State Legislature Sues Governor Over Medicaid Expansion

The ADN has the story.  Basically 

"a Republican-controlled House-Senate committee voted 10-1 to authorize spending up to $450,000 to hire a pair of law firms to work on a suit against the governor."

WHO VOTED HOW?

Voting in favor of hiring the two law firms were Republican Reps. 

Mike Chenault of Nikiski, 
Steve Thompson of Fairbanks, 
Craig Johnson and Charisse Millett of Anchorage and 
Mark Neuman of Big Lake, 

Democratic Rep. Bob Herron of Bethel  (member of the House Republican Majority)

Republican Sens. 
Anna MacKinnon of Eagle River, 
John Coghill of North Pole, 
Charlie Huggins of Wasilla and 
Kevin Meyer of Anchorage.


Voting against:

Democratic minority member, Juneau Rep. Sam Kito.

Absent: 

"Two Republican senators from coastal areas typically viewed as more moderate, Gary Stevens of Kodiak and Peter Micciche of Soldotna, were absent, as was Sen. Lyman Hoffman, D-Bethel, who belongs to the Senate’s Republican majority.

Rep. Mike Hawker, R-Anchorage, also missed the meeting. He was in Minnesota undergoing medical treatment but said by email he would have voted against hiring the law firms."

 THE LAW FIRMS TO BE HIRED

The DC Firm:  Bancroft PLLC   - This boutique DC firm, that epitomizes the DC revolving door.  From their own website:

"Bancroft PLLC was founded by former Assistant Attorney General Viet D. Dinh and now includes former Solicitor General Paul D. Clement, former Associate White House Counsel H. Christopher Bartolomucci, and other accomplished professionals focused on our clients’ most difficult and complex legal issues. Among our 12 lawyers are 6 U.S. Supreme Court clerkships, 12 U.S. Court of Appeals clerkships, and 5 Presidential appointments."

One of their top attorneys, Paul Clement, recently had his going hourly rate of $1,100 cut to $300:

"— Judge Mae D’Agostino of the Northern District of New York, giving the reasons for slashing Paul Clement’s customary $1,100 hourly rate to $300 per hour when awarding attorneys’ fees in Osterweil v. Bartlett, a Second Amendment case.

(For what it’s worth, $1,100 was Clement’s hourly rate in 2011, when he was began representing Osterweil. Clement’s current hourly rate is $1,350. Osterweil would’ve been getting a deal!)"

  

Another Bancroft attorney was denied his claim that he worked while driving to the office.

Obamacare is not a new topic for this company.  They represented the 26 states that went to the Supreme Court over  Obamacare in 2012.

Anchorage based firm:  Holmes, Weddle, and Barcott.



Who's Calling The Shots Here?

Not clear.  We know that the Koch supported Americans For Prosperity has been strongly opposed to Obamacare.  Presumably they are working with key members of the House and Senate Majorities on this.  But we shouldn't leap to conclusions.  Maybe others are involved too.   It would be interesting to learn who Meyers, Chenault, and the others talk to behind closed doors and what they talk about.

The members of the Majority seem to believe that they are immune to electoral removal.  Redistricting has given many of them comfortable seats.  But I don't suspect they realize how many people are affected by this who may well be motivated to vote in 2016.

Not only are they still dragging their feet on expanding Medicaid, but they've allocated up to $450,000 on this for their attorneys.  And the governor's office will probably have to spend just as much to defend his decision.  Sure is easy to spend other people's money, it seems.  The Republicans also spent millions of dollars over the years in unsuccessful lobbying efforts to open up ANWR.

Julian Bond In Anchorage

When I heard the news about the death of Julian Bond who'd started the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and been a Georgia state representative among many other things, I thought about the time I got to talk to him when he was here at the University of Alaska Anchorage.  I don't even remember what we chatted about, but it was an honor to have the chance to just be with him.  But then, given my recent experience at my Peace Corps reunion, I began to question my memory - did this really happen? 

