Leaving Anchorage On A June Night

The last post had the sun peekabooing through the fog bank from the airport last night.

Denali about 11:20pm

Here are some photos after the plane took off about 11:15pm.

The Alaska Range over Cook Inlet as we took off to the north, then looped to the west to fly down Turnagain Arm.

Then we flew over the mountain ridges and over Prince William Sounds.  This was about 11:30pm. 

Anchorage Sun Cools Off In Coastal Fog

Almost 11pm, at the airport, waiting for our flight. The sun dipped into the fog bank. It's almost solstice so despite our 11:10pm departure, the sun was still up.

When Is A Bear Not A Bear? Face Saving Medicaid Review?

From yesterday's Alaska Dispatch:

The Alaska Legislature plans to hire a consultant to help lawmakers separate “fact from fiction” in the debate over expansion and reform of the public Medicaid health care program.
The Legislative Budget and Audit Committee, chaired by Rep. Mike Hawker, R-Anchorage, on Friday issued a request for proposals for what it called an “independent professional policy resource.”

While I try to step back here and look at things from all sides and present the facts.  But sometimes doing that seems disingenuous.   It's like saying, "There's a large four legged furry animal, bigger than most dogs with sharp teeth that stood up on its hind legs and sniffed the air.  Some say it is a bear and some said they couldn't see it well enough to tell."  The people who can't be sure are generally those who have a vested interest in their not being a bear.  Maybe it's because

• they've always believed there are no bears in the area, so it must really be a big dog.   Or  
• they told you flat out that there are no bears around, and it's hard to admit being wrong.  Or
• they have a vested interest in their being no bears - like they're being paid to keep bears away.

Medicaid expansion is the bear wandering around Alaska.  Republicans have believed it's bad since they first started calling it Obamacare.

• Some believed this through genuine belief that the market is the best way to do everything, despite the fact that the market was leaving millions of Americans uncovered, particularly people who really needed coverage. 
• Some were with Sen. McConnell who declared "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president."  Anything the president wants, they oppose it and Obamacare, along with Medicaid expansion, has always been a key target.
• Some, with an eye toward national conservative PAC's that promise money for candidates who vote against Medicaid expansion and to defeat those who vote for it, Republicans (and Democrats) have a vested interest in preventing Medicaid expansion.

The irony is that states who refused to set up their own insurance exchanges are now facing the possibility of losing all federal Medicaid funding.  And they brought it own themselves.  They sued the federal government on a technicality.  The bill says there can be subsidies for people in states with a state exchange and they've argued those without a state exchange, using the federal exchange instead.  Their intent was to end the subsidies and thus kill Obamacare.  But now it's turning out that those states will be cutting off millions of citizens from affordable health care and huge costs will be shifted to those states.

They're charging Obama with not preparing for the possibility that the Supreme Court rules in their favor, which now they see as a catastrophe.  Obama, a constitutional lawyer, is just saying that he can't imagine the court ruling against Obamacare.   I'm sure behind that objective mask, he's got a big smirk as he thinks, "These guys brought this on themselves, let them squirm."

That's all some of the background behind yesterday's headline about the Alaska majority caucuses spending more money that they have repeatedly said we don't have, for a "report."

I'd just remind them that former Republican governor Parnell commissioned a study on Medicaid expansion from a conservative think tank.  He kept that study secret - even though it was paid for with public money - until the very last minute.

He kept is secret with good reason:  The facts contradicted his anti-expansion decision.

"Under our baseline participation assumptions, expanding Medicaid would cost the state $200.6 million more over the 2014 to 2020 period, compared to not expanding Medicaid, for a total increased cost of $240.5 million.  However, the state would receive $2.9 billion in additional federal funds and fewer individuals would remain uninsured.  Additionally, this new cost would comprise only 1.4 percent of total Medicaid costs from 2014 to 2020 (Figure E-4).
 To minimize state costs under expansion, the state could also elect to implement expansion under a number of alternative design scenarios."

 I posted about this study and Parnell's decision on it in detail here.

