The Anchorage Coalition to End Homelessness has hired Anchorage Assemblywoman Meg Zaletel as interim executive director, effective immediately.
Zaletel currently represents Anchorage Assembly District 4, a midtown area. The group calls her a subject matter expert on fair housing and homelessness. In her role as chair of the Assembly Committee on Housing and Homelessness, she has been a negotiator on behalf of the Assembly to the Office of the Mayor on issues surrounding homelessness and the mayor’s plan to form up a navigation center to help people get back on their feet. She has been hostile to that concept in favor of her own ideas.
Now, Zaletel will have to recuse herself on the Assembly when it comes to voting on any issues involving homeless policy or appropriations and will step down from her role as chair of the Committee on Housing and Homelessness.
The nonprofit coalition receives local, state, and federal funds, as well as support from private philanthropy. One year ago, a Jeff Bezos foundation, Day 1 Families Fund, awarded the coalition $450,000. Last year, the group had a budget of $1,240,895.
The board at the homeless coalition may be appointing Zaletel as interim for now, in order to allow her to serve the remainder of her term on the Assembly. They may require her to step down from the Assembly, rather than run again, since the Assembly is now spending well over 40 hours a week in meetings, which leaves little time for Assembly members to hold down full-time jobs. This is an indication that she does not intend to run for reelection.
Zaletel’s move to the nonprofit organization was expected; those close to the matter said the organization wanted to wait until the recent special recall election was over; Zaletel won it handily with help from New York funding from a labor union political action committee. That result was certified by the Assembly on Tuesday.
The former director of the homelessness coalition, Jasmine Boyle, resigned in early November to take a position at another nonprofit in Anchorage.
Kathy Henslee has filed for the District 4 Assembly seat; that election is in March and April.
A political action committee to support the campaign of Sen. Lisa Murkowski was filed on Tuesday by Jim Lottsfeldt, of Lottsfeldt Strategies.
Lottsfeldt is a longtime political operator in Alaska associated with mainly Democrat and Big Labor candidates.
The filing for Alaskans for Lisa was made with the Internal Revenue Service and is the first true sign that Sen. Murkowski is going to run for reelection in 2022. She has been a U.S. senator for Alaska since 2002 and most politicos expect her to form up her campaign committee soon. She is being challenged by upstart candidate Kelly Tshibaka, a Republican, and a likely Democratic Party challenge by State Sen. Elvi Gray-Jackson.
On the super-PAC filing, the treasurer is listed as Murkowski’s former chief of staff Michael Pawlowski, and the address is on the same floor in the Peterson Towers as Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s Anchorage office, which is located at 510 L Street, Suite 60O.
Next door to Sen. Murkowski’s office is the home of the law offices of Scott Kendall, a former Murkowski campaign manager who subsequently engineered the Ranked Choice Voting ballot measure that voters passed in 2020. The political action committee is in Suite 610, making the 6th floor of the Peterson Towers look like a formidable operation for Murkowski’s 2022 campaign.
Although they share a floor, no coordination can go on between the political action committee and Murkowski’s official office or Murkowski’s actual campaign. Federal election laws require a clean firewall between those entities.
Calling a new federal mandate for health-care workers an “insult to personal freedom to heath-care workers,” Gov. Mike Dunleavy joined a coalition of states Wednesday in a lawsuit seeing to block the Biden Administration’s effort to make health care providers force their employees to take the Covid-19 vaccine.
A new Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Service rule forces Covid vaccines for almost every full-time, part-time, volunteer or contract employee working in health care settings that receive Medicare or Medicaid funding. CMS estimates more than 10.3 million Americans would fall under this overarching mandate.
“This new rule is an insult to the personal freedoms of the health-care heroes who have been critical to Alaska’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic,” Dunleavy said. “This is unconstitutional and yet another example of the Biden Administration’s overreach on issues that should be left to the states.”
Alaska Attorney General Treg Taylor and attorneys general from nine other states filed the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri.