Boxes

So I went on line to look up "Julian Bond at UAA."  And there it was - in the UAA Archives.  So I biked over to UAA to see what they actually had.  The first box had a stock pr photo that Bond must have sent in advance.  The second box had negatives of the event in one folder, and negatives with a proof sheet in the second folder. 

So here are some pictures from when he was here.  You can read the mainline obituaries and notices elsewhere - as in this New York Times article.  

   

 

click to enlarge and focus

 For this one I used Photoshop's inverse (under image) function to change it from negative to positive.

All these images are from:

UAA University Relations photographs, Archives and Special Collections, Consortium Library, University of Alaska Anchorage

There was no more information than than the date 1984 and Julian Bond written on the negative sleeve. 

There were lots and lots of other old photos in the same folders.  You can wander through the collection electronically at http://consortiumlibrary.org/archives/Collections.html

I was experimenting a bit trying to get decent images from the proofs.  I vaguely remembered there was a way to change pictures from negatives to positives in Photoshop and it was pretty easy.  As I mentioned above - just go to Images, then to Inverse. 

 

Clouds And Shadows And A Glory

One would think that pictures from the plane in an out of Anchorage would get old.   But even though I've lived here for almost 40 years now and I'm still amazed by how the mountain views change as the light and shadows change.  So I shouldn't be surprised by a seeing Cook Inlet differently as we flew into Anchorage Monday.

The battery on the bigger camera died as we got over Turnagain Arm, so these are from my little Powershot.    Below is the road into Girdwood and the mudflats.

As we flew in and out of the clouds, our shadow came and went, sometimes circled by a rainbow.  This actually has a name - a glory. - ( I needed to check on it before posting.)  According to Wikipedia:

"A glory is an optical phenomenon that resembles an iconic saint's halo about the shadow of the observer's head, caused by light of the Sun or (more rarely) the Moon interacting with the tiny water droplets that make up mist or clouds. The glory consists of one or more concentric, successively dimmer rings, each of which is red on the outside and bluish towards the centre. The effect is believed to happen due to classical wave tunneling, when light nearby a droplet tunnels through air inside the droplet and, in the case of a glory, is emitted backwards due to resonance effects.^[1]"

"The scientific explanation is still the subject of debates and research. In 1947, the Dutch astronomer Hendrik van de Hulst suggested that surface waves are involved. He speculated that the colored rings of the glory are caused by two-ray interference between "short" and "long" path surface waves—which are generated by light rays entering the droplets at diametrically opposite points (both rays suffer one internal reflection).^[3] A new theory by Brazilian physicist Herch Moysés Nussenzveig, however, suggests that the light energy beamed back by a glory originates mostly from classical wave tunneling, which is when light rays that missed a droplet can still transfer energy into it.^[1]"

After flying over south Anchorage, we veered west for a slow loop back to the runway.  Lots of cloud shadows on the water.

And then as we closed in on the runway, the light changed again. 

". . . editing the film to fit the story line." Or Why We're Seeing So Many Stories About White Cops Killing Black Men Now

Edward Jay Epstein's News From Nowhere was published in 1973.  In it he outlined how news at television networks got made.  It's a great book that looks at the structure of the networks and how that structure and the technical requirements at the time shaped what people saw each night as "the
news."

Despite its age and the many changes in video and in media delivery systems, it's still worth reading because of the organized insight he offers about news production (in the most literal sense.)

And this year, as stories about white police officers shooting unarmed black men started showing up almost weekly, I thought back to this book and how it explained that 'the news' is based on a pre-determined storyline.  Clearly, police harassment of African-Americans has been taking place for a long, long time.  The Phrase Finder traces the official media debut of the term "Driving While Black" to 1990.

"The term came to public view in the 1990s, although the reports of the police tactic date from long before that. In May 1990 The New York Times included a piece with this line:

'We get arrested for D.W.B... You know, driving while black.' "

I remember being at a conference in Florida back in the 1990's and asking a black professor who had been a classmate at USC about why he was dressed in a suit and tie when most of us were less formal.  He replied that his clothing was an attempt to mitigate problems when he was stopped by the police - particularly when in the South.  Wearing a suit and tie might increase the odds that the police would let him go without anything serious happening. 

