - make us see ourselves.  But this one is pretty specific.  Last month I posted about a visit to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.  In the post I wrote: 

"[Our friends] wanted to see the Ansel Adams exhibit.  When I asked one of the guards about the photography policy, he said, no photography in the photography exhibitions."

So I was doubly amused when I saw today's BLISS cartoon in the Anchorage Daily News this morning.

I had plenty of head shots in my Getty post so I didn't post my photo of the top of the Ansel Adams poster outside the gallery.  But here it is now.

Did Bliss visit the Getty too?  Or another Ansel Adams exhibit?

The Bainbridge Island Museum  didn't object to my camera at their Ansel Adams exhibit of his photos of the Japanese internment camp at Manzanar.   I posted a few here.

I hope Harry Bliss doesn't mind his cartoon here.  It is my photo of my local newspaper and I left it a little out of focus.  And I've linked to Bliss' website.   And he was making fun of the museum not allowing photos. And I made his exact punchline on my blog a couple of weeks ago. [I'm writing all this because I am aware that a cartoon is the equivalent of a whole article or a whole book and I generally don't post other people's cartoons without their permission.  This is more than just a repost of his cartoon.]

Maybe the Getty can buy a copy and put it up in their Ansel Adams exhibit gallery.  

The Bergdahl Rorhschach Test

[Lots of  people leave a movie before the credits are over.  And sometimes the director saves some great stuff for the end of the credits.  This is a post that has some related, but only in a very tangential way, content at the end.  But I think it's worth waiting for.]

[UPDATE June 9, 2014 Anchorage Daily News reporter Rich Mauer offers more detail to the Bergdahl Rohrschach with his interview with four Anchorage soldier's in Bergdahl's unit today.]

Original Rohrschach image from here, but see notes below*

The commentary on Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl reminds me a lot of a Rohrshach test.  In a Rorschach:

[t]he underlying assumption is that an individual will class external stimuli based on person-specific perceptual sets, and including needs, base motives, conflicts, and that this clustering process is representative of the process used in real-life situations.^[33] [From Wikipedia]

And we see all sorts of folks 'seeing' in Bergdahl (the external stimulus) radically different things, based, I'm assuming, on those  "person-specific perceptual sets, and including needs, base motives, conflicts."


Some of the things people see in the Bergdahl Rohrschach:

• Traitor
• Confused Young Man
• Sane Young Man Who Reacted To The Insanity Of War
• Means To Trash The President
• Republicans Acting Bad Once More
• Chance To Empty Guantanamo
• US Commitment To Recover all POWs
• Negotiating With Terrorists
• Innocent Until Proven Guilty
• All Our Soldiers Are Hereos

The traditional Rohrschach Test has very specific techniques for interpreting people's responses.  There are different methods:  The Exner method and the Rohrschach Performance Assessment System seem to be the two major ones.   Wikipedia goes through the basic inkblots and standard interpretations.  And there's even a section on conflicts among the testers over interpretation.

Frustrated with people's seemingly mindless interpretation of current events?  Think of the current event as a sort of Rohrschach test. 

In looking at Rohrschahs,  psychologists looks at more than just what the testers 'see' in the inkblots.  They also look at how they approach the task - for instance, do they take it as given to them or do they ask if they can turn the cards around?  They listen to how the person forms the interpretation.

And we should do the same too.

Everyone's response will be a combination of the respondent's preconceived notions of how the world works and the evidence presented.  The less connected to the facts of the case, the more the response tells us about the respondent than about the case, the more the respondents are projecting their world views, their values, their biases onto the case. 

But none of this is new to most of you reading this. Perhaps for some it's a different metaphor for thinking about this.

The real questions we have to find ways to answer are:

1.   How do we form our 'judgment habits'?  (Yes, they're habits.)  How do we learn to go from evidence to conclusion?   To what extent is this affected by genetics and to what extent by environment? 
2.  How do we learn to balance feelings and rational thinking to improve the likelihood of coming to more accurate assessments?
3.  What causes some of us to short circuit and shut down one side or the other - rationality without any feeling or feeling without any rationality?

I know you can all think of examples of people rationally going through the evidence before they make their conclusions known.   And you know people whose instant conclusion pops out of their mouths as soon as the first tiny bit of (possibly false) evidence is presented.