The states seek an injunction to prohibit CMS from enforcing the mandate on grounds that the rule violates the 10th Amendment, the federal Administrative Procedures Act and other federal laws.
“The 10th Amendment prohibits federal agencies from taking away powers that are reserved to the states, which know best how to enact the kinds of public health measures to best fit the needs of its citizens,” said Attorney General Taylor. “This rule would punish our rural hospitals and countless health care workers across Alaska by withholding Medicare and Medicaid funding if they don’t comply with a mandate. The courts have already stopped one overreaching federal vaccine mandate in the 5th U.S. Circuit of Appeals, and we hope this one will be blocked as well.”
The CMS mandate covers a broad group of Medicare- and Medicaid-certified providers and suppliers, including rural health clinics, hospitals, long-term care facilities and home health agencies. Under the rule, health care workers must receive their first vaccine dose by Dec. 5 and be fully vaccinated no later than Jan. 4. Unlike the proposed Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) rule, CMS’s regulations provide no mechanism for employees to undergo testing rather than be vaccinated.
The rule makes exceptions only for specific medical or religious reasons.
The health care industry already faces a worker shortage in nearly all areas, likely to be exacerbated by the CMS mandate. There are critical shortages of nursing aides and nurses at nearly a quarter of all American long-term care facilities. The lawsuit estimates that if the CMS mandate is left in place, more than 200,000 healthcare workers could lose their jobs.
The lawsuit calls the mandate “an affront to the millions of healthcare workers who risked their lives in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic to care for strangers and friends in their communities,” and that the federal government has cast aside the health care workers who have personal reasons for not wanting the COVID-19 vaccine.
In addition to Alaska, the states in the lawsuit are Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming. Read the full complaint at this link.
Last Friday, Dunleavy and 10 other governors and attorneys filed a lawsuit against President Biden over the vaccine mandate for private employers. He also joined a lawsuit
The mission of the Anchorage Health Department is critical in this era of a global pandemic, with possibly more pandemics to come. But to the Anchorage Assembly, health is evidently not that important. They’ve been unwilling to confirm a Department of Health Director for nearly half a year.
On Tuesday night’s Assembly agenda, Joe Gerace was up for confirmation. But at the last minute, an anonymous person lodged a complaint about Gerace, who has been interim health director since the Assembly drove off the former director, David Morgan.
The Anchorage Assembly majority of nine decided to table the Gerace nomination and take up the anonymous allegation in executive session at 10:30 am on Friday, even though Gerace was willing to speak to the allegations on the public record Tuesday. There’s no indication that Gerace will be confirmed on Friday or if his confirmation yet delayed.
The Assembly and those attending the meeting seemed surprised by the guerrilla attack on Gerace, who has an extensive resume in health, law enforcement, and the military. Some of them said they had been on board with the nomination of Gerace, until the two allegations showed up.
A last-minute attack from an anonymous person.
A former employee is making a claim, and another person is making an anonymous claim made on his confirmation day, Tuesday.
Although the Democrats did very well with the new political map for the House of Representatives, when the Senate map was voted on, they were exceedingly unhappy.
Nicole Borromeo and Melanie Bahnke, members of the Alaska Redistricting Board who represent the interests of Democrats, could not accept that they didn’t have the votes to steer the Senate map to their liking, as they had done with the House map. In the end, even after they played the race card, the 3-2 vote finalized a Senate map on Tuesday.
Borromeo was especially dramatic and loud in her opposition, using the Democratic playbook that has everything about race.
“It opens the board up to an unfortunate and very easily winnable argument about partisan gerrymandering,” she lectured. “I don’t believe that any of the arguments that she [Board member Bethany Marcum] put on the record, and more importantly the sound sound legal advice that we got from counsel in executive session, supports this pairing.
Borromeo said, “It defies logic that we would do minority reach into South Muldoon and pair it with a very white District 8 miles away on the highway, that crosses one mountain range, and expect the courts to believe with any satisfaction that we have satisfied the public trust in the process.”
South Muldoon is 56 percent white, but to Borromeo is is all about the 44 percent nonwhite.
