Andrew Gray, the cofounder of a rage-driven political group called Anchorage Action, made a demand to Mayor Dave Bronson on Tuesday night during the Anchorage Assembly meeting. He presented a petition with over 1,200 names on it from people who he said want to see Judy Eledge fired as the deputy librarian. Some who have signed the petition are library workers, others are patrons. Some appear to be from out of state.
Gray said, without presenting proof, that Eledge had removed books with gay themes from the library stacks. He said she reminds him of his mother, and his mother should not be in charge of a library.
Assemblywoman Jamie Allard attempted to stop the attack on Eledge’s character or the impugning of her, but Assembly Chairwoman Suzanne LaFrance allowed the attack to continue for the man’s full three minutes.
Eledge is deputy librarian, a position she was appointed by the mayor after she withdrew her name from consideration to be the head librarian for Anchorage.
Later in the meeting, Mayor Bronson spoke and said that the personal attack on an employee of the city was inappropriate.
“She is an employee of mine and you said that was allowed because of free speech,” Bronson said, speaking to Chairwoman LaFrance. “If that is a change in the rules of decorum here tonight going forward … you let that go for nearly two minutes. Finally, Jamie Allard had to step in and interrupt that process … And just I need you to know here that Judy’s been doing an exceptional job for eight months under very trying conditions. She’s a 75-year-old woman and she has got a lot of employees who actively work against her. We don’t know if that’s even legal what they are doing. I appreciate Judy’s service more than you can imagine … She is a dedicated employee, she is doing a great job and she continues to have my undying and unquestioned support. So to the request made to the petition, based on the way it was delivered by Mr. Gray, I won’t even dignify that by even reading it, my staff will. And just so you know, when she received that treatment you need to understand the perspective I have…If someone stood up at the podium and attacked your clerk that way would you allow it continue? And we know over the last two years you wouldn’t have.”
Bronson asked for public apology from Assembly Chair LaFrance, but she rebuffed his request.
Assemblyman Chris Constant then lectured the mayor and said he should have made a motion to overrule the ruling of the chair at the time the offense took place. LaFrance then prevented the mayor from speaking further on the topic.
The American Conservative Union Foundation (ACUF), host of the Conservative Political Action Conference (known as CPAC), released the 51st edition of its annual Ratings of Congress.
The scorecard, considered the “gold standard” for evaluating political ideology, includes an exhaustive compilation of over 20,000 votes cast last session by all 535 members of Congress across the full spectrum of policy issues.
In the scorecard, Alaska Sen. Dan Sullivan rates 79%, improving 5 points from 2020’s scorecard, while Sen. Lisa Murkowski is a 49% conservative, a drop of 3 points from the 2020 scorecard. The late Congressman Don Young was rated 54% in 2021, an increase of 2 points from 2021.
Sen. Dan Sullivan has been rated for seven years by the organization and has maintained a score in the 79% range. He was judged on 38 votes he took in 2021.
Sen. Dan Sullivan has been fairly consistent in his conservative leanings over the years.
Sen. Dan Sullivan’s strongest issues:
Human Dignity
Government Integrity and Transparency
Regulations
Sen. Dan Sullivan’s weakest issues:
Taxes, Budget and Spending
Sen. Lisa Murkowski, now running for reelection, has been rated by the organization for 19 years. She was judged on the 38 votes she took in 2021. Her lifetime rating by the organization is 55.82%, but she has been steadily dropping over the years and is now trending blue.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski has been steadily voting more blue in the two decades she has been in the Senate.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s strongest issue:
Second Amendment
Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s weakest issues:
Government Integrity and Transparency
Regulations
Labor
Taxes, Budget and Spending
Human Dignity
The late Congressman Don Young, who died March 18, had been part of the scorecard for 49 years, and was judged on the 34 votes he took in 2021. His “lifetime rating” was 72.19% but he had dropped markedly in recent years on the conservative scorecard, with his votes in the blue-purple range.
Congressman Don Young was a steady conservative in the pipeline years, but started voting “bluer” in 2010.
CongressmanDon Young’s strongest issues were:
National Security
Human Dignity
Personal Liberty
2nd Amendment
Property Rights
Congressman Don Young’s weakest issues were:
Government Integrity and Transparency
Law and Judiciary
Welfare and Poverty
Taxes, Budget and Spending
Labor
Award for Conservative Excellence 74 Lawmakers earned the Award for Conservative Excellence Conservative Ratings of 90% or above:
Rep. Jim Jordan (100%) Sen. Rand Paul (100%) Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (100%)* Rep. Lauren Boebert (100%)* Rep. Byron Donalds (100%)* Sen. Mike Lee (97%) Rep. Jim Banks (97%) Sen. Ted Cruz (95%)
Rep. Ronny Jackson (95%) Rep. Ken Buck (95%) Rep. Madison Cawthorn (94%) Rep. Matt Gaetz (92%) Sen. Marsha Blackburn (92%) Sen. Tommy Tuberville (92%) Sen. Rick Scott (90%)
Nine freshmen earned 100% ratings, tying the 2007 Congress as the largest number of freshmen earning perfect scores since the 1994 Gingrich revolution.
