The Future Of Tipping - Every Solution Has Unintended Consequences

But that doesn't mean we should just stop and take things as they are.

I started thinking seriously about tipping when we had breakfast in Talkeetna last May.  I read this sign and as we left, without leaving a tip, I mentioned the policy to the person taking our payment.  Who then started talking about some of the side effects.  For one thing, I asked about the legal obstacles to tipping mentioned in the sign.  (I think that was part of what held up this post - I didn't have much internet access when we were at Denali and didn't want to spend on legal research.)

Basically he said that they went to this policy - abolishing tips and raising prices - because only the wait staff could legally benefit from tips, and they didn't think that was fair.  Some of the issues he brought up included:

1. The serious loss of income for the best servers.  People here on vacation or for climbing often have a lot of money and will tip a good server quite a bit, so when the policy was announced - after discussing it with everyone, if I recall right - some went to other restaurants were they could earn a lot more money through tips.  
2. They had to raise prices to pay everyone minimum wage without tips.  I get that, but I also figured the difference wasn't that great and was probably what I would have paid in a tip anyway.  
3.  Not everyone left tips and those people don't feel the way I do about the raised prices.  

This was last May and I can't find the notes I wrote down so I'll stop there.  I know I did want to look into the law, but I'm guessing that after several days at Denali, this slipped from my conscious todo list.

But Sunday, two things brought tipping back to my attention.  First, I got a thank you note for a tip I put into my check for a year of the Anchorage Daily News.  Our news carrier leaves our paper right  at our doorstep every day.  She doesn't throw it into the bushes or two steps from our door.  It's right there.  I can open the door barefoot and lean down and pick it up.  This is particularly appreciated in the winter.  How much should one tip a mail carrier?  My decision wasn't so much thinking about what she is paid, but more about saying, "Even though I've never seen you, I want you to know that I appreciate your great service."  Apparently I tipped her more than most others because she wrote the thank you.  Maybe it's just her route isn't full of fancy homes with high income earners.

She also noted in her thank you  - which was taped to the orange plastic bag the paper comes in - her appreciation that I was the only one of her customers who recycles the plastic bags.  I called the ADN once and asked about that, and they said to leave them outside and the carrier will pick them up.  Since then, I've been stuffing the new bag each day into one of the bags until the bag is
full.  Then I leave it out on the front steps - secured so it doesn't blow away - and in the morning it's gone.  I mention this so others who think about recycling plastic bags know you can do it this way.  (And the Assembly recently passed a law banning plastic bags at stores, but not for newspaper delivery.)  I'm not sure how they reuse the bags - since I'm sure it's easier to pull one off a role than to try to retrieve them out of a used bag, but knowing she thought that was a good thing and not a pain in the neck, was also positive.

Finally,  a Washington Post article reprinted  in the ADN Sunday about tipping and getting rid of tipping by requiring restaurants and hotels to pay the minimum wage not counting the tips.  It doesn't deal with the issue of losing servers (which wouldn't happen if a law were passed instead of one restaurant voluntarily making that decision).  Here's one snippet that I wanted to push back on a bit:

"Customers shouldn’t have to subsidize an employee’s wages through their tips, whether they’re ordering a pizza or taking a white-water rafting trip. And now, finally, it looks like we’re slowly reaching the point where we agree: This can’t go on."

My quibble here is the phrase "subsidize an employee's wages."  I'd argue we're subsidizing the owner's profit.  After all, the owner should be paying a fair wage.  And our tips, as important as they are, don't pay for health care or retirement.  And I want to acknowledge I know there are differences between small family owned restaurants and large corporate chain restaurants.

Of course, this is should all be in the larger context of the laws and customs that favor the educated and wealthy in ways that increase the gap between the very wealthy and everyone else, and our continued clinging to the morality of the Protestant work ethic to blame the poor for their poverty and assuage any guilt the wealthy have (since they deserve it for their assumed hard work.)

And I'll try to check on the Alaska laws about tipping to see how that fits in.

How Did Chagrin Falls Get Its Name?

