Congressman Don Young has two job openings — one in his DC and one in his Anchorage office:
Special Assistant – Anchorage
The special assistant monitors and updates our state director and me on state and local issues. This position acts as my liaison to federal, state, and local agencies, and answers casework correspondence and communications with constituents.
Duties include, but are not limited to, handling constituent casework assignments, assessing issues on the ground that may require legislative action, acting as Young’s proxy at meetings when he is voting in D.C., and compiling and delivering constituent opinions on items before Congress.
The ideal candidate works well under pressure, is willing to work with a flexible schedule that may include nights and weekends, and can grow and maintain relationships with community members and stakeholders in Alaska.
Strong oral and written communication skills, knowledge of Alaska and its culture, a grasp of the legislative process, understanding of local and state issues, and a level temperament are required. Given the range of casework and his office’s commitment to privacy, applicants must be able to maintain confidentiality and exercise discretion.
Travel of up to 10% may be required, and applicants must hold a valid driver’s license.
Legislative Correspondent – Washington, D.C.
Responsibilities include answering phones, overseeing constituent communications, managing all incoming and outgoing mail, processing flag and tour requests, supervising the interns’ day-to-day tasks, drafting legislative and non-legislative letters, and other duties as assigned. Candidates must be able to set and meet deadlines, work well in a team environment, and occasionally work outside of standard business hours, including nights and weekends. Alaska ties are preferred but not required.
To apply, send a resume and cover letter to [email protected]with “Anchorage Special Assistant” in the subject line.
Two young Republicans who are challenging Republicans incumbents in Congress posted Halloween commentary that featured President Joe Biden.
“Happy Halloween! Today is full of scares, but there’s nothing more frightening than Liberal Lisa Murkowski being Sleepy Joe Biden’s Chief Enabling Officer. It’s time to defeat her and spook the DC Insiders!,” was the comment posted with Kelly Tshibaka’s Halloween greeting on Twitter. She is challenging Sen. Murkowski to represent Alaska.
Running for the House of Representatives, Nick Begich posted a design featuring Sen. Chuck Schumer, President Joe Biden, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi as pumpkin heads, calling them monsters who need to be kicked out of the “swamp.” His Halloween greeting was posted on Facebook.
The number of students enrolled in Anchorage School District has not fully recovered from what it was before the Covid pandemic and subsequent school closures and the district’s pandemic policies.
For the 2018-2019 school year, there were 46,734 students enrolled, according to the Alaska Department of Education.
Last year’s official number was 41,902.
Now, according to the October count, there are 42,826, an increase of just 924 students from last year, but a decrease of 3,908 from before the pandemic.
That is a 2% recovery in enrollment in the public schools year over year, an important measure because State Base Student Allocation funding is calculated on enrollment. It’s more than an 8 percent decrease from the year before the pandemic hit and schools across the country began enacting various measures, including closing schools, moving to distance learning, masking, and ending school bus service.
The student count period for this year ended Oct. 22.
For FY2020, the district received an historically high amount from the Legislature, over $331 million. In FY2021, that dropped to nearly $322 million.
State foundation formula payments for the first nine months of the fiscal year are calculated based on the priorfiscal year’s official enrollment number. The remaining three months — April, May, and June — are re-calculated and trued up based on the finalized foundation counts for that school year, so that as the year ends, districts will have been paid what they are due based on the reconciled “average daily membership” count.
However, there is a “hold harmless” provision that says if the drop from the prior year is more than 5%, the funding formula will be based on the prior year’s count. The hold harmless provision has a three-year formula explained here.
Anchorage school enrollment peaked at 50,024 students in the 2003-2004 school year. Since then, ASD has added more than a million square feet of new schools. In simple terms, in 18 years Anchorage has lost nearly 8,000 kids — but added space for 6,000 more.
This year’s official number is much lower than it was projected to be by the district. See story below from September:
Nearly every seat was full and the parking lot overflowed, with cars stretching far down the street at ChangePoint Church in Anchorage, where some of the leading experts on early treatment for Covid-19 led a full day of presentations for medical professionals and separately for lay people.
800 cars were parked in the parking lot itself for the event, and up to 1,200 people attended some or all of the day’s presentation.
