During an extended whine two years ago, Sen. Dan Sullivan attacked President Joe Biden for using two Marines as political props for a speech in Philadelphia in which Biden said: “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic. Now, I want to be very clear, very clear up front: Not every Republican, not even the majority of Republicans, are MAGA Republicans. Not every Republican embraces their extreme ideology.”
Read MoreThe mess created by problems with the Statewide Transportation Improvement Plan has had its first clear financial consequence—the state stands to lose tens of millions in federal funds because it didn’t have the paperwork in order for projects to spend it on.
Read MoreGov. Mike Dunleavy has yet to fill the vacancy on the Alaska Permanent Fund board created by the resignation of Gabrielle Rubenstein, which followed disclosures about her questionable dealings with the staff of the corporation.
Ten people have applied this year to serve as trustees.
Read MoreNick Begich’s biggest holdings are in three limited liabilities companies and one limited partnership that he says are worth in total between $4 million and $20 million—FarShore Partners LLC, FarShore Ventures II LLC, FarShore Ventures III LLC and Listen Ventures III, LP.
In 2023, he said he received no income from those companies.
His largest other asset is his share of a Begich family business owned mainly by his dad that has long promoted conspiracy theories and peddled pseudoscience.
Read MoreNick Begich the Third, who finished second in the primary election for Congress, has adopted the Sen. Dan Sullivan canard that the Biden “administration has crippled our economy by restricting resource development and has now issued 66 executive orders specifically targeting Alaska.”
This is part and parcel of the lie that there is an “unprecedented war on Alaska,” a long-running Republican fantasy.
Read MoreAlaska journalist Craig Medred continues to investigate the death of veteran bicyclist Matt Glover, which doesn’t make up for the lack of an official investigation by the Fairbanks City Police.
Read MoreWhen Donald Trump adds a new lie to his act, he repeats it so often word for word that he probably is soon unaware that he is lying. Take for example, his favorite lie about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge—that it contains more oil than Saudi Arabia.
He repeated his fairy tale while boasting with Elon Musk: “I got ANWR in Alaska approved. Ronald Reagan couldn’t do it. Nobody could do it. Everybody tried. Nobody could do it. I got it approved. The first thing that Biden did was unimprove it to get rid of it. He ended it. His secretary went in and she ended it. And what a disgrace. That’s ANWR. That’s bigger, or they think it could be bigger than Saudi Arabia in Alaska.”
Read MoreAlaska’s leading Republicans, with the notable exception of Sen. Lisa Murkowski and some others, accept the gibberish of Donald Trump as the price of membership, never daring to question his competence or identify his lies.
Sen. Dan Sullivan, Gov. Mike Dunleavy, Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom, Nick Begich the third and the entire Republican Party apparatus—from Carmela Warfield and Craig Campbell to Cynthia Henry and Cheryl Markwood don’t dare openly discuss the matter of whether someone who rambles incoherently about sharks and electric boats and World War III can be trusted with the power to order a nuclear holocaust.
Discussing that in the open would require them to confess that Trump’s mental state, as expressed in the dear leader’s lies, should disqualify him from the presidency. As close as any of them come to backing Trump’s behavior is the often-expressed excuse from Sullivan that “maybe the rhetoric wasn’t so great.”
Read MoreThe Dunleavy administration remains at odds with local government agencies responsible for developing plans to spend federal highway dollars in Anchorage, Fairbanks and Mat-Su.
The bureaucratic fog is still thick enough to prompt a dozen Democratic and independent legislators to ask Transportation Commissioner Ryan Anderson to cancel road planning changes announced in July to the State Transportation Improvement Plan. They said the wide-ranging changes in projects and allocations will put the 2025 road construction season in the three areas at risk.
Read MoreEven during his Indiana high school days at the Culver Military Academy boarding school in the early 1980s, Dan Sullivan must have learned about the complicated history of the Vietnam war.
And he certainly couldn’t have finished his studies at Harvard and Georgetown without knowing about the institutional failures within the nation’s political and military institutions that led to the worst U.S. foreign policy disaster of the last century.