A blog visitor from Chagrin Falls, Ohio looked at the post  What Do I Know?: Horsetail: One Person's Weed is Another Person's Scouring Pa.  I couldn't help thinking, "How did it get named Chagrin?" So I looked up Chagrin Falls and a Wikipedia article told me about the Chagrin River - and has beautiful pictures.  But it didn't really tell me about the name.  That I found at a blog -Midwest Guest - (whose last post was November 2017), which had a post that addressed my question.  The blogger stopped at the sign because

"The sign immediately sparked my curiosity. I love waterfalls, but more importantly in this case, I remembered Chagrin Falls as the title of a tune by Canadian rockers, The Tragically Hip. I couldn’t help turning off onto the side road where the arrow pointed me to see the infamous Chagrin Falls."

That's something I would do.  And the first thing that came to mind was going to  see Wichata Falls, because of Pat Metheny's "As Wichata Falls, So Falls Wichtata Falls." (A great, great piece of music.)  But I've never seen a sign for Wichita Falls. Later in the post, she* tells us about the name.

"The historical marker at the falls says the Chagrin River drew its name from a French trader named Francois Seguin, who traded with Native Americans in northeast Ohio during the mid-1700s. The Chagrin Falls Historical Society offers a couple of other possible explanations for the name, but says the most accepted story is that the name represents a corrupted and Americanized version of trader Seguin’s name."

Here's the Pat Metheny piece.  I remember exactly where I was when I first heard it (though not exactly what year).  Just leave it on in the background.  It goes on and on.  Good speakers help with this one.





 You can go to the Midwest Guest blog to hear Chagrin Falls.

I tried to leave a comment  at Midwest Guest to thank the blogger, but comments are closed on that blog.  So I have to do it here.  Thanks!  We share the same sort of curiosity it seems.

*I first wrote 'he', not because I default to he, but because I somehow felt it was a he.  But I decided I should check and it turns out - from what I could tell - that the blogger is a she.  I love to have my assumptions proven wrong.  It makes me more careful about making assumptions.

And speaking of assumptions, Wichita Falls is NOT in Kansas.  It's in Texas.

Weekend Reading - IRS Tax Help & School Choice; 'Kavanaugh's Cabal'; 5000 Year Old Meds

A few things I've read in the last couple of days you might find interesting or alarming.


1.  From an LA Times article titled, "Some small business owners could avoid cap on state and local tax deduction after IRS clarifies new rules"

"Small business owners could avoid a new federal limit on state and local tax deductions after the Internal Revenue Service said Wednesday that rules it released last month to prevent efforts in California and other states to circumvent the cap apply only to individuals. 

Businesses will be allowed to claim a full federal tax deduction for contributions to charities or government programs — particularly those offering school choice scholarships — that offer state tax credits, the IRS said."

Betsy DeVos is an example of how Trump has put people in charge of agencies who are ideologically opposed to the missions of the agencies.  I learned about the national right wing organizations pushing for 'parental rights' when I covered the hearings, led by current Alaska gubernatorial candidate Dunleavy.  Dunleavy's mantra was 'parental rights.'  It's code for destroying public schools, money for charter schools, home schooling, and other ways to funnel public education funds into private hands running private schools.  So here we have an attempt by the Trump administration to punish high tax states (because their people care about good government services) by eliminating the federal tax deductions for state and local taxes.  Well, that was part of the tax cut legislation.  But now they're saying, well, that's only for individuals.  Businesses are exempt, especially if they support 'school choice' - a buzzword for charter and other private schools.

Alaskans - better get lots of people voting in November so that Dunleavy comes in second, or better yet, third.



2.  David Brock: I knew Brett Kavanaugh during his years as a Republican operative. Don't let him sit on the Supreme Court.

"Brett and I were part of a close circle of cold, cynical and ambitious hard-right operatives being groomed by GOP elders for much bigger roles in politics, government and media. And it’s those controversial associations that should give members of the Senate and the American public serious pause. 

Call it Kavanaugh's cabal: There was his colleague on the Starr investigation, Alex Azar, now the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Mark Paoletta is now chief counsel to Vice President Mike Pence; House anti-Clinton gumshoe Barbara Comstock is now a Republican member of Congress. Future Fox News personalities Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson were there with Ann Coulter, now a best-selling author, and internet provocateur Matt Drudge."

