Why you should vote no on Ballot Measure One
Take a good long look at the picture above. That’s John-Henry Heckendorn in the middle with the big sign.
He’s the brains behind the Ship Creek Group, which is getting Democrats elected right and left in Alaska since he arrived on the scene just a few short years ago from the East Coast.
Heckendorn was the political director for the Alaska Democrats. He interned for Mark Begich. His Ship Creek clients are all Democrats. He is the best thing to ever happen to Democrats in Alaska.
In this photo, he is turning in 42,540 signatures to get Measure One on the Nov. 8 ballot. He’s happy.
Why would Heckendorn, who recently helped win four-for-four in Anchorage Assembly races and who dragged Dean Westlake over the finish line in the House District 40 race, want to push for every eligible Alaskan to be registered to vote? Out of the goodness of his heart, or out of the interest of a political agenda?
Liberal progressives are trying to turn red-leaning Alaska into a blue state. Ballot Measure One is part of their plan. Heckendorn is just the guy to do it.
It’s all being funded by outside groups backed by untraceable dollars that know they can socially engineer Alaska by simply getting more low-information voters to cast ballots.
Heckendorn and his Ship Creek Group have the contract with the ballot measure backers to make sure that happens.
Theirs is a two-pronged approach: First get everyone registered to vote, including those who have no interest and who will rarely vote. And second, make sure those ballots get voted in future elections. No matter what it takes.
The measure, put on the ballot by left-wing activists, would automatically register as a voter every single person who applies for an Alaska Permanent Fund dividend. You apply for a dividend? The state is going to make sure you’re registered to vote, not by your choice, but by the state’s. Of course it will weed out kids and felons, but everyone else will be fair game.
Let’s look at who at the national level is behind this push for automatic registration.
First we have the National Education Association, or NEA, which is a national union and a powerful one at that, with an annual budget of $300 million.
The NEA backs Democrats and spends $3.6 million on lobbyists in a typical year. It’s membership totals 3.2 million. Why does NEA want the automatic voter registration to pass? So it can bargain for higher teacher pay and less accountability for results. Having more Democrats in office will help.
The New Venture Fund is also a main funder of the propaganda blitz to pass Ballot Measure One.
The NV Fund is a grant-making organization that gives heavily to organizations closely associated with the Democratic Party’s key causes.
More than $550,000 is being spent on media messaging by the New Venture Fund to support the passage of Ballot Measure One. The fund’s president was quoted in the Alaska Dispatch News saying that when more people vote, it’s better for democracy.
But a look through the IRS Form 990 filing of the New Venture Fund reveals three big grant strategies: Pro-abortion groups, climate change advocates (anti-oil), and voter engagement efforts.
These three strategies are aligned: Get more uninformed people registered to vote, and then create strong messaging and marketing around specific issues to drive them to the polls to ensure that “progressive” lawmakers are elected.
The New Venture Fund is trying to change public policy by swinging elections. It is a pro-big-government group whose lobbyists are part of the revolving door, in and out of government. The Fund has also made six-figure contributions to Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president.
WHO ISN’T REGISTERED
A recent Pew study reports that some 24 percent of the eligible voting public isn’t registered to vote.
That may seem like a hefty number, until you consider this: According to a Gallup poll taken this year, when adults are asked to identify the country from which America gained its independence, 24 percent had no idea (they answered Russia, France, China, Mexico and Unsure).
In another question during the same poll, some 20 percent of adults answered incorrectly when asked if the earth revolves around the sun or the sun revolves around the earth.
It’s a rather sure bet that there’s an overlap between those who think the sun revolves around the earth and those who aren’t registered to vote.
But among those who are registered, some 25 percent hardly ever vote anyway. Three quarters of those people say they just don’t know enough about the candidates.
Is that not OK? To not vote if you don’t know what you’re voting for? In fact, many of us have felt similarly when faced with a long ballot filled with names of judges about whom we know nothing. But do we as a society governed by laws truly want willfully ignorant people pushed into the voting booth?
The liberal hive mind says yes.
But there are others who say no. Registering to vote, they say, is a demonstration of citizenship and is a responsibility that should not be automatically compelled by the government. When government pushes voter registration on people as nearly mandatory, it compells a behavior, and thus influences outcomes.
Ballot Measure One is a solution in search of a problem. Its backers are not being intellectually honest with voters because they have a clear and focused agenda to sway elections to Democrats and their causes.
On Ballot Measure One it’s buyer beware. The universal voter registration opens a world of unintended consequences for Alaska, and will likely turn a red state blue.
Beltrami flips: Would take ‘leave of absence’
Weeks of intense criticism of AFL-CIO President Vince Beltrami have taken their toll.
The candidate who flipped from being a Democrat to a noncommittal has withered under pressure and in a recent letter to supporters, the union boss now says he will take a leave of absence from his job as AFL-CIO president, if elected to Senate District N.
There are a few problems with that:
- Beltrami doesn’t disclose if he’ll take a paid leave of absence or if he’ll forego his $185,000 a year job.
- Beltrami has to run for his job as AFL-CIO boss in another two years, which would be right in the middle of his Senate term.
- How can he run for his AFL-CIO job if he is on leave?
- Beltrami also doesn’t say if this would be a seasonal leave of absence, for the 90-day session, or if it’s an indefinite leave, since legislators work all year long.
And because it’s a personnel matter, voters will never know if the union is storing his earnings in a trust somewhere, which he’ll be able to access after he leaves office.
TAXES AND PERMANENT FUND DIVIDEND GRAB
It’s been a tough week for Beltrami, who went on the record on Alaska Public Media in support of broad-based taxes, and the restructuring of the Permanent Fund dividend.
“Some kind of broad-based revenues we have to be able to agree on,” he said during his moment at the mic on KAKM.
THE BULLY REVEALED
Beltrami also figured in a graphic published by an independent group opposing his candidacy, in which some of his less-than-civil Twitter comments were captured. According to the word cloud below, Beltrami likes to belittle those who disagree with him, using the words “lame” and “coward” more than any other words he uses on Twitter.
To see how the word cloud was created, here are two examples of the kind of political dialogue he has provided Alaska workers as theirAFL-CIO boss over the past few years. Will Beltrami do better as a senator than he does as a mean-spirited, belittling union bully?
Meet David Eastman, true north conservative
It’s 8 a.m. and David Eastman is winding his way up the dark corridor of the Parks Highway toward Talkeetna, going against morning inbound commute.
It’s a drive he will make dozens of times in the coming two years as he seeks to represent District 10, which is much of Wasilla and the Susitna River Drainage. The election is Nov. 8, but today, it’s all about hearing the concerns and ideas of people in the northern part of his district.
Going against traffic has been Eastman’s way for years, as a conservative working to elect Ron Paul as president in 2012, or even at West Point, where he raised concerns about aspects of the curriculum that were at odds with Army values: “They brought in a guest speaker who claimed to be a gay cannibal, for instance. It was supposed to shock all us uber-conservative students.”
Eastman was born in Redwood City, California, and grew up in Orange County. Homeschooled, and private schooled, he decided at an early age that he wanted to live in Alaska.
But it wasn’t until he completed West Point and joined the Army that he finally achieved the dream that started when he was six years old.
“There were two slots open for military police in Alaska, and I got one of them,” he says. That was around Thanksgiving in 2003, after he’d been through the Army’s police officer training at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri.
Political life came easily to Eastman, whose Christian conservative upbringing included getting involved with Republican politics in high school and learning from his parents, who served on the board of Right to Life of Southern California.
He became the youngest delegate to the Republican National Convention in San Diego in 1996. Although at 15 he was a year younger than the cutoff age, the RNC accepted Eastman because “they liked my essay about how awesome Bob Dole was,” he explained.
His parents also encouraged him to go into business, which he did as early as age 6, when he opened up a refreshment stand out of his wagon at the local ball fields. He sold candy and soft drinks, and later went door-to-door selling Christmas cards.
“I never had to ask for money until I ran for office,” Eastman said.
In 2009, as he was leaving active duty and joining the reserve side of the Army, Eastman was accepted for a Summit Oxford fellowship, which allowed him to study in Oxford, England for a semester, where he focused on legal studies to complement his undergraduate work at West Point.
His resume item on Summit Oxford has become fodder for the Democrats who oppose him, but he counts his time studying in England as profoundly important to the development of his critical thinking skills. He was able to sit as a moot court judge for Oxford law students on more than one occasion.
