Russia fired cruise missiles on Monday at mock targets in the Bering Sea, which are the waters separating eastern Russia from Alaska. The Russian Defense Ministry said it is an exercise to protect the northern shipping route in the Arctic.
Russia has increasingly been using the Arctic Ocean for shipping and four weeks ago a group of Russians from the Russian Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute unveiled a massive Russian flag on the sea ice nearby the drifting polar station, “Severny polyus-41,” in an event that was meant to display dominance.
On Monday, Vulcan, Granit and Onyx cruise missiles were fired over distances of hundreds of miles to strike targets that were simulating enemy ships in the Bering Sea, according to Reuters. About 10,000 Russian military troops are involved in the exercise, along with multiple planes, helicopters, and other equipment.
“The drills took place on Russia’s Chukotka peninsula and in the Chukchi and Bering Seas, and were supervised by Admiral Nikolai Yevmenov, commander-in-chief of the Russian navy,” Reuters reports.
In July, Russia conducted similar exercises in the Black Sea to the south.
“Nonprofit voter registration” doesn’t sound interesting. Yet nonprofit voter registration, or the use of tax-exempt charitable organizations to conduct and fund voter registration drives, is one of the most important and underreported political scandals of our time.
Nonprofit voter registration, and the get-out-the-vote (GOTV) activities that usually accompany it, have become the heart of a billion-dollar industry in America. According to Candid’s Foundation Funding for U.S. Democracy database, since 2011 nearly 60,000 grants have been made for “Voter Education, Registration, and Turnout” and “Civic Participation,” benefitting 15,000 different organizations to the tune of $5.9 billion dollars.
Most of the largest grantors and grantees in this industry are left-leaning. Despite IRS rules prohibiting 501(c)(3) charitable nonprofit groups from engaging in partisan electioneering, it has long been an open secret that the purpose of their work is to register voters from favorable demographics in order to help get Democrats elected. The voter registration industry has always retreated behind the fig-leaf of “nonpartisanship” when necessary, which has protected it from serious scrutiny..
Until now, that is. My recent special report, How Charities Secretly Help Win Elections, ripped away that fig-leaf. The report reveals the untold story of a nondescript charity named the “Voter Registration Project” that was used to funnel over $100 million into a five-year voter registration scheme hatched by Clinton campaign operatives to help Democrats win elections in 2020. Using tax forms, leaked documents, and leaked emails, the report shows how the scheme aimed to register over 5 million “non-white” voters in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia, and Nevada; how it was developed through multiple drafts and edits into a highly sophisticated plan dubbed the Everybody Votes Campaign; and how that plan was eventually adopted by a super PAC tied to Sam Bankman-Fried that instructed billionaire donors to keep it completely secret since it was the most “cost-effective” method for “netting additional Democratic votes.”
The report even shows several of the plan’s major donors admitting, in signed tax forms, that their “charitable” grants to the Voter Registration Project were made for the express purpose of supporting the super PAC that had recommended it to them. It was the largest, most organized, and most blatantly partisan nonprofit voter registration drive in American history. By our estimates it generated between 1 and 2.7 million swing-state votes for President Joe Biden in the 2020 election.
Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Americans are expected to believe the excuse, given on the Everybody Votes Campaign’s new website, that their left-wing donors are merely “committed to creating a more representative democracy by building and supporting large-scale, long-term voter registration in communities of color.” Their website notably boasts that 76% of the 5.1 million voters they have registered were people of color, but then curiously declines to mention which states said people of color were from. A recent job listing from the organization shows that their targets states for 2024 will be Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin.
That’s right, the donors and directors of the Everybody Votes Campaign care deeply about the civic participation of “communities of color.” So deeply, in fact, that they have been, and will be, registering millions of minority voters, but only in the most important presidential swing states. No room for California and New York (two of America’s most populous states) nor Mississippi and Louisiana (which have the highest Black population by percentage).