At one time or another, each of them partied at my Georgetown townhouse amid much booze and a thick air of cigar smoke.

I did look Brock up before posting this. This piece is posted at an NBC link called Think.  He wrote a book called Blinded by the Right and has since become a Democratic 'operative.'
James Fallows is a journalist I've followed for many years and he's usually pretty savvy.  Here's his tweet about Brock's article.

I was a newsmag editor during the period David Brock is describing here:https://t.co/Lv5wNqOd8D

What Brock says about B Kavanaugh’s role on the Ken Starr team rings true to my experience in those days. I think most other DC journalists from that era would say something similar

— James Fallows (@JamesFallows) September 7, 2018

I was suggesting Kavanaugh was a zealot based on watching the hearings this week.  But Brock makes him out as much worse than that.  And the more recent documents the Democrats got from the Archive suggest that he lied to the Senate committee at various confirmation hearings including this one.

3.  From an Andrew Sullivan piece in New York Magazine that doesn't really tell us much more than we already know:

"This emperor has had absolutely no clothes from the very beginning. The only thing in doubt all along has been the Republican Party’s complicity.
And that complicity remains. If anything, it is intensifying. As Jim Fallows constantly points out, any single Republican senator — Sasse, Corker, Collins, Graham, Paul, Murkowski — could check this president by voting against him, on any number of issues . . "

I had tried to call Murkowski's office earlier, but the message machines was full.  This reminded me to send her an email asking her to vote no on Kavanaugh's confirmation.  You can too, here.


And for something totally different:

4.  From Science: 5000-year-old ‘Iceman’ may have benefited from a sophisticated health care system

Ötzi, the 5300-year-old “Iceman” discovered frozen in the Italian Alps in 1991, was a medical mess. His teeth were rotting, he had a bad stomach bug, and his knees were beginning to degenerate—not to mention the arrow in his back that probably killed him. Now, a new study concludes that the herbs and tattoos he seems to have used to treat his ailments may have been common around this time, suggesting a sophisticated culture of health care at this point in human history.

Help Plan The Future Of The Anchorage Library System

Alaska Room 2008 

A recent article by Charles Wohlforth discussed the loss of the Alaska room in the library - begun
by flooding when pipes burst and completed by the loss of librarians to maintain it.  It was (and still is) a great space.  But all the Alaskana stuff has been relocated in a much less usable spaces.

"A 2016 study comparing Anchorage's public libraries to other cities of comparable size showed we support them less in every category: fewer hours, books, staff, programs and material purchases. Anchorage spends less than half as much per resident on library materials as other cities.
The Alaska Room had seven dedicated staff when it opened, including an archivist and archive technician, said Merrell, who helped plan and lead it. Now the entire Loussac Library has only five professional librarians."

So here's your chance to help the library get back to its former (though never good enough) self, and perhaps a better incarnation.

Here's the planning outline.

Here's a link to the survey to help the library with their strategic planning

A Break From Politics - Campbell Creek Impressions

These photos are of Campbell Creek yesterday late afternoon, modified a bit with photoshop.

From a bridge (near Lake Otis), modified using the posterize filter.

And the same picture using Curves.  (I still use Curves experimentally - I can't really plan the effects I'm going to get.  I probably should look for some lessons online.)

And for those of you who want to see the original.

What exactly do photographers do when they manipulate pictures in programs like Photoshop?  Is this artistry or enhancement or deception?  What you get from the camera - the third picture here - doesn't exactly portray what the original was like.  Aside from the obvious cropping out - in the sense - the rest of the picture, the camera doesn't capture  the light and colors the same way the human eye does.  And, of course, different eyes and different brains see the same scene differently.

This sort of playing around(experimenting may be too pretentious here, though not if people do this more systematically) can give us ways to see things in the scene we can't see with the naked eye.  It can also hide things we might originally see - and if someone does this to deceive, then, well it should be evaluated the way one would evaluate any deception.  How serious was the deception?  To what extent should the victim have been paying more attention?  How badly was the victim(s) hurt?  Those sorts of questions.

