Alaska Revenue Commissioner Lucinda Mahoney announced Thursday she will resign effective Friday, Sept. 9. Mahoney is leaving to refocus on her health and family. Must Read Alaska has learned that she has been facing health challenges.
“I want to acknowledge and celebrate Commissioner Mahoney’s many contributions to the people of Alaska,” said Gov. Mike Dunleavy, who will turn his focus on finding an acting Revenue commissioner. “Under her leadership, the state’s credit rating and overall fiscal health significantly improved. Oil tax credits have been paid off, the state’s public employee pension obligation has been significantly reduced, and school bond debt reimbursement is reinstated. She came into office just as the global pandemic was appearing in Alaska, and successfully managed the distribution of early PFD payments to assist Alaskans in 2020, and again this year for families struggling to make ends meet due to rampant inflation. The people of Alaska thank Commissioner Mahoney for her contributions to our great state.”
With Alaska voters turning out in historic numbers for a mid-August election, the 49th state has just elected a Native grandmother from rural Alaska as its temporary congressional representative.
Mary Peltola, a Democrat, is someone with low name recognition from a town of 6,500, far away from the hustle of the political world. Before June, hardly any Alaskans even knew her name.
How did this happen in a state where President Donald Trump won just two years ago by a 10-point margin?
Chalk it up to the new “ranked choice voting” method voted into law by Alaskans in 2020 and tried for the first time on Aug. 16, when Alaska held both a regular primary and a special general election.
In the special general election part of the ballot, Peltola beat the most famous person in Alaska history, Sarah Palin, to fill the remainder of the term of the late Congressman Don Young.
Weeks ago, Dittman Research had accurately predicted Peltola’s strong chance of winning the special election. He and other pollsters who work in Alaska say that Palin’s 63% negative rating with voters, and Peltola’s lack of negatives make it unlikely that Palin could win in a head-to-head with Peltola.
Dittman Research poll vs. actual results of the Aug. 16 special primary election for Alaska’s one congressional seat.
In the second round of tabulating, half of Republican candidate Nick Begich’s voters heeded Begich’s call to “rank the red.” They picked Republican Palin second on their ballots.
But nearly 50% of Begich voters were not of the same “rank the red” mindset. About 29% of Begich voters picked Peltola second. Several conservative, lifelong Republicans told Must Read Alaska they voted for Peltola second to block Palin from office. They find her too polarizing.
Another 20% of voters didn’t vote for anyone else after they picked Begich. Thus, 11,222 ballots were declared “exhausted.”
This is a stunning defeat for Palin. She is a former governor, a former vice-presidential nominee, is endorsed by former President Donald J. Trump, who won in 2016 and 2020. Trump went to the extraordinary length of traveling to Alaska to appear at a rally for Palin this summer.
Ted Nugent, Kid Rock, Rand Paul, Newt Gingrich, Nikki Haley, and a host of other luminaries endorsed the glamorous political star.
Palin also outspent Peltola by a factor of four in this race. She had super PACs from the Lower 48 dropping hundreds of thousands of dollars into supporting her.
Yet Palin was beat by a smiling Yup’ik who last held elected office under a different surname — Mary Sattler, a state legislator from 1999-2009. Peltola has no college degree. She is a Bernie Sanders-style Democrat who has been married three times.
Peltola is yet to be fully defined. Her negatives are mainly that she will align with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and President Joe Biden – both are kryptonite to Alaska conservatives and to the state’s economic stability.
Alaska voters have an opportunity to reconsider this stunning upset in the regular general election on Nov. 8, when they will choose, in ranked choice voting, which of four candidates will be the two-year congressional representative starting in January: Peltola, Palin, Begich or Libertarian Chris Bye.
Some say Palin has cost Alaska a Republican in Congress because of her hubris and lack of self-awareness about how she stands with average Alaskans. In the meantime, after 49 years, the Alaska seat in Congress has flipped to blue, taking the political world by surprise, defying conventional wisdom. Why? Not enough conservative Alaskans view Sarah Palin as credible. Too few feel she has the intellectual prowess for the job. The election just demonstrated those views.
The fight isn’t over: Now, Alaska conservatives are trying to figure out how to flip that seat back to the red column in November, knowing that Palin cannot break 50% in Alaska. And everyone from Biden to the local Democratic Party will pour everything they have into keeping that seat blue.