It should be obvious to anyone who looks a little deeper than the mission statement that “Everybody Votes” is more than a little bit of a misnomer.
This article was originally published by RealClearPublicAffairs and made available via RealClearWire.
The new chief of police in Juneau might literally be known as Chief Bos?
Maybe. It’s either that or Chief Campbell or Kingsbury.
The City and Borough of Juneau has narrowed its list to three finalists for the chief of police position that opened upon the retirement of Chief Ed Mercer on July 31. The finalists are:
Derek Bos
Derek Bos is the Police Chief for Eagle Police Department in the town of Eagle, Colo., a role he has held for just 10 months — since December 2022.
Chief Bos previously held the position of Chief of Police for the Brush Police Department in Brush, Colo. from 2018 to 2022. Bos started his career as a sworn officer with the Chaffee County Sheriff’s Office in Chaffee, Colo. where he held a variety of roles from 2006 to 2016.
Bos earned a bachelor of arts degree in political studies with an emphasis on criminal justice from Dordt University, a Christian college in Iowa.
Krag Campbell
Lt. Campbell serves with the Juneau Police Department, a role he has held since October 2017. Born and raised in Ketchikan, Campbell started his career as a police officer at JPD in 2002 and has been promoted through the JPD ranks to his current role. Campbell grew up in Ketchikan. He earned his Alaska Advanced Police Certificate and is a graduate of the Federal Bureau of Investigation Academy in 2019.
Joshua Kingsbury
Kingsbury works for Amazon, but he started his career as a sworn officer with the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office in Albuquerque, N.M. in 1996 and retired in 2021 as a Captain with oversight of Field Services, Criminal Investigations, and Judicial Operations/Administration. Since then, he has been employed as a multi-site loss prevention lead for Amazon in Albuquerque. Kingsbury holds a bachelor of science degree in criminal justice from Western New Mexico University.
The finalists for the Police Chief were selected after initial screening by the Human Resources and Risk Management Director and interviews with the City Manager’s Office. All finalists will participate in an on-site selection process, including community town halls and meetings with JPD and CBJ staff, starting on September 26, 2023.
The public is invited to town hall meetings with each finalist in the City Hall Assembly Chambers at the following times:
Krag Campbell, Tuesday, September 26, 5:30 p.m.
Joshua Kingsbury, Wednesday, September 27, 5:30 p.m.
Derek Bos, Thursday, September 28, 5:30 p.m.
After each town hall meeting, the public is welcome to submit feedback on the candidate to the city manager for consideration in the selection process.
There’s a runaway fighter jet somewhere near South Carolina.
Personnel from Joint Base Charleston and Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort in South Carolina are responding on Sunday to a mishap involving a missing F-35B Lightning II jet from Marine Fighter Attack Training Squadron (VMFAT) 501 with the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing.
The pilot ejected safely into a North Charleston neighborhood and was transferred to a local medical center in stable condition. Emergency response teams are still trying to locate the F-35, which apparently kept flying without the pilot.
The public is asked to cooperate with military and civilian authorities as the effort continues. The focus is currently on two lakes north of North Charleston, Lake Moultrie and Lake Marion.
On the base’s Facebook page on Sunday, the military asked that those with information about the whereabouts of the wandering jet call the JB Charleston Base Defense Operations Center.
The F-35B Lightning II jet, manufactured by Lockheed Martin, is said to cost about $80 million to produce and is used by the U.S. Marine Corps. It is the Marine Corps variant of the Joint Strike Fighter and has vertical lift fan and pivoting engine nozzle to deliver vertical landing and short takeoff capability to expeditionary airfields, according to Military Times. The F-35 replaces the AV-8B Harrier IIs.
On Sept. 13, 2022, the Juneau Empire published the following opinion piece about building a new city hall in Juneau. One year later, Juneau voters are again being asked to approve a bond proposition to build that same new city hall.