Epstein has a section called "The Story Line" in Chapter 5:  The Resurrection of Reality.

"More than fifty years ago Walter Lippmann suggested that newspaper reporting was in large part a process of filling out an established 'repertory of stereotypes' with current news.  In a similar way, network news is involved with illustrating a limited repertory of story lines with appropriate pictures.  One NBC commentator, Sander Vanocur, observed that 'network news is a continuous loop:  there are only a limited number of plots - 'Black versus White,'  'War is Hell,' 'America is falling apart,' 'Man against the elements,' 'The Generation Gap,' etc. - which we seem to be constantly redoing with different casts of characters."  Many of the correspondents interviewed complained about the need to fit news developments into developed molds or formulas, and to order stories along predetermined lines;  at the same time, most accepted it as a practical necessity." [emphasis added.]

He  explains that, in part, this is due to having to coordinate so many different people - reporters, cameramen, sound men, writers, etc.  There needs to be some common idea of what the story will be.  It's necessary

"that there be a stable set of expectations of what constitutes a proper story.  Moreover, producers generally assume that a given audience will have certain preferences in terms of both the form and the content of news stories.  "Every program has certain requirements and guidelines for its filmed reports," an ABC executive explained.  "Eventually these might harden into formulas and clichéd plots, but when they fail to hold the audiences' attention, the producer or the program is usually changed."

So, I'm guessing that until now, the 'white cop kills unarmed black man' story line was in competition with the 'cops are good, cops are honest and trustworthy' story line.  But with cameras on phones and with anyone being able to post on YouTube, there was finally footage available with the new story line that got a big audience that the mainstream news media (no longer just the networks) couldn't ignore.  And the media then caught up.

But some things seem not to have changed that much.  Epstein writes that most pieces are 'sound' pieces such as speeches, testimony, press conferences.  However,

"there is also a category of stories mainly concerned with visual action, such as riots, demonstrations and disasters, in which the pictures need not be synchronized with words spoken at the time.  In the case of these action stories, the establishing footage becomes the story itself, with the simple addition of a voice-over narration.  In these stories, cameramen are usually given free rein and are expected to seek out the most violent or exciting moments of the event.  One NBC cameraman explained, "What the producers want on the film is as much blood and violence as we can find.  That's the name of the game, and every cameraman knows it."  Robert MacNeil claimed in his book that cameramen in Vietnam at the height of the war were ordered by the networks to "shoot bloody" - and this produced a strong focus on military action at the expense of the less visible political considerations."

There's a lot more in News From Nowhere that explains how the structure of the news industry shapes the stories that the networks aired.   We all know, vaguely, that the news is managed, but this book spells out quite clearly how it was done, at least 1970s style. 

Proud Parents Push Daughter's Book

As I was perusing books at Powell's bookstore in Portland Sunday, a couple asked me if I had read Landfall by Ellen Urbani.  No, I hadn't.  It's very good I recall them saying.  Then they revealed it had been written by their daughter.  I asked if they were in it.  No, but they were in a previous one.  And this one is dedicated to them.  So I asked them if I could take a picture of them holding the book.  Here it is.

But, in answer to my question, they showed me the dedication:

"Along with virtually every other good thing in my life, this book is a gift from and for my mother, whom I adore.

And with her, my father, who each day gives everything he has for his family."

And clearly, Mom adores Ellen back.

The book takes place post Katrina.  As I looked for info about the book I found several sites saying it comes out August 29 this year, but it was already at Powell's - maybe because Portland is her home town.  Her first book, it turns out, was about her experience as a Peace Corps volunteer in Guatemala 1991-1992,  I didn't mention to her parents that I was in Portland for my Peace Corps group's reunion.

 Other Books

Powell's is an enormous bookstore with room after room of books.  Here are a few books I looked at near the entrance.   The first three reflect my always burning curiosity about what makes people tick.

