Congressional candidate Nick Begich has another Republican district endorsement, bringing it to six districts, six Republican women’s clubs, and the Alaska Young Republicans.
On Monday, District 29 — the Mat-Su Valley — voted to endorse Begich for Congress. The district, like five others did earlier, refused to endorse Nancy Dahlstrom, the other Republican running to replace Rep. Mary Peltola, the Democrat incumbent.
“It’s an honor to be counted among so many respected conservatives and I look forward to working with leaders across the state to help make Alaska a priority for the rest of America,” Begich said. “We have worked hard to present a positive vision for Alaska, reflective of the values of hard-working Alaskans and their families.”
Jubilee Underwood over Rep. David Eastman for State House District 27
Elexie Moore over Rep. Jesse Sumer for State House District 28
Rep. George Rauscher for State House District 29
Robert Yundt instead of Sen. David Wilson or Stephen Wright for Senate Seat N
Incumbent Mayor Edna DeVries for mayor of Mat-Su Borough
Tom Bergey – D1 School Board
An earlier version of this story incorrectly mentioned an endorsement of Jared Goecker for Senate.
Begich has so far won the endorsements of District 6, 8, 26, 27, and 36. Both Kenai Republican women’s clubs and both Mat-Su Republican women’s clubs endorsed him, as did Capital City Republican Women, and Republican Women of Fairbanks.
He has the endorsement of the House Freedom Caucus, Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida, Rep. Scott Perry of Texas, and Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, among others. Vivek Ramaswamy has also endorsed him.
Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy declared a state disaster emergency for the 2024 August Juneau Glacier Flood.
The Disaster Declaration funds emergency response efforts and activates the state’s Public Assistance and Individual Assistance Disaster Recovery Program.
On the morning of Aug. 6, 2024, an outburst flood from a build up of water on the east side of the Mendenhall Glacier caused major flooding in the Mendenhall Glacier Basin.
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Multiple homes and roads are inundated. No reports of injuries have been reported, the Governor’s Office said..
“I am grateful no one has been injured or killed by this morning’s outburst flood. Emergency responders and managers have done an outstanding job keeping their residents safe,” Dunleavy said. ‘‘In addition to the Disaster Declaration, I have directed all state agencies to support the community as they deal with this major flooding.”
The State Emergency Operation Center (8 EOC) raised its activation level to three which indicates a disaster event has occurred. SEOC deployed a Division Supervisor and Operations Specialist to Juneau to coordinate the state disaster response and support CBJs Incident Command.
The SEOC is actively responding to emergency life, health and safety requests form CBJ and has engaged SEOC’s Mass Care group to provided assistance from volunteer and faith based agencies. The Department of Transportation and Public Facilities and Department of Public Safety are part of the ongoing response effort.
The disaster declaration has activated the state’s disaster Public Assistance and Individual Assistance disaster recovery programs. The Public Assistance program reimburses communities and jurisdictions for emergency response costs, emergency protective measures, and can fund repair of critical infrastructure damaged by the declared disaster event. The Individual Assistance program provides grants to individuals and families with damage to their primary homes or transportation, disaster related medical expenses, or other eligible disaster related expenses.
On Thursday, Aug. 8, the Fairbanks North Star Borough Assembly will hear Resolution 2024-27, a matter that was originally to to be heard at the last Assembly meeting, but which was waylaid when the Assembly failed to complete its agenda.
This resolution, sponsored by Assembly presiding officer (and Senate candidate) Savannah Fletcher, creates a committee of out of left-leaning community organizations to move the borough elections to mail-in voting. The mail-in ballot system of voting is already used to elect members to Golden Valley Electric Association, and mail-in elections are used in Anchorage and Juneau, among other places.
For those unfamiliar with mail-in voting, this is not the same as absentee voting. In absentee voting, the resident voter affirmatively applies for the ballot, receives the ballot, votes the ballot, has it witnessed, and returns the ballot. While not perfect, it does have a chain of custody.
Mail-in voting is a system where ballots are mailed to everyone, and people return their ballots in the mail or to a drop box. This system was used by the Alaska Division of Elections in 2020. The division mailed ballots to all eligible senior citizens in the state, under the auspices of not wanting to expose seniors to Covid in 2020.
There are significant issues with these mail-in elections.
The first issue is local control. Do the people of the Fairbanks North Star Borough want their elections controlled by cleverly chosen community groups (Get Out the Native Vote and League of Women Voters are the ones listed in the resolution) or cede control of their elections to other boroughs, the way Juneau ceded control of its mail-in elections to Anchorage when it started mail-in elections in 2020?