The morning session was highly technical for those in the medical profession. In the afternoon, it was more about people and policy, and there was much cheering and approval from the audience, who rose to their feet to applaud several times.
Lockdowns “cause more lives lost than it saves by far,” said Dr. Robert Malone, the founder of the Global Covid Alliance of doctors telling the truth about Covid, its origins, successful early treatment, and the misguided medical establishment. He is the inventor of the vaccine technology used in the Covid-19 vaccines currently being used. “These lockdowns are totally inappropriate.” He and the group of doctors have been trying to take their messages to every state.
It’s not fun, he said, being libeled by the media or the medical industry, after spending 30 years in research with several vaccine patents to his name.
“They are hunting physicians that speak out. They hunt them through a standard practice. And by ‘they,’ I’m referring to the press,” he said during the afternoon session.
He said in Italy he was labeled as a terrorist, and as part of the “dirty dozen” by Italian media, for being part of an international summit on Covid.
In Portugal, he ran into a pediatrician who advocated against vaccinating children for Covid. The doctor was vilified in the press and ended up with a threat against his medical license.
Malone, who just came back from Hawaii, said Hawai has had its economy destroyed by lockdown policies that have no merit.
He met a doctor on the island of Maui who has said publicly that pregnant women should not be given the Covid vaccine. The result of speaking out was a U.S. senator declaring, also publicly, that the doctor should lose his license.
Malone talked about other people in Hawaii who worked on early treatment and had their licenses threatened: “I’ve seen the same thing play out again and again and again.”
“The press is hunting physicians all over the world,” Malone said, acknowledging that a reporter from Reuters was in the room.
“I’ve been accused that the reason I’m doing this is because there’s some flaw in my character and I’m seeking attention. Trust me, this is not fun. It’s not fun to be constantly subjected to attacks, derision, character assassination, professional assignation by the press,” he said at the beginning of his afternoon presentation. “I’ve been called the most vilified scientist in the world. I’m not doing this for fun. I’m not doing this for some sense of personal aggrandizement. I would have been quite happy staying on my farm with my wife and working on the four different clinical trials that I am about to start.”
He said he went public with his opinions about the Covid vaccine because “I was personally offended by what was being done, by the violation of the ethics, of the standards and regulatory norms that I’ve been trained on for over 30 years as a vaccine and drug development specialist.”
All of the speakers at the summit had harsh words for the media for creating a culture of fear around the virus. Malone called out the “fact-checking” industry, and said the fact-checkers are paid by organizations such as the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to attack people. That foundation has major financial ties to Johnson & Johnson, he said.
Dr. Richard Urso, a Houston opthamologist, repeated the message that vaccinating children with the Covid-19 vaccine was not only unnecessary but could be harmful. His message was repeated by the other guest speakers. He called for the medical community to draw on their courage to do the right thing, and treat patients early for Covid, rather than wait until they are on a ventilator. There are treatments that are working, and natural immunity is the strongest defense at this point.
The overarching message from the presentations was the importance of medical freedom, and the need for doctors to be able to care for patients without the fear they are currently experiencing.
All of the speakers warned against using the new Covid vaccines on pregnant women. Too little is known about what happens when the vaccine hits a pregnant woman’s system or the unborn child she carries.
The visiting doctor-scientists had words of praise for local family physician Ilona Farr, who was the first speaker of the day. She received a standing ovation from the large auditorium. Farr described how she has worked to keep people out of the hospital by using treatment protocols being developed by doctors all over the world. There are only a few doctors and nurse practitioners in the state who are actually treating people for Covid with the specific protocols that she says are working in almost every patient she has treated, except one patient who got the medicines too late.
It’s very difficult in Alaska to get the Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine prescriptions filled, and Farr and the other doctors advised people have them in their medicine cabinets in advance of contracting the virus, because the virus is so debilitating that once sick, people are unable to advocate for themselves.
Other points the physician-scientists made:
When people say Ivermectin is a horse drug, remind them aspirin is also used as a horse drug.
No Covid shots for children. Natural immunity will be better for them.
Let physicians treat patients.
