The Alaska Legislature tried to shut down the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation plan to run an Anchorage office for a handful of employees, but Gov. Mike Dunleavy and the trustees declined to go along.
The trustees are now proposing $35,000 to continue an Anchorage lease that the Legislature officially rejected. The corporation trustees voted 4-2 in June to ignore the Legislature on this, backed up by the governor.
Read MoreThe 2024 financial disclosure reports of Rep. Mary Peltola and Republican Nick Begich the Third were due a month before the primary election, but the clerk’s office of the U.S. House claims they were not filed.
It makes little difference, however, as there is a $200 token penalty for candidates who do not file in a timely manner.
Read MoreJohn Espindola, whose 2023 appointment to the Regulatory Commission of Alaska led to a new law this year making it harder for the governor to put unqualified people on the commission, is now the chairman of the RCA.
In a meeting Wednesday, the other commissioners elected Espindola, the former personal assistant to Dunleavy, to preside over the commission.
There is already one vacancy on the five-member commission. There will soon be two.
Read MoreThe Ketchikan dog survival story is a good one.
A week after the Ketchikan landslide that killed city employee Sean Griffin and injured three others, state geologist Travis Watkins heard whimpering in the wreckage of a house that had been pushed 47 feet.
James Montiver was able to escape the building after the slide, but Bill Montiver was trapped and later rescued.
Read MoreI suspect that some people in Minto, the 150-person village northwest of Fairbanks, don’t know what is being done in their names by Minto Money, which makes small loans at interest rates of more than 700 percent on the internet.
Minto Money says it does not do business in Alaska, is not subject to state laws that limit interest rates and does not have to be licensed in any state.
It is allegedly organized under the laws of the Native Village of Minto and headquartered at “205 Lakeview Drive, Suite 7, Minto, Alaska.”
As one of numerous lawsuits against Minto Money says, there is a tribal building at that address with no suites or numbers, so it is an unlikely site for e-commerce.
Read MoreThe federal highway department annually marks the end of August with a redistribution of billions in transportation dollars that states haven’t obligated.
It does this through a competitive process in which states must have plans in place to obligate the money for approved projects before the end of the fiscal year September 30.
Alaska came up short in the competition this year, with a $19 million share, down from $108 million last year and $87 million two years ago.
Read MoreAG Tregarrick Taylor refused in February to join the lawsuit filed by the Federal Trade Commission, eight other states and the District of Columbia against the proposed $24.6 billion Kroger merger. There is no reason to swallow his claim that prices at Fred Meyer will drop if 18 Alaska Safeway and Carrs stores are sold off to an East Coast company with no Alaska ties that will have a hard time competing in Alaska.
Read MoreDuring 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.
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