The legislature doesn't need to spend more time on yet another study.  All they have to do is do their jobs.  Sit down and read the original study.  There are a number of legislators who, I'm sure, would have trouble understanding the study.  But Hawker, who's cited in the article, is a retired CPA.  He should be able to understand that study and know we don't need yet another study.  But he's also the legislator most responsible for the opulent redo of the Anchorage Legislative Information Office that everyone agrees is way above market value. 

The conclusion that makes the most sense to me (which doesn't mean its the right conclusion) is that another study could cite new evidence that would allow the Republicans to let the governor, on his own, expand Medicaid without any serious opposition from the legislators.   And if that is the case, then the already stressed Alaska budget will take another hit so the Republican majority's ego can be massaged.

This is really a bear.  But if that's what it takes to get Medicaid expanded in Alaska and adding health care coverage, many say, to 40,000 people, so be it.  But I hope the people of Alaska - particularly those who have given up on the process and stopped voting - realize how the Republican majority's talk of fiscal carefulness is belied by most of what they do.  The list of the legislators - particularly those from Anchorage and Mat-Su - who took excessive per diem during the special session is just yet one more piece of evidence of their lack of concern for the people of Alaska.

[Feedburner failure repost]

How Plastics Saved The Elephant

I ran across a Scientific American article on the history of plastic.  It reminded me how much history has to teach us and how much of it we don't know. 

Thai work elephants 1967-8

"elephants, the paper warned in 1867, were in grave danger of being "numbered with extinct species" because of humans' insatiable demand for the ivory in their tusks. Ivory, at the time, was used for all manner of things, from buttonhooks to boxes, piano keys to combs. But one of the biggest uses was for billiard balls. Billiards had come to captivate upper-crust society in the United States as well as in Europe. Every estate, every mansion had a billiards table, and by the mid-1800s, there was growing concern that there would soon be no more elephants left to keep the game tables stocked with balls. The situation was most dire in Ceylon, source of the ivory that made the best billiard balls. There, in the northern part of the island, the Times reported, "upon the reward of a few shillings per head being offered by the authorities, 3,500 pachyderms were dispatched in less than three years by the natives." All told, at least one million pounds of ivory were consumed each year, sparking fears of an ivory shortage. "Long before the elephants are no more and the mammoths used up," the Times hoped, 'an adequate substitute may [be] found.'"

 Plastics.  It's mind boggling to know that humans nearly wiped out elephants 150 years ago, just so they could play billiards!

The savior of the elephants?

Plastics freed us from the confines of the natural world, from the material constraints and limited supplies that had long bounded human activity. That new elasticity unfixed social boundaries as well. The arrival of these malleable and versatile materials gave producers the ability to create a treasure trove of new products while expanding opportunities for people of modest means to become consumers. Plastics held out the promise of a new material and cultural democracy. The comb, that most ancient of personal accessories, enabled anyone to keep that promise close.

There was even a contest to find a substitute for ivory so they could keep making billiard balls when the supply of ivory was gone.

The need for natural material to make combs almost wiped out the hawkbill turtle.  In fact plastics - first made from plant material and then from oil - saved a lot of creaturers.

Celluloid could be rendered with the rich creamy hues and striations of the finest tusks from Ceylon, a faux material marketed as French Ivory. It could be mottled in browns and ambers to emulate tortoiseshell; traced with veining to look like marble; infused with the bright colors of coral, lapis lazuli, or carnelian to resemble those and other semiprecious stones; or blackened to look like ebony or jet. Celluloid made it possible to produce counterfeits so exact that they deceived "even the eye of the expert," as Hyatt's company boasted in one pamphlet. "As petroleum came to the relief of the whale," the pamphlet stated, so "has celluloid given the elephant, the tortoise, and the coral insect a respite in their native haunts; and it will no longer be necessary to ransack the earth in pursuit of substances which are constantly growing scarcer."

 As the human population increases, we make heavier use of critical materials, up to the point that we may use them all up - and in the case of animal based materials, cause extinction.  If we are lucky, we find a substitute to give relief to those natural sources. 

But then we get dependent on the new material to the point of endangering the natural world again.   And the local humans who live in that now destroyed natural environment.