But here we have Sullivan asking the U.S. Senate to conclude that “the Vietnam war was an extremely divisive issue in the United States, as a result of certain biased and shameful attacks from some in the media, academia, politicians and many others.”
That is not why the Vietnam war was an extremely divisive issue in the United States.
Read MoreAT&T says that declining phone business in rural communities from Akutan to White Mountain is prompting it to propose an end to Alascom intrastate long distance telephone services in 42 villages, which will affect 500 residential and 1,400 business customers.
Read MoreGov. Mike Dunleavy led a successful pressure campaign to block a $150 million bond proposal with Wells Fargo Bank proposed by the staff of the Alaska Housing Finance Corporation.
That’s according to Fairbanks Mayor David Pruhs, an AHFC board member, who praised Dunleavy for leading the charge to get the board to kill the deal.
The $150 million plan with Wells Fargo Bank died for political reasons, not for financial reasons. It was “political correctness payback” against Wells Fargo, Pruhs said.
Read MoreThe fallout from the judicial scandal related to former Judge Joshua Kindred continues to spread.
Bloomberg Law reports that the former law clerk woman who complained about Kindred’s behavior alleges that the U.S. attorney’s office denied her a job because of the ruckus that ensued. The former law clerk said her boss at the prosecutor’s office informed her about her failure to get a job via an all-staff e-mail last September.
Read MoreIf you see or hear a claim that the Alaska Permanent Fund ended the fiscal year June 30 with a $428.3 million shortfall—and you might—don’t jump to conclusions.
This is more about the antiquated structure of the $80 billion fund than it is about recent performance. For nearly a quarter-century, the advice from financial experts has been clear—the fund needs a modern structure that provides more flexibility in dealing with tens of billions in global assets.
Read MoreThe Alaska Legislature approved a bill this year that, among many other things, will make it harder for Gov. Mike Dunleavy to appoint unqualified people to the Regulatory Commission of Alaska.
But Dunleavy has yet to sign the measure, House Bill 307, and one of the five commissioner jobs is vacant, so we’ll see if another unqualifed person is appointed.
Read MoreWith only one of three federal district court judgeships now occupied, the Alaska federal courts face a judicial emergency under the definition used by the nonpartisan administrative office of the federal court system.
A judicial emergency requires specific criteria about excessive case load levels. An emergency is also assumed to exist in “any court with more than one authorized judgeship and only one active judge.”
With the forced resignation of Judge Josh Kindred, the only federal district judge in Alaska is Judge Sharon Gleason.
Read MoreGabrielle Rubenstein announced plans to resign from the Alaska Permanent Fund Board of Trustees Wednesday, but not before providing a key vote in removing Ethan Schutt as chairman and replacing him with Jason Brune.
Former Attorney General Craig Richards referred to it as a “coup.” I have heard from other sources that the trustees had informally agreed in private to make Brune the chair. The vote was 4-2 with Richards and Schutt opposed.
Read MoreTruth is the first casualty of war, even in imaginary wars.
I want to deal here today with the 68 alleged executive orders and actions that Sullivan cites in his shock and awe campaign.
On December 8, 2021, in one of the first speeches he gave in Congress about the Biden war on Alaska, Sullivan said multiple times that there were “20 executive orders in eight months” and portrayed these as sanctions or direct attacks on working families.
Read MoreHistorian Heather Cox Richardson’s analysis on President Joe Biden’s decision to pull out of the 2024 race is cogent and enlightening. If you haven’t done so already, listen to what she said Sunday night.
I am in awe of the discipline and skill required to produce her daily “Letters from an American,” which has more than 1.5 million subscribers. She has her critics, but I know of no one else writing about history and politics with such finesse on the brutal schedule she keeps.
Read MoreMoms for Liberty is a nationwide group that circulates lists of books it wants to ban from public school libraries.
The Moms also object to anyone saying that Moms for Liberty want to ban books from public school libraries.
Moms for Liberty want to be able to decide what materials the children of other people should have access to in school.
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