Here's another picture of Campbell Creek further down the bike path.  This one is looking south. (The first ones were looking west).

I used the posterize filter to get this one too.

I think many, if not most photographers do some fiddling with their pictures now just to get a nicer looking picture - playing with the saturation, contrast, exposure buttons are the most obvious ways.  Cropping is basic.  But even the earliest black and white photographers played with their images in the dark room to achieve similar improvements to what they had caught on the negative.

All the images are looking down from bridges, into the sun's reflection on the water.

Kavanaugh Impressions After Two Days of Hearings

I don't know what's in Kavanaugh's head.  I can only speculate based on what I saw as he answered questions from friendly and unfriendly Senators.

1.  He's smart and has a great memory for details.  Except when he doesn't.

He was able to rattle off the numbers of different Federalist Papers and who said what within them.  For example, when Sen. Lee asks him what his Greatest Hits list of Federalist Papers.  Though his ease here is helped by the fact that he teaches classes on this topic and this was from a friendly Senator, so he may have known what the question was in advance.  (Though if that's the case, then he's also a great actor, as he seems very surprised by the question.)



 He could give details about why he decided various cases the way he did - including the facts in the cases.  He's very quick with all this.  Though as you can see in this exchange with Sen. Klobchar, he seems to be talking about facts of the case to avoid answering the question at times.  There are other examples where a Senator tries to move him along saying they've heard his answer to someone else about the context and just please answer the question.   Here's Sen. Klobuchar asking about how Kavanaugh came up with a pricing test in an anti-trust case.

But at other times, he couldn't remember at all.   As in this exchange with Sen. Harris over whether he ever talked to any attorneys at President Trump's firm.  Suddenly, this guy who could answer every detail of every case, can't remember.

CSPAN has posted the entire nearly 8-minute exchange between Kamala Harris and Kavanaugh on the Mueller probe. It is worth your time. pic.twitter.com/ezJVEuDeUK

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) September 6, 2018

Now, he says that he doesn't know all the attorneys that work at that firm and asks Sen Harris to give him a name.  She won't do that.  She clearly believes that he is just refusing to answer.  And his demeanor looks a lot like the proverbial deer in the headlights for a good part of this. In contrast to his confidence in other places.

2. Someone, please, ask him if he has ever been wrong about anything"

 At some point, I tweeted that plea. Sometimes very smart people don't realize the limits of their knowledge, and eventually I began to feel that way about Kavanaugh.  When Ted Cruz asked about what he's learned from coaching his daughter's basketball team, he basically said:
1. The importance of coaches
2. The effect you can have on people's lives
You can listen yourself.

Brett Kavanaugh on coaching his daughters' basketball team: "Coaches can have such an impact I think on building confidence." pic.twitter.com/Bff2OiQfVE

— Fox News (@FoxNews) September 6, 2018

He didn't learn anything from the girls themselves that he didn't know before. It just confirmed how much good he was doing for the girls. He didn't learn that, say,  he talked too much sometimes, that they often could do things without his help. Nothing like that.  What he learned was how important he was in their lives.

At another point, he was asked a friendly question about who his audience is when he writes decisions.  His answer was (and I couldn't find that part again now) something like - academics, law students, other judges;  that he hoped his reasoning would help them.  Again, his wisdom is so great, it will help other see the light.

Putting these two responses together with Kavanaugh's relationship with the Federalist Society, I began to think.  But here's a bit more on Kavanaugh and the Federalist Society (from Bloomberg):

"The answer [to the question about how to insure that conservatives get on the Supreme Court after Roe v Wade] was the Federalist Society, a group that has skillfully, brilliantly and patiently educated and nurtured legal conservatives from law school through their careers. Few civil society groups in U.S. history have been as effective. 

There’s nothing nefarious here. The Federalists are remarkably open and transparent. To become an insider, one simply needs to be genuinely smart and genuinely conservative. Over dozens or even hundreds of repeated interactions, mostly organized around intellectual exchange, members get to know one another well. The informal hierarchy that results informs judicial appointments, as it was always intended to do. 