Our petroleum use, which saved the whale a hundred years ago, is now causing climate change.  Today petroleum based sports enthusiasts, like the billiard players, continue their dangerous games.  But the rest of us are guilty too.  We can't get free of our addiction to fossil fuel powered cars and airplanes and electricity.   Some, though, are rushing to create alternative sources of energy and finding ways to wean humans from oil. Meanwhile those companies that have gotten rich off of fossil fuels, are fighting any curtailment of the source of their wealth and we continue to buy their products to fuel our lifestyles which we can't imagine without fossil fuels.

And our search for other natural resources as well as our growing human population's encroachment into forests continues to make the survival of non-human species like the elephant and the tiger and millions of smaller, non-iconic species iffy. 

The whole article is fascinating and has lots more details.

"Alien forms of historical consciousness and discourse" - For Example: Arapaho Narrative Past

Each language has its own words that don't exist in other languages, its own grammatical quirks, its own intonation and rhythms that allow them to convey ideas or feelings that can't be expressed as precisely or even at all in other languages.

All this came as a slow realization over the years.  Learning German and having to use it as a student in Germany brought the first glimmers of this understanding.  Learning Thai and living in Thailand expanded my sense of how language shapes how we know things.

This awareness has made me realize that each language (and the culture it represents) is like a volume in the encyclopedia of human knowledge.  Losing a language and culture is like losing a part of the encyclopedia.  We lose what that particular culture has learned from its experience in its time and place in the world, its unique knowledge gained from solving the problems of survival it faced.  The culture overall may not seem like an 'important' culture, but how do we know that?  Much, if not most, of its cultural richness is invisible to people who don't know its language.  And there are so many cultures that most of us don't even know exist. 

But back to how languages shape how we see the world and how we negotiate it.  A simple example.

In English, gender is conveyed, incidentally, by the simple words  'he' and 'she'.  We automatically reveal the gender of the person we speak about.  We don't really have to reveal the gender of the person acting when we speak.   In Thai and Chinese, the equivalent words (third person singular) do not distinguish between males and females.  The terms are gender neutral  But in Thai, there is no exact translation for the English word "I."  Instead, there are two different words - one that males use and another that females use.  When a speaker uses the closest Thai word to the English "I" the speaker reveals his or her gender.  Well, not always.  There are other words that can be used in place of 'I" that instead of gender, reflect the speakers' relationship to the listener.  They could use another word that indicates they are younger or older than the listener and other kinds of status relationships between themselves and the listener.

You simply cannot translate these words from one language to the other without some sort of explanation in the translation.  The words just aren't in the other language.

This morning I heard about the Arapaho narrative past, which was explained as a tense which reflects that the speaker didn't not personally experience the events he's relating.  (I can't find where I heard this - something on the radio.)

What I could find on line focuses mostly on how to understand attempts to translate from Arapaho (and other languages):

Click image to see clearer            Screenshot from Algonguian Spirit

Or, from a paper on these issues for ethnographers from Academia:

 "An understanding of non-Western histories requires not only the generation of documents and an expanded conception of what constituted documentation but also a determined effort to try to comprehend alien forms of historical consciousness and discourse." [Fogelson 1989: 134][emphasis added]

Another misplaced strategy is to impose wholesale the structures of myth to history without establishing the connection in real practices and interaction. Myth contains materials for history but does not structure it totally. The results of a reified myth approach are structures existing "nowhere" in real sociocultural space and time, much as in Levi-Strauss's analysis of myth. In the Arapaho context, "right ways of doing things" (as expressed in forms of the verb nee'eestoo-) precede instruction in myth. The shapes, rhythms, and forms of practice retain primary generative force over cognitive structures, mythologic, or even thought world. Myth is neither a charter for social action nor a model of Arapaho thought. The most sacred myths were told only to a very few people of requisite age and ritual preparedness. To generalize from certain myths to history, then, is misplaced concreteness. Rather, it is necessary to look at social practices the select or reflect mythical and historical material. Of course, myth and history often converge, though not in a direct way. They show up as bits and pieces among so much other material people exchange communicate.