The Man In The Monster is a book about a journalist who befriends a serial killer on death row as she seeks to understand the man and his actions.  This gets directly to the basic theme of this blog - how do you know what you know?  Why is a man's life summed up by something he spent, perhaps three or four weeks on in total, rather than everything else he did?  Is it accurate to forever label him a murderer when, as the parts of this I scanned suggest, it was hard for the author to imagine the man she grew to know as the man who had killed?

Mark Ruthman, Chicago in a First Read review of the book writes:

"This is a very well-written and soul-searching peek at an unexpected relationship that develops between a brutal killer and a pacifist journalist. While this seems wildly improbable, the journalist has an amazing sense of compassion and the killer is well-educated and legitimately or convincingly remorseful and highly functioning and medicated by the time she meets him, so that she only catches glimpses of the "monster" that on a handful of occasions took control of him and caused him to stalk and sometimes rape and kill women and girls. As time develops and she sticks with him through his retrials and appeals and sentencing, all the while fervently trying to keep him from being executed, her compassion wins out and she has to be reminded by him of his horrific actions. She pieces together the story of his childhood and early relationships where parents, family, and others skewed his notions of how to treat other people in relationships and general. His family history suggests both nature and nurture went awry and contributed to his desires to commit horrible crimes. .  ."

There are a number of reviews of the book at the link.

Another book that tries to bridge communication among people by getting them to share their stories with each other.  This was particularly poignant on a weekend when we were meeting up with friends we'd share Peace Corps training and teaching in Thailand with and learned more of each others' stories since the last time we'd seen each other - in some cases 45 years ago. 






What's Your Story? was put together by Brandon Domon who sat in a public space and gave people a blank page to write their stories.  The rules are spelled out in the book, which, like the stories in it, is all handwritten.

Click to enlarge

 Straight To Hell is a disturbing book, by a young banker who describes his high flying days and ways.  If you don't already question the enormous salaries in banking, then this book should at least raise a few.  Like whether the market is the best way to determine salaries. The chapters I looked at were about his life in Hong Kong.

Again, a sharp contrast to the life I led for a year in Hong Kong teaching at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

This book reminds me of pale version of John Perkins' Confessions of an Economic Hitman.   But it seems to focus more on the sensational than the structural forces that allow this to happen.  But both are exposés of corporate greed behind the facade of respectability. 







And finally, this last one combines two stories by Japanese writer Haruki Murakami.

I was hoping you could read the staff recommendation at the bottom, but it's too small.  It basically says these two first books of Murakami have long been out of print in English, but now they are back, that they are coming of age stories for the characters, but also for Murakami.

I found this note on his beautiful website:

In 1978 Murakami was in the bleachers of Jingu Stadium watching a baseball game between the Yakult Swallows and the Hiroshima Carp when Dave Hilton, an American, came to bat. According to an oft-repeated story, in the instant that he hit a double, Murakami suddenly realized that he could write a novel. He went home and began writing that night.

A bookstore is a little like an airport - each gate offering you a different destination.  Except a bookstore offers an overwhelming number of options.  I bought two books.  Americanah,  a novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a Nigerian-American.  The other is The Larouse Book of Bread, by Éric Kayser.  It's time to take my bread making to another level.  Can I bake 50 different kinds of bread in the next year?  That would be nearly one a week.  Maybe I should aim for 25.  After all, I may want to repeat some of the best ones. 

1965-1975

Portland had me back in 1966 through about 1970 as we reminisced about Peace Corps training and our time in Thailand together, plus what we've all been doing since.

So, it's appropriate, as we get back to Anchorage, I go back, tonight, to 1965-19 75 in Anchorage at Cyrano's for "From earthquake devastation to Boom Town in a madcap ten years!"  The email I got implies Steve Heimel and Johanna Eurich are involved in this week's production.

I bet it doesn't include my first visit to Anchorage in August 1967 as our Peace Corps group's last American stop was in Anchorage.  A bunch of us had found out that if you had a ticket from Chicago to Bangkok, you could stop on the West Coast free and we didn't plan to spend our last three days in DeKalb, Illinois (nothing against DeKalb, but we seen enough corn growing during our training and those on the West Coast wanted a stop home.)