Kavanaugh has long been understood to sit at the top of that informal Federalist hierarchy. Clerking for him was the most coveted job a young conservative could get right out of law school. Nearly all of Kavanaugh’s law clerks went on to clerk for the Supreme Court. That’s extraordinarily rare. Among current judges, only Merrick Garland (nominated by President Barack Obama to the Supreme Court but never voted on by the Senate) has a comparable rate of success. The point is simply that the network, from law students all the way to Supreme Court justices, understood Kavanaugh’s place and saw him as a likely future justice."

There was also some discussion of Kavanaugh meeting with the Black Student Association at Harvard and how he coaches students there on how to get into the pipeline to clerk for the Supreme Court.

3.  The Church of the Federalist Society

In some ways, you could liken the members of the Federalist Society to a group of true believers who work hard to recruit new members and train them in their conservative doctrine and teach them how to insert that doctrine into the courts so that decisions come out consistent with their conservative ideology.  (The Democrats want their take on justice  - which favors the poor and those excluded more, and favors regulation over large corporations - on the court as well, though not nearly in such an organized way, not nearly as effectively.)

So, as I got the sense that Kavanaugh really believes in how right he is about the law, and how he's a great influence on his daughters' basketball team, and how he writes his court decisions so that they will stand as lessons to other judges, law students, and legal scholars, his visits with the black students at Harvard was another part of this.  He's like a true believer who evangelizes for his cause.  While he's polite and respectful at these hearings, he's also right, in his mind, about everything.  And he's an originalist when it comes to the Constitution, just as evangelicals are literalists when it comes to the Bible.  (It appears I'm not the first, by a long shot, to make this comparison.)

There were various times when it was pointed out that Kavanaugh was pushing the law further than anyone else.  In the anti-trust case against Whole Foods for example.  And that didn't bother him at all.  Or that not only was he pushing harder, but other conservative judges took issue with him.  But he wasn't disturbed by this either.  Because he's part of an legal cult (my word, not his) that he believes will eventually fill the courts so that his interpretations will get more supporters over time.

4.  But as smart as he is, he's ruled by doctrine, not by the humans who come before the court

He was repeatedly questioned about his decision in the Garcia case - a 17 year old asylum seeker who got to the US and was detained and then found out she was pregnant.  She went through all the hoops to get an abortion in Texas where she was in custody.  But the Feds, who held her, weren't allowing the abortion.  Kavanaugh, in his dissent, wanted her to get a sponsor so she could get some counseling before having the abortion.  This despite the fact that she'd done what the law required to get around parental consent - she'd gotten cleared by a judge.  Kavanaugh argued that she still had time before the cut off point for abortions in Texas.  But he was hammered hard on this - that he'd added new hurdles for the 17 year old that weren't in the law. He offered a reference that said it was permissible. His interrogator responded, but it wasn't required by the law.  That he'd added it to her burdens here.   The key insight for me here, was how Kavanaugh was wrapped up in legal arguments, not in the extra days or weeks his preferred decision would add to the girl's agony of trying to get the abortion done and over with.  Was he still acting as a coach?  Did he see her like one of his basketball team who would benefit from his counseling?

Sen Booker also asked him about his decision on a South Carolina (I think) voter id law.  Booker gave the example of a 90 year old black veteran who had voted in a previous election but was told he wasn't registered.  He got a drivers license, got a birth certificate, and was asked for further documents, and only got registered when he held a press conference with the governor.  Again, despite a number of clear facts about race discrimination against blacks, he found - as I recall this right - no problem with the voter id law.  His defense was that the other justices found the same.  Booker tried to get Kavanaugh to see that this was no different from the poll taxes that had kept blacks from voting for decades in the South.

Again, I see more concern with clever law that will be adopted by others, than with justice and the consequences to actual human beings.  The legal evangelist spreading the gospel.   That, of course is the positive interpretation.  The negative interpretation would be that he had no problem with the voter id law because it would exclude likely Democratic voters.