After 49 years, the Alaska seat in Congress has flipped to blue, taking the political world by surprise. On Thursday morning, Cook Political Report changed Alaska’s ranking from Likely Republican to Likely Toss-Up for the first time in history.
Mary Peltola of Bethel, Alaska has won the temporary seat for Congress. She appears to have won by about 3 percent.
Peltola received over 91,000 votes and Sarah Palin received over 85,000 votes. Peltola appears to have 51.47%, Palin 48.53%. Results have not as of this writing been posted by the Division of Elections and are not final until certified.
The Division of Elections ran the count for the second choice made by voters who picked Nick Begich first for the seat, and assigned them to Peltola and Palin, according to how voters had indicated. The results were announced by a blurry and sometimes hard to hear livestream on Facebook almost immediately after 4 pm on Wednesday, when the second choices from Begich’s ballots were redistributed to their respective candidates.
– 50.3% of Begich second votes went to Palin.
– 28.7% of Begich second votes went to Peltola.
– 20.9% of the voters did not rank another candidate.
Alaska adopted a complicated ranked choice voting method in 2020, via Ballot Measure 2, a scheme pushed with out-of-state liberal billionaire dollars; it passed by a small margin. The special general election to replace the late Congressman Don Young is the first time it has been used in the state.
There were over 11,222 “exhausted” ballots in the final count. Those were voters who chose no one on the ballot after Begich.
Peltola is the first Alaska Native to serve in the one congressional seat that Alaska has. She will fill out the remaining term of Young, until the regular election decides who will serve in the seat for the two years starting in January. Peltola, who served in the Alaska Legislature under the name Mary Sattler from 1999-2009, has the least amount of funding in the race and had only received 10% of the vote during the jungle primary election on June 11, when there were 48 people on the ballot.
She is also the first Democrat to hold the seat since Nick Begich I died in a plane crash in October of 1972. And she will be the first woman.
For Palin, it’s a serious blow for her political comeback. She had been endorsed by former President Donald Trump but could not convince enough voters to put her first or second on their ballots. The conservatives — Begich and Palin — had 60% of the vote combined at the end of the primary, but it was Peltola who managed to get enough second place votes to put her ahead.
Interior Republicans in Fairbanks, Districts 31-36, have organized separately from the Alaska Republican Party, creating their own group, and renting a temporary headquarters to last through Nov. 15. This move to create a separate operating group is so they can provide resources to people interested in running for local and state offices, to provide central location for meetings and to get candidate information out to the public.
Their location, at 59 College Road, across from Costco, is also the place to distribute candidate signs and information for conservative candidates. They will be engaged in get-out-the-vote activities for all Interior conservative candidate.
The group, Interior Republicans has also launched a robust websitewith candidate information and local event listings to help influence voters on “ranking red” in the November general election. The group is also holding election watch parties, and had Gov. Mike Dunleavy hold a meet-and-greet at the Interior Republicans offices. The Dunleavy campaign and numerous other candidates have rented space in the offices. At this point, the group has not hired staff, but is maintaining the offices with volunteer help.
“Donations are being accepted to help us keep the doors open,” said Cheryl Markwood, the founder of the group and longtime Republican activist. “After the November election, we hope to keep Interior Republicans active in recruiting candidates and providing education for more strategic political planning for the upcoming elections in 2023 and 2024.
The group sees itself as another resource, not replacing the Alaska Republican Party, which is based in Anchorage.
“We’re providing services that the arm of the Republican Party cannot fulfill,” she said.
Anchorage schools have not only taken over sex education for parents, they are teaching wokeism, gender neutrality, “pick your pronoun,” “change your name,” and techniques needed to be successful in sexual proclivity.
In full transparency, they will provide a parental consent form that seems pretty benign.
However, the description of the Academic Plan and Learning Outcomes is not informative to parents. Here is the form that informs parents of the curriculum and the learning outcomes:
This form meets the intent of the state law to get parental approval. Once the permission slip is signed by the parent, the school district is off the hook.
The learning outcomes are vague and do not reflect what is being taught in the classroom. The permission form is misleading to parents. An argument can be made it is deceiving.
Based on the learning outcomes above, most any parent would sign the permission form. That is exactly the objective of the the Anchorage School District, which prides itself on its “transparency” and “accountability” principles.