But sometimes the people that mouth off quickly, loudly, and arrogantly without waiting for all the evidence are right.  And the people who deliberately exam every detail sometimes turn out to be wrong.  A lot goes into 'getting it right' than just these two dimensions. 

There are lots of directions this post could go.  I really wanted to just raise the idea of current events being like Rohrschach inkblots, we learn more about the people talking than about the issue. 

But as I did that, I also started thinking about the wide array of factors that affect good and bad interpretations.  And after barely touching that, I'm already thinking about how we deal with people who aren't rational or who ignore feelings.   But I'm not ready to put all those ingredients together into a satisfying post yet. 
 
So let me conclude this post with a little seriousness and a little silliness.

*Images (the serious part)

I spent a more time on the images (there's one below too) than I did on actually writing.  Like the two here, most images I use here are originals I create.  But if I use someone else's images (even if I alter them as in this post), I like to give credit.  I found the Rohrschach image using google image search.  But my source clearly wasn't the original, but that site didn't cite its source.  Google reverse image search gave me over 500 locations for the image.  I passed on finding the real original site. I  really don't want to link to a site that used an image without giving credit - and I'm not that impressed with the post the image was in. 

Hermann Rohrshach (the silly part) 

When I was looking up the Rohrschach test, I found a picture of Hermann Rohrschach on Wikipedia.  I was surprised at how young and contemporary - and cool - he looked.  According to Wikipedia,

  "in 1921 he wrote his book Psychodiagnostik, which was to form the basis of the inkblot test."

He was was born in November 1888, so he was probably 38 when the book came out.  In April 1922, again according to Wikipedia:

"he died of  peritonitis, probably resulting from a ruptured appendix.^[9]"

He left a wife and two children, ages five and three.  Below is his picture and the actor it made me think (another Rohrschach like test?) should play him in the movie of his life.

Hermann and Matt

Hermann's picture is the way I found it.  It took a little time to find a picture of Matt Damon in a reasonably similar pose.  Then I changed it to black and white, got rid of the background, shrank it, and added the mustache.   I think they'd seem more alike  if you didn't see the pictures side-by-side.  As I look at the two now, I know that readers will think of other actors who look much more like Hermann. 

Birch Shield Bug Close Up

I used the Photoshop Sketch - Water Paper filter only for the background.  I left the bug and leaf alone.  Except where the edges merged with the background, they're the original photo.

I posted a picture of the birch shield bug in 2011 with a description from Dominque M/ Collet's Insects of south-central Alaska.  Yes, it's really called a bug.  Elasmostethus interstinctus if you want to be formal.

I'm proud of myself.  I didn't look at the computer until 3pm today.  Puttering around in the yard was good. 

If you have an Alaska bug you can't identify, the Cooperative Extension Service has a form you can submit online or in person.

By the way, here's a site that has pictures of a lot of different shield bugs.

Charter College Graduation And Lady In Blue

I have a friend.  I went to his Charter College graduation in 2010, at the Performing Art Center.  Except that after he 'graduated', he was he still had two more classes to take.  Over time that escalated to four and then six classes.  I know this because I went with him several times when he spoke to a counselor and then a higher level administrator.

But he finally got this all completed and we went to graduation again Friday night. 

Here's the President talking to the grads with the faculty in the background. 

Here's a grad getting his diploma.

I'm thinking lots of thoughts, but it's late and I need to go to bed.  It did make me wish the Regents hadn't eliminated the Community College system. 

And the lady in blue.  Well, I took the picture down.  She wore a very short skirt and very high heels walking out of the PAC.  I found myself debating whether I should post the picture or not and decided that if I have a question, I should not post it.  While I took the picture in a public place and you can't see her face, I didn't ask her permission.  I'm still trying to articulate my gut feeling and I can't yet.  

Why I Live Here - Breakfast on the Deck

The best room in the house isn't in the house.  It's our summer extra room - on the deck.  Here's what I saw when I looked at the ceiling while I ate breakfast this morning.

 Here's one of the walls.  














OK, I can see a little more than trees, but it's a bit of wooded paradise on a normal city lot right in the middle of town.  It helps that there's a hill, but otherwise, it's just that no one cut the trees in the back ever.  We too have just left it natural.  And we've added trees on the sides to keep a little green summer oasis in the city.  It's also relatively low maintenance.


And they say it's good for our mental health. 