Sen. John Kennedy (79%) Sen. Chuck Grassley (77%) Sen. Marco Rubio (77%) Rep. Elise Stefanik (77%)
Rep. Dan Crenshaw (76%) Leader Kevin McCarthy (74%) Sen. Ben Sasse (73%) Rep. Liz Cheney (71%)
Conservative Ratings of 50% – 69%:
Sen. Bill Cassidy (67%) Sen. Lindsey Graham (66%) Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (64%) Leader Mitch McConnell (64%)
Sen. Rob Portman (59%) Sen. Mitt Romney (56%) Rep. Jeff Van Drew (56%) Rep. Anthony Gonzalez (51%)
Conservative Ratings of 20% – 49%:
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (49%) Rep. Adam Kinzinger (42%) Sen. Susan Collins (41%)
Rep. Fred Upton (38%) Sen. Joe Manchin (32%) Sen. Jon Tester (21%)
Conservative Ratings of 10% – 19%:
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (16%) Sen. Mark Kelly (13%) Rep. Jason Crow (11%) Rep. Bennie Thompson (10%)
Rep. Pete Aguilar (10%) Leader. Steny Hoyer (10%) Rep. Val Demings (10%) Rep. Sharice Davids (10%)
Conservative Ratings of 5% – 9%:
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (8%) Sen. Raphael Warnock (8%) Rep. Eric Swalwell (8%) Whip. Jim Clyburn (8%) Rep. Mike Thompson (8%)
Sen. Jon Ossoff (5%) Sen. Michael Bennet (5%) Sen. Dianne Feinstein (5%) Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (5%) Rep. Connor Lamb (5%)
The Coalition of the Radical Left 92 Lawmakers placed in the Coalition of the Radical Left Conservative Ratings of 0% – 4%:
Leader Chuck Schumer (3%) Rep. Karen Bass (3%) Sen. Cory Booker (3%) Rep. Katie Porter (3%) Rep. Jamie Raskin (3%) Rep. Adam Schiff (3%) Sen. Bernie Sanders (3%) Rep. Ted Lieu (3%)
Rep. Maxine Waters (0%) Rep. Mark Pocan (0%) Sen. Elizabeth Warren (0%) Rep. Ayanna Pressley (0%) Rep. Rashida Tlaib (0%) Rep. Ilhan Omar (0%) Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (0%) View the other “Radical Left” Here
The ratings have been incorporated into CPAC’s new Lawmaker Comparison Tool, which runs head-to-head comparisons on lawmakers’ strongest and weakest policy areas. The system has been deployed to help direct support to the most conservative candidates in the upcoming primary and general elections.
To produce this year’s scorecard, the ACUF’s Center for Legislative Accountability analyzed every vote taken last session, and selected a wide-array of issues relating to fiscal, tax, regulatory, education, defense, environment, Second Amendment rights, election security, life, and government integrity. All U.S. lawmakers at the federal and state levels are scored on a 100-point scale.
ACUF is the first and only organization in America to annually publish individual ratings for all 8,000 federal and state lawmakers in America. ACUF’s Center for Legislative Accountability is also home to the nation’s most comprehensive conservative policy database containing over 17,500 detailed bill analyses which span 50 years of Congress and all 50 state legislatures.
The list of co-hosts is long for a fundraiser for Kelly Tshibaka for U.S. Senate on Thursday evening The location is at the Bell’s Nursery Espresso Bar at 13700 Specking Road in South Anchorage. In fact, so long that the organizers had to shrink the print on the invitation.
Bell’s is a destination nursery that also grows acres of greenhouse tomatoes and cucumbers that are found in local stores. It’s a favorite place for people to shop for Mothers Day and wedding gifts. But the nursery will be closed to sales for the campaign event that is from 6-8 pm in the nursery’s espresso bar for the Republican candidate who is challenging Sen. Lisa Murkowski.
Wine served that evening will be from the Bell’s Nursery own 1.5-acre covered vineyard on DeArmoun Rd.
Tshibaka has been campaigning for over a year, since announcing the last week of March, 2021. She won an endorsement from Donald Trump nearly a year ago, and an endorsement from the Alaska Republican Party, and has been appearing all over the state to take her case for change to the people of Alaska.
Campaigning is in full swing in Alaska for the lone congressional seat that is vacant. Nick Begich, one of the leaders in the race, according to recent polling, is having a spaghetti feed fundraiser at Kriner’s Diner on Tuesday, April 26, at 2409 C Street.