By PAULETTE SIMPSON
For far too long, without first consulting taxpayers, Juneau’s elected officials have poured millions into premature plans for shiny new things.
Improved quarters for city government may well be necessary. I simply question the stipulation of building brand new instead of re-purposing surplus square footage, of which Juneau has plenty.
Re-purposing, however, would require an objective, comprehensive inventory of potential locations, an acknowledgement of Juneau’s demographic reality, and an admission that absent a growing population, our local tax base can’t support constructing and maintaining another expensive public building. Rather than conduct that painful “big picture” analysis, city officials instead create distractions and commission spiffy designs.
It’s been happening for years.
Unbeknownst to most current Assembly members, who either lived elsewhere or were teenagers at the time, in 2003, Mayor Bruce Botelho convinced the Assembly to spend over $500,000 on an international design competition for a new age 174,000 sq. ft. Capitol to replace the current 96,000 sq. ft. building.
Juneau would issue municipal bonds to construct this $100 million Capitol on Telephone Hill, which the state would then lease for $7 million annually.
Four Outside architectural firms were selected and paid to submit designs to the mayor’s Capitol Planning Commission that in 2005 chose the winning proposal from a Santa Monica, CA firm. The design featured an egg-shaped translucent dome with glass wings; renderings suggested the sci-fi dome would dominate and dwarf the downtown historic district.
“I think the [jury members] have lost their freaking minds,” wrote Rick Tyner in a letter to the editor of the Juneau Empire. “I would rather move the capital to Anchorage than look at one of these eyesores the rest of my life.”
Roundly rejected by the state’s residents, the new capitol was not included in Gov. Frank Murkowski’s budget for fiscal year 2006.
After the design competition collapsed, the existing capitol’s problems became a critical issue. The modest six-story brick office building, originally built in 1929-30, was out of date and seismically unsound; the masonry was decaying, and moisture had leaked into the walls.
In 2006, a wise and responsible Legislature began setting aside funds to repair and upgrade the Capitol. Renovation commenced in 2013. By January 2017, the majority of the work had been completed at a cost of around $36 million. The state paid most of the costs and the Juneau Community Foundation contributed about $1 million. Juneau’s Art Deco treasure was saved.
Discussions surrounding the 2005 ($500,000) fiasco focused primarily on the avant-garde design. Few questioned how the deteriorating old building would be backfilled, or if the structure would be boarded up or torn down once the new Capitol was built.
The “Juneau 2006 Economic Overview” had warned that Juneau’s public-school enrollment had declined to its lowest level since 1992 and that Juneau had, “at least temporarily – stopped growing.” And this, exactly, is what is happening now in 2022 as city mothers and fathers promote the construction of a new City Hall while our tax base continues to shrink.
Arguing for its construction, Rich Moniak wrote, “A new City Hall is an investment in democracy” (Juneau Empire, Sept. 2, 2022).
Comparable hyperbolic claims were made in 2005 when the egg-dome architects cooed that, “The new Capitol Campus encourages democracy,” going so far as to label their creation a “physical manifestation of democracy.”
The 2005 concept for a new Capitol Campus in Juneau.
The Assembly’s cheerleader in chief for the current project, Wade Bryson, spouts similar blarney, suggesting a new City Hall is the “single largest loudest action that we can take against capital creep.”
Earth to Wade: Affordable housing, a road, and an attitude of accommodation and hospitality are probably a better bet.
Bryson also declares that “Every aspect of Juneau life will improve by us doing city hall correctly.”
So, if we gift government grand new quarters, will Juneau magically become more affordable, taxes go down, and the dump no longer stink?
In 2005, Gov. Frank Murkowski spared Juneau a 96,000 sq. ft. vacancy at the corner of 4th and Main.
Now, 18 years later, City leaders continue to delight in new designs while school enrollments drop. Juneau voters get the final say on a new city hall when we vote on Proposition No. 1 in our Vote-by-Mail election occurring now through October 3.