The National Institute of Health has no protocols for early treatment, even nearly two years after the pandemic started.
We are having an epidemic of fear.
For the vast majority of people, the virus is survivable.
Using remdesivir, the one medication approved for treatment of Covid, can be inappropriate and also dangerous if administered too late in the course of the illness, and can cause organ failure.
Treating Covid early with Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine, Vitamin D, Zinc, Quercetin, Melatonin, and other nutrients has been successful when used in appropriate doses.
Using Ivermectin or other medications when patients are already in shock or on ventilators is not helpful
People are dying unnecessarily because of the lack of early treatment.
Covid vaccines don’t stop transmission or infection. They are not creating safety.
Covid-19 is a manufactured virus made in China. Dr. Li-Meng Yan said it is part of a bioweapons program and the Communist Chinese hope to tear apart America with the virus.
I first arrived in America on February 1, 1978. An agent of the Immigration and Naturalization Services greeted me at the John F. Kennedy Airport in New York. He gave me $8, a small booklet titled Introduction to a New Life, a packet titled United States Refugee Program, and wished me “Good luck!” On that same day, I traveled to Philadelphia, where my new life began as an immigrant in America.
Three to four months later, a rumor went around among the Russian immigrant community in Philadelphia that Vladimir Vysotsky, a popular actor, poet and singer, would perform at the Doral Restaurant in the northeast part of the city. Tickets cost $10, which at that time was a substantial sum for newly arrived immigrants. But I scraped together the money for a ticket and went to the Vysotsky concert.
I knew Vysotsky’s songs well. Having been a student of the history faculty of Kiev Pedagogical Institute, I had participated in archeological expeditions and always listened with enthusiasm to his songs and often shared the experience with a small circle of friends while seated around a fire.
In the U.S.S.R., Vysotsky, an ideologically controversial character, was “the voice of the heart of a nation.” His wide-ranging and forthright poems and songs were considered subversive by the Soviet authorities, but they were the cultural lifeblood for many Russians, especially for young generation of the 1960s and 1970s.
Vladimir Vysotsky
Vysotsky is so unique that there are probably few like him worldwide. In some ways, however, his music and lyric resembles a combination of American performers—John Prine, Johnny Cash, Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan, but in the context of Russian culture.
In a majority of cases, Vysotsky performed at factory concert halls or in other unassuming venues and in cultural clubs. It was practically impossible to attend one of his concerts in the former Soviet Union due to a high interest for his performance or security reasons engineered by the internal police.
In the spring of 1978, nearly 200 people, all Russian immigrants (approximately 300 immigrant families lived in Philadelphia in the 1970s), were crowded into the Doral Restaurant auditorium in northeast Philadelphia. Representatives of Soviet authority from the Russian Embassy in D.C. or from the nearest Russian Consulate were also present, standing in various corners of the hall and looking intently over the assembled crowd. Their mere presence evoked a feeling of caution, tension and fear borne of past years in the Soviet Union.
On the stage was a chair, and near this chair one of the concert organizers had placed a bottle of vodka with a highball glass. A short time later, Vysotsky quietly came on stage with his guitar and, without looking out over the attendees in the hall, sat on the chair and turned to the audience: “Please, do not send me notes with requests. I will sing only what I want or can sing.” The audience did not respond to these words; he began to perform, one song after another, without commentary and particular emotion. The concert lasted 40–50 minutes. Vysotsky did not drink the vodka.
My second, but at that time not personal, encounter with Vysotsky occurred in the summer of 1990, in Altay (mountains in Russia north of Mongolia) where, along with students of the history faculty of Krasnoyarsk University, I was conducting an archeological investigation of the Denisov Cave—a Late Paleolithic site dated approximately 20–25,000 years old. Academic Anatoliy Panteleyevich Derevyanko, on behalf of the Siberian Branch of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R., had invited me to Akademgorodok (a large scientific center in Western Siberia) in Novosibirsk for three months to participate in the archeological expedition in Altay.
By this time, I had already lived in America for 12 years and had become a naturalized U.S. citizen.
