In the myriad of conflicting and contradictory claims made by the Dunleavy administration over using public funds for private schools, one that stands out is the declaration that school districts may be violating the Alaska Constitution by allowing students to pay for private-school tuition with public money.

A violation of that nature should prompt action by the attorney general to force the school districts to stop, but AG Tregarrick Taylor has allowed it to go on. He is seriously conflicted over the issue.

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One of the arguments that the Dunleavy administration is making to the Alaska Supreme Court this week is that the state has no control over unconstitutional spending by the school districts because the law championed by Dunleavy absolves it of responsibility and bans the state from applying other rules.

Attorney General Tregarrick Taylor claims that the state education department has no control over the districts on how correspondence school allotments are used, though the education department is free “to ask the attorney general for legal advice on how student allotments may be spent,” but that school districts are “independent actors for purposes of liability under state law.”

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An educational organization is not necessarily an educational institution, according to the Dunleavy administration.

The league of state synonymists is pinning its legal hopes in the landmark school funding case on a flimsy claim that the words organization and institution are not interchangeable.

That’s relevant because the Alaska Constitution prohibits spending public funds at “any religious or private educational institution,” but it doesn’t say anything about public funds spent on religious or private organizations.

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Enough already with the hypocrisy of Sen. Dan Sullivan and fellow Trumpists on the border question.

Sullivan has one of his employees assigned to attack President Joe Biden on social media in the voice of Dan Sullivan, pushing a fictional portrayal of Donald Trump as a man with all of his faculties.

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Dave Winfield hit 465 home runs in the Major Leagues. Before he made it big, Winfield spent two summers in Fairbanks for the Alaska Goldpanners. One of his home runs may have hit the roof of the Fairbanks Curling Club. Or it may have bounced in the dirt and hit the wall of the club. It doesn’t really matter.

In the words of Lew Freedman, “any Goldpanner history talk quickly turns to Winfield. His name comes up in the first paragraph. Whether he ever hit a home run off the roof of the curling club or not.”

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In a March legislative hearing, the Dunleavy administration reported that 14 of the 31 jobs in the “member benefits” office of the Division of Retirement and Benefits were vacant.

This was the highest vacancy rate in the division, which has a total of 129 positions.

On April 1, the state said there was a delay of 3.5 months in processing retirement applications.

On Tuesday, the Department of Administration Commissioner Paula Vrana said the delay in processing has been cut to 8-10 weeks.

After publication of my blog post on this topic, a skeptical legislator contacted me to ask about reports that the 8-10 calculation only includes applications that have been officially entered into the system. I asked her to clarify if the backlog excludes the applications received by the state that have yet to be dealt with at all.

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The essential job of the chief executive in Alaska is to manage the daily operations of state government and keep the machinery of the bureaucracy running.

But the food stamp backlog, chronic delays in processing payroll forms, and the 15,000 people waiting for action on Medicaid applications are prime examples of how the administration of Gov. Mike Dunleavy has stumbled over the basics.

Now add another program where the state is falling short—getting new retirees the pension payments they are owed by the state and paying survivors the death benefits they are entitled to collect.

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As an online tool for tracking some state spending in Alaska, the new Checkbook Alaska website is an important advance over what has gone before.

But the state needs to do much more to live up to the 2022 law that says “The Alaska Online Checkbook Act shall be construed in favor of disclosure and transparency.”

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If the Alaska Supreme Court listens to what Sen. Mike Dunleavy claimed a decade ago, then Gov. Mike Dunleavy will lose his effort to funnel public funds to private schools and the Alaska Superior Court decision will be upheld.

On April 10, 2013 Sen. Mike Dunleavy said he knew it was illegal to allow public funds be used to pay tuition to allow a student to take even a single course in a private school.

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While Sen. Dan Sullivan stood in a room with other obsequious Republican senators, competing to stay in Donald Trump’s good graces, Sen. Lisa Murkowski found something better to do—have lunch with friends.

“I haven’t gotten any cards saying we wish you were there,” Murkowski told reporters, the Washington Post said.

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The governor’s office has yet to explain why it falsely claimed to be gathering signatures for education petitions.

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This is a reminder that Gov. Mike Dunleavy continues to pay Virginia publicist Mary Vought $5,000 a month for public relations work in Washington, D.C. under a questionable no-bid contract that has been extended or amended eight times without public justification or discussion.

Her husband is former federal bureaucrat Russell Vought, a Christian nationalist radical who is central to the Trump 2025 drive to remake the federal government and cater to Trump’s dictatorial whims. “Post-constitutional” is the euphemism in which Russell cloaks his scheme.