Arapaho Project offers a very technical description of the tense: 

Sound Changes in Words:

      Often in Arapaho, when prefixes and words combine, the sounds change at the combination points. This makes it hard sometimes to recognize what the original form was. The most common changes involve the letter -h-, and are as follows:

      nih (past tense)  + h- > nih’-

                                he’ih (narrative past tense)  + h- > he’ih’- 

For people dealing with Arapaho myths, all this technical detail is important.  But for others (like me) it's a springboard to other ideas about how different language forms could change how we know things.

Why Does This Matter?

So, when I heard this concept of Arapaho narrative past, my ears perked up.  I started thinking about the idea of a tense that is used when telling a story that is not your own story.  Using that tense alerts listeners to the speaker's relationship to the story.

Think about how this might affect things.  Politicians and business folks, when relating stories, would, simply by their use of grammar, have to indicate whether the story they were relating was their own story or someone else's. Think about other ways a language could embed truth telling into its syntax, making harder to lie, or at least easier to figure out that someone was lying. 

I'm not saying that's what Arapaho narrative past exactly distinguishes, I'm just extrapolating other possibilities.  When I looked this Arapaho language phenomenon, I see I'm not likely to understand it exactly, but it does seem to distinguish between talking about myth and some more than real world story from the everyday kinds of stories.  That listeners know that what is being related is not of this world, that the words are supposed to be understood as describing another state of being.

Even in reading English that was written two hundred years ago, we lose a lot because we don't know, really, the way people then thought about the world, what things we assume that they wouldn't have.  We know they had different ideas about slavery, about the roles of men and women, about food, about health, about religion.  And, we think that we, in hindsight, can understand what they meant when they wrote something.  But truly we can't really put ourselves in their world.  After all, twenty year olds today talking about the 1960s are talking about a very different reality than the one I lived in the 60s. They take the outline of events, void of all the color and nuance of the times, and replace it with the color and nuance of their own times.

It's not simply historical consciousness and discourse that's hard to understand.  We have alien forms of consciousness around us in our own communities speaking in what appears to be our own language.   You could say this about  some of the Republicans and Democrats in Congress, or our own Alaskan legislators, who take the same 'facts' and decorate them with their own cultural meaning.  

That's a lot of what the citations above from the ethnographers are talking about.  I'm not judging here, simply pointing it out as an inevitable cross-cultural barrier to understanding.  The first step to dealing with the gap is to at least be aware of it. 

[UPDATE June 15, 2015:  I forgot to add a link to a related previous post on evidential language, in which the speakers give evidence for the claims they make.

"Tuyuca requires verb-endings on statements to show how the speaker knows something."]

]

Why Zoning Laws Matter - Landscaping: The Case Of Northrim Bank

This is the site of the now closed Northrim Bank branch office at 36th and Old Seward.  Notice the beautiful carpet of asphalt. Nothing is marred with soil or green in this picture.  (Though to be fair, there were a few bushes up along the building on the other side.)  This building was at this location long enough that the old Municipal code Title 21 for landscaping commercial property applied.  You can see how strict the code was.

This is where the "hybrid single point urban interchange" is planned for 36th and New Seward.  Given the state of the budget, maybe we can be spared the engineers' overbuilt creativity with exit lanes on the left, not the right. 

Now here is the new Northrim branch that just opened this week about a mile away.

And here it is from the other side. This landscaping is only a few weeks old and it already looks a million times better than their old location.

And a lot better than this location used to be. I don't have handy a good picture of the old lot, but you can get the idea from this picture of the rebuilt Sugar Shack coffee stand after it was vandalized and burned.   It's almost the same view as the one above, just a little closer.  Basically the whole space where the bank and parking lot sit now was just dirt with maybe a little bit of asphalt on one side and some weeds along Lake Otis. When we moved in here in the late 70s this lot was all birch trees. Then they all got cut down one day and it sat empty for years and years until the Sugar Shack was put on it.

I'm not sure whether the bank did this just to meet code or if they went beyond what the code required.  But I do appreciate it.