Photo from Alaska Airlines

I don't remember the flight between LA and Seattle, but the Alaska Airlines plane I boarded in Seattle was all decked out as a Gay '90s saloon - flocked red wall paper, stewardesses (they were all women back then) in floor length red velvet skirts, and there was a piano on board with live music.  [Warning:  this weekend comparing memories reminded me that mine is selective, but this picture from a story about the promotion does give some validation to my brain cells.)

I got to Anchorage at 6 am and was picked up by Bob D., a high school friend, who was stationed at Elmendorf.   He dropped me back at the airport to catch the Northwest flight to Tokyo where we overnighted and bought cameras.  There was another stop in Hong Kong - just the airport this time - and then to Bangkok.  And yesterday I posted the group picture of us just after we arrived.

I remember how totally green Anchorage was and the beautiful mountains, and I recall being told "Here's the university" and seeing nothing but trees.  So when there was an opening at UAA when I was finishing my degree, I was delighted to get the offer and we drove up in 1977 - just outside tonight's decade.


So, 7pm at Cyrano's.  Tonight is the last night of this decade.

More information on all this is here.

Fiinding Flowers In Paper Napkins

A man with scraps of white paper and flower sculptures was sitting at the table J picked for our breakfast at Powell's bookstore.  We made eye contact and he slipped off his ear buds as I asked about the paper.  Napkins. His name is Arnold Drake World.  It's been twelve years figuring this all out.   It's all math now, Fibonacci sequences.



Here's Arnold Drake World's website.   He also seems to have gotten pretty good press coverage here in Portland.  For example this video at the Oregonian.

Aside from the cheerful twinkle in his eye, I was caught up by his seeing in paper napkins a world of sculpted flowers.  What latent worlds all around us are just waiting to be discovered and brought to life?

Peace Corps Reunion Portland

This is just a quick filler post.  My Peace Corps group is together for the second time since our official tour of duty ended in 1969 (though some of us stayed a third year and others lingered in the Peace Corps or in Thailand other capacities).  I did manage a break yesterday morning - the hotel has bikes for guests to use - and road along the river and some old routes from when we lived here in Portland in 2003. 


It took me a bit to figure out what Greenland was, but I stopped to snap a picture of Alaska's future.  I think Oregon's ahead on this because they've had more organized medical marijuana sales.

I really haven't had my camera out that much.  I've been enjoying reuniting with old friends, some whom I haven't seen in close to 50 years as well as meeting their equally interesting partners. 


And we're living out the reality of how unreliable memory is.  Some of us remember things that no one else does.  Others remember some parts of our training and others don't recall them at all. 






We talked in the bar, at breakfast, on the shuttle, at the Japanese garden.







Here's a sloppy group picture from our dinner Saturday night.  Some folks are totally recognizable after all these years and others not at all. 

There's a few more than half of the original group who went to Thailand to teach English together in 1967. 

And this morning a bike event is happening outside our hotel window.  I haven't had time to process all this.  Maybe there will be more later. 

Beatrice Does Leather - Your Imagination Is The Limit

As we pushed the stroller to the park yesterday we passed lots of little shops, but one particularly caught my eye.  It had stunning purses on beautiful stands.  Not many.  But exquisite.  I thought, "How much must each one cost to have a store here in San Francisco with just a small selection?"  So I went in to check.

A woman came out from the back, and I noticed there were people back there working.  They actually made the items (there was more than purses) right here.  We started talking about the shop and the process of making these purses.  (The description below is from both our talk and her brochure.)


Beatrice (or Bea) Amblard is from Paris.  She got an apprenticeship at Hermes after finishing a course at the Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Paris.  Hermes sent her to their new San Francisco boutique in 1987.  After 14 years at Hermes, she went on her own and started April In Paris.