At the conclusion of the archaeological expedition, the students from Krasnoyarsk University with whom I had worked gifted me a book of Vladimir Vysotsky’s verses titled Klich (“call” or “summons”). The book was already quite worn and, it appeared, read many times by many people. On the first page of the book the students had written: “To our friend Alex from his Soviet student historians. Denisov Cave – ‘90’.”
Vysotsky died in Moscow in July of 1980 at the age of 42. Although he left behind a long and sad account of his last days under the influence of many drugs, he is fondly remembered by those who loved his lyrics and open-minded, pro-freedom songs.
These were my encounters and are my recollections regarding Vladimir Vysotsky, one of the instigators and pioneers of glasnost (“the opening”) in the former Soviet Union, that took place long before the Soviet Chairman of the Communist Party Mikhail Gorbachev’s socio-economic reforms in the mid-1980s.
Alexander B. Dolitsky was born and raised in Kiev in the former Soviet Union. He received an M.A. in history from Kiev Pedagogical Institute, Ukraine, in 1976; an M.A. in anthropology and archaeology from Brown University in 1983; and was enroled in the Ph.D. program in Anthropology at Bryn Mawr College from 1983 to 1985, where he was also a lecturer in the Russian Center. In the U.S.S.R., he was a social studies teacher for three years, and an archaeologist for five years for the Ukranian Academy of Sciences. In 1978, he settled in the United States. Dolitsky visited Alaska for the first time in 1981, while conducting field research for graduate school at Brown. He lived first in Sitka in 1985 and then settled in Juneau in 1986. From 1985 to 1987, he was a U.S. Forest Service archaeologist and social scientist. He was an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Russian Studies at the University of Alaska Southeast from 1985 to 1999; Social Studies Instructor at the Alyeska Central School, Alaska Department of Education from 1988 to 2006; and has been the Director of the Alaska-Siberia Research Center (see www.aksrc.homestead.com) from 1990 to present. He has conducted about 30 field studies in various areas of the former Soviet Union (including Siberia), Central Asia, South America, Eastern Europe and the United States (including Alaska). Dolitsky has been a lecturer on the World Discoverer, Spirit of Oceanus, andClipper Odyssey vessels in the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions. He was the Project Manager for the WWII Alaska-Siberia Lend Lease Memorial, which was erected in Fairbanks in 2006. He has published extensively in the fields of anthropology, history, archaeology, and ethnography. His more recent publications include Fairy Tales and Myths of the Bering Strait Chukchi, Ancient Tales of Kamchatka; Tales and Legends of the Yupik Eskimos of Siberia; Old Russia in Modern America: Russian Old Believers in Alaska; Allies in Wartime: The Alaska-Siberia Airway During WWII; Spirit of the Siberian Tiger: Folktales of the Russian Far East; Living Wisdom of the Far North: Tales and Legends from Chukotka and Alaska; Pipeline to Russia; The Alaska-Siberia Air Route in WWII; and Old Russia in Modern America: Living Traditions of the Russian Old Believers; Ancient Tales of Chukotka, and Ancient Tales of Kamchatka.
The Early Treatment Summit, which takes place Saturday at 6689 ChangePoint Dr. Anchorage, will be live-streamed.
Details: The morning session, 8 am-noon, will be live on the Must Read Alaska YouTube channel; the session will be of a more technical nature and designed for medical professionals. We will also livestream the luncheon keynote speaker.
Those attending in person must register at the summit’s website in advance.
The summit has been organized by a group of concerned Alaskans in the medical field who are interested in how the Covid pandemic can be addressed with early treatment of those who become infected in order to reduce symptoms and promote recovery.
Guest speakers include Dr. Li-Meng Yan, a Chinese scientist who defected to the United States and who has gone public about the origins of the coronavirus, linking it to bioweapons laboratory experiments in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China. She is the luncheon keynote speaker.
Also speaking at the conference are:
Dr. Robert Malone, one of the primary inventors of the mRNA vaccine technology used in the Pfizer and Modern Covid vaccines, is one of the speakers at event on Saturday that is sure to rattle the mainstream medical establishment in Alaska, and has already led to “anti-vax” insinuations by the mainstream media.
Dr. Richard Urso, a Texas ophthalmologist and scientist who works on drug repurposing research. He is a member of America’s Frontline Doctors, a group that is pioneering treatments for Covid.
