[Update: The Commissioner of Administration has issued a notice to State employees regarding the misuse of state time and equipment. It is at the bottom of this story.]
Some Alaska State workers today are using their all-employee email lists to get coworkers out to a noon rally today. They’re doing so on state government equipment and during the work day.
A note from Bradley Johnson, of the Department of Revenue, has been making the rounds. It tells state workers to join him on the picket line over the lunch hour:
As that note made its way around the 20,000 state workforce, responses came in, including one from Anna Ramirez at the Department of Health and Social Services, who said in all caps: “TOGETHER WE WILL MAKE A DIFFERENCE – UNITED WE STAND, UNITED WE FIGHT!! And a special thanks to BRADLEY JOHNSON for his courage at the union meeting Wednesday…” Erika Burkhouse in the Department of Administration forwarded the note.
An entirely different response came from a Department of Corrections worker, Thomas Leonard, who told the group to stop emailing him about non-state business.
The workers passing the note around are flouting state ethics laws that prohibit using “”State time, equipment, property or facilities for their own personal or financial benefit or for partisan political purposes.”
Under some administrations, this is an offense that would lead to disciplinary action or termination. Examples of misuse of official position are shown below, from the State’s ethics explainer:
Since the emails in question are generally aligned with the Gov. Walker’s political goals, it seems unlikely that we will see disciplinary action under the Walker Administration even though there is a clear violation of state ethics law here.
Update: Sheldon Fisher, the Commissioner of Administration issued a memo to all State employees regarding the events described above:
Democrats in Juneau deserve credit for at least one thing: what they lack in good ideas they more than make up for in chutzpah.
Now 10 days from a government shutdown at the time of this writing, the legislative session has become a monkey fight inside a clown car driving into a dumpster fire.
The House Majority threw a tantrum last week after Gov. Bill Walker took away their income tax woobie in his proposed compromise to end the standoff with the Senate by passing an 11th hour budget funded entirely with the Permanent Fund Earnings Reserve including a $2,200 dividend check that will cost the state more than $1.3 billion on top of its $2.7 billion deficit.
Like a child who cleans their room by stuffing all the toys and dirty laundry into a closet, House Majority leaders then proceeded to claim that they had done their job by passing a budget and asked for a cookie.
House Republicans aren’t completely blameless in this mess, either. Half their caucus, including their leader Charisse Millett, voted for the budget-busting PFD. Perhaps she could better spend her time trying to figure out what her principles are rather than combing Gavel to Gavel footage looking for reporters goofing off in the gallery while her members make ridiculous analogies to Pearl Harbor, Ho Chi Minh and Vladimir Putin.
Some soul-searching is probably required when you’re on the wrong side of a vote by Les Gara.
Visit the Family Research Council’s blog this week and you’ll find an article titled, “Ten Things Every New Father Should Know,” a touching essay by a writer experiencing Fathers Day as a new dad of a six-month-old.
The council is a nonprofit organization recognized by the Internal Revenue Service as such, and is unabashedly conservative Christian and family focused, promoting traditional values of strong marriages between men and women as the foundation for a strong society. The mission statement is “FRC advances faith, family and freedom in government and culture from a Christian worldview.”
That mission statement is no longer a statement of faith, but a statement of hate, according to Guidestar, the nonprofit tracker that manages a database of all nonprofits, their financials, their programs, and their reports to the Internal Revenue Service.
Guidestar, a nonprofit itself, bills itself as the largest source of information on nonprofit organizations. It is the self-styled gatekeeper of the nonprofit sector. Organizations big and small live and die by a Guidestar rating. So when the site puts a warning flag on a nonprofit, such a designation cannot be ignored.
But now Guidestar has adopted standards set by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and has decided to put a “scarlet letter” over its listing of the Family Research Council and other groups like it. The pro-marriage group is now considered the equivalent of the Ku Klux Klan. It’s on the “hate group” watch list.
The warning banner has also been placed over Guidestar’s information for at least two Jewish nonprofits and some other groups that may or may not be religious in nature. These include the American Freedom Defense Initiative, the Immigration Reform Law Institute, the American College of Pediatricians, the National Task Force for Therapy Equality, the American Family Association, the London Center for Policy Research, and the Jewish Institute for Global Awareness.
