Here are the results from Tuesday night, Wednesday night, and Thursday night in the Anchorage Mayor's race. There is almost no change in the rankings from night to night. From Tuesday to Wednesday a couple of people traded ranks. The biggest shift is due to a tie for 11th place on the first night. There were NO changes in rank for the top eight candidates from night to night.
From Wednesday to Thursday there are no changes in rank.
I'm guessing that, at least in part, this is due to mail in voting. Instead of votes coming in from different precincts which often are more politically homogenous, they came in from all over.
Mayor Race
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
-----------
----------
--------
------
EVANS, Bill
999 (4)
3,871 (4)
4,782 (4)
SWANK, Albert L., Jr
36 (9)
139 (10)
157 (10)
MARTINEZ, George
321 (6)
1,272 (6)
1,658 (6)
MOMIN, Reza
12 (11)
35 (13)
39 (13)
FALSEY, Bill
1,281 (3)
5,312 (3)
6,703 (3)
HERNDON, Heather
91 (7)
303 (7)
337 (7)
ANTHONY, Anna
63 (8)
190 (8)
233 (8)
BRONSON, David
3,116 (2)
12,986 (2)
15,953 (2)
BROWN, Jeffrey
33 (10)
147 (9)
196 (9)
VERSTEEG, Jacob
11 (12)
31 (14)
35 (14)
ROBBINS, Mike
745 (5)
3,097 (5)
3,766 (5)
DUNBAR, Forrest
3,701 (1)
13,711 (1)
16,458 (1)
COLBRY, Darin
8 (14)
18 (15)
21 (15)
WESTFALL, Joe
12 (11)
48 (11)
61 (11)
KERN, Jacob Seth
9 (13)
38 (12)
41 (12)
Total
10,438
41,198
50,430
Looking at the numbers makes me wonder about the standards for getting on the ballot. I think we wasted a time at candidate forums by having candidates who couldn't even get 100 votes out of 50,000. While I do think candidates without a chance of winning can add different points of view to the debate, having too many candidates at a forum means the public gets to question the main candidates less.
I wanted to do the same thing for the other races, but I needed to think this through better technically before I started. But I'll leave Wednesday night totals for the recall and school board races below. I don't think there are any changes in rank, but some races tightened, others widened.
[UPDATE: Wednesday April 7, 2021 8:30am: I have only been able to get the original early results marked as 8:42pm. I tired various times last night and again this morning. No changes. I just talked to Brandy (Brandi?) at the Municipal Clerk's office. She told me those are the only results so far. They are working on them and probably will have an update tonight. (In the past there were regular updates as the ballots came in. That didn't happen this time.) Brandy also told me that if you want to be alerted when the numbers are updated, you can text "Start" to 907 312 1012.]
When I was relatively new to Alaska, I went to a public administration meeting downtown during the annual Fur Rendezvous. Walking from my car I passed the ice sculptures which included a large structure with a slide. I couldn't resist. I went up the ice steps and slid down the slide. And went on to the meeting.
Sometime later, one of my graduate students, a women older than I, told me that she had seen me go down the ice slide and that was the moment that she knew I was okay.
Later I read an article about how Japanese CEOs participate in all day company retreats and join in some activities in which they aren't particularly skilled - maybe karaoke or basketball - and that showing their clumsier selves in front of all their employees is a way to humanize them and connect them with the people they work with.
Those were my thoughts as I watched Alaska Airlines' video welcoming them to OneWorld - an alliance of, now 14, airlines around the world. I understand the importance of OneWorld membership because when we went to Argentina a couple of years ago, LATAM airlines told me "if you are a OneWorld member" you can get much better prices and services.
The video starts with Alaska Airlines' president and then he gets welcomed by the heads of the various airlines in the group. Then at the end they do the Alaska Airlines safety dance, an adaptation of the Virgin Airlines safety video Alaska acquired when they bought Virgin Airlines. (The Virgin one is worth looking at - an example of how imagination can take a boring safety announcement and make it riveting.)
So below is the second part of Alaska's new OneWorld welcome video - the part that involves a variation on the safety dance, including the CEOs of the various member airlines. [I'll have to wait until it's actually posted to be sure it starts at the dance. If not, the dance starts at about 3:16]
Sure, it's a PR video, but with a spirit that takes off the corporate suits and gets seriously playful
If the conservatives on the Supreme Court have been consistent about anything, it's been in support of big business. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, at the Amy Barrett confirmation hearings, argued that while everyone focused on abortion and LGBT issues before the court, the real impact of packing of the court with conservative judges was to set up a court that unabashedly sided with big business. Whitehouse cited 80 cases that were decided by 5-4 rulings along partisan lines. These cases had four themes important to large corporations:
Unlimited Dark Money - that allows the wealthy and corporations (yes those do overlap) to control legislatures that make the rules and even to get people appointed as head of federal agencies that regulate them. Citizen United is the key decision here, but there are many others
Knock the Civil Jury Down - The powerful can't control civil juries like they can control Congress.