Andy Kriner, owner of Kriner’s Diner, is the host.
All contributions are welcome, the campaign said, including a “penne” for your thoughts.
Nick Begich is the Republican Begich who filed for office in October to replace Don Young, who passed away in March. He is born in Alaska and raised by Republican grandparents. In 2020 he was co-chair of the Don Young campaign for Congress, and told the congressman then that he would run in the next cycle.
Ballots will be in the mail tomorrow, April 27, for the special primary election for the temporary placeholder for Alaska’s congressional representative. The Division of Elections says it may take a few days for voters to receive them.
Alaska is conducting a special election to fill out the remaining term of the late Congressman Don Young. Since March 18, and likely until early September, Alaska is without representation in the U.S. House of Representatives.
The special election primary was made an all-mail election because the timing of the special election, which is required by law, is so tight, with the regular election for the same seat (and others) starting in August.
The primary for the special election will have 48 names on the ballot that will be sent to all 586,318 registered voters in Alaska. Ballots must be returned or postmarked by June 11 to be counted. That means voters will have about 40-45 days to vote their ballots and get them back to the division. The deadline to register to vote in the special primary election is May 12. If you’re already registered to vote, the division will be mailing the ballot at the address it has on file.
According to law, the special primary election for the congressional seat must be held on a date that is “no less than 60, nor more than 90” days from the vacancy of the seat, which was March 18. With Ballot Measure 2, the special primary is now a jungle primary, where the top four candidates — who could be from any party — advance to the special general. Because of other deadlines, such as the requirement to send military and overseas voters ballots 45 days in advance of the election, the Division of Elections needed to hold the election between June 11 and June 16, and chose June 11 as the date.
In August, the four who advance from the special primary election will appear on the main regular primary election ballot, where voters will face a separate section with candidates for the two-year seat. The candidates for the two-year seat may be different from the candidates in the section for the placeholder seat.
The special general election will be done via ranked choice voting on that ballot, while the regular primary, conducted at the same time, will be “vote for one” method. This mess of confusion has been brought to voters by Outside dark money that tricked them into believing Ballot Measure 2 was a good idea.
Whoever emerges from the special general election, which won’t be known until September, will serve out the congressman’s term until the swearing in of the new congressional representative in January.
On Wednesday, the Division of Elections will announce where absentee voting stations will be located, and will begin hiring bilingual absentee voting officials and outreach workers. There will be no polling stations on June 11, the final day.
The Biden administration is taking millions of acres off the table for development in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.
The decision to lock up NPRA was made by the principal deputy assistant secretary, Laura Daniel-Davis, in the Interior’s Land and Minerals Management section. Daniel-Davis was chief of staff to Interior Secretaries Sally Jewell and Ken Salazar in the Obama administration, and during the Trump administration she went to work for the National Wildlife Federation, returning to federal service once Democrats were back in control of the Department of Interior.
Her action reverses a land use plan put in place during the Donald Trump administration. In addition, it adds massive new levels of regulation on the oil and gas industry in Alaska to protect threatened and endangered species on Alaska’s North Slope.
The NPRA is a 23,599,999-acre petroleum-rich area that surrounds the city of Utqiagvik (Barrow), and other Inupiat villages that are on its perimeter.
The plan to shut down Alaska’s resource economy came immediately after Interior Sec. Deb Haaland had left Alaska; she had spent three days in the state touring King Cove and meeting with Alaska Natives who support the Biden-Haaland agenda to keep oil in the ground.
U.S. Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan criticized the decision.
“This shortsighted decision closes millions of acres to responsible energy development, deliberately upending a careful balance in the management of the reserve and more broadly across Alaska lands,” Alaska’s delegation said in a statement. “The Biden administration’s move abandons the 2020 version of the IAP, which was developed in partnership with the North Slope Borough and in consultation with North Slope Tribes and Alaska Native Corporations. It comes mere weeks after President Biden pledged to ‘work like the devil to bring gas prices down.'”
“This was the wrong decision when it was announced in January, and it is only worse today. We need more domestic resource development, and areas explicitly designated for that purpose should be at the top of the list, not on the chopping block. It is simply shocking that the Biden administration can look at the world, and decide that Alaska is where ‘keep it in the ground’ should apply,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski said. “This decision also flies in the face of many of the Alaska Natives who live on the North Slope, who participated in the 2020 plan update and who supported its finalization. The administration is choosing to ignore them, while giving outside environmental groups everything they want.””