The Oct. 3 Fairbanks school board election is critical for keeping parents in charge of their children.
If the leftists win, Fairbanks will be getting a board that welcomes Critical Race Theory, DEI, and the belief that they know better than parents or guardians.
The three leftist candidates are Bobby Burgess, Meredith Maple, and Tim Doran.
The moderate/conservative candidates are April Smith, Maggie Matheson, and Michael Humphrey.
And once again, money is flowing into the state from Outside interests to affect the election results. The leftist candidates have outraised the more moderate and conservative candidates by $40,819 to $26,547.
Much of the funding for the left-leaning candidates has come from the “Putting Alaskans First Committee,” which is funded mostly by government union PACs, including the NEA-PACE teachers union. The contact person and treasurer is Joelle Hall of the Alaska AFL-CIO labor union.
Here is its most recent APOC report:
“Putting Alaskans First Committee” sounds like a good organization, right? But most of the funding for the “Putting Alaskans First Committee” comes from Outside Alaska organizations. Here is a quote from its website where it even says that “A majority of contributions … came from outside the state of Alaska”:
“Paid for by the Putting Alaskans First Committee, 3333 Denali St. Ste. 125 Anchorage, AK 99503. I, Kim Hays, Chair approved this message. Top three contributors are UNITE AMERICA PAC of Denver, CO, LIUNA Political Fund of Washington, DC, and NEA Advocacy Fund of Washington, DC. This NOTICE TO VOTERS is required by Alaska law. I certify that this advertisement is not authorized, paid for, or approved by the candidate. A majority of contributions to Putting Alaskans First Committee came from outside the State of Alaska.”
Why do Outside organizations from Denver, Colo. and Washington, D.C. have such an interest in the Fairbanks school board election?
Why are the campaigns of Burgess, Meredith, and Duran funded by these Outside interests?
It appears as if the leftist candidates are running a pretender campaign, hiding the values they really represent. Their campaign pages are plain vanilla and say very little about their values and beliefs.
Do you want your children to be masked in class? Candidate Burgess would probably push to mask your children. If you had seen him at the latest school board meeting, that would have to be your conclusion:
April Smith is Burgess’ opponent and has opposed the masking of students and the closure of schools during the pandemic. All three leftist candidates running now criticize her for that stance. Smith has also opposed Critical Race Theory, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies in the school district. Most of the opposition to April Smith has come from the transgender/gender identity community, which favors hiding a student’s gender transitioning from parents.
The conservative candidates are being attacked for their “focus on culture wars” and not academics, when in fact, the Left has brought the culture wars to the classroom in its attempts to indoctrinate our children.
And their attempts to replace parents with radical leftist ideas have awakened mama bears.
The Fairbanks Education Association, which is the teachers’ union associated with the NEA, has endorsed Burgess, Doran, and Maple. That’s because the union believes the focus of schools should be on equity and inclusion and most of all, increased funding. The ABCs seem to be buried somewhere in their agenda.
Even the radical environmental organization The Alaska Center (For the Environment) has endorsed the three leftist school board candidates.
Fairbanks voters, do you want these three teacher-union endorsed candidates negotiating union contracts and raising your taxes?
Burgess, who is running against incumbent April Smith, believes the only way to improve K-12 education is more funding. He believes the Alaska Reads Act is okay but there is not enough money to implement it. He quotes the usual “flat funding” complaint that the teacher’s union has pushed for the past few years, without acknowledging that extra funding is awarded to schools year after year, outside of the base student allocation.
Meredith Maple is running against Maggie Matheson. She is married to Kell Gitter who was a female in 2013. Here is a quote from article from the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, May 1, 2013: “Kelly Gitter’s shoelaces were frozen, and her socks were wet after she played for the first time in the Springfest Rugby Tournament on Saturday afternoon at the University of Alaska Fairbanks”. Having transitioned to a male, Gitter and her/his wife Maple are raising their adopted child.