People in the FNSB, an independent bunch, will probably want to retain control of their own elections, lest they become another Anchorage, controlled by Marxists on the Assembly. Yet the only cost effective means of utilizing mail-in voting is to farm it out to Anchorage. Juneau did that before deciding to pay $700,000 for its own vote-counting center, something used only once a year. The carrying costs for the city of 32,000 are absurd.
Second, Alaska has bloated voter rolls. A large part of the FNSB population is transient due to the military, university, tourism, and other reasons. When people move, they often forget to “unregister,” to vote. They are often more concerned about other matters than their voter registration. Ballots are going to arrive at their old address — you can take that to the bank.
In fact, one local storage unit business owner said that he has a very high return rate — nearly 80% of notices the business sends in the mail are returned. Many people often assume when they get to their new location, their registration at their new place will automatically unregister them from their old addresses. There is some chance of that happening if a person is moving within Alaska, but it often does not occur if the person is moving outside of Alaska. It can take years to remove a person from the voter rolls. This means hundreds of ballots will be unnecessarily printed, and money wasted on printing and postage.
The vote will be less secure. The result of these ballots being mailed out to everyone is that ballots are then available to the person who assumes the old address. Somes people put their ballot in the trash at the post office, and there are numerous stories of people walking into post offices and finding unvoted ballots in the trash. This leaves the chain of custody of the vote wide open and reduces the integrity of the election process.
The chain-of-custody issue is real. Dinesh D’Souza’s movie 2000 Mules highlights the chain-of-custody issues involved in using mail-in voting. Ballots can be stolen out of mail boxes and voted by others. Apartment complex trash cans will be filled with the ballots of past tenants. Ballots mailed to long -moved residents be acquired and voted. All of this undermines the confidence that people have in the election process.
The cost savings are an illusion and do not hold up to the promise of increased voter participation. While some argue mail in ballots are cheaper than hiring election judges, the postage and printing costs are not cheap. In Anchorage, there is hardly any difference in the cost per ballot, between the old system of voting at the polls and the mail system and participation rates have hardly changed. Staffing call-in lines and help centers is also not cheap. For the voter, this can be very time consuming; some voters recently spent hours on the phone with the help line at GVEA mail-in election.
Tale of Two Concurrent Elections
Two different elections held over a similar geography and time frame recently occured to provide a stark contrast: The FNSB special election on May 7 and the GVEA Election.
The May 7 election was undertaken with voting at the polls, early voting, and absentee voting.
The GVEA election was mail-in voting. According to its website, GVEA has 36,176 members, and in the borough-wide election, 4,063 ballots were cast on either side of the by-law vote. Assuming each member received one ballot, that is an 11% participation rate. Granted, the by-law issue was not as compelling as tax hike, but that is still pretty low, and much lower than typical borough elections.
The May 7 election had the highest turn out in 10 years: 23.4%, with over 76,000 ballots cast. This would seem to suggest that a move to mail-in voting would result in significantly lower voter turn out.
The cost of the GVEA election was greater than the May 7 special election cost. Excluding media spending by the FNSB school district, which was not unsubstantial, the FNSB had allocated $125,000 for the special election. That included printing, staff time, paying election workers, and other costs related to the election.
In contrast, GVEA spends roughly $25,000 in printing and mailing ballots per district. Of the 7 GVEA districts, 6 are squarely in the FNSB borough. That means GVEA actually spends more than the borough on elections, and achieves half the participation rate.
If the objective is to increase voter turnout in the FNSB, it seems clear mail-in voting would be detrimental to voter participation and is provably more costly to implement. If the objective is indeed to increase voter turnout, mail-in voting is not the solution. It may be right for some communities, but experiences in Anchorage and Juneau should be instructive: It will absolutely cost more money. It may result in the same or lower voter turnout. The ballots will be less secure.
Readers who wish to weigh in on the resolution can write their Fairbanks borough assembly at [email protected] or call the borough clerk at 907 459 1401 to sign up to testify in person or by phone.
After Vice President Kamala Harris was officially acknowledged by her Democratic Party as the presidential nominee on Monday, she announced Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate first thing Tuesday morning.
“I am proud to announce that I’ve asked @Tim_Walz to be my running mate. As a governor, a coach, a teacher, and a veteran, he’s delivered for working families like his. It’s great to have him on the team,” Harris posted on X/Twitter shortly before 10:30 a.m. eastern time.