I'd note also that another Democratic senator suggested that Kavanaugh's dissent on the Garcia abortion case was what caused him to be added to the Supreme Court nominee list after being left out of two previous lists.  It was argued (I'm using the passive voice here because I can't remember which Senator it was) that his dissent was a signal that he was amenable to Trump's promise to appoint a judge who would repeal Roe v Wade.

5.  Republicans loading Court while they can

With the blocking of the appointment of Merrick Garland for nine months and now the rush to get Kavanaugh approved before the November election - despite the fact that the committee hasn't gotten all the documents that had been asked for.*  Another senator pointed out that Kavanaugh had warned against hasty judicial decisions, but that this hasty decision (the confirmation) wasn't being delayed.  I suspect that Kavanaugh will be approved.  If he isn't, the Republicans could possibly approve someone before new Senators come on board in December, but it would be much harder.  But that assumes that the Democrats can gain a majority in the Senate, which is not a certainty, though the president is doing his best to make that happen.

*There was plenty of party-line debate on this.  The Republicans claiming they got all they needed and the Democrats saying, but there's still more that has been withheld in an unprecedented (for a supreme court confirmation hearing) claim of executive privilege.  And that they'd only gotten the 400,000 (or some such number) pages of documents the night before.  Though one of the Republicans suggested that data technology could help them get through it all in an hour or so. (I'm not sure if he said an hour, but it was a very short time.)

6.  Some impressive women and people of color in the Senate

Amy Klobuchar was knowledgable, tactful, and thorough.
Cory Booker was able to ask difficult questions with respect, but also with persistence.
Kamala Harris and Mazie Hirono took no crap.  They were tough and didn't apologize for their aggressive questions.  My impression was that they are US Senators now and they're not going to allow anyone treat them in any way except as full equals.  And their performances probably help confirm the idea that people of color and women have to be twice as good as white males to get where they are.
That's not to say that white male Senators like Whitehorse  and Durbin weren't also firm interrogators.

I don't claim to know what Kavanaugh's thinking.  I can only speculate based on how he answered questions in the first two days of his confirmation hearings and my ability to interpret such behavior.  But I offer this as one way to interpret all this.  I'm going to post this now, but I'll proof it again tomorrow morning.  (Well, it's 2 hours into the morning already.)


[I tried to embed these videos from C-SPAN, but Blogger is embedding my Blog Banner instead, so I'm giving you links to the videos at C-SPAN.  I was able to embed some Tweets that had videos in them.]

BlacKKKlansman and Crazy Rich Chinese - Rediscovering Going Out To See Movies

Last Tuesday, it was rainy and I suggested we go see BlacKKKlansman.  The theater isn't far, but it was raining, but worse we fooled around and didn't have time to walk.  And when we got there, the lines were long.  But when we got to the front we were surprised that the tickets on Tuesday were only $5.75.  And then, inside, the seats were leather-like recliners.  Hmmmm, the theater wants to woo us away from Netflix.  Or at least to share some of our Netflix time.

BlacKKKlansman's - that's getting to be a hassle to type out - biggest draw was that it was a Spike Lee movie.  But I have to say it was basically a slick detective flick, but with a black point of view.  And the ending - with the scenes that yelled out:  Hey, this is relevant today - look, here's David Duke being pals with Trump - were not great film making, but I understand Lee's feeling that his point might be over people's heads.  At least the people who needed his message.

Tonight we walked over and saw "Crazy Rich Chinese".  I've following EJR David's discussions of Filipino and other brown Asians being the hidden Asians, lost in the word Asian.  And here you can read  a Singaporean writer of Gujarati descent view of how darker skinned Singaporeans are depicted in the movie.  The debate over what any specific movie needs to cover - especially when it represents people not normally represented in Hollywood - is to be expected.  No one can make a film that represents everyone the way the want to be represented.  The idealist answer is to let each filmmaker make tell their own story.  But that assumes others have access to make a film and gain major distribution of it.  After all, "Crazy Rich Chinese" is one of the few Hollywood movies to have such a predominantly Chinese cast.  How do the various Indian groups, the Arabs, and Peranakan gain access to Hollywood resources to tell their stories?