Dr. Ryan Cole, a board-certified dermatophathologist (AP & CP) and the CEO/Medical Director of Cole Diagnostics in Idaho. He has worked as an independent pathologist since 2004 and is a member of America’s Frontline Doctors.
The name of Dr. Yan as a speaker has been a guarded secret until Must Read Alaska was permitted to disclose it on Friday evening.
According to Congressman Mo Brooks of Alabama, who met with Dr. Yan recently:
China seeks to develop a race-based bio-weapon that targets and eliminates some human races while leaving other human races unharmed.
“COVID-19 is a part of a larger, more comprehensive unrestricted bioweapons program of the Chinese military.”
“Dr. Yan fled Hong Kong to inform and warn the world about China’s virus weaponization program.”
Communist China seeks to kidnap or kill Dr. Yan in order to silence her.
“Chinese military scientists suggest that World War III would be fought with biological weapons.” The source for this statement is Communist China’s “People’s Liberation Army’s official bioweapons textbook.”
“According to the (Communist China) People’s Liberation Army document, modifications to the virus are designed to appear as if they occur in nature. … The manual then calls for ‘gaslighting with unrelenting misinformation’, obfuscation and denial. According to Dr. Yan, the world is living the intentional modification, release and contrived narrative around what ultimately is an attack by the Communist Chinese Party on the entire world.”
Dr. Yan “confirms that the (COVID-19) virus is not from nature and that the Chinese made up the nature-origin evidence and coerced the international academic world into spreading a false narrative.”
“These viruses were part of the military’s curated collection as described in the (People Liberation Army’s) manual, for study as potential unrestricted bioweapons.”
“SARS-CoV-2 has been adapted in the lab to be able to infect humans using established gain-of-function processes commonly utilized throughout China.”
Dr. Yan encourages the world to ensure Communist China’s “potential remaining bioweapons can be secured and destroyed.”
Dr. Li-Meng Yan, a Chinese virologist known for an explosive interview with Tucker Carlson in which she claimed the Covid-19 SARS-CoV-2 virus was made in a Chinese government laboratory, is the keynote speaker at a Covid summit to take place in Anchorage on Saturday. Over 800 people have already registered for the event, which has a capacity of 1,200.
Dr. Yan was educated at two top medical schools in China, Southern Medical University and Central South University. She was a post-doctoral fellow at the School of Public Health at the University of Hong Kong.
Dr. Yan is said to be the only Chinese insider in the West with firsthand knowledge about the true origins of the coronavirus and the Chinese Communist Party’s work to disguise their bioweapons research.
Since escaping from Hong Kong on April 28, 2020, she has been interviewed four times by the FBI, according to her bio.
On the Tucker Carlson Today show, she revealed that her husband is helping the Chinese Communist Party make her “disappear” for exposing the origins of Covid. Yan told Carlson that according to immigration records, her husband has entered the United States with an HB-1 visa for two years and may be planning to harm her with the assistance of the CCP and some people within the U.S. She travels with a heavy security detail.
Original details:
Dr. Robert Malone, one of the primary inventors of the mRNA vaccine technology used in the Pfizer and Modern Covid vaccines, is one of the speakers at event on Saturday that is sure to rattle the mainstream medical establishment in Alaska, and has already led to “anti-vax” insinuations by the mainstream media.
The Alaska Early Treatment Summit takes place from 8 am to 5 pm at ChangePoint Church, 6689 ChangePoint Drive in Anchorage. Although the church is not sponsoring the summit, it has rented out the facility to a group of doctors and other medical professionals who are remaining anonymous to prevent backlash from medical colleagues who are pushing the Covid-19 vaccine widely as the only defense against the virus.
“Our main goal of this event is to discuss early treatment of Covid-19. We know that if we can treat early (within the first week), we can affect the outcome of Covid with the goal of decreasing hospitalizations and deaths, regardless of vaccine status. That is our main message,” said an Anchorage doctor, speaking on condition of anonymity. “Unfortunately, the vaccine does not prevent infection or transmission of this disease and that’s why it’s not the answer to this problem.”