In the end, Board Chair John Binkley had to shut the agitated Democrat women down, and get the map voted on, as Wednesday is the deadline for the maps to be completed. The final action of the board is to sign the proclamation and adjourn.
The work of pairing Senate districts to the new lines ended with some unchanged Senate-House combinations, while others will look new to voters. All Senate legislators but Donny Olson will have to run for reelection, due to the new district lines.
In Southern Southeast Alaska, the Senate District that now has Sen. Bert Stedman representing it, has the House members Rep. Dan Ortiz and Rep. Jonathan Kreiss-Tompkins, as before. And Sen. Jesse Kiehl of Juneau still has Rep. Andi Story and Rep. Sarah Hannan in the downtown Juneau district.
In the Kodiak-Cordova area, Sen. Gary Stevens stil has Rep. Louise Stutes and Rep. Sarah Vance in his district.
Kenai Sen. Peter Micciche is paired with the same lawmakers, Rep. Ben Carpenter and Rob Gillham.
Anchorage is where it gets interesting.
South Anchorage Sen. Roger Holland has a different district, with Rep. Laddie Shaw in one House seat and one open House seat.
In South Anchorage, Sen. Natasha Von Imhof and Sen. Mia Costello have been pushed into the same Senate district. Rep. Tom McKay is in one of those House seats and Reps. Matt Claman and Sara Rasmussen are in the other House seat inside that Senate district.
In Midtown Anchorage, Elvi Gray-Jackson is still the senator, but paired with Rep. Harriet Drummond in one House district and Rep. Andy Josephson and Rep. Chris Tuck smooshed into the other.
Common buzz around the Legislature is that Rules Chair Bryce Edgmon (previous House Speaker) has no affection for Tuck, and ensured that his appointee on the Redistricting Board, Nicole Borromeo, pushed to force Tuck to defend his seat against Josephson.
In Downtown Anchorage, Sen. Tom Begich is paired with hardline leftist Democrats Rep. Zack Fields and Rep. Harriet Dummond. Geran Tarr is the other House member.
East Anchorage and Muldoon has Sen. Bill Wielechowski paired with Rep. Ivy Spohnholz and an open seat.
An open Senate seat for Government Hill , Muldoon, and JBER, combined with Eagle River, has incumbents Rep. Kelly Merrick and Rep. Ken McCarty in one district and Rep. David Nelson in the other.
For the South Eagle River-East Anchorage, where Sen. Lora Reinbold represents, Rep. Liz Snyder has one House seat while the other is open.
In midtown-East Anchorage, Sen. Josh Revak is paired with districts represented by Rep. Calvin Schrage and Rep. James Kaufman.
In the Mat-Su, Sen. Mike Shower is paired with districts now represented by Rep. George Rauscher of Sutton, and Rep. Kevin McCabe from the Big Lake-Denali Borough area.
Sen. David Wilson is paired with the open House seat of central core Wasilla, and the House seat that now has Rep. David Eastman and Rep. Chris Kurka gerrymandered into it, an effort driven by board member Borromeo on behalf of Democrats who don’t like Eastman.
Palmer Sen. Shelley Hughes has a district that has Rep. DeLena Johnson in one House seat and Rep. Cathy Tilton in the other.
Fairbanks has Sen. Click Bishop paired with a district that has Rep. Mike Cronk and Rep. Adam Wool in the other House district.
Fairbanks Sen. Scott Kawasaki is paired with Rep. Bart LeBon and Rep. Steve Thompson.
North Pole and Northeast Fairbanks Sen. Rob Myers is paired with Rep. Mike Prax and Grier Hopkins.
When school boards get together for meetings, the public is usually able to attend.
But when the Alaska Association of School Boards gets together to talk strategy for the coming year, the public is not welcome. That’s what Nial Williams discovered when he sat in on the Association of Alaska School Board conference this weekend at the Anchorage Hilton and quietly videotaped the proceedings. Until he was unceremoniously booted out.
