A legend in Alaska talk radio is coming back to the airwaves in Alaska after taking 18 months off. Dan Fagan says retirement is not all it’s cracked up to be.
“It’s been 18 months since I walked away from the microphone – believing at the time – I was done for good. But how much golf can one man really play? On Monday, I’m jumping back into the battle, ready to fight, fight, fight, as our next president has called us to do. My show will air between 7 & 9 AM on KVNT 92.5 FM in Eagle River, 104.5 FM in Anchorage and 1020 AM in the Mat-Su Valley and streamed globally on 1020KVNT.com.“
Fagan was also a popular columnist here at Must Read Alaska until his retirement. Hopefully he’ll get back on his keyboard and contribute in this space, as well as over the airwaves. Fagan moved to New Orleans a several years ago to take care of his aging mother. His show, which ended in December of 2022, ran five days a week for four years. Prior to that, he had a long history in journalism and pioneered conservative blogging in Alaska with the Alaska Standard, which he stopped publishing years ago. He’s also written opinion columns for the NOLA.com news site for New Orleans.
Alaska House District 6 and 29 Republicans, located in conservative Lower Kenai and in Wasilla-Sutton, have joined two other Republican district committees in passing resolutions stating that after the primary election on Aug. 20, only the top vote-winning Republican candidate for Congress should proceed to the November ballot. Second, third, and fourth place Republicans should drop by Sept. 2.
Candidate Nick Begich, who has been through a tough ranked-choice voting process in 2022, is the only Republican who has made that commitment so far. Nancy Dahlstrom has refused to say if she will drop if she loses to Begich.
District 13 and District 25 Republicans have passed resolutions that ask candidates to “drop, if not on top.” All four districts are among the dozen that have endorsed Nick Begich.
The resolutions from District 29 and District 6 say, in part, that many Alaskans refuse to take part in ranked-choice voting, and only want to vote for one candidate. Having more than one Republican candidate on the ballot in the November general election “has the potential to dilute the vote and forfeit the election to a candidate other than a Republican.
The resolutions state, “at lease one Republican candidate has publicly declared his willingness to withdraw from the race if he is not the Republican who garners the most votes in the Primary Election.” That’s Nick Begich.
The districts are directly speaking to the other three Republicans, including Dahlstrom.
Districts that have announced their endorsement for Begich now include 1, 6, 8, 17, 23, 25, 26, 28, 29, 33, 34, and 36.
Also, six of seven Alaska Republican women’s clubs and both of the Young Republican clubs endorsed Begich.
The Alaska primary elections used to allow Republicans to hold their own primary with a ballot open to Republicans and anyone else not signed up with an official party. But in 2020, Ballot Measure 2, backed by dark money from the New Venture Fund, passed the voters. This took away the Republican primary and created a system by which all candidates are on the same ballot.
There are 12 candidates competing for Congress and the top four will proceed to the general election, where voters are then instructed to rank them in the order of their preference. Through a tabulation system that depends on machines, the lowest voted candidate gets tossed and his ballot is awarded to whomever was the voters’ second choice.
The process of reassigning ballots in this way means that those who only vote for one candidate might have their ballot counted only once, if their candidate is not the winner, while people who rank may have their ballots counted as many as three times until their ballot joins the others for the winning candidate.
Many Republicans oppose this system and a great number refuse to participate in ranking, preferring to state their one choice and then cast their ballot.
Tim Walz, Democrat vice presidential candidate, has been found to have embellished his military service, including saying he served at a higher rank than he actually did. Will this hurt him with voters in the general election?
This poll is closed. After 20 hours, the results are:
396 people said it will hut him and 82 people said it will not hurt him.
Thanks for taking part. We’ll do another one soon!
(Editor’s note: Art Chance wrote opinion, theater reviews, and political analysis for Must Read Alaska for many years. He passed peacefully in his sleep on Oct. 17, 2023. This column first ran on Nov. 10, 2021 and we run it again in his memory.)
I spent an interesting hour or so last week with Lt. Gov. Kevin Meyer. I wouldn’t say we’re friends; I was in government too long to really have friends, but we know each other and can converse as honestly as political types converse.
I’m associated with a group of old guys, mostly guys, mostly old anyway, who have a few hundred years of governmental and political experience. And while we’re mostly out to pasture, we still like to meddle in things and tell people what they should have done.
So, we had a chat with the lieutenant governor about election integrity, mail ballots, witness signatures, Dominion machines, and most interestingly, the Kelly Tshibaka report on the Division of Elections.
In the early days of the Dunleavy Administration, Tshibaka was something of a minister without portfolio who had a fancy pedigree and a resume as an Inspector General for the U.S. Government. Gov. Mike Dunleavy tasked her with doing an investigative report on the Division of Elections. I’ll assume it was for “the Administration,” but I’ve worked in administrations where the governor and the lieutenant governor weren’t all that friendly, so I don’t know whose idea it was and what the real purpose was.
Tshibaka produced an investigative report, which since she was working for him, I assume she gave to the governor. It appears the governor gave it to the lieutenant governor, who has responsibility for the Division of Elections. Somewhere in there, the Attorney General got involved.
It was supposed to be a meeting of allies if not friends, so I couldn’t subject Lt. Gov. Meyer to the withering cross-examination my old advocate’s brain was screaming for. Meyer is a former senator, so I assure you he knew little of the ways of the Executive Branch. Most of Gov. Dunleavy’s appointees had little or no Executive Branch experiences so I don’t know how they looked at things.
In my time as an appointed official, I was a jaded, cynical, long-time bureaucrat who would never involve the Attorney General in any of my business unless I wanted to delay or hide something or knew it was destined to go to court, and even then, I’d wait as long as I dared.
Rule One: If you’re a Republican-elected or -appointed official, the Department of Law is not your friend.
Since I couldn’t do that cross-examination, I don’t know if Meyer went to Attorney General Treg Taylor for advice or word leaked out that there was some sort of report . Somebody filed a Public Records Act request for the report. Alaska’s Public Records Act dates back to the days when so-called “Sunshine Laws” were very fashionable and it is pretty wide open. Other than a very limited number of explicit protections, if the State produces it or causes it to be produced, it is a public record and the public is entitled to inspect the record. If you want copies, they can charge for the copies, but that is a clue they don’t like you and aren’t going to be helpful. In any event, the Tshibaka report wound up in the care of the AG and has never seen the light of day since.
Gov. Sarah Palin and Annette Kreitzer, her Commissioner of Administration, struggled mightily with this issue, but the struggle is futile; if you don’t want to read it on the front page of the newspaper that hates you most, don’t do it, don’t write it, or record it. I was a pretty controversial figure for many years; try finding something that isn’t a pleading or a published formal document on State letterhead with my name on it.
Sen. Mike Shower is trying to advance some election integrity legislation. Of course, there are a lot of people in the State Legislature whose last desire is election integrity, especially those whose day job is with a union. Shower is a sitting Senator and he says the lieutenant governor and the AG won’t give him a state document. There is absolutely no legal reason under the Public Records Act to deny release of that report to any citizen of Alaska, and especially not to a member of the Legislature. (A caveat; I’m given to understand that it has some reference to the criminal case against Rep. Gabriel LeDoux, and there is an explicit confidentiality protection for information related to an on-going criminal matter.)
I’ve dealt with some of these requests from legislators when I believed that it was all about a State employee trying to use political influence. I just sent the requesting legislator a copy of AS 39.25.080, the law controlling State employee record confidentiality and asked them if they would adhere to it if we provided the record. If they agreed, it was a crime to give the record to their favorite ADN reporter, so we never had any real problem with it.
So, we got a concert of mumbling and dissembling from Meyer. He carried on about how it wasn’t finished. All he needs to do is read AS 40.25.220 and he’ll find that drafts and notes are public records. If you produce it as a State employee or officer, it is a public record and the only way you can avoid disclosing it is to throw it in Gastineau Channel; you’ll get charged with destroying the public record. You be the judge of which is best for your career.
I don’t even know what is in the Tshibaka report; it may say that the Alaska Division of Elections is the best in the world. But if it does, why are they hiding it? In my days as an advocate, I had a simple rule; if it was there to come out in hearing, it was going to come out, so it was a helluva lot better for it to come out from you than from the adversary. Meyer and Dunleavy need to stop hiding behind or listening to the lawyers and just stand up with this. Wondering what it says is worse than knowing what it says.
Art Chance is a retired Director of Labor Relations for the State of Alaska, formerly of Juneau and now living in Anchorage. He is the author of the book, “Red on Blue, Establishing a Republican Governance,” available at Amazon.
The same dark money group that is now funding a voter initiative on campaign contributions, so the dark money Outside groups can continue to control elections in Alaska, is responsible for making Alaska’s elections insecure back in 2016 through a voter initiative that has, since 2017, registered people to vote automatically whenever they apply for a Permanent Fund dividend. Even if they aren’t citizens.
New Venture Fund put at least $565,000 into the effort in 2016 that succeeded in convincing Alaskans to pass a ballot measure that allows anyone who even applies for a Permanent Fund dividend to get a voter identification card. They should return it if they are not a U.S. citizen, but it’s all on the honor system, according to the Division of Elections.
The New Venture Fund, a subset of the dark-money Arabella Advisors umbrella of political operations, now wants Alaskans to sign a petition saying that individuals can’t contribute more than $2,000 to campaigns, which leaves the dark money groups like the New Venture Fund in control of Alaska elections in perpetuity, because groups like NVF can set up any number of subgroups to funnel money in ways average Alaskans can’t.
With just these two programs — no voter registration controls and preventing people from contributing to campaigns, Alaska will be at the mercy of Outside dark money.
In response to Must Read Alaska‘s story over the weekend, functionaries of the Governor’s Office have told Alaskans that there is nothing that can be done to fix the automatic voter registration problem and that it’s not really a problem. The Must Read Alaska report, they say, is a nothing-burger.
But there is at least one fix. The executive branch could work with the legislature to repeal or amend the Permanent Fund Dividend Automatic Voter Registration Program. The executive branch — the governor and lieutenant governor — could call for a pause in the program while a legal review is done to see if it violates the Alaska Constitution or state statutes.
The seriousness of the problem is hardly in question. The New Venture Fund already finances the 907 Initiative, The Alaska Center for the Environment, the Alaska Venture Fund, and even Alaskans for Posterity, a group that tries to trick people into thinking it is the free-market group known as Americans for Prosperity-Alaska.
The New Venture Fund is the equivalent of a political party in Alaska. It has far more money and influence in elections than the political parties combined.
A Dunleavy Administration employee privately contacted Must Read Alaska subsequent to our story on the flaws in automatic voter registration, and said that the PFD automatic voter registration program is highlighted in the Elections security audit produced by Kelly Tshibaka, former commissioner of Administration, with recommended solutions.
That state’s election security report, completed in 2019, has never been made public and those who have asked for it, including legislators, have had their requests refused. What else is in this report that the public cannot see?
Fairbanks Republicans in District 33 met over the weekend and endorsed Nick Begich for Congress.
It brings the number of districts endorsing the 46-year-old Alaska Republican, who is running a campaign to replace Democrat Rep. Mary Peltola to 12.
Districts that have announced their endorsement for Begich now include 1, 6, 8, 17, 23, 25, 26, 28, 29, 33, 34, and 36.
Also, six of seven Alaska Republican women’s clubs and both of the Young Republican clubs endorsed Begich.
There are a handful of House districts in Alaska that are extremely rural and heavily Democratic voting, and do not have a committee of Republicans.
Begich now has the support of one-third of the organized Republican districts.
The rest of the districts have made no commitment to any Republican. Two districts have also passed resolutions saying that whoever comes in after the first-place Republican needs to drop out.
Not a single Republican committee has endorsed any of the three other Republicans running for Congress.
Also endorsing Begich on Monday was former Alaska House Rep. Norman Rokeburg, who said, “I served with both Mary Peltola and Dahlstrom in the Alaska House. I am supporting Nick Begich for Congress.”
One of the biggest dark money groups in the country, which has controlled many of Alaska’s election outcomes over the years, is the New Venture Fund. It’s a name every Alaskan should know, but that few do.
The New Venture Fund is the group behind a new pop-up group called Citizens Against Money in Politics, which seeks to instate a $4,000 campaign contribution limit in Alaska elections for groups, and a $2,000 limit for ordinary citizens. The group is collecting signatures all over the state, most recently in Fairbanks.
This weird signature gatherer that claimed to be indirectly associated with me, which is a lie.
Also was taking up 4 handicap parking spaces right in front of Safeway in North Pole, AK. He did not have permission from The property owner and had to have the police called to have… pic.twitter.com/WeNGVmQ0Nw
This initiative would give the ability of groups like the New Venture Fund to create numerous pop-up groups and spend money changing outcomes in Alaska, while putting regular citizens at a disadvantage for fighting them. It’s similar to what happened with 2020’s Ballot Measure 2, which brought in the ranked-choice voting method now used in Alaska, to disadvantage Republicans except for Sen. Lisa Murkowski.
The New Venture Fund, along with ASEA, AFL-CIO, and NEA-Alaska — also among the biggest forces in Democrat politics in Alaska — are doing what they say the Legislature should have done — create campaign contribution limits in Alaska. The limits that were the law of the Great Land, limiting contributions to $500 per individual to a campaign, were overturned by the Ninth Circuit and currently there are no limits at all on how much can be spent on a campaign.
The campaign limit laws, however, give particular power to those groups that are “independent expenditure groups,” which is what the dark-money constellation of which the New Venture Fund is but one hot-burning star. New Venture Fund is a subset of Arabella Advisors, which has become synonymous with political “dark money.”
Year after year, Arabella guides donor money, which includes money from foreign billionaires like Hansjorg Wass, to the subgroups — New Venture Fund, Sixteen Thirty and Hopewell Fund. Rarely do those donations show up in a candidate’s campaign finance disclosures. But take, for example, Forrest Dunbar’s run for mayor of Anchorage. The Sixteen Thirty Fund funneled $35,000 into a group called “Building a Stronger Anchorage,” which was created solely to get Dunbar elected.
If New Venture Fund is successful in getting the signatures it needs to get campaign finance laws back on the books, it will pour millions into convincing Alaskans to vote for the initiative at the ballot box — all under the guise of making elections fair. In reality, it will make elections work for the New Venture Fund and its affiliates out of D.C.
The New Venture Fund also spawned “The Alaska Venture Fund,” a group that takes credit for stopping mining in Alaska.
For the Citizens Against Money in Politics, the group has reported $91,656.46 in contributions so far this year, with $75,000 coming from the New Venture Fund, and the AFL-CIO and NEA-Alaska contributing $5,000 each.
There is no group that has organized in order to combat the effort to limit the rights of citizens to contribute to campaigns.
And there is no sure way to know whose money is being laundered through New Venture Fund in order to change Alaska elections to benefit New Venture Fund and labor unions.
Citizens Against Money in Politics is headed in Alaska by Juneau Democrats, with former Attorney General (and former Mayor of Juneau) Bruce Botelho leading the charge.
Botelho brokered the deal that put Bill Walker and Byron Mallott together after the ballot was already set in 2014, helping that ticket to become the Democrats’ nominee for governor and lieutenant governor. He was a significant player in the drive to take the Republicans’ primary away from them and implement ranked-choice general elections in Alaska.
Donald Trump told Fox News last week that he will refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserves, which have been drained to dangerously low levels by the Biden Administration.
Trump said the Biden has been gambling with American security in order to try to force gasoline prices lower.
“[Biden is] using the strategic reserves, which is meant for military, which is meant for war, and very important things, he’s using it to try and keep gasoline prices down,” Trump said, referring to election-year politics. “We can’t allow that to happen. We don’t need energy from any other country. We have to fill up the strategic reserves again. It is the lowest number it has ever been.” he added.
When Biden took office, the nation had 638 million barrels of oil in reserve that were to be kept in storage in case of a national emergency. Biden drew the volume down to 346 million barrels for two years, and particularly leading up to the 2022 midterm elections, in an effort to drive down gas prices for Americans and increase the chances that Democrats would win their elections. He then started to rebuild it to its current level of 375 million barrels.
The reserves are still at the lowest level since they were. first filled after being established in the early 1980s and the levels are barely higher than last year, when Biden promised he would refill it. Although his administration has announced that it would purchase oil for the reserve, it has canceled most of those purchases.
The Strategic Petroleum Reserve is a federal government complex of four sites, each with with deep underground storage caverns created in salt domes along the Texas and Louisiana coasts. It was established to prevent another oil crisis, such as the one that occurred in the 1970s.
Rick Whitbeck, Alaska director for Power the Future, said, “It’s good to see someone running for president understand that energy security is national security. Our nation’s strategic petroleum reserves were never designed to be used as a political football. The Biden administration has done exactly that, manipulating them for political gain and votes, instead of for their designated reasons.”
Energy is on the ballot in November, Whitbeck said: “Let’s hope America makes the right choice, and we can return to energy dominance once again as a country.”
How does one define a coward? Or if we don’t want to judge their character, perhaps their actions, which we would call “cowardly”?
And what is a “chicken hawk”? This was a term used by the media to define politicians who were eager to use military force, but to let others do it. The term was thrown most often at neo-con and globalist, former VP Dick Cheney. Perhaps now the Democrats will have their own.
You have heard that bullies are really cowards, but they use their aggressiveness to cover their inner fears. Bullies always pick soft targets, never ones that might match their own physique or militant character. In school, bullies picked on the class nerds, never the class jocks. If you have ever seen the movie The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, villain Lee Marvin picks mercilessly on the nerdly Jimmy Stewart, who is serving steaks in a crowded saloon … until Marvin scornfully trips him, and John Wayne’s steak finds the floor.
Wayne ordered Marvin to pick up the steak, off the floor, which would be demeaning to the bully. He would not allow Marvin’s sidekick to do it. The room hushed, expecting a shoot-out. After a lengthy stare-down, Stewart, eager to avoid bloodshed, shows true courage by scolding them both, and picks up the steak himself. Marvin and his crew dash out the door and shoot wildly into the air to create confusion, keep people scared of him, and make good their escape.
Tim Walz is a Chicken Hawk: first he parades his military service. And why would a politician do that? Why, to show his courage, a virtue people admire even in an enemy. But now the truth about Walz is emerging, for resigning from his unit when it was going to be deployed to Iraq.
To borrow a phrase from submarine movies: “Damage control — Report!”
The Deep State always has some damage control handy. “Simply say that you resigned in order to run for Congress.”
Yet his own compatriots know better, and are telling about his shameful resignation to the alternative media, and how the entire structure of the unit was compromised by needing to bring in unfamiliar replacements.
The next move would be to have the media lackeys to either discredit the sources, or to suppress them.
Next: At a campaign stop for governor some years ago, Walz said that we need more gun control, and that he proudly disowned the NRA. “I have handled weapons in war” he told his audience, and they should not be in the hands of citizens.
“Damage control: Report!”
“Simply say that you merely misspoke. You meant to say, ‘I have handled weapons of war.’ ”
It never occurred to Walz that his own citizens of Minnesota might need them to protect their life and property during the 2020 riots, when he delayed calling out the National Guard.
Oh, and then he spoke of how the riots were “exciting” and were “restoring a sense of optimism coming back.”
WATCH: Tim Walz calls George Floyd riots ‘EXCITING’… Blames ‘society’ for civil unrest. pic.twitter.com/8jdaEOxpBp
And what of Kamala Harris, who set up a bail-bond fundto get them back on the streets as soon as possible?
“Damage control: Suppress!”
But it gets worse: Mother Teresa of Calcutta knew who “the poorest of the poor” were, the A-1 most helpless members of the human family: The pre-born children, firmly fixed into the gunsights of Planned Parenthood, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. The unborn are easier targets than the Class Nerd or Jimmy Stewart, so Walz knows a soft target when he sees one.
Here is how a coward struts his “courage”: Bragging that he defied Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s advice to tone down his baby-killing rhetoric, signing a bill that allows elective abortion up until birth. If you view the video, it looks like Walz is about the burst a blood vessel, as he literally shouts his aggression to his radical audience.
“And my record is so pro-choice, Nancy Pelosi asked me if I could tone it down. I stand with Planned Parenthood, and we won!”
Wow, that took courage, Mr. Walz. You out-lefted Nancy Pelosi!
We are dealing with the demonic in this election. Whatever flaws exist in the alternatives, pale before the reality of this evil, lying, wicked, cowardly, bullying, doubling-down national ticket of death. They enjoy the continued support of big business, the media, academia, mainstream medicine, the anti-human globalists, and the endlessly deep pockets of the federal government.
A note to the remaining sensible Democrats out there: You still have a chance to step out of your self-induced stupor. This is not a matter of Left v. Right, Liberals v. Conservatives, Democrats v. Republicans. We are dealing with people who hate humanity. It is “Us” v. “Them.”
You will not be safe with these people.
None of us will be.
Bob Bird is past chairman of the Alaskan Independence Party and the host of a talk show on KSRM radio, Kenai.
