I usually ignore the advertisements that fill the sidebars at Athletics Nation (a blog for fans of the Oakland A's baseball team), but Sunday morning I happened to notice one targeting Congressman Richard Pombo. The execrable Rep Pombo represents ("represents") a district just to the east of the Bay Area, including a large rural area plus a bit of suburban ("exurban") areas and part of the city of Stockton. Stockton is the home of one of the Oakland A's minor-league affiliates -- single A; the AAA team is in nearby Sacramento -- and the east-of-east East Bay tends to be A's territory generally, so presumably the idea is that an advertisement on an Oakland A's fan site might actually reach some voters in Pombo's district.

As with a lot of advertising, one wonders how much this is really about reaching the target audience and how much is maintaining a friendly relationship with the publisher. (In my younger days I worked for a trade magazine for the insurance industry which was sustained by a lot of "advertising" of that sort.) Athletics Nation itself is avowedly apolitical. Although they aren't quite 100% successful in quashing every political remark, the custodians of AN do a pretty good job of snuffing out any significant political discussion before it happens, deleting posts as needed and even, occasionally, banning repeat offenders from the site. I say "custodians" in the plural because the blog has grown so much that it's become too much for the original blogger to handle. AN's founder, Tyler "Blez" Bleszinksi is still the top dog, but two of his chief lieutenants (one of whom, by coincidence, is the son of a Berkeley composer with whom I've worked closely and frequently) each now write as much there as Blez does; and below those two are a handful of sub-lieutenants who are authorized to do various administrative duties and/or fill in when the other three are unavailable.

If Blez has any political opinions, he has successfully kept them hidden from AN. It is no secret, however, that he is a personal friend of renowned liberal political blogger Markos Moulitsas, of Daily Kos fame. (More precisely, they met through their wives, who were best friends in college.) It was Kos who helped Blez get AN launched, and more recently the two of them in partnership set up an entire community of sports blogs modeled after AN. (That's also when the advertising began in earnest.) Although some of these are reasonably successful, none of them comes even close to matching AN in volume of participation. I'm not sure why it should be that A's fans would be so much more blog-participatory than, say, Red Sox fans, but it is undeniably the case.

Unlike Blez, I have no need to hide my political views. Now that Tom Delay is gone, I can think of no member of Congress more dislikable than Rep Pombo, and no better example of what is wrong with Congress. TRB used to say that the real scandal isn't what's illegal; it's what's legal. If Pombo is engaged in any illegal activity, I'm unaware of it (though he was among the many who dealt closely with convicted crooked lobbyist Jack Abramoff). Pombo is the master of the formula for success in today's Congress: (1) identify wealthy interest groups who could benefit from friendly legislation; (2) solicit huge campaign contributions from these groups; (3) share your campaign wealth with other candidates in need, thereby securing a network of allies within Congress who are beholden to you; (4) use this network of allies to get yourself voted into a key position where you can personally make a significant difference on key legislation; (5) use that power to create economic benefit for your wealthy contributors, thus motivating them to keep the cycle of giving alive.

In Pombo's case, the interest groups of choice are corporations in extraction industries that profit from depleting the nation's natural resources and polluting or otherwise damaging the ecosystem. The position he found his way to, using money and influence to bypass then formerly traditional seniority system, was the chair of the House Resources Committee. There, he takes advantage of his capacity to rewrite whatever environmental legislation comes through and, more important, write laws that hand out public land and resources to private interests.

The ad on AN against Rep Pombo doesn't even mention the name of his opponent. I didn't follow its link, but it made me curious: Could it be that a pillar of the Republican Congress like Pombo is actually in danger of losing? So I googled a bit, and I see that Pombo's race is indeed considered to be genuinely contested, although Pombo still has a slight edge. [UPDATE: It's election day now, but I have yet to check to see if Pombo was defeated.]

Somewhere along the way, I noticed a link showing that some group has put Pombo on its list of "20 Most Corrupt Members of Congress. There I see another link showing that the same group also puts Pombo on its list of "10 Worst Congressmen" as well. The first list includes members from both the Senate and the House; the second is House only. Five of the 10 on the second list make both lists.

Pombo ranks only seventh on the list of 10 worst. Me, I would have named him number one, now that DeLay is gone, but perhaps only because I don't know the others well enough. Coming in at number three on the list is a fellow who once represented me. Alaska gets only one representative in the House[*], and for as long as I can remember that one has been Don Young.