The focus of the meeting was on the concept of racism and “equity,” which is one of the newer educational trends. Equity is understood in this era to be different from equality. Equity means every persons gets to succeed, and assistance is given according to their perceived need, in order to level the playing field. It’s a socialistic concept rooted in Critical Race theory.
Featured in the meeting was Anchorage School Board Chairwoman Margo Bellamy, who spoke at length about the concepts of disparity and promoted the concept of teaching Critical Race Theory. The document under consideration says Critical Race Theory without actually saying it:
Bellamy believes that people who are black or brown have no real chance in the current system because it has barriers to their success. Bellamy said “we can’t leave out the word ‘racism’.”
The four-day meeting also featured various awards for school board members across Alaska. Among those receiving awards for service is former Anchorage Board President Elisa Vakalis, who has been charged with theft and fraud.
Of note, the Mat-Su Borough School Board is not a member of AASB, and has not been for at least three years.
Dennis Prager, host of a radio show and founder of Prager U, will be the keynote speaker at the Alaska Family Council 2022 spring dinner on May 21 in Anchorage. Tickets are expected to sell out fast.
Through PragerU, the Dennis Prager Show, his social media fireside chats, and extensive writings, Prager has reached billions of people and touched the lives of millions around the world. He is a calm conservative in a noisy and cantankerous world.
The Dennis Prager Show is heard on nearly 400 affiliates plus iHeartRadio.com, and TuneIn.com, as well as various websites.
Born in Brooklyn, NY, Prager has authored nine books on subjects such as religion, happiness, morality, the left, Islamism, and America.The Rational Bible, is the first volume of his five-volume commentary on the first five books of the Bible – rooted in his extensive knowledge of biblical Hebrew. It is currently the bestselling Bible commentary in America, and at publication was the #1 bestselling non-fiction book in the United States.
His latest book from PragerU is a children’s story about Veterans Day. You can order it here.
Prager is an expert on communism, the Middle East, and the left, he did his graduate work at the Russian and Middle East Institutes of the Columbia University School of International Affairs. Prager taught Russian and Jewish history at Brooklyn College.
The motto of his show is, “I prefer clarity to agreement.”
President Joe Biden’s administration, ordered by an appeals court to respond by Monday, wrote its defense of the federal vaccination mandate on private employers with more than 100 employees. In it, he tells businesses in America to continue mandating vaccines on their employees, as though he will win the court challenge that has currently put a suspension on his vaccine mandate.
Here are some of the Biden Administration’s top points:
Biden says the federal government is within its authority to have OSHA issue an emergency temporary standard, which the Biden Administration falsely claims does not take effect until January. In reality, to meet that standard employees must begin their vaccinations two months in advance of the Jan. 4 deadline).
“Petitioners seek emergency relief,but most of their asserted harms are at least a month off, and many of their claimed harms relate to a testing requirement that does not become effective until January 2022. No reason exists to rule on petitioners’ stay motions immediately, before the Judicial Panel on Multi district Litigation even assigns a court to hear the many pending challenges, see 28 U.S.C.§ 2112(a),and certainly no reason to consider a permanent injunction, which would be particularly improper,” the Biden Administration wrote.
“Even if this Court adjudicates the motions, petitioners are not entitled to a stay or any broader order. Petitioners are not likely to succeed on the merits because their arguments are foreclosed by precedent, inconsistent with the statutory text, and contrary to the considerable evidence that OSHA analyzed and discussed when issuing the Standard,” the Biden Administration wrote.
The Biden Administration said the plaintiffs “have not shown that their claimed injuries outweigh the harm of staying a standard that will save thousands of lives and prevent hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations.”
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals will next decide whether to reverse its decision to suspend the Biden mandatory vaccination order or to permanently stop it. There are numerous other challenges pending in other legal jurisdictions, something the Fifth Circuit will be sensitive to.
On Monday, the Biden Administration said that private sector employers should continue to order their workers to get vaccinated. “People should not wait,” said White House Deputy Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre during a press conference on Monday. “They should continue to move forward and make sure they’re getting their workplace vaccinated.”