Dr. Malone will be joined by Dr. Richard Urso, Dr. Ryan Cole, and Dr. Li-Meng Yan.
Malone invented mRNA vaccine technology when he was at the Salk Institute. His research continued at Vical, a biopharmaceutical company, in 1989, where he designed the first in-vivo mammalian experiments. His work on the mRNA technology has led to over 10 patents. Malone was also an inventor of DNA vaccines in 1988 and 1989.
Dr. Urso is a Texas ophthalmologist who studied medicine at the University of Texas Medical School at Houston and went on to complete his residency in ophthalmology at the University of Texas Southwestern in Dallas. He concluded with a fellowship in oculoplastics and reconstructive surgery at the University of Texas branch at Galveston. He has served as an ophthalmologist and clinical assistant professor in the Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Science at the University of Texas Medical School at Houston as well as Assistant professor in the Department of Head and Neck Surgery at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. Urso has been involved in drug repurposing in addition to drug development and has received FDA approval for his novel wound-healing drug .
He is a member of America’s Frontline Doctors, a group that is treating patients across the country for Covid, using a combination of Ivermectin, at times hydroxychloroquine, plus other treatments involving Vitamin D, Zinc, Quercetin, and anti-inflammatories. The group of doctors has been featured on OAN, in Epoch Times, and other non-mainstream media, and the mainstream medical community and media casts the group in a poor light.
Cole, another member of America’s Frontline Doctors, is a board-certified dermatophathologist (AP & CP) and the CEO/Medical Director of Cole Diagnostics in Idaho. He has worked as an independent pathologist since 2004. He attended Ackerman Academy of Dermatopathology for his dermatopathology fellowship (chief fellow) after completing a residency in anatomic and clinical pathology with a surgical pathology fellowship at the Mayo Clinic. He has done extensive research/training in immunology.
Alaska Covid Alliance, the group sponsoring the event, is keeping local supporters’ and sponsors’ names private — these professionals have too much to lose if their colleagues decide to stop referring patients to them or if they are reported to the state medical board.
Alaska Public Media threw shade on the conference, writing, “The conference claims to have a mission of spreading information about COVID-19 treatments and patient rights, but most of the speakers are not infectious disease experts and are advocating for treatments that are not supported by research.”
“Malone now claims that the vaccines actually make the disease worse, something the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says is false. A profile in The Atlantic magazine says that Malone is careful to distance himself from the “anti-vax” label, but he has appeared alongside people who have spread vaccine misinformation,” Alaska Public Media wrote.
The public broadcasting station also noted that America’s Frontline Doctors have seen their videos “removed from some major social media sites for spreading false information about the vaccine.” And the news station writes that Urso “was investigated and cleared for prescribing hydroxychloroquine to patients to treat COVID-19,” a treatment the news station claimed is “disproven.”
Malone, Urso, and Cole have been traveling the country to speak to Americans, and are on a mission to reach people in every state. At a conference in another state, they met similarly minded medical professionals from Alaska who agreed to coordinate the upcoming Saturday summit.
Some medical professionals are concerned that the Covid-19 vaccines are “leaky,” which means that the virus can easily defeat the one mechanism the vaccine is using to protect people. Leaky vaccines can lead to breakthrough cases of an illness.
Although the doctors are not necessarily anti-vaccine, many of these doctors believe that treatments for the inflammation and blood clots that are brought on by Covid are best done early, and that too little focus is given to this area of healing, while emergency rooms fill up and patients are being put on ventilators after the virus has made a stronghold in their bodies, rendering their immune systems too weak to fight.
Alaska saw 809 new Covid diagnoses on Oct. 28, a 16 percent decrease from the week prior.
232 Alaskans are in the hospital with Covid, and 33 of those are on ventilators. The number of people in the hospital with Covid represents 21 percent of all hospitalization.
There are 290 non-ICU beds available statewide and 20 ICU beds available.
65 percent of eligible Alaskans have had one dose of a Covid vaccine, and 60 percent have been fully vaccinated. A partial vaccination reportedly confers between 64-75 percent protection from the virus.
According to the CDC, the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was 95% effective at preventing laboratory-confirmed infection with the virus that causes COVID-19 in people who received two doses and had no evidence of being previously infected.