However, no warning banner exists above the listing for the Council on American and Islamic Relations — CAIR. That group’s mission is “to enhance understanding of Islam, encourage dialogue, protect civil liberties, empower American Muslims, and build coalitions that promote justice and mutual understanding.”
In 2014, the United Arab Emirates placed CAIR on its list of terrorist groups, along with al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, al Shabab and Boko Haram. CAIR may or may not be related to groups that fund terror; there is disagreement in the public arena about its ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s website, “all hate groups have beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics.”
Among the groups listed as hate groups is Act for America, founded by Brigitte Gabriel, a terrorism expert who has first-hand experience as a child victim of Islamic-inspired terrorism. She is a lecturer and author who has advised the Trump Administration, the United Nations, British Parliament, the Pentagon, Joint Forces Staff College, US Special Operations Command, US Asymmetric Warfare group, the FBI, and others. She is a Christian who warns people about Islam and terrorism.
The David Horowitz Foundation is also now listed as a hate group by Guidestar. Horowitz is the founder of the David Horowitz Freedom Center (formerly the Center for the Study of Popular Culture). He is a rational conservative, but he takes no intellectual prisoners.
GuideStar’s president and CEO, Jacob Harold, told the Associated Press that his organization defends the use of the hate group listing and said the warning labels are in response to a recent increase of “hateful rhetoric” in the U.S.
Look for the influence and credibility of GuideStar to wane if they persist with an increasingly partisan and biased rating system.
INCOMING TO ALASKA: FAMILY RESEARCH COUNCIL CRUISE
Family Research Council’s political action committee endorsed Joe Miller for Senate in 2016, when he ran as a Libertarian in Alaska, supplanting Cean Stevens at the last minute. Alaska former Governor Sarah Palin spoke at the organization’s Values Voter Summit in 2014. The group has been a recent critic of Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s stances on abortion and the public funding of Planned Parenthood.
The council and some of its supporters will be on its first-ever fundraising cruise to Alaska July 29 – Aug. 5 with the organization’s president Tony Perkins.
Bald Eagle in the Ketchikan rain. (Antti T. Nissinen photo, Creative Commons license via Flickr.)
The Department of the Interior today announced an initiative to involve the public in uncovering and reducing unnecessary regulatory burdens.
The initiative is in response to Executive Order 13777, “Enforcing the Regulatory Reform Agenda,” signed by President Donald Trump in February.
The department will be taking recommendations through a link at www.regulations.gov.
Interior is asking the public to comment on how they are affected by specific federal regulations and which Interior regulations are ripe for repeal, replacement, or modification.
The department singled out certain attributes that would lead to reform, including regulations that:
Eliminate jobs, or inhibit job creation;
Are outdated, unnecessary, or ineffective;
Impose costs that exceed benefits;
Create a serious inconsistency or otherwise interfere with regulatory reform initiatives and policies;
Rely, in part or in whole, on data or methods that are not publicly available or insufficiently transparent to meet the standard for reproducibility; or
Derive from or implement E.O.s or other Presidential directives that have been subsequently rescinded or substantially modified.
The Interior Department has jursdiction over the Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Indian Education, National Park Service, Office of Surface Mining, Reclamation and Enforcement, Bureau of Reclamation, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and U.S. Geological Survey, and other agencies where thousands of regulations are applied.
Citizens may offer ideas to reduce unnecessary regulations by:
Going to www.regulations.gov and following the online directions to submit your comments to Docket ID No. DOI-2017-0003.
Sending your comments by mail to Mark Lawyer, Office of the Executive Secretariat, U.S. Department of the Interior, 1859 C Street, NW, Mail Stop 7328, Washington, DC 20240.
In June of 2013 a group of educators, scientists, and artists removed 8,000 pounds of debris from Hallo Bay in Katmai National Park, Alaska. Because there was no place to dispose of it locally, the debris had to be taken from beaches in Zodiac inflatable skiffs, and ultimately transported to Seward, Alaska, some 220 miles away.
U.S. Senator Dan Sullivan, chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries, and Coast Guard, will convene a hearing on Thursday to explore the effects of marine debris and the efforts being made to clean it up in the oceans and Great Lakes. The hearing starts at 10 am, Eastern Time.
Sullivan’s subcommittee will explore solutions to the ever-increasing volumes of debris floating up on shorelines in the Pacific. Invited speakers include David Balton, deputy assistant secretary for Oceans and Fisheries, U.S. Department of State, and Nancy Wallace, director of the Marine Debris Program, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Alaska’s marine debris problem is compounded by its extensive remote coastline, which is longer than the rest of the United States’ coastline combined. The government estimates more than 250,000 tons of debris is floating on the oceans’ surface and 11,000 tons of debris enter the Great Lakes every year.
NOAA is addressing marine debris in Alaska with 20 projects and has removed about 450 tons of debris from shorelines, some of it tracing back to the tsunami resulting from the earthquake that struck Japan in 2011. The agency is also surveying the cleanup work to create baseline information to better track re-accumulated debris.
In March, Sen. Sullivan introduced Senate Bill 756, the “Save Our Seas Act,” with bipartisan sponsorship from Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Cory Booker (D-NJ). Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska also co-sponsored the bill. Thursday’s hearing is in advance of the expected smooth sailing of the the SOS Act through the Senate.
The SOS Act:
Gives authority to the NOAA Administrator to declare severe marine debris events and authorize funds to assist with cleanup and response. The governor of the affected state may request the NOAA Administrator make a declaration.
Reauthorizes NOAA’s Marine Debris Program through FY2022.
Rep.-elect Karen Handel will represent Georgia’s 6th District after beating a well-funded Democrat.
Karen Handel won Georgia’s 6th District, even though just weeks ago polls said that opponent Jon Ossoff, who held the hopes and aspirations of Democrats everywhere, was heading for the win. He was the rising liberal star.
A poll published by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution had Ossoff leading Handel 51-44 in late May, and reported he had “… a large advantage in the June 20 runoff.”
The AJC, a newspaper that famously leans left, went on:
“Ossoff led Handel among women by 6 points, comparable to other recent polls in the nationally watched race. But it also showed him with nearly a double-digit lead among male voters,” the Constitution reported.
“The upset-minded Democrat is trouncing Handel among voters who identify themselves as independents, a crucial voting bloc in the conservative-leaning district. Republicans have long relied on self-described independents to vote for the GOP in Georgia,” the newspaper opined.
Yesterday, the AJC kept up the background drumbeat for Ossoff: “Ossoff’s campaign has long-held that it has the edge in voter enthusiasm – a more committed base of voters who will flock to the polls regardless to support him.” The writer was addressing whether rainy weather might keep Democrats home, as southern lore predicts it does.
On June 1, another poll released by WSB-TV/Landmark Communications, showed that 49.1 percent of voters favored Ossoff, and 47.6 percent favored Handel. Landmark polls suggested an even closer race by June 18, showing the candidates only one point apart, well within the margin of error.
“We’re looking at a dead heat,” Landmark President Mark Rountree told WSB-TV.
On May 23, Salon had Ossoff with a comfortable seven point lead. Democratic pollster John Anzalone said Ossoff was in a strong position, and Ossoff himself chirped, “This is what momentum looks like.”
Even on Election night, the media could not comprehend what was happening. Politico published a graphic that had the results reversed, with Ossoff winning and Handel losing. The publication later corrected it.
It is a district that trends liberal, to be sure. And yet, the Republican won, 52.7 to 47.3 percent.
There’s no denying the election in Georgia was the hill Democrat strategists chose to die on as their referendum on President Donald Trump’s agenda.
Would the jittery supporters of the president come through for him? They would. Just as they did in April, when an open seat special election in Kansas was won by Ron Estes, the Republican candidate who survived a tough challenge from Democrat James Thompson in what is known as a conservative district.
DEMORALIZING?
The Left had also made Georgia’s 6th the most expensive race in U.S. House history. The open seat was the focus for the “Resist” movement across the country. For one shining moment, all eyes were on suburban Atlanta.
For her part, Representative-elect Handel is making history as the first Republican woman to be elected to Congress from Georgia. After being battered by $30 million in negative campaigning by Ossoff, she graciously said that she would represent all her constituents, including those who voted for Ossoff.
Earlier this month, her home and her neighbors’ homes were targeted with threatening letters and packages containing white powders. At about the same time, it was discovered that Ossoff doesn’t even live in the district that he was running to serve, and would not be able to vote for himself.
Democrats will turn their focus back to the president, who gives them ample opportunity to attack. These relentless attacks compound and create fatigue with voters. As we brace for the 2018 election cycle, the Indivisible Project and the Democratic Party will regroup and look for a new way to connect with voters. Because if they can’t win the Georgia 6th, even with obscene levels of campaign spending, they’re in trouble.
Yet more trouble appears on the horizon for the already troubled business of journalism in Alaska.
Rumors have been swirling for weeks that yet more downsizing is coming at the Alaska Dispatch News – the state’s biggest, brawniest and, by sheer force of numbers, best news organization.
And Monday came a “Reader Survey” tucked away on page A-4 of the Alaska’s largest newspaper asking readers in little-bitty type to tell editors “what you absolutely can’t live without in (a) newspaper…with no choice but to produce a leaner print paper.”
It appears other editions could now be on the chopping block.
“…As advertising and subscription revenue move online,” Monday’s “dear-valued-reader” message said, “it is necessary to scale our print product accordingly.”
The appeal was slightly odd that in this the Internet Age it required readers to rip out the ad and mail it back or deliver it to the Dispatch News office, and in that the tiny type in the request was sure to be hard to read for many regular newspaper subscribers who now skew heavily toward the geriatric set.
Beyond that, the percentages quickly plummeted to 16 percent for people ages 18 to 24. Forty-two percent of the latter were regular newspaper readers when Pew started polling in 1999.
Here is a collection of new briefs from around the state:
SEN. MURKOWSKI TARGETED BY ADS, CAMPAIGNS: An organization called the Community Catalyst Action Fund (CCAF), which focuses on universal health care and protecting Obamacare, is targeting Sens. Lisa Murkowski-Alaska, Jeff Flake-Ariz., Susan Collins-Maine, Dean Heller-Nev. and Shelley Moore Capito-W.Va. with a media blitz urging them to vote no on the reform of the Affordable Care Act.
Screen shot of the advertisement targeting Sen. Lisa Murkowski on the upcoming vote to reform Obamacare.
In addition to CCAF, the Indivisible Project is also getting involved with targeting Murkowski, providing a website to encourage citizens to call lawmakers, and providing scripts for them.
However, the most active group is the CCAF, which is supported in part by The Atlantic Philanthropies and focuses on organizing citizens and training them to ask candidates pointed questions about their opinion of Obamacare.
The group seeks to shape the narrative of the debate over health care reform. The ad campaign started Monday and the group plans to spend $1.5 million on trying to convince the targeted lawmakers to vote no on the Republican-sponsored bill to replace Obamacare. CCAF appears to believe that the five senators they are targeting with the ads — including Sen. Murkowski — may be susceptible to left-wing pressure.
WHO IS CCAF?
CCAF is a left-wing organization run by experienced Democrat operatives. Board members include the Chairman Karen Hicks, of the Civix Strategy Group, who describes herself as having designed and run national and state based campaigns “that combine a winning strategy with a plan to build lasting power through leadership and skill development.”
Karen Hicks, chair of CCAF, which is targeting Lisa Murkowski to vote no on Obamacare reform.
Hicks has run and held leadership positions on presidential, statewide and local campaigns. In 2008, she served as a senior advisor to then-Sen. Hillary Clinton with a focus on the early nominating states as Clinton ran for president.
In 2004, Hicks was the field director for the John Kerry Campaign and oversaw the campaign’s $80 million grassroots mobilization effort in the battleground states.
She is vice chair for NARAL Pro Choice New Hampshire.
Also serving on CCAF’s board is Dan McGrath, executive director of Take Action Minnesota. He worked for Progressive Minnesota, as a canvasser and community and political organizer, and became the group’s executive director. He also has a labor organizing background with Service Employees International Union (SEIU).
Robert Restuccia is the Fund’s executive director. He is an assistant professor at Boston University’s School of Public Health and was with the organization Health Care for All for over a decade. That group has allied with the Indivisible Project with the “TrumpCare Ten” initiative to target Alaska and nine other states, by pushing scripts out to citizens and providing support for calling senators.
CANNABIS CAFES: The Alaska Marijuana Control Board is looking at options for on-site cannabis use in businesses, such as marijuana cafes. The board meets July 11-14 in Fairbanks.
The control board shelved the project in February, but is once again trying to put sideboards on what would essentially be marijuana taverns.
CHILKAT VALLEY NEWS SOLD: Kyle Clayton, a reporter at the Chilkat Valley News, has bought the paper from owner Tom Morphet. Clayton has reported for the Petersburg Pilot and elsewhere.
A special election to recall Haines Borough Assembly members Morphet, Heather Lende, Tresham Gregg is scheduled for Aug. 15. Citizen Don Turner Jr. alleges that Morphet and Lende were pressuring the police department to provide a police blotter to the Chilkat Valley News newspaper, which Morphet owned and for which Lende wrote. The newspaper is a for-profit business, creating a possible conflict of interest since Morphet had a financial stake in providing readers police news.
Morphet owned the newspaper since 2012, and is staying on to help with the transition. He put the paper up for sale several months ago.
BE ON THE LOOKOUT: Four members of an Ohio family who may be on the Kenai Peninsula now are sought by Ohio authorities in connection with a mass murder.
George Wagner IV, Edward “Jake” Wagner, George “Billy” Wagner, III, Angela Wagner
An execution-style killing of eight members of a family in Pike County, Ohio happened in April of 2016. George “Billy” Wagner, III, 46, Angela Wagner, 46, George Wagner IV, 25, and Edward “Jake” Wagner, 24, are wanted for questioning. Investigators speculate the killings may have been related to marijuana-growing operations, but a child custody dispute may also have been the motive.
The Dayton Daily News reports investigators learned of the family’s location from Pastor Kelly Cinereski of Resurrection Bay Baptist Church in Seward, who said the family attended his son’s church in Kenai on Sunday.
A contract on a bar napkin, signed by Alice Rogoff.
It may be a rough summer in the Alice Rogoff household. At the very least, it will be a different summer than the one she had in 2015, when President Barack Obama came to dinner to her Campbell Lake home.
Life is tumultuous in and around the empire of the woman who advised Gov. Bill Walker on the merits of borrowing against the Alaska Permanent Fund and other state funds.
She advised using the Fund as collateral, investing the borrowed money at a higher rate, and spinning off profits for Alaska: “…by prudently using financial leverage to restructure our wealth, we can double the Alaska Permanent Fund and other state cash assets every 10 or 12 years.”
Rogoff’s husband, billionaire David Rubenstein, manages a small portion of the Permanent Fund through his Carlyle Group investment company, so that leveraging plan would work well for her and her share of the family fortune.
This summer, Rogoff faces several big personal and professional challenges:
CRASHGATE: July 3 will be the one-year anniversary since Rogoff, owner of the Alaska Dispatch News, clipped a tree and crash-landed her float plane into the waters of Halibut Cove, and had to swim from the wreckage.
The National Transportation Safety Board report on that incident should be out soon. It is undergoing internal review and editing, we are told by the NTSB.
Alice Rogoff swims to a rescuer after crash landing her float plane in Halibut Cove in 2016.
Reports from the agency normally take 12-18 months to be released.
Rogoff retained her pilot’s license for land, but not for water. She left the scene and the public has not had a full accounting of her whereabouts for several days after the accident.
HOPFINGER SUIT: On July 11, Rogoff will be in court — or her lawyers will, at least. They’ll face off against her former business partner and founder of the Alaska Dispatch, Tony Hopfinger, who is also the former husband and partner of Amanda Coyne, now a senior adviser to Sen. Dan Sullivan. Coyne was part of the original Dispatch digital startup.
Tony Hopfinger
Hopfinger and Rogoff were partners in the Dispatch, but when the relationship soured, Tony moved on, with a paper napkin promise from her that she would pay him $1 million for his share over the course of 10 years. That didn’t happen.
Last year in July, Hopfinger sued because Rogoff stopped payments after the first installment. There appears to be $900,000 outstanding in debt owed, according to a bar napkin upon which their contract was scribbled, just 10 days after she had purchased the newspaper from McClatchy. There may be legal fees and other damages — all that is under discussion in court.
WIRED FOR LITIGATION: Hopfinger is not the only one waiting for payment. M&M Wiring has brought a claim against a company that involves the Dispatch allegedly not paying a nearly $459,000 bill for work done on a building Rogoff leased for her new printing press.
Rogoff purchased the new press 18 months ago but has yet to make operational and it may need a lot more money than she has on hand.
Last year, the Dispatch leased the building from Arctic Partners LLC. Rogoff planned to move her entire newspaper operations there, including the reporting, marketing and administration, we are told by sources close to the newspaper.
The nondescript building at 5900 Arctic Blvd. needed extensive upgrades to become a functioning newspaper plant and offices, including major enhancements to the electrical system.
The Dispatch contracted with M&M Wiring to do that electrical work, the scope of which grew over time beyond the original work order, according to the complaint filed with in Anchorage Superior Court.
Ed McCoy, an employee of the Dispatch (known as Santa Claus by those who work with him), acted as the representative for both the newspaper and for Arctic Partners in getting the work done, the complaint says. At some point, McCoy was no longer the point of contact, but Adam Cook, one of Rogoff’s lawyers, was.
“Mr. Cook seems to have assumed the role of Dispatch’s project manager for the Project since he was directing the sequencing of contractor work, evaluating contractor bids, evaluating the project budget and directing contractors, including M&M…” the complaint says.
On Dec. 29, 2016, the Dispatch terminated M&M from the project entirely, the complaint claims.
It also claims that Arctic Partners LLC was aware that M&M wasn’t being paid for the work it was doing to get the building ready for the Dispatch.
With the electrical work halted, the final bill was about $958,800, some of which was paid. Nearly half — $454,479 — is said to still be owed, according to the claim. Plus 10 percent interest, which was part of the contract signed by McCoy.
As a way to get its money, M&M put a lien on the building. That case has now been assigned a judge, Eric A. Aarseth. Calls to M&M’s attorney went unreturned.
Meanwhile, Alice had taken possession of the press and installed it on concrete that may not have been strong enough to support the weight and vibration of a major press operation. City permits indicate that there was a problem with the concrete and work over the winter slowed to a crawl.
Reinforcement of that concrete may require the press to be removed from the building, according to newspaper veterans.
With the new building not operational, Rogoff is still leasing printing press space from GCI, to whom she sold the previous ADN building. Her main newspaper office is on C Street in Midtown Anchorage.
WHERE IS IT ALL GOING? Newspaper observers wonder if the Dispatch is worth a fraction of the $33 million Rogoff is believed to have paid McClatchy on April 8, 2014.
After all, she doesn’t own the real estate. She has a press at GCI’s building in Airport Heights. She has another nonfunctional press possibly resting on inadequate concrete in an industrial building that is still substandard. That building is tangled in a lawsuit. A contractor says she owes nearly half a million dollars. A former business partner will see her in court in three weeks over $900,000 he says is due.
In the summer of 2015, the menu at the Rogoff table was fit for a president: Cold-smoked king salmon lox, razor clams, Mat-Su lettuce, Koyukuk moose hunted by Alice, and berries picked by Alice.
This summer, there are no convoys of black government limousines driving to the Rogoff mansion. There are no Secret Service agents leaning on shiny cars or a dashing president seated for photos in the cockpit of her private plane at her Campbell Lake dock.
Her floatplane is totalled. Her float plane license surrendered. Her newspaper is an Alaska-sized headache that to all outward appearances is bleeding cash.
The summer of 2017 will be about how to satisfy contractors and landlords, whether she has to pay her former business partner, and whether she can keep Alaska’s largest newspaper running during one of the worst economic downturns in Alaska history.
There is irony in the fact that the anti-growth, anti-industry policies her newspaper promotes are contributing to its economic headwinds. We imagine that is probably lost on her.