Weaken Regulatory Agencies - particularly pollutors to weaken their independence and strength
Voter Suppression and Gerrymandering - making it harder for citizens to vote for candidates who might vote against big business' interests - Shelby County decision on no factual record against overwhelming support on the other side, that knocked out voter suppression protections and a bunch of states started suppressing the vote. Same on gerrymandering.
*You can see the Whitehouse presentation in the Senate below and I recommend that you listen to it. Whitehouse puts a lot of puzzle pieces together that help us understand the conservative goals of getting Heritage Foundation trained judges onto the court. Here's another Whitehouse report on partisan decisions at the Supreme Court which divides the cases a little differently.
Conservatives Question NCAA Lawyers
So I was surprised to see that in the Supreme Court case National Collegiate Athletic Association v. Alston**, the conservative judges were asking the NCAA lawyers some tough questions. After all this is about a large monopolistic organization exploiting student athletes for big money. It would seem a natural for the Supreme Court's conservatives to be protecting the NCAA. But no. From the LA Times:
"Justice Clarence Thomas said it was “odd” that the salaries of college coaches have “ballooned,” but that did not destroy the aura of amateur competition between colleges and universities.
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said the case showed “colleges with powerhouse football and basketball programs are really exploiting the students that they recruit.” Most athletes work very hard on their sports, have little time for studies and often do not graduate. “They are recruited, used and cast aside,” he said.
Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh said he, too, was concerned about the “exploitation of athletes.” This looks like a system “where schools are conspiring with their competitors to pay their workers nothing,” he said, likening the situation to a classic antitrust violation in the business world."
But on further consideration, the NCAA is not exactly a for-profit corporation like Pepsi. On its home page it tells us:
The National Collegiate Athletic Association is a membership-driven organization dedicated to safeguarding the well-being of student-athletes and equipping them with the skills to succeed on the playing field, in the classroom and throughout life.
We support learning through sports by integrating athletics and higher education to enrich the college experience of student-athletes. NCAA members – mostly colleges and universities, but also conferences and affiliated groups – work together to create the framework of rules for fair and safe competition.
Those rules are administered by NCAA national office staff, which also organizes national championships and provides other resources to support student-athletes and the schools they attend. The NCAA membership and national office work together to help nearly half a million student-athletes develop their leadership, confidence, discipline and teamwork through college sports.
I've left the link to the Core Values there, because it goes to a page that doesn't really mention core values other than being dedicated to to "the well-being and life-long success of student athletes." Most of it is about who all the members are.
Also, notice that their sole emphasis is on the welfare of student athletes. Absolutely no mention of money.
So Why Are The Conservatives Asking the NCAA Hard Questions
The NCAA generated close to a billion dollars just from the NCAA basketball playoffs. They claim that most of that goes to the colleges and universities From CBS Sports:
"The NCAA Tournament remains the lifeblood of the association's 1,268 members. It is the primary source of the NCAA's income. That $800 million in annual tournament revenue is 72% of the NCAA's $1.1 billion annual total. Last year, $600 million of that $800 million was scheduled to flow back to the schools.
That revenue fills athletic department coffers, provides operating capital for conference offices and provides funds directly to athletes in need."
But does this money help support universities or even cover the costs of college sports? Best Colleges says no.
"By any measure, college sports are a big business — but that doesn't mean universities are getting rich off athletics. The reality is that most sports programs operate in the red. If the time comes when colleges have to pay athletes to participate, then the financial picture will change even more dramatically."
Some of the largest college sports programs, the ones that get the most back from the NCAA - see the Best Colleges link above for the top 20 and how much they make - might make a profit. Or maybe not. It's not clear. My quick search for information on this leads me to believe that most of the stories are based on information from the NCAA. I didn't find any in-depth independent studies. But I also didn't look too hard.
So maybe my hypothesis about the conservatives on the Supreme Court is wrong. Maybe they're big sports fans and so they have more empathy for college athletes than they do for average employees. Maybe they see the NCAA not as a corporation (it isn't one) but as a cooperative of universities. Then my hypothesis may be right. Or maybe they think the universities make more money from sports than they actually do. That sports help pay for political science programs and affirmative action scholarships.
Just raising a possibility. I really don't know what paying college athletes would mean. The biggest winners, probably, would be the majority of college athletes who will never go on to be highly paid professional players.
But it's clear that monopolies concentrate power and concentrated power attracts those who want power. Breaking things up will bring change and quite probably good change. When they broke up ATT in 1984, we got a revolution in telephone technology. (I bet some readers don't even know about ATT being a giant phone monopoly that merely leased black dial up phones to every home.)
And if the Supreme Court finds this monopoly problematic, maybe they'll have to take a fresh look at other concentrations of power. That would be the best consequence.
* Here's the video of Sen. Whitehouse at the Barrett hearings. He really does a great job of bringing together a number of threads.