Well, almost as long as I can remember. Looking up Don Young's history triggers a very distant and incomplete memory. In 1972, Alaska's congressman was Democrat Nick Begich: (His name was most familiar to me for the junior high school named after him, though other Begiches later ran for office, and Nick's son Mark is now mayor of Anchorage.) Begich was running unopposed that year, but he was campaigning anyway, as congressmen are wont to do. About three weeks before the election, another congressman was visiting Alaska. En route to a campaign stop somewhere in the sparsely populated state, the two of them, along with an aide and a pilot, were lost in a small plane crash.

This was a huge piece of news at the time -- enough to make a slight dent in my six-year-old consciousness -- not so much for Rep Begich as because the other congressman on board was none other than the House majority leader, Hale Boggs of Louisiana (who, incidentally, was also the father of journalist Cokie Roberts). Begich and Boggs were both re-elected, but the plane was never found, and in late December the four passengers were declared dead. This necessitated special elections, and the one in Alaska was won by Don Young, who has been re-elected 16 times since then.

I'm not going to say anything unkind about Don Young today. I'm not going to defend him either, nor even his bridge projects, but my distaste for misleading reporting compels me to point out that Rep Young's blurb on the "10 Worst" list really isn't fair at all. Rep Young is an unabashed advocate of porkbarrel projects for his state, and among his most notorious are two bridges for which he and Sen Stevens secured an earmark of federal funds (later revoked).

Now I happen to agree that neither bridge was deserving of federal funds, but missing information makes the bridges sound even more preposterous than they really are. The first bridge would connect the city of Ketchikan with Gravina Island. Ketchikan is the second largest city in Alaska's southeastern panhandle (after the capital, Juneau), which still doesn't make it very big -- about 12,000 population, I think. The settled part of that panhandle is composed mostly of islands and a few bits of mainland squeezed between the sea and the mountains that come right up to the coast. Only two of Alaska's southeastern towns are connected to the mainland road system; for the rest, the only way in is by ferry or by plane.

The quoted paragraph is correct in pegging the population of Gravina Island at 50, but it gives the false impression that the only point of the bridge is to serve those 50 people. The missing piece of information is that Ketchikan's airport is on Gravina Island, there being no suitable space for a runway on the larger Revillagigedo Island, where Ketchikan is sited. The purpose of the bridge would be to connect the city of Ketchikan to its airport by means other than ferry. At a price tag of $300 million for a charming but podunk fishing town, it's still hideously un-cost-effective, but it's not the completely pointless boondoggle that opponents have made it out to be.

And the site I've linked here is not the only offender. The same bridge was recently mentioned in the Economist, and the same misleading omission was made.

The description of the other bridge, the Knik Arm crossing, is similarly misleading. Anchorage is located at the end of a very large inlet. At its end, the inlet (Cook Inlet) forks into two smaller arms, and Anchorage is built on the flat triangle between the arms. (See this map, on a site about volcanoes.) Unlike most cities of its size, Anchorage has no suburb cities contiguous with it. To the west, northwest and southwest it is surrounded by water. The east is blocked by the immediate presence of the tall Chugach Mountains. To the south these mountains come all the way to the coast, so that the road leading south out of Anchorage follows for many miles a narrow ribbon cut out between the cliffs and the shore. To the north the passage isn't quite so narrow, but what little space there is part of the grounds of two military bases. (One of these, Elmendorf AFB, is home to a lot of secretive and high-tech defense apparatus; its location is ideal for filling in a satellite defense network that covers the entire globe.)

The nearest communities to Anchorage of significant size are thus up the road to the northeast, following the northern arm (Knik Arm) past the military bases. (The closest one is Eagle River, not Eklutna as the linked map might suggest.) At end of Knik Arm you reach the city of Palmer and, not far beyond that, starting to turn west again around the end of the arm, the city of Wasilla. Palmer and Wasilla have grown considerably in the past decade, along with several other smaller communities in the general area. They are not suburbs of Anchorage by any means, but the road connection to Anchorage is important, and the farther away from Anchorage you get, the less practical property development becomes. Towns nearer the mouth of the Arm but on the opposite shore (eg, Knik), although closer to Anchorage as the crow flies, are further in terms of driving and thus more remote.

You can see where this is going. The proposed bridge would extend directly from Anchorage, near its port, and cross Knik Arm to the north. At the moment, there is no settlement to speak of on the northern shore. It is true, as the quoted passage above claim, that the site where the bridge would reach the opposite shore is a "scarcely habitable patch of marshland", but the same could be said of the San Mateo bridge crossing San Francisco Bay. Obviously the point of the bridge is not just to reach the marsh on the other side and stop. It would connect with the roads to the north, providing an alternate route from Anchorage to Wasilla and Palmer (for Wasilla, slightly shorter). To the smaller communities east of Wasilla it would drastically shorten the drive, and thus would open up the entire area for development, and the route to the highway that leads north to Talkeetna and Fairbanks would be more direct as well.