The school district has stepped in as the surrogate parents in teaching sex education.
As noted in a previous article, the Anchorage School District is pairing boys and girls to ask extremely intimate and sordid questions of each other in a “speed dating” exercise.
Here is a second example of the questions the boy-girl pairs are to ask each other:
These questions are from a book, “100 Questions You Would Never Ask Your Parents” by Elizabeth Henderson and Nancy Armstrong, which is being used to teach sex education to Anchorage high school students.
What learning objective is aligned with question #41: “With all the condoms out there, how can I know which one to pick?”
There are also several questions about unprotected sex and pregnancy. Do these questions lead the student to Planned Parenthood rather than a conversation with their parent? After signing the permission slip, are these the type of questions you as a parent thought would be covered?
This sexual movement is not limited to Alaska. It is happening in many schools throughout the nation. A poster in an Eau Claire, Wisconsin high school classroom portrays the school as “I’m Your Mom Now.”
This refers to the gender fluid, transgender, LGBQT+ effort to groom students to question their biological sex.
As noted in an earlier story, the Anchorage School District also intends to keep parents in the dark when a middle or high school student decides to change genders. It’s not just Anchorage.
According to The Federalist, teachers in San Francisco held a meeting in which a question came up as to how to handle a parent who asks teachers to use her child’s given name and biologically correct pronouns. One teacher conveyed an experience in which a parent stated to her, “I know you were using a different name than my child’s given name at birth and the pronouns we gave them, and I’m respectfully asking that you use the name and the pronouns that we gave them.”
The teacher proudly described her defiant reply, “So, in my classroom, I will refer to your child by whatever name and pronouns that they’ve told me they feel most comfortable with.”
Without a focus on the 3 Rs, more parents will be looking for other places to educate their children. More students will be leaving the public education system. If so, the public education system only has itself to blame.
David Boyle is an education writer for Must Read Alaska.
More Americans believe the latest legislation to hire 87,000 Internal Revenue Service agents is part of a plan to audit middle and lower class Americans and small businesses than to target corporations and wealthy Americans, according to a new poll.
Convention of States Action, along with the Trafalgar group, released the poll that found that “52.1 percent of voters say that the new 87,000 IRS employees, approved by President [Joe] Biden’s legislation, will be used to audit middle-class Americans, low-income earners, and small businesses; or to target the political opponents of those in power.”
The poll comes after Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act, legislation that allocated $80 billion in additional taxpayer funds to the IRS.
Overall, 33% of those surveyed said the new IRS employees will be used “to audit middle class Americans and small businesses” while 31.6% said they will be used “to audit wealthy Americans and large corporations.”
Another 15.9% said the auditors will be used “to target the political opponents of those in power.”
“We wanted to understand whether or not voters believe that the true purpose of hiring 87,000 new IRS agents is to focus on – the Biden Administration has been claiming – ’large corporate and high-net-worth taxpayers’ or whether something else is afoot,” said Mark Meckler, president of the Convention of States Action. “Democrats believe that this is the case, and that what they’ve been told by their leaders is accurate. Independents and Republicans strongly believe the country is being lied to, and that this new IRS is going to target either everyday Americans, or those who are political opponents of the federal bureaucracy.”
“We have volunteers in every state, and this matches what we are hearing from the grassroots,” Meckler added.
Another recent poll found that most Americans don’t expect the Inflation Reduction Act to actually reduce inflation.
As The Center Square previously reported, a Morning Consult/Politico poll released earlier this month found that only 24% of those surveyed think the bill will actually reduce inflation while 34% said it will make inflation worse.
Update: Alaska Oil and Gas Association has changed the timeframe for the congressional candidate forum to end at 3:45 pm on Wednesday in order to avoid the awkward timeframe for candidates.
A candidate forum for Alaska’s congressional election is one of the highlights of the Alaska Oil and Gas Association’s conference on Wednesday, Aug. 31. From 3-4:30 pm three candidates on the General Election ballot will answer questions before the energy industry leaders at the Dena’ina Center, at a conference that is an annual event.
But during that conference, the Division of Elections has announced it will be tabulating the ballot choices for the final winner in the special election to temporarily replace Congressman Don Young, who died March 18.
The process of counting the second Begich votes should not take long once the computer is set to calculate the second round of voter choices.