Walz was not among the top favorites by pundits, who thought Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro or Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly were the true finalists. Also in the hunt were North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker. Many thought Shapiro was locked in, as Pennsylvania is seen as a needed swing state by both parties seeking to govern from the White House.
Walz has become somewhat famous recently for calling Republicans Donald Trump and Sen. JD Vance “weird,” a comment picked up and repeated by many social media warriors, like Anchorage Assembly Chairman Chris Constant.
Walz is a far-left radical Democrats with a long list of negatives. In addition to allowing cities in his state to burn during the George Floyd riots of 2020, last year he signed legislation that allows illegal aliens to get drivers licenses in Minnesota. There will be plenty for Republican supporters of Donald Trump and J.D. Vance to work with in turning Walz’ “weird” comments back on him.
Walsh, who is 60, supports abortion for all, voting reforms, and has the endorsement of all of Minnesota’s labor unions.
Walz signed a bill that lets the state take away the children of parents who disagree with sterilizing them and chopping off their body parts in the attempt to provide “gender affirming care.”
“So if your 14-yr-old is sad but thinks it’s gender confusion & u object to castrating him, the St takes custody,” noted Megyn Kelly on X/Twitter, using abbreviated words.
“One person’s socialism is another person's neighborliness.”
The Mendenhall River and Lake crested at around 3:15 a.m. Tuesday morning at close to 15.99 feet.
According to the National Weather Service office in Juneau, where meteorologists stayed up through the night monitoring the flooding event, the water is receding and the water level in Suicide Basin, which disgorged on Sunday, had decreased by about 332 feet since 7 a.m. Sunday.
Drone footage by Zachary Hanna was posted on Facebook, and can be seen in 3-D at this link: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/jcjcvoUqV7bRPUmp/
When the water is at 15 feet, Killewich Drive is covered by 2 feet of water and Riverside Drive has 1 foot of water covering it in places. One person reported two feet of water in her house, while last year’s event brought no water into her house. Fire crews were using a raft to extract a stranded person on Long Run Drive at about 5 a.m.
By 4:30 a.m., the water level had reduced to 15.8 feet. The river will drop from the major flood stage of 14 feet by 8 a.m., and will drop out of minor flood stage of 9 feet by 4 p.m. Tuesday.
Water builds up behind an ice dam in Suicide Basin on the east side of the Mendenhall Glacier and, like it did last year last year, made a dramatic entrance into the populated valley when the pressure became great enough to succumb to gravity. Last year a few homes along the river were lost in a similar event.
Alaska Electric Light and Power cut power to streets as the water rose throughout the night: At 7:30 p.m., power was cut to View Drive. At 1:05 a.m. power was cut to Killewich and Gee Street. By 2:11 a.m., 2:11 a.m. power to the was cut to rest of Meander Way and to Rivercourt Way.
An emergency shelter opened at Floyd Dryden Middle School on Mendenhall Loop Road, as several streets were under evacuation orders.
Alaska Rep. Mary Peltola was recruited by fellow Democrat Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland to be part of a program he created called Democracy Summer. It is a program to recruit young Democrats and train them in the ways of the party and campaigning for Democrats, developing a young army, if you will, to be deployed across the nation.
Now, just a month after an assassination attempt was made against Donald Trump, Raskin is planning to take the next step and overthrow the government if Trump is elected president again. In a televised interview, he said he and colleagues will use Section 3 of the 14th Amendment against Trump, since the Supreme Court has not done so to his satisfaction.
“It will be up to us on Jan. 6, 2025 to tell the rampaging Trump mobs that he’s disqualified. Then it will be bodyguards for everybody and civil war conditions,” he said.
Jamie Raskin is saying that congress will STOP Trump from taking office even if he’s chosen by the voters.
This is extremely dangerous. Every Democrat needs to be on the record about this immediately. pic.twitter.com/9IwRoGrrQu
Section 3 of the 14th Amendment pertains to “Disqualification from Holding Office.” It says:
“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”
Raskin plans to prevent Trump from taking office and is ready to create “civil war conditions,” if he has to. He has been training youth across America to be his foot soldiers.
“Founded by Congressman Jamie Raskin, backed by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and buoyed by thousands of supportive alumni across the country, Democracy Summer engages high school and college-aged young people in state-of-the-art tactics in voter registration, canvassing and digital political organizing. Moreover, through on-line seminars with leading historians, law professors, political organizers and union and elected leaders, it provides an intensive education in the historical struggle for democratic freedom and essential lessons for effective political leadership today,” the group’s website says.
The question is for Peltola: Was this part of the Democracy Summer training program that Peltola has been part of? Does Peltola support Raskin’s insurrection and plan to overthrow the government? And is she willing to use the same section of the Constitution to remove Raskin for his own already-declared intent to overthrow a duly elected president?
Defeating and unseating Trump has been a part of Raskin’s plan since he was elected to his federal seat in 2016, the same year Trump was elected.
“Elected to Congress the same night in November 2016 that Donald Trump won the presidency, Jamie went to work immediately to rally the Democrats locally and nationally and—as a key Member of the House Judiciary Committee, Oversight and Reform Committee, Rules Committee and Administration Committee—to oppose the lawlessness, corruption and extremism of the Trump Administration,” says his biographical review at Democracy Summer’s website.
With that as the basis for Democracy Summer, Mary Peltola has signed on to help Raskin with his ambitions, which were revealed in his interview above — overthrowing the next president. It’s now up to Peltola to decide which part she wants to play in Raskin’s Revolution.
Alaska’s Local Boundary Commission staff has released its final report on the petition to dissolve the City of Hoonah and incorporate the Xunaa Borough. The report recommends against the petition, which has been developed with paid consultants to the city of Hoonah.
“LBC staff does not recommend adopting the petition in its current form. As identified in this report, there exist substantive concerns about assumed areawide powers and the addition of fewer than 100 residents to the existing population fails to meet the LBC’s constitutional, statutory, and regulatory requirements for borough incorporation,” the report says.
The proposed Xunaa Borough would encompass 10,403 square miles, but would have just 980 residents, mostly in Hoonah. That would make it the eighth-largest borough in Alaska by geography, none of it connected by road, but the third smallest by population, after Yakutat (pop. 687) and Bristol Bay (pop. 844) boroughs.
The petition only meets a few of the Local Boundary Commission standards. The petition proposes to trade one local government for another, but assume very little responsibility for services now delivered by the state, staff said. The proposed boundary would only benefit Hoonah to the exclusion of neighboring communities.
In addition, there appears to be outright opposition to the proposal by neighboring communities.
“It is unclear why the city moved forward so quickly, and a letter from the Gustavus mayor to Hoonah’s mayor in October 2019 expresses puzzlement over why the multi-community based approach was abandoned. A more compelling petition would have included one or more of the neighboring municipalities of Gustavus, Tenakee Springs, and Pelican, as well as a plan to consolidate school districts and apportion borough assembly representation to ensure a more equitable distribution of resources throughout the region,” the staff said.
The question of whether the proposed borough “will embrace an area and population with common interests to the maximum degree possible” was in doubt due to the singularity of Hoonah.
Many of the remote properties that are included in the proposed borough boundary are owned by people in other parts of the state; therefore, the proposal does not extend local government to a significant population. “Rather, it offers a refuge for those seeking to avoid annexation by the City and Borough of Juneau,” the staff noted.
The staff also referred to what occurred when the Bristol Bay Borough was formed.
“These communities often share marine and air-based transportation methods. If Hoonah is allowed to establish boundaries that include all of Icy Strait and a significant area of the Gulf of Alaska, it could capture revenue, in the form of excise taxes, that could otherwise be distributed to other communities in the region,” the staff noted.
The decision comes as no surprise. Earlier this year, the staff indicated it was not favorable to the petition.
Department’s full final report is posted to the Local Boundary Commission website, along with all other petition documents and public comments. A public hearing will take place on Sept. 5, at the Hoonah City Council chambers and will be available by Zoom. The public hearing will be the last opportunity to comment on the Xunaa petition. No further written comments will be accepted by the Department.
The Defense Department is moving and aircraft into strategic positions across the Middle East to improve U.S. force protection, increase the defense of Israel, and ensure the United States can respond to a variety of contingencies, said Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh at a press briefing on Monday.
The steps being taken include deployment of an additional fighter squadron to the Middle East, reinforcing the defensive air support capability. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin is sending the USS Abraham Lincoln Aircraft Carrier Strike Group to replace the USS Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group in the Central Command area of responsibility.
Additionally, Secretary Austin has ordered additional ballistic missile defense-capable cruisers and destroyers to the U.S. European Command and U.S. Central Command regions. The Department is also taking steps to increase our readiness to deploy additional land-based ballistic missile defense.
These actions are meant to prepare for and mitigate against the possibility of regional escalation by Iran or Iran’s partners and proxies.
According to an anonymously sourced story in Axios, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is saying that Iran and Hezbollah may attack Israel within the next 24 to 48 hours. Iran and Hezbollah have vowed to retaliate for Israel’s killing of top Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists last week.
“The sources said Blinken stressed [in a call to G-7 leaders] that the US believes Iran and Hezbollah will both retaliate,” according to Axios, which added that the U.S. “doesn’t know the exact timing of the attacks.”
The news comes the same day that reports have come in about an unknown number of U.S. personnel injured in a suspected rocket attack on Al Asad Air Base in Iraq on Monday
“Initial indications are that several U.S. personnel were injured,” a spokesperson said in a statement. “Base personnel are conducting a post-attack damage assessment. We will provide updates as more information becomes available.”
Since the horrific Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, which resulted in the most Jewish people killed since Hitler’s Holocaust, the Secretary of Defense has reiterated that the United States will keep America’s “ironclad commitment to the defense of Israel.”
Already in the region is the USS WASP Amphibious Ready Group / Marine Expeditionary Unit (ARG/MEU) operating in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea.
Austin spoke yesterday with Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant to reiterate the U.S. support for Israel’s security and right to self-defense against threats from Iran, Lebanese Hezbollah, Houthis, and other Iranian-backed terrorist groups.
The National Weather Service says the a glacial outburst of water has released from Suicide Basin, to the east side of the Mendenhall Glacier, and a large amount will be in Mendenhall Lake and then Mendenhall River, which is expected to crest near near 15 feet on Tuesday morning.
Last year in the same week in August, a similar event ended up taking one house with it as it gushed down toward Gastineau Channel and damaging others.
Here’s how the flooding will develop, the Weather Service says:
At 9.0 feet: Water starts to cover Skaters Cabin Road between Skaters Cabin and West Glacier Trailhead, also water will flow into the Mendenhall Lake Campground.
At 9.5 feet: Areas along View Dr will start to flood and cause minor flooding of yards. There will be 0.5 feet of water over the Skaters Cabin Road between Skaters Cabin and West Glacier Trailhead. Campsite 7 will be flooded with water starting to flow over the road between campsites 8 and 9 in the Mendenhall Campground.
At 10.0 feet: Water levels will inundate Mendenhall Campground with up to 3 feet of water covering low areas as well as up to 1.5 feet of water covering Skaters Cabin Road. Portions of West Glacier Trail will be impassable.
At 10.5 feet: Significant flooding along the Mendenhall Lake area with more than 3 feet of water in places and the Mendenhall campground will be evacuated. Some homes along View Dr will have up to 3 feet of water in yards.
At 11.0 feet: View Dr will be flooded and impassable with significant flooding to some homes in the area. Locations below back loop bridge will see bank erosion along unreinforced river banks along with hazardous navigation from debris in the river. Homes along the river on Meander Way will begin to see flooding of some backyards. Portions of the Dredge Lake Trail System will be impassable. Flood waters start to reach Dredge Lake.
At 11.5 feet: Houses along the south side and the east end of View Dr will start to flood.
At 12.0 feet: Water starts to back up between Riverside Dr at Tournure St and Mendenhall River School. Significant bank erosion along unreinforced river banks.
At 12.5 feet: 2 to 4 feet of water in some backyards along Meander Way on the the river side.
At 13.0 feet: Water begins to flow through some backyards of homes on the northside of View Dr and flood low lying areas. Locations on View Dr will see depths of 1 to 4 feet of water in homes.
At 13.5 feet: Water will begin to flood at the north end of Meander Way as well as Stream Ct & Northland St from storm drains. Also storm drains along Riverside Dr and Riverwood Dr. start to back up. Severe bank erosion along unreinforced river banks.
At 14.0 feet: Water starts to enter Northland St., Turn St., Stephen Richards Memorial Dr., Parkview and Center Ct. Up to 1 to 2 feet of water will cover Meander Way.
At 14.5 feet: Meander Way will be under 2 to 4 feet of water. Water will start to enter the lowest levels of several homes on Meander Way. Water will start to flow into backyards along Killewich Dr. and onto Riverside Dr. near Melvin Park. Significant flooding of multiple homes along View Dr.
At 15.0 feet: Up to 2 feet of water will be covering Killewich Dr. Water starts to enter the backyards of houses along the south side of Marion Dr. Rivercourt Way, Lakeview Ct., Center Ct., Parkview Ct., Turn St. and Northland St. could have up to 1.5 feet of water over the road. Up to 1 foot of water covering Riverside Dr, at Tournure St.
A flood warning is in effect for the flood areas through 4 p.m. Tuesday.
