The hypocrisy of Gov. Mike Dunleavy and Attorney General Tregarrick Taylor is on full display with the state claiming that we must have AM radios in electric cars because of the need for emergency communications.
Taylor has just signed onto the latest right-wing Republican chain letter whining about the future of AM radios in cars, while Dunleavy has just vetoed $1 million for public radio in Alaska.
Read MoreThe Alaska Permanent Fund would have been better off divesting from fossil fuel companies a decade ago, according to a new study from the University of Waterloo.
The study found that the Permanent Fund would have $1.5 billion more, which is about $2,000 per Alaskan.
Read MoreCook Inlet natural gas will not be able to keep the heat and lights on for all concerned during the next decade, according to a study led by Enstar, the Canadian company that supplies natural gas to Southcentral.
The leading long-term option for filling the gap, the study says, is an in-state gas pipeline, subsidized by the state, a fossil fuel solution that downplays renewables.
Read MoreWith Aniak residents facing a four-fold increase in power bills, it’s hard to see how the village can survive without immediate help.
The Regulatory Commission of Alaska heard from dozens Aniak residents Wednesday morning on phone lines, pleading for immediate assistance and asking why the state has refused to do anything. They said the survival of the community is at stake
Read MoreThe refusal of the Regulatory Commission of Alaska to engage in a public evidentiary hearing on the most important case in the RCA’s history—the sale of BP’s assets to Hilcorp—is at the center of the Supreme Court case at which oral arguments took place Wednesday.
The attorneys for the RCA, Hilcorp and BP all defended the actions of the RCA and did not deal with matters of substance, but instead focused on technicalities and process.
Read MoreThe repeated failures of the Regulatory Commission of Alaska, Gov. Mike Dunleavy and the Alaska Legislature will be on full display Tuesday when the Alaska Supreme Court hears a case about whether the public deserves to be informed about some of the many secrets behind the biggest single business transaction in state history—the sale of BP’s Alaska business to Hilcorp.
Read MoreNothing that John Espindola has done during his years of working for the state as a “personal assistant” and policy analyst for Gov. Mike Dunleavy qualifies him to serve on the Regulatory Commission of Alaska.
And it is doubtful that the work Espindola did in New Mexico in the years before he hired on with Dunleavy in 2018 meet the minimum educational and professional requirements spelled out in state law about who is eligible to regulate Alaska’s utilities.
Read MoreThe Legislature rejected Bethany Marcum, the CEO of the right-wing Alaska Policy Forum, after Gov. Mike Dunleavy appointed her to an eight-year term on the University of Alaska Board of Regents.
Dunleavy is politically aligned with the forum, a group that is no friend of public education, both K-12 and the University of Alaska. The forum is a bottomless well of misleading claims and phony statistics about education.
Dunleavy has returned to the Alaska Policy Forum talent pool to make another selection for the regents, this time former forum board member Seth Church of Fairbanks, who has long been active in right-wing causes.
Read MoreJustice Samuel Alito and his buddies on the Wall Street Journal editorial page produced a turgid response to a ProPublica investigation about Alito’s fishy Alaska vacation before they had read it.
Journal editorial writer Kim Strassel, who claims to live half the time in Wasilla, wrote on Twitter that Alito “destroys the silly piece from the hit team” at ProPublica. She is clueless.
Read MoreBillionaire Paul Singer brought Justice Samuel Alito to Alaska on his private jet for a fishing vacation at the King Salmon Lodge in 2008, where the going rate was more than $1,000 a day.
It was the first time the two had met.
Singer, a hedge fund titan with a net worth of $5.5 billion, had 10 cases before the Supreme Court in the years that followed, but Alito never recused himself.
ProPublica published a thorough and damning investigation Tuesday night about Singer’s generosity to Alito, and how Alito never disclosed the gift of the trip to the lodge on the Naknek River from a man who became his friend.
Read MoreThe headline number about Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s vetoes—that he trimmed more than $200 million from the operating and capital budgets—is misleading. It disguises his focus on cutting education at all levels.
More than 85 percent of the real reductions in programs and facility maintenance are in budget items related to education, the most important public service for families in Alaska.
Read MoreGov. Mike Dunleavy vetoed more than $140 million in funding for education at all levels, but refused to explain or try to justify his latest attack on education.
His vetoes included cutting half of the education increase approved by the Legislature to prevent layoffs and cutbacks in districts across the state. Dunleavy cut $87 million from the one-time boost that districts had said wasn’t enough to offset years of not adjusting for inflation.
Read MoreThere are many public safety questions about turning our highways into industrial mining roads that remain intentionally unexamined by the Dunleavy administration.
The new plan to double Kinross truck traffic from Fox to the mine is the latest evidence of the pitfalls of saying yes without blinking or thinking.
Read MoreThe six trustees of the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation all live in the Anchorage area, but that’s no reason for the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation to expand its bureaucratic footprint beyond Juneau and waste hundreds of thousands leasing new office space in the state’s largest city.
Read MoreWe now know more about the alleged “Alaska Office of Family & Life” that Gov. Mike Dunleavy claimed to have created when he promoted philosopher/photographer Jeremy Cubas and set his salary at $110,000.
There never was an office, just a task assigned to Cubas to create a website, oppose abortion and speak about why young women need to have more babies. Cubas resigned two weeks ago. the website was never launched.
Read MoreWe haven’t been blindsided by the police staffing crisis in Fairbanks. We just haven’t been paying attention to an emergency that has been years in the making. Our elected officials have downplayed the severity of the situation.
Seven years ago, former Police Chief Dan Hoffman said the “department is on the verge of operating at true crisis levels.”
Read MoreThe City of Fairbanks is moving to a part-time police department in August, ending 24-hour patrols and cutting back by four hours, leaving 8 a.m. to noon with no officers on patrol.
This is alarming, to say the least. If you call 911 in an emergency, what answer can you expect if you are within the City of Fairbanks? Same-day service? Maybe not.
Read MoreSen. Dan Sullivan should come clean with Alaskans about why he didn’t actually read the 37-count indictment before announcing his verdict that it’s all Joe Biden’s fault.
The all-purpose “Blame it on Biden” Sullivan statement recycles lazy talking points, which is also what happened March 31 when Sullivan attacked the previous Trump indictment without bothering to read it.
The first indictment “moved our country into banana republic territory,” Sullivan falsely claimed in March.
Read MoreThe Alaska Permanent Fund and the state’s retirement systems have billions of dollars invested and managed by “private equity” companies.
We know little about the specifics because of blanket confidentiality rules. We are told to trust that the experts know what they are doing. Perhaps that’s true.
What we don’t hear from anyone in Alaska state government is any discussion of the impacts of this investment category for the state, the nation and the world.
Read MoreThe alleged office, which I suspect is nothing more than a set of talking points that will be assigned to someone else in the governor’s office, is not something Alaska needs.
What we need is for Dunleavy to do much more about the deficiencies in state government in dealing with families and children.
It is hypocritical of him to claim to be ”pro-life,” while doing nothing to fix the gaping holes in our system that destroy families and lives.
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