Alaskans are usually divided on issues like this. Most of the Alaskans I know are probably on the side that opponents would be called "anti-growth", but I know they're the smaller side, especially in the urban parts of Alaska. I'm not sufficiently in touch to know the exact opinion, but I'd be very surprised if a majority of people in Anchorage and the Palmer-Wasilla area don't favor the bridge being built. (Whether they'd favor paying for it is another question entirely. As a kid growing up in Alaska, I watched the electorate repeatedly pass ballot initiatives to move the capital from Juneau to a more central location ... and repeatedly defeat ballot initiatives to pay for said move. The capital is still in Juneau.) Me, I'm agnostic on the point. I can certainly see the appeal. I can also see -- having many times looked across the ugly muddy expanse that is Knik Arm -- what a huge project it would have to be in terms of both expense and impact.

And so Alaskans, through their dutiful representatives, seek to have the federal government pay for it. I'm always skeptical of porkbarrel highway projects. Although I'm not as opposed to federal spending for local infrastructure as the Republican Party used to profess to be, I'm more opposed to it than the current Republican Party reveals itself to be by its actual free-spending behavior. It will surprise no one to learn that the greatest advocates of the bridge are a group of developers who have invested heavily in the land that would be opened up by the bridge, and this makes me wonder if perhaps the financial burden of the bridge shouldn't be shouldered more by the private sector that the once-respectable Republican Party used to vaunt. (Yes, "vaunt". If something is to become "vaunted" then first someone must vaunt it.)

[*] Alaska gets only one representative in the House because of its small population. It was only this weekend, in the course of fact-checking something related to this post (I forget exactly what), that I discovered Alaska is now the fourth least populous state in the union. When I first was old enough to notice such things -- and I was almanac-minded at a surprisingly young age -- Alaska ranked 50 out of 50 in population. Some time when I was a kid, I remember, we passed Wyoming to become 49th. Then some time when I was an adult I noticed we passed Vermont to become 48th. I'm not sure when it happened, but apparently now we have -- I say "we" even though I haven't lived there in more than a decade -- passed North Dakota as well.

7:19:06 PM  [permalink]  comment []  

I neglected to change my voter registration after moving earlier this year, and by the time I got around to doing it I had missed the deadline. I can still drive down to the old neighborhood and vote there, but I won't. Our Senate race isn't close, and I don't care enough about whatever else is on the ballot. So sue me.

One of the central tenets of Benzene philosophy is that any news that isn't still just as newsworthy a week later probably wasn't worth writing about in the first place.

I don't feel any worse off for having missed the entire exit-polls-were-wrong furor in 2004. I missed it because I was gone all day and didn't get home till about 11 pm, by which time the real results had (mostly) come out. Where was I all day? I was doing what every good "freelancer" does on election day: I was working at a polling place.

Our polling place had its share of irregularities. At the end of the day after the polls close, the computer that reads the ballots spits out a big printout. We don't see the full results, just data like the number of ballots cast in each precinct, etc. I don't remember the exact details, but there are about seven or eight books in which we'd been checking off names and they're all supposed to match the results on the printout. When they don't -- and most of them didn't -- you go back through the book and figure out what you did wrong. Usually, there are some simple clerical errors like someone added a column wrong, forgot to tally a name, etc. These are easily fixed. (My book was correct, but only because I had a lull near the end of the day and took the time to go back and check for errors then.)

To me, with my accountant mentality, this all seemed very straightforward, but it was surprising to me how many election workers were completely baffled by it. (Admittedly, a few of them just weren't very bright at all.) One woman was nearly in tears when she couldn't get her book to balance at all. I took it from her, not out of any sense of chivalry or pride, but simply because no one could go home until the report was finished and signed, and the report couldn't be started until all the books were balanced. She wasn't getting anywhere with it, and I knew I could.

I did what any good accountant would do, double-checking every possible source of discrepancy and ruling them out one by one. That accomplished, it was sufficiently demonstrated that there was one ballot given out which did not find its way into the ballot box. Maybe the voter accidentally stuck it in with the absentees, maybe the voter ripped it up and didn't go back for a new one, or maybe the voter absent-mindedly carried it out the door with him or her. Those sort of things aren't supposed to happen unnoticed, but they do. So I wrote up a little asterisk note, documenting what I had checked and what possibilities remained unconfirmable, and that's what we sent in to headquarters.

That was two years ago. This year, I'm doing nothing. I saw a few preliminary results on blogs I read, but I'm not sitting by the TV to watch the numbers come in. The results aren't going anywhere. If I don't catch up with them till tomorrow or the next day, that's fine by me.

6:07:52 PM  [permalink]  comment []