In a speech that didn’t get enough attention last year, Russell attacked legal immigrants to the United States, claiming that they refuse to assimilate. I suspect his real targets are not all legal immigrants, just those from what Trump calls “shithole countries.”

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The Dunleavy administration is trying a new tactic on its state-funded data mining operation to promote non-existent “petitions” to boost Dunleavy’s efforts to direct more public money to private schools.

In 2019, Dunleavy claimed he was gathering signatures on a petition to submit to legislators to support a Permanent Fund Dividend of $3,000. He also claimed he had a petition to cap government spending. And a petition to pay back PFDs.

But there were no petitions. He was simply collecting names and addresses of people who could be called upon for political support, disguising the nature of the exercise by calling them “petitions.”

He’s doing the same thing again.

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A Fairbanks high school math teacher and mother of two has begun to fill in the gap for those who have asked for analysis of the recent charter school study touted endlessly by Gov. Mike Dunleavy, Education Commissioner Deena Bishop and many Republican legislators.

West Valley High School teacher Beth Zirbes, who has master’s degrees in math and statistics from UAF, makes a clear case that the situation is far more complex than the simplistic portrayal by Gov. Mike Dunleavy, Education Commissioner Deena Bishop and many Republican legislators.

I commend Zirbes for devoting many hours of her own time to try and put this study in context, showing its strengths and weaknesses and why more work needs to be done. This should not be the end of the analysis, but the beginning.

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Anchorage attorney Craig Richards, who helped defend Gov. Mike Dunleavy against the recall, has been getting $12,000 a month from the state for the past year as “statehood defense coordinator.”

As I’ve written here before, the no-bid contract the Dunleavy administration created for Richards violated numerous procurement regulations.

Now he has a new contract, which again makes a mockery of the state procurement laws. Richards has basically become a part-time political employee of Dunleavy.

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Fairbanks volunteers who have joined Moms for Liberty are looking for books to ban in local school libraries, including books they have not read.

It’s no surprise that they have found plenty of objectionable words and want to read them out loud at school board meetings.

Members of the club, including Ruth Ewig, Gail McBride, and Cynthia Wozniak, want their opinions about acceptable books and objectionable words to become the law of the land. McBride and Wozniak made that clear in testimony to the school board this week.

They denounced “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison, with McBride and Wozniak saying it should be immediately removed from school library shelves. Lots of other books should be pulled as well, they said.

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“As the nation’s largest non-profit legal firm solely dedicated to religious liberty, our legal services are always provided at no charge to you,” the Texas-based First Liberty Institute says.

The Dunleavy administration has chosen three lawyers of the First Liberty Institute to help defend the practice of using state funds for private schools, contrary to the language of the Alaska Constitution.

The Alaska Constitution says, “No money shall be paid from public funds for the direct benefit of any religious or private educational institution.”

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Wall Street Journal reporter Molly Ball wrote: “Sen. Dan Sullivan stood beside the newly elected Taiwanese vice president in an orchid-draped room of the island’s presidential palace, making a promise that wasn’t wholly within his power to keep.”

“This is the message our bipartisan delegation wants to send to the people of Taiwan: ‘You can count on the United States of America,’ said the silver-haired Alaska Republican, a recently retired Marine.”

There is nothing “wholly” about this.

Sullivan never questions the brilliance of the convicted felon. And Sullivan cannot keep any promises to Taiwan if Trump wins because a Trump promise is as good as a degree from Trump University.

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Gov. Mike Dunleavy is spending state money on another data mining expedition on Facebook, claiming he has petitions on parental rights and education reform.

Are the petitions real? What do they say? Who will get the petitions? Who knows?

“By clicking submit, you agree to send your info to Governor Mike Dunleavy, who agrees to use it according to their privacy policy,” the Dunleavy ad says. “Facebook will also use it subject to our data policy, including to auto-fill forms for ads.”

One of Dunleavy’s new ads features a fake photo of four lecherous old characters with oversize noses polluting the room with cigar smoke and a headline, “They don’t want you to have parental rights.”

Other ads with alleged petitions claim that teachers are quitting their jobs because the Legislature failed to approve Dunleavy’s teacher bonus plan and families are fleeing the state because of a lack of education “reform,” a word means whatever you want it to mean. Everybody loves reform. And everyone loves parental rights.

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Four of the six Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation trustees refused to follow a legislative directive to close their new five-employee Anchorage office, claiming the Legislature doesn’t have the power to stop them.

This is not a smart move by Jason Brune, Adam Crum, Ryan Anderson and Gabrielle Rubenstein, who may think they are free to ignore the Legislature because they operate with the political blessing and protection of Gov. Mike Dunleavy.

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