I hope Trump skips this movie.  It makes him look like a low-rent developer, and that might piss him off and lead to a war with Singapore.  And as Trump starts to realize that his Singaporean meeting with Kim Jun-un was big win for Kim and a big loss for Trump . .   I'll leave that to your imaginations.

[UPDATE Sept 5:  A reader emailed to point out that the name of the movie is "Crazy Rich Asians".  Yes, of course.  But I was trying to call people's attention to EJR David's criticism that it's not about "Asians" but about Chinese, and that the term Asians often means East Asians, not darker skinned Asians like Filipinos and Indians and Pakistanis and Bangladeshis.  ]

No, No, No - Bill Walker's Not A Progressive - Confusing Rational For Progressive - Updated

This was in a letter to the editor Sunday in the Anchorage Daily News (ADN):

"Instead, the three-way race pits two progressives against each other, encouraging them to battle it out between themselves while the conservative has no real opponent."

The Republican Party has been mean and nasty and obstructionist and focused on narrow partisan hardball tactics, particularly since  Obama was elected.  (Of course, it has nothing to do with race, wink, wink.)  A prime example was McConnell's,

"Our top political priority over the next two years should be to deny President Obama a second term."

And despite bringing the approval of judges to a near standstill, and blocking even debate on Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland completely, they have the nerve to complain that the Democrats want to get documentation before considering Brett Kavanaugh now.  Senators used to refer to each other as the Honorable Senator from ...  Now they make personal attacks:

'I question their sincerity. ... What more do they need to know?'

[I assume I needn't mention the elephant in the White House because everyone is fully aware of his total lack of any kind of social decency or conscience.]

This all leads to how people are now confusing someone being polite and rational as being Progressive.  Maybe that augurs well for Progressives in November, but I would like to point out that being Progressive isn't simply about being rational and well mannered.  It's about policy that include all Americans, about taking care of those who have greater hardships and obstacles, about having access to affordable health care, about focus on the community AND the individual, about breaking down legal and social structures that help the rich get richer and insure that poor stay poor.  It's about America as the democracy that sets an example to the world and recognizes that it's immigrants who have kept the US vital and creative and economically strong.

Bill Walker was a Republican until the day he filed as an Independent to run for the Alaska governorship.  He did this to avoid running in the Republican primary where he'd lost the primary four years earlier.  Compared to Dunleavy?  Walker is definitely a better choice, but for a Progressive there can't really be a question between Begich and Walker.  Walker told us in 2014 he was running for Governor to get his gas pipeline put in.  That's been his focus.  And he has seemed often to be the only adult in Juneau.  Though the other Republicans have refused to take the state's financial dilemma seriously and the Democrats didn't have the power to get other revenues sources.  But Walker is also a pro-life Republican.  And  even with his dedication to the pipeline project, it hasn't happened and more and more people are skeptical it ever will.  His Chinese 'partners' are known to be corrupt.  And even with Trump pushing coal, alternative energy is the future, and not the distant future.  Close enough that the cost of the pipeline is likely to be unrecoverable by the time it's built.  The Chinese are sending their first experimental cargo ship to Europe through the Northwest Passage because global warming is making that viable.  And I'm pretty sure that tankers will be able to take North Slope LNG directly from Prudhoe Bay by the time any pipeline is finished.

If I had to pick a Republican to be Governor, Walker would be probably one of the least harmful.

But he's not a progressive.  He's about as progressive, as Richard Nixon, under whose watch we got The Clean Air Act, The Clean Water Act, The Environmental Protection Agency, the opening of China, and the Privacy Act.  And Roe v Wade was decided by the Supreme Court while Nixon was president.  Nixon didn't talk publicly about Roe v. Wade, but when his office tapes were released much later, he'd acknowledged the need for abortion at times (in case or rape or a black and white baby.)

Decency and rationality are important qualities in politicians.  When I watched the Watergate Hearings live back in the 1970s, all the members of the House Judiciary Committee displayed those characteristics - whether Republicans or Democrats.