Meredith Maple states on her web site that “Pre-K programming not only prepares students for Kindergarten, but also improves their lives permanently. “ Apparently, Maple believes it is the responsibility of teachers to “program” children in their values, not parent’s values.
Michael Humphrey is a conservative candidate running against Tim Doran. Tim Doran is currently on the board and is a retired teacher/principal. Humphrey states on his website that, “Children have the right to be secure in their bathrooms and private spaces, in their sports, and in the values imparted to them by their parents without facing new values proposition from positions of authority at school.”
Humphrey also believes in the teaching of core subjects and a rigorous focus on academics.
So, it’s up to Fairbanks voters: Do you want boys who identify as girls to use girls’ bathrooms?
Fairbanks, do you believe a student’s pronoun usage and transgenderism should be hidden from parents?
Do you believe diversity, equity and inclusion are more important than teaching a child how to read?
You have a clear choice.
Here are the moderate/conservative candidates: Michael Humphrey, April Smith, and Maggie Matheson.
Here are the leftist candidates: Bobby Burgess, Meredith Maple, and Tim Doran.
Remember, elections do have consequences.
Electing these leftists will dramatically change the education of your children.
You need to get out and vote.
Vote for your children and grandchildren. They are depending on you!
David Boyle is the education writer for Must Read Alaska.
Traveling this holiday season? Plan for chaos, just in case flight attendants decide to strike.
After a vote by participating flight attendants went heavily toward a strike two weeks ago, over 26,000 flight attendants are set to sit out their shifts if the contract negotiations with Alaska Airlines and American Airlines are not resolved by November.
A strike might not be not on every flight, but on random flights, which would cause airline management to be unable to adapt. It’s a type of asymmetrical labor warfare that would give flight attendance the upper hand.
Some 99.47% of participating flight attendants voted to authorize a strike, and more than 93% of eligible flight attendants participated in the vote.
The Association of Flight Attendants, the AFL-CIO union representing the flight attendants, are asking to be paid during boarding and deplaning, and a 40% overall increase in pay and benefits. They say that current wages for flight attendants make them qualify for federal food stamp assistance during their first year of work for Alaska Airlines.
Currently, flight attendants are not on the clock until the boarding door is closed, the brakes are released, and the plane is pushed back. If there is a long delay in boarding, due to mechanical issues or runway congestion, flight attendants can be on board but not paid for many minutes or hours.
Negotiations, scheduled through November, could lead to a holiday strike during the busiest travel season of the year. The union cannot call the strike until at least the end of September, which marks the end of the 30-day cooling off period that is a labor rule of the National Mediation Board.
Picketing by Alaska Airlines attendants took place in August in major airports of the west coast, including Anchorage, with some flight attendants holding signs that said, “PAY US OR CHAOS.”
The Air Force will miss its annual enlisted recruiting goal across all three components for the first time since 1999, according to the head of the recruiting division.
The active duty Air Force reached 90% of its goal of 26,877 enlisted recruits, about 2,700 short of what it needs, according to Air Force Times. The Air Force Reserve and Air National Guard fared are also short, with 30% shortfalls in each component. The Reserve had set a goal of recruiting 9,300 and the Guard aimed at enlisting 11,745 airmen.
It’s not a complete surprise to the top brass. In March, Air Force Secretary Scott Kendall told a group that the Air Force would miss the goal by 10%, and six months later he appears to be spot on.
“We are swimming upstream against a reduced propensity to serve nationally across the board and a limited percentage of qualified candidates,” Kendall said in March.
Kendall continued to soften the news throughout the year. In June, he said the Air Force was working on ways of managing the situation.
“We have things that we can do to manage our way through this, so we’re not in any kind of crisis,” Kendall said at the Center for New American Security on June 22, according to Air & Space Forces Magazine.
