The Long Day Coming Home

Got to take my granddaughter to the playground this morning before leaving.  We had a long discussion about schools - there's elementary school, middle school, and high school, then college I told her.  She told me she goes to pre-school, but when she's older she'll go to elementary school.

Then we walked her to pre-school and went on to catch the ferry.  I always marvel at the mental distance the 35 minute ferry ride takes me.

Bainbridge is heavily wooded and semi rural - though lots of houses are hidden behind the trees.  A fake wilderness.  But this was the view from the ferry leaving the island.

Half an hour later, the weather was different and we were pulling into downtown Seattle with its big buildings and homeless street people.

But crossing water is almost always good for the soul.

We scooted our suitcases up the hill to the train to the airport where we spent more time than we expected.  Our plane was an hour late leaving.  Our plane came into Seattle from San Francisco 45 minutes after we were supposed to take off.  Our flight out of San Francisco last week to Seattle was an hour late too.

But it was about five Seattle time when we took off and circled back over Puget Sound.

It was cloudy much of the way and I had stuff to work on.  But I looked out and big white mountains were peeking through the clouds.

It kept getting clearer.  This is a massive glacier with icebergs floating in the waterway in the middle.  If you click on the picture it will enlarge and focus.  I think this is the Malaspina glacier.   The Jet Propulsion Lab says

"Malaspina Glacier in southeastern Alaska is considered the classic example of a piedmont glacier. Piedmont glaciers occur where valley glaciers exit a mountain range onto broad lowlands, are no longer laterally confined, and spread to become wide lobes. Malaspina Glacier is actually a compound glacier, formed by the merger of several valley glaciers, the most prominent of which seen here are Agassiz Glacier (left) and Seward Glacier (right). In total, Malaspina Glacier is up to 65 kilometers (40 miles) wide and extends up to 45 kilometers (28 miles) from the mountain front nearly to the sea."

The picture they have shows it from further north (left).  In my picture you can't see the Seward glacier on the right

And finally the mudflats at low tide as we approach the Anchorage airport with the sun penetrating the veils of clouds.

The tug of home pulls one way and  the tug of our granddaughter (and grandson who we also got see on this trip) another.

To Know The Son, Know the Dad - So What Can We Learn From Trump's Dad?

The biblical citation below with attributions to Matthew and to Luke.

"No one truly knows the Son except the Father, and no one truly knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him."

Not quite what I had in mind, but the concept is there, even if it refers to one specific son and father.

But there are other similar beliefs scattered throughout our culture.

Attributed to Alexander Pope:

'Just as the twig is bent the tree's inclined.’

The Free Dictionary tells us about:

'Like father, like son.'

Idiomeanings offers:  [At first I thought they were trying not be sexist by offering a mother/daughter example, but since it involved shopping, I think not.]

'The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.'

There are lots of sons who have distanced themselves from their dads and worked to be exactly the opposite of them.    Psychology Today has a long article tracing the changes since the industrial revolution that have changed the relationships between the father and the son.  Fathers today have fewer connections with their sons, resulting in what the author calls "Father Hunger."

Life for most boys and for many grown men then is a frustrating search for the lost father who has not yet offered protection, provision, nurturing, modeling, or, especially, anointment. All those tough guys who want to scare the world into seeing them as men and who fill up the jails; all those men who don't know how to be a man with a woman and who fill up the divorce courts; all those corporate raiders who want more in hopes that more will make them feel better; and all those masculopathic philanderers, contenders, and controllers--all of them are suffering from Father Hunger. They go through their adolescent rituals day after day for a lifetime, waiting for a father to anoint them and treat them as good enough to be considered a man.

I think the author generalizes a lot here, and he doesn't offer any hard evidence in this essay.  But my own sense is that the love of parents - often the father - is a yearning that many men have.  They want father's approval and blessings and not getting it as they need it often plays a big role in men's lives.  They never feel truly comfortable with themselves and act out in many inappropriate ways.

What does Trump's relationship with his father tell us about this idea?

Trump's grandparents came to the US in 1885 from Germany.  Fred Trump, the father,  was born October 11, 1905 and became a real estate developer in partnership with his mother at age 22, who helped finance the company.