Community vaccination rates – 1 dose:
95% – Bristol Bay region.
90% – Aleutians
89% – Skagway
87% – Nome
87% – Yukon-Koyukuk
85% – Kusilvak
85% – Sitka
84% – Juneau
82% – Yakutat
82% – Bethel
77% – Haines
76% – Aleutian West
76% – Denali
75% – Kodiak
73% – Ketchikan
72% – Prince of Wales
71% – Northwest Arctic
70% – Petersburg
69% – Anchorage
69% – Valdez-Cordova
68% – Wrangell
68% – Dillingham
57% – Fairbanks
54% – Kenai
48% – Mat-Su
43% – North Slope
41% – Fairbanks Southeast
699 Alaskans have died from Covid since March of 2020.
I am thankful for the wisdom of our Founding Fathers who gave us a representative republic, where the rights of the minority are protected from the mob.
“A republic, if you can keep it,” is the way Benjamin Franklin described it at the end of the Constitutional Convention.
I’m thankful for those checks and balances, the separation of powers, and for elections.
In our local governing body, Assembly members are non-partisan representatives for their constituents. They provide these checks and balances at the local level.
But what I observed this week at the Assembly meetings leaves me dumbfounded.
I witnessed a super-majority of the Assembly launch a new volley of attacks on community members trying to do their civic duty. Like bullies on the playground, a progressive cabal has unleashed the hounds on anyone who doesn’t align with their exact political agenda.
From mothers giving testimony to qualified, willing public servants volunteering to serve on boards and commissions, this Assembly majority weaponized its power and is now holding Anchorage hostage.
They have intimidated those who have stepped up, even so far as to ridicule and destroy reputations. Their goal seems to be to wreak havoc.
What the Assembly majority did in denying Mayor Dave Bronson his choice for Real Estate director for the municipality can be called gangster government.
Jim Winegarner has an impressive resume as a real estate professional, landman, with over 40 years of experience in oil and gas land work, mostly in Alaska, doing acquisitions, negotiating operating agreements, and working on joint ventures for the next generation of oil and gas, among other things.
For the past several months, he served as the as the Anchorage Chief Housing Officer. When the previous Real Estate director didn’t work out due to her own problems with the Bronson Administration, Winegarner was named as her replacement.
He is a good fit, and this is a nonpolitical position. Unfortunately, the Assembly majority wanted to punish the Bronson Administration for dismissing Winegarner’s predecessor, and all for the purpose of causing havoc. It’s embarrassing to witness.
There is yet another aspect of this that should give the citizens of Anchorage pause. The position of Chief Housing Officer is embedded in the Mayor’s Office. That position is funded by the Rasmuson Foundation, whose CEO Diane Kaplan donated $250 to the Forrest Dunbar mayoral campaign this year. She also donated $450 to the Suzanne LaFrance Assembly campaign last year, and $250 to the Vote No on Zaletel Recall campaign this fall.
The chief housing position to which Winegarner was originally appointed upset Kaplan and the Rasmuson Foundation, which wanted to have its say, and have its way. Here’s the reality: The Rasmuson Foundation has embedded into the Mayor’s Office a position that believes it controls, like it did under the previous Mayor Ethan Berkowitz and Acting Mayor Austin Quinn-Davidson. This mayor is not going to allow Kaplan to tell him who he can hire.
You can see where this is going. There is a liberal war declared on the Mayor’s Office, and even a position as uncontroversial as a Real Estate Director is not immune to this warfare.
Never before in the history of Anchorage have citizens seen a rogue Assembly, one that is using the tools it has been granted by our charter as daggers against good, upstanding, and qualified people. The charter is clear — they must vote on an appointment based on qualifications.
The Assembly majority’s actions are transparent. People in Anchorage and across the state see these actions for what they are: Not serving the public, the majority mob has a political agenda, fueled by their hurt egos as they try to damage Mayor Bronson. The harm they are creating to Anchorage and our children’s future is simply collateral damage to them, acceptable because the ends justify the means.
Jamie Allard, a veteran, is one of two Assembly members representing Chugiak and Eagle River.