They even put trees and bushes in the ally, on the other side of the fence from the parking lot, giving the neighbors a bit of green screen. Some might say that the old Sugar Shack and old Northrim landscaping is the 'real' Alaska.  But I'd say the real Alaska was when this lot was all birch trees.  But I'll take this new landscaping over the open dirt space that's been here. 

Finance Committee Amendments - More Session Starting At 8AM Tomorrow

They're offering a series of amendments that I can't find online.  They've passed them out, but can't really figure them out as we go.

They just said something about holding until tomorrow morning, which means the bill won't pass tonight. 

Amendment 1:  Suicide awareness and prevention training
Amendment 2:
Amendment 3:  Deletes Sec. 14, insert new - "does not require an athletic coach who is an unpaid volunteer to report child abuse or neglect
amendment 4:
Amendment 5 - conjectural from Miccichi - delay until June 30, 2017 to understand impacts  (on hold until tomorrow at 8am)

I couldn't keep up with this all, but basically Reps. Tarr and Millett were asked if they were ok with the changes and that there are still finishing touches that will happen tomorrow morning.

An interesting part was Sen. Dunleavy asking Millett and Tarr what was it, besides the opt in and opt out parts, that caused people in the House to say they wouldn't vote for the bill?  He didn't get the answers he wanted and eventually called for more dialogue rather than battling in the press.  I'm not sure why he was asking.

It sounded like he was trying to figure out what, if anything, would be safe to put back into the bill, but that's speculation.  

Sort of Restored HB 44 (Erin's Law) Testimony Done at Sen Finance

Erin's Law public testimony is done. 

Finance committee's changes returned the key parts of Erin's and Bree's Law - it's mandatory for schools, it's opt out for parents, no longer opt in.  And it now covers K-12 again. 

There are 27 sections of the bill that add in many of Sen. Dunleavy's wish list.  But the worst of his amendments are gone - the prohibition on contracting with abortion providers, and some of the parental rights sections that undermined kids rights to access to this training.

The committee is going to recess and do some amending and are hoping to be back  at 4:45 to look at amending this based on the testimony.

Testimony was overwhelmingly for adopting the original bill that was passed in the house.  I didn't hear anyone deviate from that.  There were personal stories from victims of abuse and from parents of abuse victims.  There was testimony from people in the field of fighting abuse. 

Things are in a much better state now. 

Finance Committee Rewrite of Erin's Law Has Big Improvements

I'm at the public testimony for HB 44 Erin's Law.

I wrote up a synopsis of an earlier post that argued that at least 2000 kids would be molested because of the changes from the original Erin's Law to the Senate Education Committee Substitute.

When I got here, I was quickly shown by a friend that there is a new committee substitute bill from the Finance committee.

There are lots of small changes have improved the bill significantly.

• Schools have changed from 'may' back to 'shall' have this program.  That's the biggest benefit.
• Parents now have to 'opt out' as in the original, instead of 'opt in' as in the rewrite.
• And the kids covered are once again K-12, not just 7-12.  
• The prohibition on contracting with abortion providers is gone.

Things are much improved.  I'm hopeful.  I need to compare the two bills carefully to see what is gone and what is still there.

Here's a link to the working draft of the new bill.

A Meditation On Lying and Liars

This is sort of an addendum to an earlier post that looked at different roles that legislators can play in committee meetings.  Trying to figure out the specific roles any legislator plays is made difficult because they may be, are you ready? - lying.  I know.  Our responses to reports that politicians are lying ranges from "Oh how terrible!" to "What did you expect?" 

I don't want to accuse all politicians of regularly lying though.  The word "to lie" is sort of like the word 'blue.'  There are lots of different blues and there are lots of different lies.  But while artists and paint companies have come up with words to identify different shades of blue, our vocabulary of lies is impoverished.

We make the word the one word 'lie' cover a variety of different behaviors - some inexcusable and some so common that all of us engage in them.  In fact, if we didn't tell our sweethearts they look good, when they ask, we'd be considered rude.  