With Covid-19 cases falling in Alaska and hospitals not in actual crisis mode, many Alaskans are turning their focus to the holidays.
But not the Rogers Park Community Council. It’s still working on “Covid crisis” politics.
The midtown-area council will ask the Anchorage Assembly tonight to make the position of Chief Medical Officer one that must be confirmed by the Assembly. Currently, the position is one of the few at the top of the Executive Branch that doesn’t require confirmation — similar to chief of staff.
Tuesday’s Assembly meeting begins at 5 pm on the ground floor of the Loussac Library, which is located at the corner of 36th Avenue and Denali Street.
Never in the 40+ year history of Anchorage has that position been subject to confirmation by the Assembly.
The Rogers Park Community Council passed a resolution on Monday that contains a lot of outdated statistical information about the pandemic that arrived in Alaska in March of 2020. The resolution cites a similar stance against Dr. Michael Savitt, who is Mayor Dave Bronson’s medical advisor on staff, which was taken by several pediatricians in Anchorage in October, when they demanded the resignation of Savitt. They are also trying to go after his medical license.
Savitt has taken a careful approach to mandates from the government on the citizenry. He has stated that masks generally do not work for the general public because they don’t have virus-shielding masks, people don’t wear them correctly, and most don’t handle them properly.
The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a video last week that wearing a mask will prevent transmission of Covid up to 80 percent of the time. There appears to be no data to support her assertion:
In the Rogers Park Community Council resolution, the group from the neighborhood in Assembly District 4, said that the hospitalization rate has increased 16 percent over the previous week. That data is weeks old, as hospitalizations for Covid are now at at the level they were at the beginning of August.
The Rogers Park Community Council board is dominated by those who also oppose Gov. Mike Dunleavy, another elected official who has taken a conservative approach to the virus and supported civil liberties.
Rogers Park Community Council Chair Peter Mjos signed the Recall Dunleavy petition two years go. So did the Vice Chair Scott McMurren.
Those in attendance at the meeting reported to Must Read Alaska that the vote in the unrecorded meeting was 20 in favor of the resolution, four opposed and 3 abstentions. It is not clear who voted or whether they are members of the Rogers Park neighborhood, which has about 4,000 residents.
Attendees were rude and interruptive to Dr. Savitt, who also attended the meeting, according to MRAK sources.
Rogers Park is in District 4, represented by far-left Assembly members Meg Zaletel and Felix Rivera. Both attended the meeting, which was conducted via videoconference.
Dr. Savitt’s response to the current clamber to mask and vaccinate everyone was measured. He said the Anchorage Health Department is “cautiously optimistic” regarding the last several weeks of Covid numbers for the Municipality of Anchorage.
“We continue to see a decrease in the 14 day rolling average, 7-day positivity rate and reproduction numbers. We remain in a high-risk environment or red zone, but appear to be trending downward. Hospitals remain at near capacity levels. We hope to see those numbers start to decrease soon as well,” he wrote last week.
“In a continuing effort to drive the numbers further down we encourage folks to get vaccinated and follow CDC prevention strategies, such as, proper use of masks, handwashing for 20 seconds or more, physical distancing, and properly ventilated indoor spaces. When all of these measures are used together, we decrease the chance of getting sick with COVID. We strongly encourage you to speak to your healthcare provider to discuss vaccinations. If you do not have a healthcare provider, call the Anchorage Health Department,” Savitt wrote.
“Testing remains a very important tool in combatting COVID. Early detection of COVID leads to early treatment and better outcomes. If you have symptoms, get tested. It is the only way to know if you have COVID as many other illnesses have the same symptoms. If you have a positive test, call your healthcare provider asap for advice about early treatment. If you do not have a healthcare provider, call the Anchorage health Department for advice. Do not just sit at home, not seeking medical advice and hope for the best,” he wrote.
Savitt also wrote that good treatment includes monoclonal antibodies infusion. “This treatment is safe and effective. It works best when given within the first three to five days after onset of symptoms,” he wrote.