A new analysis of Alaska’s K-12 Capital Spending shows that the state is not spending what is needed to maintain, renovate, and renew its K-12 school buildings. The study, authored by ISER research professor Bob Loeffler, reviews historical K-12 capital spending from state and local sources from Fiscal Year 2000 through Fiscal Year 2020. It details the funding sources Alaska uses for large school maintenance, renovation, and construction projects for both municipal and rural areas. The study illustrates the decline in spending after the current budget crisis hit in 2014, and shows how Alaska’s K-12 capital spending falls short of recommended industry guidelines.
“School buildings are among a community’s most valuable physical assets, especially in Alaska,” said Loeffler. “A building’s upkeep or deterioration can be a reflection of the surrounding community and can also affect the quality of education that happens inside. All homeowners understand that regular maintenance is critical to maintaining the value of your property. The same can be said of our school properties. This analysis takes a hard look at how Alaska has been doing in this regard. In short, Alaska is not spending what is needed, especially over the last six years.”
*University of Alaska Anchorage Institute for Social and Economic Research
In four days the Anchorage Municipal elections will end. (With mail-in voting it doesn't make that much sense to speak about 'election day' any more. And the Municipality of Anchorage switched to all mail-in voting a couple of years ago, though there are drop boxes and you can vote in person in various locations.)
I put the ISER report and the elections together because we are also voting for a number of School Board seats.
Here's a link to the Anchorage Daily News' candidates forums. It lists all the questions they asked of mayoral and school board candidates. Then below is a list of the candidates and links for each and you can see how they answered the questions.
To help you out, here are a few of the endorsements from different organizations: [I was going to put this all in one table that was neat and easy to compare, but two things happened: 1) I can't find many organizations that actually have endorsements and 2) an old high school friend who read my blog post on the 1963 UCLA-Michigan basketball game called. He had watched the 2021 UCLA-Michigan game with another high school friend. They had been part of the group that went to see the 1963 game together. So that used up a lot of my time. But it was good. So I'm just going to present these as I took them off the internet.
Planned Parenthood: (Strongly pro-abortion [choice], contraception, sex education, women's health)
Anchorage School Board
Seat B: Kelly Lessens
Seat E: Pat Higgins
Seat F: Dora Wilson
Seat G: Carl Jacobs
ASEA/AFSCME Union (Alaska State Employees Association/American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees) (For protecting workers' rights)
Anchorage School Board
Name
Seat
Kelly Lessens
B
Dora Wilson
F
Carl Jacobs
G
The Alaska Center (formerly the Alaska Center for the Environment) makes recommendations on the mayoral race and the Recall election, but not for school board.
The School Board races are supposed to be non-partisan. The Alaska Democratic Party seems to be honoring that non-partisan spirit since I can't find any endorsements by the Alaska Democratic Party. However, the Republicans have weighed in.
I used to try to put something clever up on April 1. My favorite was Palin Announces Conversion, with this image I put together back in 2010:
In 2019 I vowed not to do any April Fool's Day posts until after Trump was out of the White House. But even now there's still nothing one can write that can compete with what Fox News offers every day.
On the other hand, common decency never seemed so powerful. The only aggression in the White House these days seems to be coming from the President's dogs.
Maybe next year I'll be ready again. The snow is starting to evaporate. There's even an area in the backyard, under the trees, where it looks like there's soil showing. Enjoy flowers poking out of the ground. We still have a ways for that to be happening here.
I'd also note that UCLA beat Michigan Monday to move to the Final Four.
I was at the LA Sports Arena on December 28, 1963 when UCLA beat then Number 3 ranked Michigan at the LA Classic. UCLA had won all its games up to then, but hadn't really played any important teams. And UCLA was not seen as a basketball power before that season. There wasn't even a basketball arena on campus. They even played some of their home games that season at Santa Monica City College. Michigan was the test to see if their seven game winning streak was just a fluke.
But the game began with an early display of John Wooden's full court press, and in the first three or four minutes, UCLA was ahead 16 to nothing. The victory was all that much sweeter because among us was a Michigan fan who had no doubt, before the game, who would win.
That was UCLA's first National Championship of their dynasty period. They had 30 wins in a row. Every game was a nail biter - could they keep their winning streak alive. Their tallest starting players that year were Fred Slaughter and Keith Erickson at 6'5". Stars Gail Goodrich and Walt Hazard were 6'1" and 6'3" respectively. Lew Alcindor (later to become Karim Abdul Jabbar) was still playing high school ball in New York.
Most of this is still very vivid in my brain all these years later, but I did check Wikipedia to be sure of some of the details. I also found an article on the game in the January 6, 1964 Sports Illustrated, but it didn't tell me what I wanted to know - whether the Bruins got their opening 16 points in two minutes or four.
But what struck me was that the article was written by long-time NPR sports commentator Frank Deford. Deford died at age 78 in 2017. So that means he was probably only 24 when he wrote that story at Sports Illustrated.
I had no idea what all I was going to discover tonight writing this post. I must say that being at UCLA at the start of their dynasty, and then a couple of years later watching the Freshman team (with Lew Alcindor) beat the national champion varsity team at the beginning of the season spoiled me. There was never going to be anything better than those years.