The attention to John McCain's various memorials this past week reflect this same hunger for decency and rationality on the national level.  It didn't used to be a Progressive monopoly.   If McCain had died on the campaign trail in 2008 after selecting Sarah Palin as his running mate, I assure you Democrats wouldn't have been fawning all over McCain.  It's only now, seeing McCain's principled stands in contrast to a truly awful Republican president, that his passing has been honored so lavishly.  Democrat after Democrat has said, "I honor him as a genuine human being and statesman, even though we disagreed on most issues."

I asked Tom Begich (and to Mark) in July why Mark decided to run.  Their polling data at the time showed Dunleavy winning in a head to head race with Walker, so jumping into the race, as they saw it, wasn't 'giving the election to Walker.'  Tom was hoping that after the primaries, they could look at the polls and decide which one should run.  So rather than splitting the vote, Begich felt his entering the race was the only way to block Dunleavy.  That post with video is here.  

The deadline to withdraw a name from the ballot is any day now.  But if both stay in the race, no one should be confused about there being two progressives.  There are two decent candidates, two conservatives, and one progressive.

[UPDATE a little later:  Jeanne at Mudflats spells out Walker's conservatism in much more detail.]

[UPDATE Sept 4, 2018:  And the idea that Begich and Walker are both progressives is exactly the message the Republicans want Alaskans to believe.  This, from Must Read Alaska, the blog of Suzanne Downing*:

"Begich and Walker both occupy the same space in the electorate — the progressive, Bernie Sanders Democrats and others on the political left. Dunleavy has the political right locked down."]

* Downing is identified in some older opinion pieces as the Communications Director of the Alaska GOP, but I can't find any mention of her on the current AK GOP website.

Jute And Tute

Been working outside today in the backyard.  So here's a short one.  A couple of items you might have missed.


Is jute coming back?  An LA Times article says India hopes to make it the ancient textile of the future.

"Now India is betting that jute — an ancient textile whose harvesting and production have scarcely been touched by modern technology — could be a fabric of the future.
Amid a global push to reduce the use of plastic for environmental reasons, India is promoting jute — better known in the United States as the fiber used in burlap — as a material for reusable shopping bags, home furnishings, clothing, even diapers and women’s sanitary pads.
Indian officials tout the humble fiber’s eco-friendly qualities. Extracted from the bark of a tall, reedy plant, jute requires less water than cotton and almost no pesticides, absorbs more carbon dioxide for its size than most trees, and is totally biodegradable."

Modern World:  Galveston Man Booked A Prostitute – And She Turned Out To Be His Wife

 "She was furious to learn her husband had been hiring sex workers, although he was equally angry to learn his wife had been freelancing as a prostitute."

Unfortunately, the article didn't answer all my questions.  Did they have sex in the motel?   Did she get paid?  Sounds like they didn't since other guests at the motel complained about "the disturbance."  But the that's not clear.  The last line of the article says:

"The husband may now face charges under tough Texas prostitution laws, which make it illegal to engage in any type of sexual activity in exchange for money or some other form of compensation – even if it is with one’s own spouse. "

I'm not sure why I think this is worth mentioning.  I can't quite articulate it yet, but this seems to be a story that tells a lot about modern United States life and culture.  Or maybe it's a broader theme - about humanity in general.  I'm sure someone could create a profound movie around this headline.

Muldoon Farmers Market - Beautiful Vegies, Interesting Mix of Vendors, New Park

On the grounds of the old Mann-Leiser Greenhouse in Muldoon, there's now a new playground and on Saturday mornings, til it gets too cold, a farmers' market.

The farmer who grew these is originally from Nepal.

These two kabobs, the corn, a half a potato, and a roll - this was all $5 at Bub's Kabobs and BBQ.  The prices are low, Cindy told me, because they want to build up a client base.  This is definitely one of the best deals in town.

Here's Cindy and her daughter Brittany.  Bub's in the back at the grill.

A real mix of ethnicities.  And options.

It's where Debarr dead ends on Muldoon.

And here's Jerriane, one of the people who helped get the park and the market going.  I met her during the garden tour at the end of July and I finally made it to the market.

So, if you don't live on that side of town and haven't seen what's all going on there, Saturday morning (they're open until 2) would be a good time to see how that part of town is changing.

They also had music,  some food trucks, arts and crafts items too.