In her book Lying, Sisela Bok, asks readers to consider a world where no one told the truth.  One couldn't believe anything and would have to verify everything oneself.  But that would be impossible because you couldn't trust what people said or wrote.  Thus a system where people tell the truth benefits us all.  It makes our lives much easier.  But suppose you wanted to enjoy those benefits plus a little more.

"The fact that a system of truth-telling benefits you enormously doesn’t by itself justify your adhering to the Principle of Veracity. After all, if personal benefit is all that counts for you, then why not reap all the benefits that a system of truth-telling brings, and then reap a little bit more by lying for personal gain?
Of course, you couldn’t announce your policy to the public; it would have to remain your secret. You don’t want to undermine the practice of telling the truth. Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to gain anything from your lies. And you don’t want people to distrust you. A lie is advantageous only in circumstances where people will believe it – only where a practice of truth-telling generally prevails. Such a practice prevails only when most people are doing their part to support it – that is, when most people are telling the truth. The liar, then, wants to be a free rider. She wants others to do their part to maintain a system, while she skips doing her part. She reaps the benefits of the system without investing the reciprocal sacrifice of supporting it." [From Infed]

Let's say there's a continuum of liars:  from whoppers are normal to only tell little white lies. 

Whoppers Are  Normal   - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -  Only Little White Lies

Whoppers are things like, "I didn't have sexual intercourse with that woman."  Or “We found the weapons of mass destruction [in Iraq]. We found biological laboratories.”

Little white lies are more like, "Thanks for the tie, it's just what I wanted."  And there's a wide range in between.  


We all tend to think that others behave roughly like we do.  I'd argue that people on the whopper side of the continuum lie so often they think it's normal and that everyone lies.  And maybe they grew up in families where that was true.  Thus they don't trust anyone.  That's a little different from what Bok argues.  She's talking about a theoretical model where everyone benefits from truth-telling.  But I don't think people think this out so logically.  I suspect some liars know that most people are more truthful and take advantage of that. 

On the white lie end are people who wouldn't think of telling a lie any more egregious than answering a questions more positively than they actually feel. "It's delicious."  "I'll call you."   They believe in honesty, but also believe you can soften it a little to avoid upsetting people.  They are slow at recognizing big liars because it's hard to believe that people lie so blatantly. 

I tend to be on the white lie end.  For me, leaving out something important is akin to lying.  I'm not good at spotting liars, unless it's a situation I know well.  I don't notice the little body language tips.  I have to listen carefully to what they say and weigh the logic.  Only when people's stories are full of inconsistencies or at odds with what I know, do I start to consider the possibility that they are lying.

I've been reminded of the importance and the destructiveness of liars in the last week because we've been watching the old FX series Damages.  Glenn Close plays Patty Hewes, a high stakes lawyer, who in one episode actually asks a witness she's questioning, "When did you start lying?"  The witness protests she's not lying.  Patty Hewes goes on, "I was seven when I started lying regularly."  She's lies so shamelessly and to the people closest to her, people whose loyalty she demands.  We like to think that liars get found out and lose their positions of power.  But when enough of the other players are also liars, they don't out each other.  It's part of the game, even makes it more interesting for them, I guess - figuring out when someone is telling the truth and when they're lying.  Certainly in Damages, the lies pile up on each other.  Even when Patty Hughes starts to level with someone, she tends to add new lies.  (Oh, and yeah, it turns out that witness she was questioning was leaving out the cocaine addiction.)

It drives white lie folks crazy.  It's against our rules.  And while the liars may continue in their positions of power, there are costs.  In Patty Hewes' case, her 17 year old son despises her and causes her no end of frustration.

We've all seen these people lie and lie and lie, until they are caught.  Lance Armstrong insisted he hadn't doped.  Richard Nixon said he wasn't a crook.  Bill Clinton swore he didn't have sex with that woman.  Bernie Madoff lied $50 billion dollars from his friends and family even. If we look at a Tim Shipman's Atlantic Monthly article on Madoff, we can find some of the reasons people trusted him:

1.  susceptibility to his charm
2.  greed 

"charmer whose hedge fund ensnared wealthy Americans with the promise of record dividends."

