Last week Sen. Dan Sullivan whined in print that if the Democrats in the Senate really think having no leader of the U.S. Marine Corps for the first time in 164 years is a problem, then Sen. Chuck Schumer should file the cloture paperwork to force a vote.

There is no confirmed leader of the Marine Corps because of an abortion protest by Sen. Tommy Tuberville, the former football coach who is blocking Pentagon nominees under one of the arcane rules of the doddering institution of 100. The total of promotions and transfers blocked by Tuberville is now 301 and rising.

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A news account in the Wall Street Journal Tuesday says what Alaska politicians won’t: “Japan and South Korea have rebuffed U.S. overtures about joining a proposed $44 billion Alaska natural-gas project that would be one of the biggest energy investments in American history.”

The story quotes Sen. Dan Sullivan as saying the Alaska gas pipeline is closer than ever, which is a claim that Alaska politicians have been making since long before Sullivan moved to Alaska. Sullivan says that private buyers in Asia are what the state needs.

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The Alaska Permanent Fund, now valued at near $80 billion, is not about to run out of money.

But the so-called earnings reserve of the fund, which is the only portion that the Legislature can appropriate for paying dividends and running state government, could run out of money in a few years if inflation remains a problem and investment returns are low.

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The portion of the Permanent Fund that can be spent by the Legislature at any time, and includes the source of money to pay dividends, the so-called “earnings reserve,” could be empty by 2026 or 2027, depending upon market returns. This looming pressure on what is now the major source of state government revenue is not mentioned by the bond rating agency.

There is far more reason for caution than celebration in the bond report, which warns that the “state’s operating budget remains exposed to oil price volatility, and longer-term, an overall shift to less carbon-intensive energy.”

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“Sullivan couldn't be more wrong. The number one factor in warfighting and lethality is recruiting and retention of troops. I know there's been a lot of uproar about AI lately, but I'm pretty sure that we're many years away from AI and robots being anything more than an adjunct to actual human troops.

“Recruiters from all branches of the service have had an increasingly hard time finding enough qualified people to fill their quotas. A recent House Armed Services Committee hearing featured Army, Navy, and Air Force leaders stating that they would all be thousands of recruits short of their goals this year.”

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Sen. Dan Sullivan read the headlines from three news stories and tossed paper copies over his right shoulder.

His instructor in Sincerity 101 must have told him that throwing paper on the ground is a good way to show disgust.

The junior senator claimed the stories were incorrect. He was unable to cite any errors.

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Alaska Attorney General Tregarrick Taylor says his support for forcing disclosure of private health information about women who get abortions applies to the 49 states where he is not attorney general.

It doesn’t apply to Alaska now, says the general, who sees the law in Republican-tinted glasses.

Taylor is on the state payroll in Alaska, where there is a constitutional right to privacy and abortion is legal, though he would prefer that it be illegal..

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The Dunleavy administration claims that if a state bans abortions it is legal for authorities to cross state lines and track whether a woman gets an abortion in another state, according to Attorney General Tregarrick Taylor, who has once again signed onto a GOP chain letter promoting his personal political opinions.

Taylor says it is legal for states to cross state lines to investigate whether someone living in a state that has banned abortions has gone to a state where abortions are legal and gotten one there.

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The “prefeasibility study” of the graphite project 37 miles north of Nome says it would have an internal rate of return of 26 percent before taxes, 22 percent after taxes and a net present value of $1.36 billion.

So why does the Canadian company promoting the project need a 50 percent federal subsidy for the $75 million “feasibility study” that was already under way last November on an accelerated basis?

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It’s no surprise that Sen. Dan Sullivan, appearing on Meet the Press, did not attack the Republican senator who is blocking hundreds of military promotions over a Pentagon policy on travel to states where abortion is not banned.

Sullivan changed the subject, claiming the real problem is that President Biden doesn’t want to spend tens of billions more on the military.

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If the federal government had not built the Alaska Railroad a century ago, Fairbanks would probably have disappeared from the map like so many other Alaska boom towns of the early 20th Century.