六四 June 4

Learning the months is one of the few things in Chinese that's easy.  It's simply month 1, month 2, month 3, etc.  Saying dates can get abbreviated to simply the number of the month and the date.

Today is 6-4, Liù Sì  (approximately Leo Si - like sir but without the r sound at the end, and they're both falling tone, the falling tone you'd use when you just remembered you forgot something you need and you say "shit!")

I arrived in Hong Kong in July 1989 for a year sabbatical, so this is all very fresh in my mind, even 25 years later.  When we planned a trip with students to Beijing the following spring, we scheduled it so we were back in Hong Kong a couple of weeks before the first anniversary.   Here's a picture of Tiananmen Square in May 1990.

Tiananmen Square May 1990

Someone who did not want to be displayed here was standing right in front.  So I used the rubberstamp function in Photoshop to erase history.  It seemed appropriate because the Chinese government is trying to erase the memory of June 4, 1989.  Note there's a shadow across the bottom of the photo.  I decided that while I took the person out, I'd leave the shadow. 


Louisa Lim has just written a book called The People's Republic of Amnesia.  You can hear her talk about the erasure of this historic day on NPR here.


It just seems necessary to remember today, because in China this day officially does not exist.

Compulsive Maybe? Rumors, Learning Chinese, Everything Avocado, and Bedbugs - Stuff I Found Online

Before

1.    The Art of Cleanup at typograffit can be called a reordering of the everyday or the work of a control freak.  Maybe both.  But it makes you rethink things we take for granted.    There's a series of before and after pictures.  Here's an example.  It's basically pictures and quick and easy.  But you'll be surprised at what she does.

After Image from The Art of Cleanup at typograffit

 2.   Snopes - Rumor has it  is a fact checking site.  In this post they look at a video that purports to show President Obama in Russia sticking his hand out to Russian officials but no one will take it.  Then they show the actual footage that was left out that changes everything. 



3.   From  How Clever Design Can Help You Learn Chinese   on Slate.

How to remember the characters for fire, tree, sun, and moon.  And lots more characters. 

4.   Things you didn't know you could do with an avocado.  29 Next-Level Things To Do With Avocado . From brownies to baked eggs and a lot more recipes I think (emphasis on think) want to try.

 5.  Worried about bedbugs when you travel?  Bedbug Reports shows you reports by folks who found bedbugs in their hotel.  You can check out cities and specific hotels.   

[6/4/14 - I'm reposting this because feedburner didn't seem to pick it up when I posted it yesterday. Let's see if it works this time][It did.]

An Article Most White Americans Don't Want To Read

Anyone who believes that African-Americans are economically poorer than White Americans because they are somehow inferior to whites - don't work as hard, not as smart, whatever -  don't read this article.  It will disabuse you of your misconceptions.  It will force you to face the reality of how, even after slavery ended, after separate but equal ended, housing practices ensured that most African-Americans would live in ghettos and could not share in the economic benefits White Americans got through home ownership.

This is not an article for bigots.  Their hate isn't based on facts and won't be changed by facts.

It is an article for those who believe in freedom and equality and justice, but just don't know their history that well.  It's easy for them not to, because it wasn't taught in most schools.

It is an article for those who have a sense of the injustices and can always use supporting data for when they are talking to people who don't get it.   From The Atlantic.

The Case for Reparations

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. 

Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

May 21, 2014

This is not easy reading.  It hurts too much.  Some excerpts:

Between 1882 and 1968, more black people were lynched in Mississippi than in any other state. “You and I know what’s the best way to keep the nigger from voting,” blustered Theodore Bilbo, a Mississippi senator and a proud Klansman. “You do it the night before the election.”

Coates follows the life of Clyde Ross and explains the mechanics of how it was impossible for his family to get a fair deal for their crops and labor from the white dealers who set the prices and were backed up by the local power structure.  Blacks who protested the non-negotiable terms were Bilboed.  How despite Clyde Ross being recommended by one of his teachers to go to a special school set up to help Southern black kids, it was too far to walk and there were no busses for black kids.  How he gets drafted and shipped to California where he experiences a relatively open society, serves in Guam, and on returning moves north to Chicago.