She's also added a school to pass on the centuries old traditions of leather work that she has learned. I understood that she has students who have some difficulties (such as dyslexia) in regular school.  That makes perfect sense to me, because I believe we force everyone into an academic track even though some, perhaps many, would be much better off in some other track, where they use other than academic skills.

Each work is unique.  She said she interviews customers to find out about their lifestyle and how they would use the item that will be made.  Each item should fit perfectly into the customers' lives.  Bea was passionate about her art and what she does.




This doesn't come cheap, of course.  There are lots of hours put into each item.  And she uses only the best materials.  The red alligator purse I pointed to (in the photo above) was the most expensive (of course that was the one I picked) at $15,000.  A bit out of my range.  But San Francisco has lots of people with plenty of discretionary income.  (And lots with none as well.)  And there are customers coming from the April In Paris website as well:  And she sees these as pieces of art, not disposable consumer items.

Her trademark is a play on her name Bea.  And it's on all the pieces. 


I enjoyed talking to her and I only thought to pull out the video late in the process and the rest of my party had gone off to the park so I felt I needed to go.  But here's the short video I made.  While I'm a little amused by most of the cutesy, high end coffee shops and other pretension stores, I felt that this was the real thing.  This was someone maintaining an old craft, maintaining it at the level of an art form and was able to make a living doing it.


Do go visit the website.  There are lots of examples of the work.

And also visit the website for the school.  When she talked about passing on what she has learned to the next generation and preserving the art form that has survived centuries, I thought about the school in the temple in Luang Prabang where monks were taught the skills  [bottom of the post] that would allow them to maintain the art in the many temples in that ancient Lao capital.




'Your imagination is the limit . .'

So is your pocket book, which for most of us won't be made by Bea and her team. But it's ok.  People who buy these things are preserving an old art form. 

San Francisco Shots

There are lots of flowers and greens growing surrounded by cement.  Childhood memories always bring a smile when I see a blooming agapanthus.













This building commands attention.  It's an auto repair shop today.  Fortunately the address is prominent and I was able to find out more about this building.

From part of the description of this building at 3536 Sacramento in The Early Public Garages in San Francisco : 1906 - 1929 - An Architectural and Cultural History by Mark D. Kessler:

"As at Pine Street, all of the implied displacements - both vertical and horizontal - serve to highlight the most vacuous but important part of the facade  - the entrance.  Other facades of brick box garages celebrate entrance through the use of a singular, summary gesture - an arched portal beneath a gabled parapet.  By contrast, the designer of this facade pursues a fine-grained regulation of proportion, composition and motif in order to achieve this end.  This facade is remarkable for the aggregation of small-scale brick details into a unified composition that represents a simple cross-section.  The brick detailing is charming and varied, dense and delicate.  Small-paned windows, gauged brick lintels, corralled verticals, and basket-weave infill impart to this facade a surprisingly convincing residential character.  Located on a shopping street in a residential neighborhood, this building is contextual and striking."

And according to Yelp,  Leonard at Botta's auto shop's service is a good as the architecture.  This review reflects the positive experiences noted in all the other comments, though this one's prose is a little more creative:

"Got my bumper fixed here after a neighbor disregarded my car's personal space. Communication, scheduling, and drop off/pick up was easy and efficient. They communicated with my insurance (USAA) and the rental car place (Enterprise) and I didn't have to worry about a thing.

Picked it up and had a  beautiful fresh bumper (and a clean car- which was an awesome surprise). Unfortunately, another neighbor (I'm assuming it wasn't the same neighbor - that'd be really bad car-ma) must have gotten jealous, because the next morning, there were more scratches :( Ugh, my car is looking forward to moving out of the city.

Anyway, I let Leonard know and since he had leftover paint from my car that was still useable, he had me come by and he touched it up for free, which I REALLY appreciated. Would definitely recommend taking your car here. Great customer service."

The Civic Center BART station.

Jane cafe and bakery.

This was at a driveway at a fitness center.

The doors at the Central Seventh Day Adventist.

I'll do another post on April in Paris where I took this picture.  This is a preview.  Do you see the bee?