And Anchorage, a town created by the railroad and for the railroad, would have had no origin story at all.

In today’s dollars it was a $1 billion to $1.5 billion project, a massive decade-long undertaking significant enough to lure President Warren G. Harding to the ceremony marking its completion 100 years ago Saturday.

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When oil prices collapsed in the spring of 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, the BP sale of its Alaska assets to Houston billionaire Jeff Hildebrand was in jeopardy because banks led by JP Morgan were scared off, the Wall Street Journal reported at the time.

The banks had earlier agreed to what would essentially be a loan backed by future oil and gas proceeds, the newspaper said, but the oil panic led them to pull the plug. Hildebrand, the owner of Hilcorp, wanted to fund the purchase with debt.

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For the first time in 164 years, the U.S. Marine Corps does not have a leader confirmed by the Senate.

Sen. Dan Sullivan would be complaining long and loud about this as a serious threat to national security, but for one reason.

He can’t blame it on President Joe Biden or Sen. Chuck Schumer, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the woke left, environmentalists, reporters covering Congress, the dictators in China and Russia or people who understand the danger of climate change.

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One lesson that Alaska can learn from Canada can be found in the Extractive Sector Transparency Measures Act, a 2015 law that mandates publication of payments made to governments in Canada and beyond.

These reports are an excellent source of information to contrast and compare how much Canadian mining companies pay governments around the world in taxes, royalties, fees, etc.

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The University of Alaska and the governor’s office claim that Tuckerman Babcock’s term on the regents would last until 2031 and Seth Church’s term would last until 2027 if they are confirmed by the Alaska Legislature during the joint session of the Legislature.

Not exactly.

Their terms on the regents expire on the fifth day of the next legislative session.

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Created in 2022 with excessive hoo-ha by the Legislature and the governor, the 36-member Alaska Food Strategy Task Force is getting off to a slow start.

At a May 26th introductory meeting, task force leader Sen. Shelley Hughes looked for volunteers to chair three subcommittees to compile rushed reports by July 15 on three major issues—growing the agriculture industry, growing markets for local products and improving transportation and infrastructure.

The 36-member task force was supposed to have started strategizing last winter, with a report due by the end of this month on three on three of the major challenges facing agriculture in Alaska.

We should add bureaucratic inertia and task force redundancy to that list, as this effort is repeating work done last year by the Alaska Food Security Task Force.

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Wellspring Ministries of Alaska, an Anchorage right-wing religious organization led by Art Mathias, enjoys tax-free status under federal law.

Mathias’s church is a leading entity in the attempt to overturn ranked choice voting in Alaska.

On Dec. 16, 2022, Mathias filed papers in Washington creating a new church that is an “integrated auxiliary” of Wellspring Ministries. The leaders of the “church” are Mathias, his wife and Philip Izon.

The alleged “church” is called the Ranked Choice Education Association. The founders claimed to the state of Washington that the purpose of the “church” is to “promote Christian doctrines.” But it’s all about politics.

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The proposed Tetlin mine would be among the highest grade open pit gold mines in the world, if not the highest, according to Rick Van Nieuwenhuyse, the geologist and mine promoter who sold the idea to Kinross of trucking the ore nearly 250 miles across Interior Alaska to Fort Knox.

The ore is now expected to produce twice as much gold per ton as estimated in 2018 when a study said the capital costs of building mine processing facilities at Tetlin could be recovered in two years of mining. The after-tax internal rate of return was estimated at 29 percent with a grade of 4 grams per ton. Now the grade is expected to be 8 grams per ton.

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How many 82-ton ore-hauling trucks per day will Kinross run between the proposed Tetlin Mine and the Fort Knox Mine?

The shifting estimates from the company show that this is, at least in part, a public relations matter.

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In this corner we have Sen. Cathy Giessel and Rep. Zack Fields joining the promotional parade of oversimplistic claims about how to deal with China, ignoring what the cost would be to consumers.

And in this corner we have Rep. George Rauscher attacking the very idea of studying how much carbon dioxide is released in creating steel, plastic, etc., ignoring the cost of climate change or the consequences to consumers.

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