That means that Mary Peltola, the Democrat, and Sarah Palin, the Republican, will find out if the voters for Republican Nick Begich have made one of them a winner of the ranked choice voting. With the chippy relationship between Palin and Begich, it’s possible that some of his voters may have declined to rank Palin second. They may have ranked no one second, or may have even ranked Peltola, or a random write-in like Donald Duck.
But whomever they ranked should be known within minutes after the Division of Election begins the process at 4 pm on Thursday. And that makes it likely that Peltola and Palin, along with Begich, will be on stage with a microphone in front of them when the announcement is made.
The voters’ decisions in the special general election determined the temporary seat; that person will be sworn in within days and will serve until the end of the regular general election and swearing in of the new class of congressmen in January. The regular election has four people proceeding to the general election ballot in November, including Begich, Libertarian Chris Bye, Sarah Palin, and Mary Peltola.
By LAUREL DUGGAN, THE DAILY CALLER | & MUST READ ALASKA
A mother seeking resources for her formerly transgender child unearthed explicit sexual conversations between adults and minors in online chatrooms hosted by the Trevor Project, a nonprofit organization which focuses on transgender youth and mental health, National Review reported.
The Brooklyn mother, who is identified only as Rachel, discovered the chatroom while seeking resources for detransitioners — people who regret transitioning to the opposite gender — for her son after he socially transitioned as a preteen, according to National Review.
The chatrooms instead included conversations about various fetishes related to animals, fecal matter and bondage, and adults pushing minors to identify as trans and hide their transitions from their parents, the mother’s screenshots reportedly revealed.
The Trevor Project helped the Anchorage Assembly push through an ordinance banning counselors from helping children overcome gender confusion. The website the organization runs was featured in Must Read Alaska’s story on the effort in 2020. Trevor Space, the chat room, features tools to help kids hide their online chat history from their parents.
The Anchorage Assembly contracted with the Trevor Project to provide legal counsel and other services to the liberal majority of the Anchorage Assembly during the contentious 2020 debate over whether local government should curb First Amendment rights of counselors. Must Read Alaska made public records requests for documents relating to the legal advise it was being given by the Trevor Project, but the Assembly has claimed attorney-client privilege, even though there was no legal contract with the D.C. organization.
The history of blocking the First Amendment rights of counselors is in stark contrast with the counseling the group is giving gender-confused children on the same topic it’s prohibiting counselors from discussing in Anchorage.
National Review reports that one youth wrote in the chat room: “I still feel more masc and more fem on days, but it doesn’t matter what I’m feeling I will always prefer to be a girl. Does that make me trans or am I still genderfluid? Help I don’t know.”
An adult in the chat room answered the question: “If I had to guess based on your post, I’d say it sounds pretty trans.”
Users discussed explicit sexual topics in the chatrooms, such as one conversation about “the weirdest sexual thing you know” in which people described numerous fetishes including drinking bodily fluids, according to National Review, in its story behind a subscription paywall.
“So I woke up this morning with a huge urge to masturbate, even though I knew I couldn’t, and it would hurt me if I did, I went and did it anyway,” one user who was listed as an adult male wrote, according to NR. “And it felt awful, the sensations I felt, the kind of orgasm I had, it was all male, and it just completely shattered my womanhood and served as a cruel reminder of the female sensations I can’t hope to feel because of the male body I was born in.”
Another adult described pursuing nullification surgery, in which external genitals are removed in order to help a patient appear “nonbinary.”
The Trevor Project advertises itself as a youth mental health organization, but it is also a vocalopponent of laws limiting children’s access to cross-sex medical interventions and has published research promoting these interventions for youths by suggesting they can reduce mental health risks associated with being transgender.
An Anchorage grand jury has indicted 35-year-old Talon Westlake for murder in the first degree, murder in the second degree, manslaughter and tampering with evidence, all involving the beating death of his father, former lawmaker Dean Westlake. The homicide occurred on Aug. 20, at a Rovenna Street home owned by Dean Westlake in Anchorage.
Talon Westlake faces a sentence of up to 99 years if convicted at trial. He is currently in the custody of the Department of Corrections, with bail set at $25,000 cash performance bond, $25,000 cash appearance bond, house arrest on an electronic monitoring device, and the court must approve a third-party custodian to monitor him before he can be released.