Three months after Clyde Ross moved into his house, the boiler blew out. This would normally be a homeowner’s responsibility, but in fact, Ross was not really a homeowner. His payments were made to the seller, not the bank. And Ross had not signed a normal mortgage. He’d bought “on contract”: a predatory agreement that combined all the responsibilities of homeownership with all the disadvantages of renting—while offering the benefits of neither. Ross had bought his house for $27,500. The seller, not the previous homeowner but a new kind of middleman, had bought it for only $12,000 six months before selling it to Ross. In a contract sale, the seller kept the deed until the contract was paid in full—and, unlike with a normal mortgage, Ross would acquire no equity in the meantime. If he missed a single payment, he would immediately forfeit his $1,000 down payment, all his monthly payments, and the property itself.
The men who peddled contracts in North Lawndale would sell homes at inflated prices and then evict families who could not pay—taking their down payment and their monthly installments as profit. Then they’d bring in another black family, rinse, and repeat. “He loads them up with payments they can’t meet,” an office secretary told The Chicago Daily News of her boss, the speculator Lou Fushanis, in 1963. “Then he takes the property away from them. He’s sold some of the buildings three or four times.”

Why would he take a loan on such bad terms?  Well, he was denied the kind of education that might have helped prevent it.  And he was lied to by the agents - who were really the owners and who steered him (and countless others) to attorneys who worked with the agent/owners. And he couldn't get a legitimate loan.

Ross had tried to get a legitimate mortgage in another neighborhood, but was told by a loan officer that there was no financing available. The truth was that there was no financing for people like Clyde Ross. From the 1930s through the 1960s, black people across the country were largely cut out of the legitimate home-mortgage market through means both legal and extralegal. Chicago whites employed every measure, from “restrictive covenants” to bombings, to keep their neighborhoods segregated.

Their efforts were buttressed by the federal government. In 1934, Congress created the Federal Housing Administration. The FHA insured private mortgages, causing a drop in interest rates and a decline in the size of the down payment required to buy a house. But an insured mortgage was not a possibility for Clyde Ross. The FHA had adopted a system of maps that rated neighborhoods according to their perceived stability. On the maps, green areas, rated “A,” indicated “in demand” neighborhoods that, as one appraiser put it, lacked “a single foreigner or Negro.” These neighborhoods were considered excellent prospects for insurance. Neighborhoods where black people lived were rated “D” and were usually considered ineligible for FHA backing. They were colored in red. Neither the percentage of black people living there nor their social class mattered. Black people were viewed as a contagion. Redlining went beyond FHA-backed loans and spread to the entire mortgage industry, which was already rife with racism, excluding black people from most legitimate means of obtaining a mortgage.

We're still reaping the harvest of these evil practices.  This is an easy way to pick up on some of this history that doesn't normally get taught in school.  

I know that most Americans recoil at the idea of paying reparations to blacks.  It's not because terrible things didn't happen.  We know they did.  But how, some would ask, could we possible afford to make reparations?  And who would we pay?  The slaves have all died.

The fact that most White Americans oppose the idea reflects - whether they acknowledge this or not - they understand that African-Americans are owed so much.  But Germans have given reparations to holocaust survivors - and Germany is still one of the most prosperous nations on earth.  The US gave reparations to Japanese-Americans who were incarcerated during WW II simply for being of Japanese descent.  What they got was merely a token, but a big part of that payment included the explicit acknowledgment of the wrong committed.  There is no way that blacks would ever be justly compensated, but there are lots of possible ways of making some sort of reparations that acknowledge how much their people have contributed to America's prosperity while being denied their fair share.

The article, as it gets to the idea of reparations, says pretty much the same thing, only more brutally.

Perhaps after a serious discussion and debate—the kind that HR 40 proposes—we may find that the country can never fully repay African Americans. But we stand to discover much about ourselves in such a discussion—and that is perhaps what scares us. The idea of reparations is frightening not simply because we might lack the ability to pay. The idea of reparations threatens something much deeper—America’s heritage, history, and standing in the world.

The early American economy was built on slave labor. The Capitol and the White House were built by slaves. President James K. Polk traded slaves from the Oval Office. The laments about “black pathology,” the criticism of black family structures by pundits and intellectuals, ring hollow in a country whose existence was predicated on the torture of black fathers, on the rape of black mothers, on the sale of black children. An honest assessment of America’s relationship to the black family reveals the country to be not its nurturer but its destroyer.

As I said, true bigots won't read this and if they did it wouldn't change anything for them.  But the rest of America should. And talk about it.

Here's the link again to The Atlantic article.