According to some, young people have more economic opportunities right now, with a job market begging for anyone willing to work. Eligible recruits are in shorter supply than in past generations, as many young people are obese, have been on psychotropic or therapeutic drugs, use illegal drugs, or have a history of breaking the law.
Leftists say the military is racist and does not promote females.
Those on the right say the military has become too focused on identity politics, and does not value the fighting and patriotic traits of warriors.
Trust in institutions in general is also at a low point in America. Some potential warriors do not trust the government and won’t join a military that has become politicized with woke politics and suspect leaders.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan has subpoenaed FBI Agent Elvis Chan after he and the FBI tried to outmaneuver the committee as he was scheduled to testify.
On Friday, the Ohio Republican released the subpoena against Chan, in which he says that the executive branch colluded with social media companies to censor a story about Joe Biden’s son’s laptop, which Hunter Biden had dropped off at a Delaware computer repair shop in 2019 and never retrieved.
The Department of Justice, in a last minute attempt to take control of the hearing, said that agent Chan would only testify if he could have a second lawyer with him.
The committee is investigating how the Hunter Biden laptop news was downplayed and even censored by social media companies. Chairman Jim Jordan, in his investigations, believes that Chan lied about the computer.
Get caught up on the Hunter Biden laptop story and how social media giants suppressed it before the election at this link:
“The Committee on the Judiciary is conducting oversight of how and to what extent the Executive Branch has coerced and colluded with companies and other intermediaries to censor speech,” Jordan wrote. “As the primary liaison between the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) and social media companies, you are uniquely positioned to aid the Committee’s oversight.”
Jordan noted that a trove of documents now publicly available “reflect the weaponization of the federal government’s power to censor speech online directly and by proxy. It is necessary for Congress to gauge the extent to which FBI agents coerced, pressured, worked with, or relied upon social media and other tech companies to censor speech. The scope of the Committee’s investigation includes understanding the extent and nature of the FBI’s involvement in this censorship. For example, through its investigation, the Committee has uncovered evidence that appears to contradict several statements in your deposition in Missouri v. Biden, particularly as they relate to your communications with social media platforms.”
Of interest to the committee is how the FBI labeled “disinformation” reporting by the New York Post, which aggressively covered the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020 and was “deplatformed” by Twitter, which means it lost access to its account at the social media company on Oct. 14, just before the 2020 presidential general election.
“The Committee was ready and willing to proceed with your transcribed interview under the Committee’s established protocols. After the Committee repeatedly requested that you voluntarily appear for a transcribed interview, the FBI agreed to schedule your interview for September 15, 2023, with full knowledge of the Committee’s longstanding protocol for conducting transcribed interviews. Then, only three days before your scheduled interview, you and the FBI requested special treatment to deviate from this protocol, which the Committee repeatedly and clearly denied. Just one day before your scheduled transcribed interview, you threatened to withdraw your appearance due to this disagreement and today you failed to appear for your interview,” Jordan wrote in his explanation of the subpoena.
“It is necessary for Congress to gauge the extent to which FBI agents coerced, pressured, worked with, or relied upon social media and other tech companies to censor speech. The scope of the Committee’s investigation includes understanding the extent and nature of the FBI’s involvement in this censorship,” he wrote.
The FBI says the Department did not block Chan from testifying.
“Agent Chan chose to be represented by both agency and personal counsel. He went to the Capitol this morning to testify and, instead of asking him questions, Committee staff turned him away and threatened to throw agency counsel out of the room,” the FBI reported to the Daily Mail.
By bringing in an additional counsel to the hearing, Chan and the FBI likely knew that they would trigger a conflict with the committee as they attempted to set their own rules of engagement for the congressional committee hearing.
Earlier this year, Rep. Matt Gaetz has entered the entire contents of the Hunter Biden laptop into the Congressional Record, making it a public document. The documents show the FBI took possession of the laptop in December of 2019. Read about that here:
