Tuesday, June 30, 2009

He's good enough, he's smart enough, and doggone it...

Al Franken is the junior Senator from Minnesota.

YouTube has disabled embedding on the best Stuart Smalley clip I could locate.  So, doggone it, you’ll have to click on the image below to see him in action.

Congratulations to Al, kudos to the Minnesota Supreme Court, which dismissed Norm Coleman’s lawsuit unanimously (32-page PDF of the decision here), and pfffffftttt!! to Bill O’Reilly.

Thursday, June 04, 2009

In the light of day, all's well...

A quick update of last night’s post…

Reliable sources inform me that Fisken reconsidered after filing for Position 3, deciding that he won’t run for the Port Commission after all.  Based on Alec’s decision, Holland then chose to move from Position 4 to Position 3.

These machinations make sense only if the one remaining Position 4 candidate, Tom Albro, would be a positive influence on the Commission.  I don’t know much about Mr. Albro, but I’ll be looking at his platform and record.

(H/t to the Northwest Progressive Institute, which reported Fisken’s withdrawal as an aside last night.)

I hereby rescind the WTF I tossed at Rob Holland.  Though I do feel just a bit like this:

Wednesday, June 03, 2009

WTF, Rob Holland?

When Port Commissioner Lloyd Hara decided to switch over to the special election to replace disgraced King County Assessor Scott Noble, progressives throughout the county were thrilled when Alec Fisken, defeated by a corporate apologist two years ago, announced that he would run for Hara’s seat, Position 3 on the Commission.  With another progressive, Rob Holland, already running for Position 4—the place long sullied by Pat Davis, the prospects looked solid for building a more responsive, responsible Port Commission.

Then I looked at the updated list of candidate filings on the King County Elections website this evening…

I was shocked to see that Holland has withdrawn his Position 4 filing, and refiled for Position 3.  Which means that he’s competing for the same position on the Port Commission that Fisken filed for!

WTF, Rob???

What possible value is there in having the two progressives fighting for a single place on the Commission?  As the situation developed, it had begun to look as though we could fill both of those positions on the five-member Port Commission with solid reformers and progressives.  With Holland’s move to a battle against Fisken, leaving the other seat with a solitary candidate, about whom I know little if anything.

This switch is extremely odd, if you ask me.  Rob Holland had already received an early endorsement (on February 24!) from the King County Democrats ... for Position 4, not Position 3.  Alec Fisken is well known, and very well respected, by the progressive side of the Democrats in King County.  Yet now we have the two of them in the same damn race.

There’s something fishy here, and I’m not talking about the Terminal between Magnolia and Ballard.

Note:  in case the KC Elections site changes at some future point, I’ve saved a PDF image of its current contents.

Sunday, May 31, 2009

There's diversity ... and then there's diversity

Sensible people all around the country are hailing President Obama’s choice of Sonia Sotomayor as the next Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.  And rightly so—we were overdue for another woman on the Court, and long overdue for a Latino on the highest bench in the land.  Which is not to say, as the increasingly-delusional right wing noise machine slobbers incessantly, that Sotomayor will dispense Latino justice or female justice or Bronx justice.  Or even, ghopod-forbid, empathic justice. 

Once confirmed (and she will be confirmed), Justice Sotomayor will bring to the Court her unique set of life experiences.  In that sense, she’s no different from any other member of the Court.  No matter how dispassionate a person may attempt to be, one’s decision-making will inevitably be colored by his or her background.  That Sonia Sotomayor is the daughter of immigrants (sorta ... after all, Puerto Rico has been an American colony since 1898, and its residents have been US citizens since 1917), lost her father in childhood, and has been a Type I diabetic nearly her entire life will always be a part of her.  So too will her Ivy League education, her time as a DA in Manhattan, her work in a high-powered international law firm, and her years on both the circuit and appellate federal benches.

She will, in that sense, be no different from her eight SCOTUS colleagues.  Each and every one of them developed his or her judicial mindset from an underlying emotional and psychosocial history, along with the intellectual rigor of legal training and scholarship.

While her life story brings valuable, and welcome, diversity to the Supreme Court in the topic areas that the media and the wingnuts concentrate on, in other ways Sonia Sotomayor’s story is same-old, same-old for the Supreme Court.  In fact, it might be argued that in at least one way, the Sotomayor nomination actually makes SCOTUS less diverse.

By replacing David Souter with Sonia Sotomayor, we lose one of the five Harvard Law graduates (Breyer, Kennedy, Roberts, and Scalia are the others) on the Court while adding a third Yale Law alum to the current pair of Alito and Thomas.  Yes, that’s right ... seven of the nine members of the Court are either Crimson or Eli.  Furthermore, Ginsburg attended Harvard Law before graduating from Columbia.  Only Northwestern Law grad John Paul Stevens is unassociated with the pair of law schools.  Even at the undergraduate level, the Supreme Court Justices come almost entirely from elite schools—Harvard (Roberts and Souter), Stanford (Breyer and Kennedy), Princeton (Alito and Sotomayor), Chicago (Stevens), Georgetown (Scalia), Cornell (Ginsburg).  Only Holy Cross Crusader Clarence Thomas breaks that mold.

I’m not in any way making a Roman Hruska argument here.  For those too young to remember Senator Hruska (R-NE), he ludicrously and disingenuously defended Richard Nixon’s SCOTUS nomination of one G. Harrold Carswell in 1970 with:

Even if he were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers.  They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they, and a little chance?  We can’t have all Brandeises, Frankfurters and Cardozos.

(For the record, Carswell was not confirmed, and the replacement for Abe Fortas on the Supreme Court turned out to be the estimable Harry Blackmun, a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law)

The point here isn’t that I want mediocrities on the Supreme Court ... far from it!  I’m merely noting that there are plenty of rigorous, prestigious, distinguished law schools located in places that aren’t Cambridge or New Haven, and plenty of highly qualified graduates of such institutions who could been nominated for this seat on the Supreme Court.  In this sense, Sonia Sotomayor adds no diversity to the makeup of SCOTUS.

Another area of nondiversity on the Supreme Court is prior legal experience.  Every single member of the current Court came to SCOTUS from the federal appellate bench, and Sotomayor won’t change that in the slightest.  Though this path may seem like a logical progression, it hasn’t always been so.  None of the last three appointees prior to today’s Court (Powell, Rehnquist, and O’Connor) came to SCOTUS from federal judgeships.  And few of our greatest Supreme Court Justices stepped up from federal Appeals Court—Warren was governor of California, Douglas headed the SEC, Frankfurter was a law professor (and former White House official), Black was a US Senator, Brandeis was a lawyer in private practice.  Way back when, John Marshall actually served as both Secretary of State and Chief Justice between February 4 and March 4, 1801.

In another sociocultural arena, Sotomayor will actually decrease the Supreme Court’s diversity.  Justice Souter is an Episcopalian.  He and Justice Stevens are the only Protestants on the current Court.  Of the remaining members of the Court, Justices Breyer and Ginsburg are Jewish, and all the rest—Alito, Kennedy, Roberts, Scalia, and Thomas—are Catholics.  Adding Sotomayor will make the Court two-thirds Catholic.  Again, I’m not suggesting that there will be some sort of Papist orientation to the Court, just noting these facts.

As the title says, there’s diversity and then there’s diversity.  Whatever her influence, whatever her diversity or lack thereof, I applaud the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court.  Let’s just hope President Obama gets the chance to nominate replacements for the ilk of Scalia, Alito, Thomas, and Roberts.  I won’t quibble about types of diversity if we can get those pernicious legal minds off the highest court in the land.

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Random tidbits

I stayed home from work today with a suddenly-appearing cold.  Felt fine at mid-afternoon yesterday, a bit dried-out and scratchy on the bus after work, headache-y and stuffy at bedtime.  By 3am or so, I was completely stuffed up and unable to sleep.  This one is a bit odd, in that my throat is still scratchy while my nose is full ... usually those are consecutive rather than coincident.

At least, I hope it’s just a cold.  With the rapidly-intensifying, and justified IMHO, concern about the new inflenza H1N1 strain, one has to be hypervigilant.  I do wonder whether age 58 is still in the “healthy adult” range or considered “elderly” in pandemic flu circles.

One reason for my (even more extended than usual) blog-absence is that I’ve been working feverishly on wrangling the research presentations for this summer’s SABR39.  We had appreciably more submissions than in any of the previous years I’ve been in charge of evaluating and scheduling the research abstracts for the convention.  I’ve recruited another volunteer to participate in the coordination processes, which will lighten the load in the future but has necessitated extra time for training and instruction this time around.

This year’s SABR convention will be held in our nation’s capital, at a hotel that’s just a line drive away from Sasha and Malia’s new digs.  I can’t begin to express the pleasure of the vast majority of the expected attendees that we’ll be near their house rather than another of John and Cindy McCain’s mansions.  Also, this meeting will mark a personal milestone ... my 20th consecutive convention.  Yep, every year since the first one I went to, 1990 in Cleveland.  Which also means that I will have attended over half of the total number of annual SABR conventions.

Oh, and it will be my last convention as a member of the Board of Directors.  My term on the Board officially ends after the Annual Business Meeting, on July 30.

You may be wondering about my shoulder injury.  I last wrote about it two months ago, when I’d completed a month of physical therapy.  There’s been a lot of progress since then.  After another four or five weeks of weekly PT, the therapist and I agreed that I was doing well enough to continue on my own.  At that point, my range-of-motion in most axes was within about five degrees of my other (dominant) arm.  I’m not quite pain-free—in fact, it’s been a bit achier in the last week or so than it had been for the previous several weeks.  I’m continuing to do exercises on my own, but of course I’m not as diligent as I should be.  I suspect it’ll remain a bit weaker than I’d like, and a bit more likely to ache than I’d like.  On the other hand, I can do pretty much everything I could do before I hurt it, without giving much thought to potential consequences.  The ER and PT bills are starting to come in, but my insurance coverage is quite good.

When the discussion at a staff meeting of my workplace revolves around the issue of annual raises (there won’t be any this year) rather than layoffs, that’s a positive thing.  I still worry about it, due to the nature of the bureaucratic control over my particular program, but so far we seem to be doing OK.

It’ll be even better when we can put together some tangible outcome data from the big project I’m involved with.  It involves record-matching between two large databases, to be followed by a GIS analysis of patterns of injury locations and transportation to the region’s trauma centers.  I’ve run into a few hitches in the project, culminating with the demise of my workstation due to a malware infestation.  My replacement computer now holds all the data from the old one, but rebuilding the analytic files to reflect its data and file structures will take a while.

Seattle and King County politics are at a bit of an impasse right now.  The state legislative session was typical inside-baseball politicking at a time when innovative leadership toward new solutions is desperately needed.  I don’t see much in the upcoming races for County Executive, Seattle Mayor, and City Council that draws me in.  Oh, there are plenty of competent aspirants, but we need excellence and new directions now.  Doing the same old stuff better or more effectively just ain’t gonna hack it right now.

For the most part, ditto national politics.  I keep saying that the calls for investigation and correction of the pathologies perpetrated for the last three decades under the influence of far-right antigovernment zealots are intended to obtain justice or accountability, not retribution.  Our nathion ethos is deeply in need of cleansing, deeply in need of focus on our better nature, deeply in need to reorientation toward supporting the common good instead of the greed is good ideology that rides rough-shod in the dangerous, failed “free market” model.