Eastman made at try for pulic office first in 2012 after applying to Gov. Sean Parnell to fill Carl Gatto’s vacant seat. Gatto died while in office in April of that year.
Ultimately, Shelley Hughes was appointed, but Eastman ran for an open Senate seat after that, and he and three others lost to Sen. Click Bishop. With redistricting, he is now in Sen. Mike Dunleavy’s district.
“I always had it in mind to try again.” In 2016, now married to Jennifer and the father of two young children, he ran against Republican Rep. Wes Keller in District 10, and won the primary, vowing to bring fresh energy and strong conservative values to Juneau.
The sun was almost rising as Eastman rolled into Talkeetena to meet with people he hopes to represent. He knows he will be one of the more conservative voices in Juneau come January, and that Talkeetna will be one of the more liberal areas of his region.
But that’s OK with Eastman – he’s used to setting his own compass, driving north while others are heading south. And he’s well accustomed to the role of going against the conventional wisdom of politics.
Moira Smith launches Supreme attack
Moira Smith, who was Alaska’s Southeast coordinator for Fran Ulmer’s campaign for governor in 2002, is in the news, accusing U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas of groping her in 1999, when she was 23.
She is now 41 and works for Enstar Natural Gas as an attorney.
Smith is married to Jake Metcalfe, who briefly ran against Rep. Don Young in 2008 but was shamed into dropping out of the race when one of his campaign workers established fake websites attacking Ethan Berkowitz, one of his Democratic competitors who went on to lose against Young. That matter went to court, and Metcalfe lost.
Although simply referred to in the media as a citizen who donates to Democrats, Smith is much more than that. She was National Committeewoman for the Young Democrats of Alaska and has been a Democrat activist for two decades.
Her first husband worked for the Obama White House until this year. Paul Bodnar served as President Obama’s senior director for Energy and Climate Change at the National Security Council. He also was the director for climate finance and counselor to the special envoy for climate change. They divorced in 2006, according to Alaska court records, and she married into the old Juneau Metcalfe family in 2007.
The Metcalfe empire is purely Democrats, and includes Kim Metcalfe, National Committeewoman for the Alaska Democratic Party, and Peter Metcalfe, who has a contract with Gov. Bill Walker.
Smith’s husband is also the former chair of the Alaska Democratic Party and served on the Anchorage School Board. He now runs a union as the executive director of the Public Safety Employees’ Association Local 803.
Moira Smith’s LinkedIn and Twitter accounts have been disabled.
Alaska Women’s Summit in Year 4
Four years ago, Sen. Lesil McGuire commissioned a report on the status of women in Alaska. The result was shocking: Alaska is the one of the most dangerous places for women to live in the nation.
The report was a call to action for a senator who had never taken on the softer social issues. A lawyer by training, Sen. McGuire had more forcefully championed Arctic development and is known for her economic and budget-related legislation.
The report was the beginning of the Alaska Women’s Summit. McGuire collaborated with Janet Weiss of BP, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, and Karen Hagedorn of ExxonMobil to launch the annual conference and try to create momentum on the economic and social conditions of women in Alaska.
This year’s featured speaker is Rosie Rios, who is the Treasurer of the United States, overseeing the U.S. Mint, Bureau of Engraving and Printing and Fort Knox and who is a key liaison with the Federal Reserve. She will be introduced by Julie Fate-Sullivan.
The fourth annual summit is Friday, Oct. 28 beginning at 8 am at the Captain Cook Hotel in Anchorage.
“When you invest in bringing up the quality of life for women, you grow the domestic product of the state and in turn improve the quality of life for all people,” McGuire said. “If women better understand their relationship with money, if they understand home ownership, this is all traced back to the economic empowerment of women. It’s about trying to meaningfully improve ourselves so we can improve the statistics around women generally.”
The history of women’s conferences sometimes looks adversarial to men, and McGuire is determined to change that.
“This is not the conference for bra-burners, and it’s not anti-men,” she said. “But if you look at women in Alaska, while those who are single are much less likely to be homeless than men, once they have children then those numbers shoot through the roof, and so do suicide rates, which are 10 times the national average.”
An update to the 2012 report on the status of women in Alaska is here.
“We need to do what we can to support mothers who still need to make an economic contribution because of their children,” she said. “If we have a better quality of life, our children benefit, and because women are the primary caretakers for aging parents, our seniors also benefit, and so do our husbands and partners.
Register for the Alaska Women’s Summit here.
Bright, shiny objects: Threats
JOE MILLER FOR THE KILL
A curious subject line in an email from Joe Miller suggested a bit of violence on Alaska Republican Party Chairman Tuckerman Babcock:
Subject: Let’s take a sledgehammer to…, Tuckerman?
The letter was a plea for cash for Miller’s Libertarian bid for U.S. Senate. He is at odds with Babcock, who has been sending out mailers opposing Miller and supporting Sen. Lisa Murkowski, the Republicans’ nominee.
BELTRAMI DROPPING THE F-BOMB
An audio is floating around out there where AFL-CIO president and Senate candidate Vince Beltrami is heard cursing out a constituent, just like you knew he would. We’re working to get our hands on it.
Beltrami is running against Sen. Cathy Giessel for District N.
TRUMP HQ POLICE CALL
Speaking of foul mouths, police were called to Trump/Pence headquarters at the corner of Klatt Road and Old Seward Highway last Friday, where an enraged woman had pulled up in a 2016 Lexus, with a load of Trump signs that she had pulled up off the street rights of way.
She was well-dressed and loaded for bear, according to witnesses. And she was cussing a blue streak, making the people in the office believe that she was trying to pick a fight.
By the time the police officer had arrived, she and her screaming were gone.
“She wanted us to help her unload all the Trump signs she had just pulled up, but we said, ‘no, you stole them so you unload them'” said one witness. “She kept yelling that she hated Trump. We were trying to be polite to her.”
Must Read Alaska has a photo of the alleged sign-ripper-upper, but we’re waiting for a call back from Anchorage Police.
Governor hits pause button on bonds to pay pensions
SINCE A YEAR AGO, HIS PLAN TO BORROW HAD DOUBLED FROM $1.6 BILLION TO $3.3 BILLION
Governor Bill Walker has backed out of his unilateral move to sell bonds in order to pay off Alaska’s enormous pension obligation. He earlier this month had met with members of the Senate Finance committee, where he faced stiff headwinds.
“Given their lack of support, I have decided not to proceed with the issuance at this time,” Walker said. “Building a collaborative relationship with the Legislature will be necessary to reach our primary goal, which is a long-term fiscal plan for our state.”
Six weeks ago, the governor wrote to lawmakers that he would, with or without the Legislature’s input, borrow up to $3.3 billion to reduce the obligation the state pays into the various pension funds for state workers (PERS) and teachers (TRS) every year.
Alaska’s pension obligation for this fiscal year is about $340 million for PERS ad $116 million for TRS, short of one-half billion dollars.
The plan was to borrow money at a low rate and invest it for higher returns, using the proceeds to pay the pension obligations. That plan was predicated on earning 8 percent on investments, while only paying less than 4 percent on the bond interest payments. It might have earned the state $1.756 billion, but it could also lose money if the markets tank.
In September, Walker wrote that “Concern around market timing and the impact of delay on maximizing the benefits of this type of transaction is one of the reasons the legislature provided the administration in AS37.15.900 to AS37.16.900 with the authority to sell up to $5 billion in bonds.”
The market, some fear, is prone to instability since it is hovering at an all-time high.
Recently the rating agencies have signaled that such a loan would again lower the state’s credit rating. Moody’s had assigned the bond a AA2 rating, which is its fourth highest rating, making it a fairly stable investment. But the state’s overall creditworthiness could have been downgraded, making it more expensive for the state and municipal entities to borrow money.
While not acknowledging the market’s disapproval, Walker wrote today: “While we believe the financial benefits of issuing state pension obligation bonds significantly outweigh the financial risks, we recognize the need for legislative input.”
POBs, as they’re called, are a gamble. The payments are smoothed out across time, but they allow municipalities and states to not trim their budgets, and continue spending beyond their means.
The worst underfunded state pensions are: Alaska, Hawaii, Illinois, Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Hampshire.
Walker first floated the idea of borrowing-and-investing a year ago in November, announcing he would explore a $1.6 billion POB. Before the end of 2015, he had increased the number to $2.6 billion. By September of this year, he had ratcheted it to $3.3 billion.
Today, the idea has been put to rest until he can repair trust with the Legislature, an endeavor that may have now gained some traction with lawmakers.