3. he was seen by many investors as a tribe member

"what cuts deepest is Madoff’s betrayal of his fellow Jews"

Writer Tim Shipman goes on to ask how Madoff got away with it for so long.  Various people had raised questions starting as far back as the 1970s, but it wasn't until 2008 that he was finally busted.

"In 1995, [independent investigator, Harry Markopolos] sent the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the financial watchdog, a 17-page statement: “The World’s Largest Hedge Fund Is a Fraud”.
Two years later, the commission found no evidence of fraud after an investigation that seems to have involved little more than asking Madoff whether he was a crook, and accepting his answers.
SEC boss Christopher Cox last week denounced multiple failures at his agency and launched an internal investigation of the relationships between his officials and Madoff, including Eric Swanson, who had at one point been involved in monitoring Madoff’s firm and later married his niece, Shana Madoff"

So, we see a lot of deference to a well known, wealthy and connected man.  In Damages there are corrupt police officers and government officials who quash investigations or even set them up to intimidate enemies.

I'd also mention the movie Merchants of Doubt which we saw last night.  They delve into a group of 'scientists' who started by attacking tobacco industry critics.  They developed a tool chest for raising doubt when, in fact, no scientific doubt actually existed.  They'd attack the messenger, which is much easier than attacking the science.  Many of the tobacco companies'  'merchants of doubt' adapted these tools to protect other industries as they fought off regulation - like the fire retardant companies who had persuaded law makers to require putting tons of toxic chemicals in all sorts of products.  Then they moved on to fight climate change which, around 2008, the movie says, was accepted by key Republican politicians including George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, and others.  But they quickly back tracked when these merchants of doubt 'educated' on them.  Rep. Inglis, Republican from South Carolina, was educated at the polls when he started saying that climate change was real. 

Truth is not an important commodity for these merchants of doubt, whose sole goal is to postpone government action as long as possible while their client corporations made as much money as they can, usually at the expense of the environment and the health of Americans.  

I raise this issue of lying as one more issue to consider when you watch our legislature.  Who are today's merchants of doubt and which of our legislators are responding to their influence?  We know, for instance, that Americans for Prosperity have opened offices in many states, including Alaska, to fight various issues, including Medicaid expansion.  And we know that the Republican majorities in the Alaska House and Senate refuse to compromise on Medicaid expansion even though a majority of Alaskans want it passed, even though it will add health care for 40,000 Alaskans, and bring lots of federal dollars to Alaska.   Without the merchants of doubt deliberately poisoning the public discourse, this legislation would have passed long ago. 

Thinking about lying, about specific liars who famously lied, about how long we let liars get away with lying, about what evidence we need to finally realize they're lying, are all good exercises so that we can spot today's merchants of doubt and the politicians who help them block legislation everyone wants.

I'd add two more points to consider:

1.  Not all politicians lie.  There are honest politicians.  They may not always volunteer everything, but they are clearly much closer to the white lies end of the scale.  This is important.  I would wager that the current ice jam in the legislature is due to no more than 10-20% of the legislators.  But the merchants of doubt make sure they're in key positions.

2.  Some liars have lied so often, they believe their own lies.  Unless you know the facts, they would convince you too.  And they clearly have convinced enough of their constituents to get elected. 

That's the case of another character in Damages, Arthur Frobisher (played by Ted Danson).  He's a billionaire businessman who told all his employees to buy the company stock as he was selling his own, just before his company went bust.  Now they are Patty Hewes' clients as they try get their lives back.  Frobisher believes he's a good guy and he did nothing wrong.  His wiping out of his employees' retirement savings is just a blip on his screen.  Unfortunate.  He even tries to hire a ghost writer to tell his story to the world, because he's sure that if people just knew him, they would like him.  Possibly Madoff was a model for this character.  [I just checked and Wikipedia says that in season 3 Frobisher is based on the Madoff scandal.  We've only seen seasons one and two, but it was clear enough for me to make that connection already.][UPDATE 8:15pm:  Decided to start season 3 and it's not Frobisher, but a new character who's based on Madoff]

I suspect a lot of our worst lying legislators have convinced themselves they're good guys.  And they are so not.