“The Bureau of Land Management has 25 million acres of land nationwide available for oil development, 23 million of which are in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska,” said Sen. Dan Sullivan. “I have long urged the President to cut the gimmicks and tap this true ‘strategic petroleum reserve,’ which is teeming with reserves ready to alleviate some of our nation’s dire energy needs. But yesterday, President Biden doubled down on his failed policies, removing half of this federally-established oil and gas reserve from consideration and—even more reckless—specifically removing areas with the greatest potential for actual production. This decision will prolong the pain for hard-working Americans and tighten Vladimir Putin’s grip over our allies. Needless to say, President Biden is not doing everything in his power to control prices at the pump or relieve average Americans’ pain. We now know, record inflation, unprecedented gas prices, and a despot wielding vast sums of the world’s petroleum supply will not deter Joe Biden in his relentless war on American energy production.”
BLM manages the NPR-A under the Naval Petroleum Reserves Production Act and other federal laws. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates the 23-million-acre region on the western North Slope – roughly the size of the state of Indiana – contains 8.7 billion barrels of undiscovered, technically recoverable oil.
Two bills set for expedited action in the House today were sponsored by the late Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska), whose legislative agenda is still moving even four weeks after he laid in state.
One bill, H.R. 441, is called the Don Young Alaska Native Health Care Land Transfers Act of 2022, as amended. It will have the federal government convey 11 acres of land in Tanana to the Tanana Tribal Council. The site is a former Indian Health Service hospital, which was demolished in 2006 by the tribal council under a contract with the federal government.
The tribe has worked on removing the building rubble and has a written understanding that the Indian Health Service will transfer the entire campus to the tribal council under a quitclaim deed. The tribe hopes to build a modern healthcare facility on the site. More about the history of the hospital and its cultural significance is at this link.
The other bill,H.R. 6651, would require the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to launch a research task force in conjunction with other agencies to study Pacific salmon. Young introduced the bill on Feb. 8.
Young died March 18 en route to Alaska at the age of 88. His seat is now the focus of a special election to fill it temporarily until January, and a regular election to choose a congressional representative for 2023-2024.
A special election to fill the newly created 12th seat on the Anchorage Assembly takes place over the next several weeks. It’s a mail-in only election for those in the district, which is a specially created liberal district.
The 12th seat is an extra representative for the downtown area of Anchorage, now only represented by Assemblyman Chris Constant. A second seat was approved by voters in 2020 and will make it much more difficult for conservatives to reassert control over city government. In the map above, District 1 in red is the area of town that will get another member on the Assembly.
Here are the key deadlines for the election:
May 10: Candidate filing deadline.
May 22: Last day to register to vote in this election.
May 31: Ballot packages mailed to qualified voters.
June 21: Special Election Day. All ballot envelopes must be postmarked by this day or returned to a drop box or Anchorage vote center by 8 pm.
City Hall Vote Center hours: Weekdays, June 13 – 20, 9 am – 6 pm. Saturday, June 18, 10 am – 4 pm. Sunday, June 19, noon – 5 pm. Election Day, June 21, 7 am – 8 pm
Five Secure Ballot Drop Box locations: City Hall Parking Lot, Clark Middle School, Election Center, Fairview Community Recreation Center, and West High School.
From the Alaska Democratic Party’s official newsletter, the official policy of Democrats in Alaska is to oppose the King Cove Road because Republicans favor it, and Republicans only favor it only for the purpose of using it as a model for opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge’s coastal plain for oil development. We quote the newsletter:
“The King Cove Road which would run through the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge has been a flashpoint between conservatives and progressives with the unlikely small village of King Cove caught in the middle of the fight. The battle for the road is to create easier access for this small isolated community to a better airport in case of medical emergencies, conservatives argue.
“You would not be wrong to be cynical about this. Why should conservatives suddenly care about a Native village in the remotest part of the state? And why should they suddenly care about accessibility to health care, for that matter? Does it sound out of character, perhaps? Wouldn’t you expect to hear something like, “They should just move to Anchorage?” or “They just want free stuff!” or “Living there is a choice.”
“You’re about to have an aha moment.
“…the move will surely serve as a model for future challenges to federal wilderness protection, America’s highest standard of public land conservation. The vast majority of Izembek has been designated as a wilderness area for decades.”
“There’s a reason they don’t refer to it as the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge road, just like they don’t call it the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Nobody wants to mess up a refuge, but “King Cove Road” and “ANWR” sound perfectly construction-worthy.
“This is not to say that the people of King Cove don’t have a genuine interest in being able to more easily access medical care, but let’s not go thinking that empathy and healthcare access for a small Native community is the real motivator for Republicans here. It’s alllll about resource extraction and creating precedent for blasting through any protected wilderness area they want.”
The coastal plain of ANWR, called Section 1002, has long been designated for oil and gas development in 1.5 million acres of the over 19.6 million acres of ANWR. It is the only area that is subject to energy development and has an estimated 4.3 to 11.8 billion barrels of recoverable oil.