In 1927, sometime before his business partnership with his mother, he was arrested at a KKK and Fascist demonstration where two people were killed.  The Washington Post wrote about this after Trump claimed ignorance about David Duke and white supremacist support for Trump.  [I checked out the NY Times June 1, 1927 article* they cite, and the story, with Fred Trump's name is there.  He would have been 21 years old at the time.]

By World War II, with the US going to war against the country where his parents were born, Fred stayed in the US building barracks for soldiers among other things.  He was 35 and all men between 18 and 45 were required to sign up for the draft.  The National World War II museum site says 50 million men had registered for the draft by the end of the war and 10 million had been drafted.  I'm sure it wouldn't have been hard to make the case that his work was important for the war.

He continued to get government contracts after the war and Woody Guthry lived in one of his buildings for a time.  He wrote a song about it:

"I suppose
Old Man Trump knows
Just how much
Racial Hate
he stirred up
In the bloodpot of human hearts
When he drawed
That color line
Here at his
Eighteen hundred family project"

Wikipedia adds Justice Department findings to the accusations.

In 1973, the U.S. Justice Department's Civil Rights Division filed a civil rights suit against the Trump organization charging that it refused to rent to black people. The Urban League had sent black and white testers to apply for apartments in Trump-owned complexes; the whites got the apartments, the blacks didn't. According to court records, four superintendents or rental agents reported that applications sent to the central office for acceptance or rejection were coded by race. A 1979 Village Voice article quoted a rental agent who said Trump instructed him not to rent to black people and to encourage existing black tenants to leave. In 1975, a consent decree described by the head of DOJ’s housing division as "one of the most far-reaching ever negotiated," required Trump to advertise vacancies in minority papers and list vacancies with the Urban League. The Justice Department subsequently complained that continuing "racially discriminatory conduct by Trump agents has occurred with such frequency that it has created a substantial impediment to the full enjoyment of equal opportunity."[12]

We do have to put this in context.  At the time, housing discrimination was common everywhere.  I remember hassling my realtor uncle about not selling to blacks and his response was that he'd be in trouble with the realtors association if he did.  To his credit, he later helped get anti-discrimination practices adopted.  [My google searches can't find this quickly.  It's what he told me and he didn't make things up.  But I'm putting it on my todo list to find out more details about when Los Angeles realtors adopted anti-discrimination policies and if I can find any references to his role.]

Nevertheless, there were people who were more and people who were less aggressive about this.  The Fred Trump  example appears pretty aggressive.  (Yes, I know, I tend to understate things.)

The Wikipedia piece also tells us that

The couple [Fred Trump and his wife]  had five children: Maryanne (born 1937), a federal appeals court judge; Frederick "Fred" Jr. (1938–81); Elizabeth (born 1942), an executive assistant at Chase Manhattan Bank; Donald (born 1946); and Robert (born 1948), president of his father's property management company. Fred, Jr. predeceased his father when he died of complications of alcoholism in 1981.

The daughters seemed to do ok.  The first son would seem to have had some serious problems if he died in his forties of alcoholism.   How hard was it for Donald to get his father's positive attention?  From my own family, I know that Germans believed that kids should not be praised, that it would go their heads.  Fortunately, my father didn't follow that philosophy.

Trump seemed to act up a lot as a kid.  From another Washington Post piece:

"Before military school, Trump was famous for breaking the rules. Long before buildings would be named after him, schoolmates used the Trump name as shorthand for getting into trouble. 

"We used to refer to our detention as a 'DT' — a 'Donny Trump' — because he got more of them than most other people in the class," said Paul Onish, one of Trump's grade school classmates.

Then came military academy.  This article compares his classmates' impressions with Trump's.  As you can imagine, Trump's version is that the others lied and he was a natural leader who got a great education, even knew more about the military than people who fought in wars.

My guess is that Trump was acting out because he wasn't getting his father's approval.  Living at boarding school and then military school away from the family at such an early age does let us know that he wasn't particularly close to his parents at that time.  

The Wikipedia quote just above mentions that the youngest Trump child took over the father's business.  What does it mean that Robert, two years younger than Trump, became president of his father's company?  Wikipedia explains some of it:

In 1968 his 22-year-old son Donald Trump joined his company Trump Management Co., becoming president in 1974, and renaming it The Trump Organization in 1980. In the mid-1970s he lent his son money, allowing him to go into the real estate business in Manhattan, while Fred stuck to Brooklyn and Queens. "It was good for me," Donald later commented. "You know, being the son of somebody, it could have been competition to me. This way, I got Manhattan all to myself."[2]

Maybe that's what happened and they parted on amiable terms.  Or maybe Trump was putting a positive spin on a difficult partnership.   He does say they avoided competing.


Does birth order matter?  The research I found in a quick google search was too contradictory to base any generalizations to fourth-child-of-five Trump.


I'm not sure what conclusions we can take from this.  I haven't read Trump's book, which should give some insights even it if is full of spin.  What I've found is not inconsistent with my belief that he's still seeking dad's approval by trying to be a rich winner in the same field as his dad.  I know, his dad is dead, but he lived long enough (until 1999)  to see some of Trump's financial triumphs (and failures.)  Nor do the data prove my hypothesis.  Did Fred ever praise Donald for his achievements?  I'd guess if he did, it wasn't effusive enough or it was just too late.  Or maybe they got along well, but Fred's behaviors weren't very good models for Donald to follow.  And there are lots of other possible interpretations.

[UPDATE March 14, 2016:  It appears to me, after reading the NYTimes article Kathy mentions in the comments, that the 'bad role model' explanation may be the closest.  The article says that the oldest son just wasn't ruthless enough and Donald, who thrived on the constant criticism and sparse praise, became the favorite son.  Dad didn't like wimps and Fred Jr.'s family was written out of Fred Sr's will.]

Please take this as bits and pieces of data that may or may not point accurately at Trump's motivation.

*Since I had to sign in through the UAA library to get the article, I'm not including the link which wouldn't work on here.  But for those of you who want to check, it's June 1, 1927, page 16.  In that same issues there are stories about the Soviets spying on the Chinese, Lindberg being feted in France, a British researchers findings that blue eyed blonds tend to commit the vast majority of crimes, and that  the Yankees won both games of their double header, with Babe Ruth hitting two home runs.


I note that I've broken down and added a Trump label to this blog.

[More feedburner problems.  I thought it might just been too much html code imported when I cut and pasted, so I'm being careful about that, but it doesn't seem to matter today.]

Play Day In Seattle, Including Otter and Sturgeon

We ferried into Seattle yesterday and then bused to Volunteer Park.  First some playground time, then the conservatory.  (My camera battery was mostly dead, but came to life if I left it off, but only for a picture or two.  So no conservatory pics.)  An old high school friend met us for lunch, then we bused back downtown and to the aquarium before getting the ferry back to the island.  We had sun, rain, and in-between.  A good adventure with our granddaughter.  She's keeping us busy, so this will be short and sweet.

From the aquarium where the otters were active and close.

And in the underwater room where you have to trust the power of glass between you and the water all around you, including above, we sat and watched the sturgeon.



From the World Wildlife Fund site:

One of the oldest families of bony fish in existence, they are native to subtropical, temperate and sub-Arctic rivers, lakes and coastlines of Eurasia and North America. They are distinctive for their elongated bodies, lack of scales, and occasional great size: Sturgeons ranging from 7–12 feet (2-3½ m) in length are common, and some species grow up to 18 feet (5.5 m). Most sturgeons are anadromous bottom-feeders, spawning upstream and feeding in river deltas and estuaries. While some are entirely freshwater, very few venture into the open ocean beyond near coastal areas. 

A threatened species 

Some species of sturgeon are harvested for their roe, which is made into caviar. The late sexual maturity of sturgeon (6-25 years) makes them more vulnerable to overfishing. It is estimated that the number of sturgeon in major basins has declined by 70% over the last century. During the 1990s, the total catch was dramatically increased by unprecedented illegal harvest. Poaching activity in the Volga-Caspian basin alone is estimated to be 10-12 times over the legal limits. Further problems are caused by water pollution, damming, destruction and fragmentation of natural watercourses and habitats which affects migration routes and feeding and breeding grounds.

Standpipes - You've Seen Them, But Do You Know What They Do?

Walking San Francisco streets last weekend, I was struck by the pipes coming out of the walls of buildings.  Things I'd seen many times but never really paid much attention to.  So, camera in hand, I paid more attention.  They come in lots of varieties and they're labeled 'standpipe' or sometimes 'dry standpipe.'

From Fireking:

Wet and Dry Standpipe Systems 

Description: A Standpipe is a type of rigid water piping which is built into multi-story buildings in a vertical position, to which fire hoses can be connected, allowing manual application of water to the fire. Within buildings standpipes thus serve the same purpose as fire hydrants. Well maintained fire standpipe systems are highly reliable and provide people protection as well as property protection. Fire King Fire Protection, Inc. specializes in Inspection, Testing and Maintenance of Fire Sprinkler Systems. 

Dry standpipe: Dry standpipes fixed into buildings, the pipe is in place permanently with an intake usually located near a road or driveway so that a fire engine can supply
water to the system. The standpipe supply pipe extends into the building to supply fire-fighting water to the interior of the structure via hose outlets, often located between each floor in stairwells in high rise buildings. 

Dry standpipes are not filled with water until needed in fire-fighting. Fire fighters often bring hoses in with them and attach them to standpipe outlets located along the pipe throughout the structure. 

Wet standpipe: Wet Standpipes are filled with water and is [sic] pressurized at all times. In contrast to dry standpipes, which can be used only by firefighters, wet standpipes can be used by building occupants. Wet standpipes generally already come with hoses so that building occupants may fight fires quickly.

And after reading about the standpipes, I realized I needed to get a picture of the hoses inside a building.  Fortunately I was in a building and found the hose.

A 2007 NYTimes article, after a fatal Deutsche Bank fire, caused by bad standpipes, went on to explain standpipes and their maintenance in more detail.

"A typical standpipe system begins with the street-level connection, known as a Siamese, which is connected to pipes that run vertically or horizontally inside the building and connect to vertical pipes that run to the top of the building. The vertical pipes are what most people think of as the standpipe.
Standpipes are required in all buildings in New York City that are more than 75 feet tall, or higher than six stories, Kate Lindquist, a spokeswoman for the Buildings Department, said.
The vertical pipes, often painted red, are exposed in a building’s stairwells, and there is a connection on each floor to which firefighters can hook up hoses.
Water, and water pressure, are supplied by the Fire Department. When there is a fire in a building equipped with a standpipe system, the first engine company to arrive connects a hose to the nearest hydrant and another to the Siamese connection in front of the building, according to Firefighter Jim Long, a department spokesman. The pumper boosts the pressure of the water being fed from the hydrant to the Siamese and then to the vertical standpipe."

It also says standpipes were first used in New York City.

". . . standpipes originated in New York City about the time of the Civil War, along with sprinkler systems, 'as buildings grew taller and as the philosophy of firefighting evolved.' Before that time, he explained, 'most fires were fought from the outside.'”

"Writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows."

“I went into the street with the cup in my hand. A slight feeling of unease arose within me at seeing it out here, the cup belonged indoors, not outdoors; outdoors, there was something naked and exposed about it, and as I cross the street I decided to buy a coffee at the 7-Eleven the following morning, and use their cup, made of cardboard, designed for outdoor use, from then on.”

We get seemingly meaningless details like the passage above. Bits of thoughts and actions of My Struggle author Karl Ove Knausgaard come in seemingly random detail, or is it random? How does one figure this out and pin it down? Is this the masterpiece some say or a loose rambling with occasional bits of interest? Is this a lazy self-indulgent soap opera, or  has he found a way to illuminate the depth of humanity through his intense, intimate autobiographical novel?

[An aside:  As an Alaskan, it’s comfortable to be in Knausgaard’s Swedish environment of winter snow and dark, summer lush and endless light, all the more so because the northern latitudes are such a rare fictional setting.]

The passage above does go somewhere. With his coffee in hand he describes the details he sees from his new office in suburban Stockholm, then pulls back to put those details into the perspective of the perpetual ebb and flow of people in the city.

“On the school playground that lay squashed between two blocks of flats twenty meters up from my office the shouts of children suddenly fell quiet, it was only now that I noticed. The bell had rung. The sounds here were new and unfamiliar to me, the same was true of the rhythm in which they surfaced, but I would soon get used to them, to such an extent that they would fade into the background again. You know too little and it doesn’t exist. You know too much and it doesn’t exist. Writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows. That is what writing is about. Not what happens there, not what actions are played out there, but the there itself. There, that is writing’s location and aim. But how to get there?”  [Emphasis added.]

The writer is asking himself these questions as he observes the waves of people and vehicles flowing in and out of the streets and offices and restaurants and schools and shops as the sun itself shifts its rays from one side to the other.

“So strictly regulated and demarcated was life here that it could be understood both geometrically and biologically. It was hard to believe that this could be related to the teeming, wild, and chaotic conditions of other species, such as the excessive agglomerations of tadpoles or fish spawn or insect eggs where life seemed to swarm up from an inexhaustible well. But it was. Chaos and unpredictability represent both the conditions of life and its decline, one impossible without the other, and even though almost all our efforts are directed toward keeping decline at bay, it does not take more than one brief moment of resignation to be thrust into its light, and not, as now, in shadow. Chaos is a kind of gravity, and the rhythm you can sense in history, of the rise and fall of civilizations, is perhaps caused by this. It is remarkable that the extremes resemble each other, in one sense at any rate, for in both immense chaos and a strictly regulated, demarcated world the individual is nothing, life is everything. . . “

I immediately thought about how we have people today ready to abandon regulated and demarcated life and throw us into chaos.  Most Americans have never experienced a government failure - when things fall apart into chaos.  It's happening in different parts of the world all the time, right now for people in Syria, where the carefully constructed order has collapsed and people are dying and fleeing.

And the best writing draws out the essence out of the shadows, but for most it's hard to tell which essence is the true essence.

I suspect we today, as probably always, are divided into people who only see events at face value and those who see events as part of a larger pattern. And how many different patterns do the pattern seers see?  [And, of course, all such dichotomies ignore that most such characteristics lie on a continuum.  They aren't either/or.  And that people are complex, seeing patterns in some cases but not others, at some times, but not others.]

I'm only on page 200 of the first book of this six volume set, so who knows where it will go?  It was a huge hit in Norway (he's Norwegian, but lives in Sweden).

PFD Voter Registration Ballot Initiative Gives GOP One More Reason To Kill PFD

I just got an email announcement saying the Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD) voter registration initiative  would be on the August primary ballot in 2016:

"If passed by voters, PFD Voter would synchronize voter registration with the Permanent Fund Dividend application process, reducing bureaucratic paperwork and saving on processing costs. PFD Voter Registration is projected to register as many as 70,000 Alaskans to vote in the first year alone, and would fix out-of-date registration for tens of thousands more." 

But given Republican efforts to suppress voting around the country (see for instance Bill Moyers and Company's Unbeliebable GOP Statements on Voter Suppression  or Al Jazeera's Republicans use vote suppression as electoral strategy or American Prospect's Voter Suppression: How Bad? (Pretty Bad)),
Alaska GOP leaders have new incentive to just kill the PFD program altogether in their antipathy to g  to income taxes and to long term thinking.  That way they could raid the Permanent Fund and make sure it's not easy for Alaskans to register to vote.

Meanwhile, someone has a petition at iPetitions to limit PFD's to people born in Alaska and their Alaska resident spouses and children.

[Sorry, reposting because of Feedburner issues.]

YELP Lives In Old ATT Building And Other San Francisco Short Stories

View of San Francisco from the bus on a rainy morning.

The waterfall is in Yerba Buena Gardens, on the way to the children's museum.  Yerba Buena, it turns out, was the name of the Mexican town in Alta California where San Francisco sits now.


The building in the center, with the flag on top, is the old Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Building, and now houses YELP.


From Marketwatch:

Unlike the sanitized office parks that Silicon Valley is famous for, Yelp’s new offices are in one of San Francisco’s earliest skyscrapers, a relic of the building boom of the Roaring ’20s. The 26-story Art Deco building was once owned by Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Co., or PT&T, one of the Baby Bell subsidiaries of AT&T Inc. The building, now named for its address, 140 New Montgomery, was designed by the well-regarded local architect Timothy Pflueger. Like an early version of Google Inc.’s /quotes/zigman/59527964/composite GOOG -0.21% Googleplex, Pacific Telephone developed ways to keep its employees inside the building, with a cafeteria for employees — most of whom were women — and an auditorium for special events, lectures, parties, bridal showers and exercise classes.
The Bell system logo remains above the front entrance to 140 New Montgomery, a reminder that Yelp’s headquarters was once home to Pacific Telephone & Telegraph. “We are kind of the new Pac Bell or AT&T,” said John Lieu, director of real estate and facilities for Yelp.
Today, the business-review site, which has been growing steadily but losing money since it was founded in 2004, occupies nine floors in the recently reopened building. The high-rise had been unoccupied since AT&T /quotes/zigman/398198/composite T -0.16% , which ended up merging with SBC and the vestiges of Pacific Bell/Telesis), moved out in 2007. The current owners, developers Wilson Meany and Stockbridge Capital Partners, bought the iconic building in 2008 for $118 million, with that price including a nearby parking garage. Initially, the developers planned to convert the building to a residential condominium, but the recession and financial crisis put those plans on ice.

The contrast between the very wealthy and the very poor is particularly visible in San Francisco.  Right near high end stores, you see homeless folks.

And not far from this Prada window was this wedding dress window.

I ran into Brian when he was yelling into a doorway that he had a 2004 BA as we walked passed.  He saw me and explained something about a a college sweatshirt and a woman.  He offered me his pipe and posed for this picture.

The Women's Athletic Club:

Despite the overwhelming role of women in the organization of the club (only outside consultants, lawyers and its architects were men) the members were almost always referred to in the press and in other records by their husband's names, i.e., Elizabeth Pillsbury was Mrs. Horace D. Pillsbury. Mrs. Pillsbury became the first president of the Women's Athletic Club. The core of the membership of the club was expected to come from the Social Register, but efforts were made to reach artistically trained women and working-class women. The aim of the club, as stated in 1914 in a letter sent to prospective members, was "educational first and recreation and pleasure afterwards." Elizabeth Pillsbury reached out to working women and girls by creating another athletic club, the Recreation Club for Girls Who Work, located at 507 Harrison Street, which was located in the heart of the industrial section of the city.

The site also gives some history of women and athletics in the US.

"Socially, physical education for women in America began as early as the 1820s in girls' schools, but it wasn't until the mid-19th century that widespread concerns began that the health of American women was in decline, perhaps because of the effects of urbanization and industrialization. In the 1860s and 1870s, several women's colleges including Mills College in Oakland were established incorporating programs for physical training in their curriculums, including calisthenics, dancing and gymnastics. The first gymnasium for women outside of women's colleges was Miss Allen's Gymnasium for Ladies, established in Boston in 1879. In the 1890s, it became fashionable for wealthy women to engage in certain sports--golf, tennis, yachting and horseback riding. It was not until 1900 that public attitudes about athletics for women began to change, but there were still voices of opposition present. In 1905, The Women Citizen reported that former President Grover Cleveland "gravely pointed out the menace of the women's clubs" but by 1925, the social venue had changed and such statements by high politicians were rare or non-existent. While California women obtained the right to vote in 1911 in State elections, it wasn't until 1919 that women could vote in national elections."

Don't park under a mock orange tree when the flowers are about to drop off.  But the flowers smell so sweet.

It appears these steps aren't used often.

Three Salad Plate And Lentil Soup at Aicha Morrocan Cuisine

From Seattle, a quick weekend trip to San Francisco to see our grandson and his parents.  Keeping us busy, but while he was headed home for a nap, we had a chance to walk home and stopped at Aicha Moroccan Cuisine for a small lunch.

What an unexpected treat.

Here's J's salad, so much more spectacular than I expected.

That's peppers and onions and I'm not sure what else on the left.  Eggplant on the right.  I feel sorry for folks who, for whatever reason, won't try eggplant.  It's such a treat when cooked right.

My lentil soup was superb.  Such a mix of flavors and textures, and the lemon was perfect in it.





And J had tea which was poured from a foot above the cup.  That picture didn't turn out that well, so here's the teapot and the empty tea cup.

And the warm bread right out of the oven.

Just a small family restaurant that looked promising.  If only other promises were so well fulfilled.

The server was wonderful, they had great music, and the other folks were also enjoying their food.


If you're in San Francisco, it's at Bush and Polk.  Like stepping into another world for lunch.

Does Tom Anderson Deserve A New Trial?

Tom Anderson was the first legislator to be convicted in the trials that eventually led to the conviction of US senator Ted Stevens (which was later voided over how the prosecutors handled evidence.)

His attorney was Paul Stockler.  Today's Alaska Dispatch News says Stockler faces possible jail time for not paying over $800,000 in back taxes.  His problems began in earnest in 2006.  He defended Tom Anderson in 2007.  It appears that he was severely distracted when he was defending Anderson.  From the ADN:

"Stockler said that in 2006, the first tax year at issue, he had a lot on his mind. He had been divorced the year before. He was sharing custody of his daughter. He was the lead lawyer in the federal weapons case and other big and complex cases. He was getting notices regarding his 2005 taxes and used that uncertainty as an excuse to delay filing in 2006, then missed one deadline after another, he said in a statement filed in court. 

“I was overwhelmed and felt helpless in dealing with my personal financial obligations beyond immediate living concerns,” he said in a statement filed in court for his sentencing. 

Late in 2006, things got worse when he had to pay back the $1 million through the bankruptcies of Avery and Avery’s Security Aviation company, he said. He didn’t have the money for that and his taxes, he said. “I was embarrassed to admit to anyone that, even though I was a successful attorney, I failed to manage my own life and timely file my tax returns,” Stockler wrote. Mostly, he said, he was disappointed in himself over the kind of example he set for his daughter."

Would Tom Anderson have knowingly hired an attorney who was so overwhelmed with his personal finaciancal problems, his divorce, and taking care of his kid?  Did he give Anderson the best legal defense possible under those circumstances?  (Should attorney's be required to disclose such distractions?  You know that isn't going to happen, and it would be hard to oversee, but when we go to restaurants, we get to see their health department ratings.}

I attended the Anderson trial in summer 2007.  It was my fist real blogging of a public news story.  Here's a post from near the end of the trial that gives some sense of things. Tom had been one of my students and I wanted to see for myself.  Tom made mistakes, but ultimately he was convicted of violating a law that neither he nor most other people even knew existed.  A law that the FBI knew well.  They constructed a sting operation that had all the elements required by the law - a public official, $10,000, and a few other details.   They had Frank Prewitt offer to take out $10,000 in ads in a public policy website Anderson and Bill Bobrick were planning to create.  It would have insider public policy info and people would subscribe to it.   The website never got set up and the prosecutors said it was just a ruse.  But defense convinced me that it was a serious idea, but that Bobrick and Anderson just never got to it, as they never got to other business ideas they had.  But the prosecutors argued the website was just a cover to get Tom $10,000,   The $10.000 is important because its the minimum the law requires for a conviction,  Tom also spoke at a public meeting without disclosing an interest he had in Prewitt's private prison company, though he spoke positively about its competitor as well.  Prewitt went after Anderson, a sitting legislator, trying to get him to do something they could get him on.  Then they wanted him to wear a wire to entrap his fellow legislators.  While Anderson at first agreed, when it came time to go down to Juneau, he didn't feel he could secretly spy on his fellow legislators.  And because he had the moral strength to not spend the session lying to his colleagues, he got the stiffest sentence of all.  That's pretty much what Tom Anderson was sentence to prison for five years over.  (He got off after three years.)

Now his attorney at the time, who, the ADN story tells us, used questionable money from a shady client (whose new trial on misusing $51 million of a trust he was overseeing, is happening right now) and squandered $3 million of it making online stock bets.  And then didn't pay his taxes.

Now, it's possible that Stockler did give Anderson a good defense.  It's what he does well and may have been his escape from all his other problems.  But surely, he would have done a better job if he wasn't distracted by all his person problems.  And he lost the case.

And now Stockler is facing up to two years in prison over $800,000 in back taxes, while Tom was convicted to five years for a $10,000 contribution, he never asked for, to a business that never got off the ground.  Really a technicality.  Many lawyers have told me since, that Tom's penalty was severe as a warning to the other indicted lawmakers so they would cooperate with the FBI and help them catch the bigger fish, Ted Stevens and his son Ben, who never went to trial.

And fellow lawyers are coming to Stockler's defense.  More from the ADN:

"Cabot Christianson, an Anchorage attorney, was on the other side in the Avery bankruptcy case. The settlement of $1.1 million “was an extraordinary sum for a solo practitioner,” Christianson wrote. “While Paul may be a victim of hubris, he is far, far away from being evil, greedy, malicious, or otherwise deserving of severe punishment,” Christianson wrote. Attorney Tim Petumenos said Stockler has been his adversary in court too, yet “his word is gold.” Stockler is hard on himself over his tax troubles and isn’t trying to evade the consequences, Petumenos wrote. Stockler often represents physicians facing medical malpractice complaints or licensing issues. One supporter called him a 'champion of doctors.'”

Lots of generally decent people commit stupid crimes.  They make mistakes, they were at the wrong place at the wrong time, they help friends they shouldn't even be friends with.  They are convicted for that crime, even though it's an aberration.  The Fairbanks Four were convicted that way for a crime they didn't even commit - they were nearby.  But even then, they were pressured into an agreement that would ignore all the misconduct by the court system that got them into prison. But they weren't rich and they weren't white.  Last year we heard story after story of young black men who were tried and convicted on the streets by white (and some non-white) police officers.  They weren't give a chance to have character witnesses speak out for them.  

This is not to say that anyone is better off by Stockler going to prison.  It might be much wiser to come up with sentences where he can use is legal talents to help indigent suspects.  Or to work on justice reforms so 'good' people who make mistakes are treated in ways that help them and society.  Or work for a social system that doesn't condemn some kids to awful childhoods where the odds of them running afoul of the law are very high.

And I doubt Anderson would want to go back to court and drag up all this again in a new trial.  He's served his time and moved on with his life.   But he sure would like his name cleared.

But I thought this was a good opportunity to remind people once again about the unfairness of our justice system.  We've been hearing about innocent people of color running tragically afoul of the law a lot.  This is a reminder of well off white men whose 'good character' an be seen by judges and it helps lessen their sentences.   We should be working for a better system overall which a) prevents kids from getting into crime in the first place and b) offers restorative justice options  c) find resolutions that are less costly to society and the families of victims and perpetrators, d) work to rehabilitate rather than punish criminals, and finally, doesn't throw the convicted into prisons where they are subject to more abuse by other prisoners and guards.  

I'd also note that Frank Prewitt, who made the $10,000 offer to Anderson and Boric, using FBI money, was  cooperating with the FBI because of his ties to the head of a private prison who himself was later convicted and sent to prison.  Stockler raised questions in court about a $30,000 loan to Prewitt, when he was the commissioner of corrections, by the private prison company, Allvest.  Money Prewitt never paid taxes on.  Now I understand why Stockler thought of that angle since he was figuring out how to pay taxes on money that appears not that much different from what Prewitt got.

Prewitt, despite denials at Anderson's trial, was paid $200,000 for his work as the prosecutor's witness.   Without Prewitt, Anderson never would have committed the crime he was convicted of, nor would have have been convicted.

Just thought it was a good idea to think about our justice system this morning.

Graffiti On Steroids

This takes graffiti to a whole new level from blublu.



Great idea and lots of work.  Here's BluBlu's blogblog.