On Tuesday, the Anchorage Assembly majority rejected a combat veteran who is a 25-year union member and former local union board president. Todd Peplow had been nominated by Mayor Dave Bronson to the Anchorage Employee Relations Board.
Peplow had supported Bronson for mayor in 2021, while the AFL-CIO has supported Forrest Dunbar. In 2020, Dunbar and the AFL-CIO lost that election, and on Tuesday night they exacted their event. Dunbar spoke against Peplow. So did the president of the AFL-CIO.
Peplow told the Assembly that “This is 100 percent politics,” retribution for his support for Bronson.
“Todd Peplow is a good man who has spent his life defending our country, and advancing the rights of workers and union members. His character and name were drug through the mud for purely political reasons. Actions like those taken last night do nothing but discourage the public from participating in their government, and demonstrates the unwillingness of the Assembly majority to work with my Administration on simple issues like filling volunteer boards and commissions,” Mayor Bronson said.
Bronson said that it’s getting increasingly difficult to find people to serve on boards and commissions because of the viciousness of the Anchorage Assembly confirmation process. The Assembly is controlled by extremist progressives, while Bronson is a conservative.
Two reporters who cover Alaska legislative news are leaving their news organizations to start a news bureau for an ideologically driven, progressive news organization backed by some of the biggest names in dark money in politics, the Arabella Advisors and the Hopewell Fund.
The journalists, Andrew Kitchenman of KTOO and James Brooks of the Anchorage Daily News, are launching a States Newsroom bureau.
States Newsroom was started by journalist-activists in North Carolina for whom the mainstream media is not progressive enough. Using money from groups such as the Hopewell Fund, which is a spinoff of the Arabella Advisors, States Newsroom is one of many avenues that progressives have for controlling the information and news narrative. States Newsroom also has funding from a donor-advised fund whose backers are secret, through Fidelity Charitable, where donors receive tax deductions for these and other political activities.
Influence Watch, a website that discerns the motives for various power brokers, describes States Newsroom thus: “States Newsroom (formerly the Newsroom Network) consists of a number of left-of-center media outlets that cover state-level politics and policy and a Washington, D.C. bureau that claims to focus on congressional delegations and key Supreme Court decisions that specifically affect the states.
“Before 2019, the Newsroom Network was a fiscally sponsored project of the Hopewell Fund, a left-of-center 501(c)(3) funding and fiscal sponsorship nonprofit managed by the Washington, D.C.-based consultancy firm Arabella Advisors, which manages multiple high-dollar left-leaning philanthropic organizations. In 2019, States Newsroom re-branded and received independent nonprofit status. A past job posting by States Newsroom referred to the organization as a ‘progressive political journalism startup.’”
The States Newsroom organization created a number of its own websites that it activated during the 2020 national election cycle, which critics say were intended to shape public opinion against President Trump. Those sites include:
Arizona Mirror
Colorado Newsline
Florida Phoenix
Georgia Recorder
Idaho Capital Sun
Iowa Capital Dispatch
Kansas Reflector
Louisiana Illuminator
Capital Research Center reported that Hopewell’s larger “sister” group, New Venture Fund operates from the same office as Hopewell and funds many of the same projects. That fund has received at least $3.9 million in grants from George Soros’ Foundation to Promote Open Society.
The New Venture Fund, which is Soros-backed, is one of the top Arabella Advisors nonprofits. So is the Sixteen Thirty Fund. That fund poured $150,000 into support for progressive candidates in Alaska in the 2020 election cycle, and another $35,000 to get Forrest Dunbar elected mayor of Anchorage.
According to the research by CRC, that is how Arabella operates. It shuffles large sums of money among these subsidiary nonprofits, which grant the funds out to further the cause. Hopewell’s largest grant in 2019 was $17.4 million, the year that States Newsroom was incubated as its own 501(c)(3).
“Hopewell itself is funded by numerous left-wing mega-donors, including the Tides Foundation, ‘dark money’ Proteus Fund, and Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation—all major donors to the Left’s top political causes. The idea that a product of this partisan, ideologically driven ‘dark money’ network is an unbiased and trustworthy news source is ridiculous,” CRC reported.
“Arabella specializes in taking huge donations from ultra-wealthy liberal donors like George Soros and the Ford Foundation to create ‘pop-up’ groups like States Newsroom—websites meant to fool consumers into believing they are standalone organizations,” CRC reported. In fact, the groups that pay for the reporting coming out of States Newsroom are hardcore progressive engines.
States Newsroom doesn’t disclose its funding, because they are laundered through the various donor-advised funds and charities. Their news product is available free for all to use, with attribution, which means this reporting from the new Alaska bureau will add to the already hyper-liberal news ecosystem in Alaska.
“Journalism is a powerful force for social change, uniquely suited to challenging systemic inequality and racism. Our goal is to build an organization that fulfills that mission,” the organization states on its website.
Must Read Alaska’s mission is to keep the mainstream media on it toes.
The Alaska Republican Party governing rules were designed to be responsive to a regular primary system, one that allows Republicans or non-aligned voters to choose the Republican ballot, and doesn’t allow Democrats to cross over and distort a Republican outcome.
With Ballot Measure 2 in effect for the first time, voters from any party or no party at all can vote for the Republicans, robbing the party of being able to self-determine its nominees to the general election. All of Alaska voters get to now say who the Republican nominees are.
That means the party’s pre-primary endorsements for Kelly Tshibaka for U.S. Senate and Mike Dunleavy for governor essentially expire Aug. 16, and Republican voters won’t determine who on their team goes to the November ballot.
Pre-primary endorsements have been important to the party because the rules prohibit party subdivisions from spending campaign time and treasure on those who didn’t get the endorsement of the State Central Committee. But there are no party rules for post-primary endorsements because the party hasn’t adapted to the new reality. In that new reality, more than one Republican can proceed to the general election.
Under the new voting scheme created by Ballot Measure 2, it’s likely that Sen. Lisa Murkowski and Tshibaka, both Republicans, will be among the final four to proceed to the November Ranked Choice Voting method created by Ballot Measure 2 in 2020.
Three Republican districts have requested the party change its rules in Article 1, Section 4 to allow the party State Central Committee to do a post-primary endorsement of candidates, and take back some portion of authority to the party that was robbed from it by Ballot Measure 2.
The matter went from the districts to the State Central Committee, then the party’s Rules Committee, and finally to the State Executive Committee, which tabled the matter until the party’s convention, April 21-23 in Fairbanks.
At that convention, it’s normal for the party’s rules to be adjusted. The adjusted rules would could put sideboards on who can call themselves a Republican on the General Election ballot. If so, that could trigger a lawsuit between the party and Murkowski, and the party would have to defend its right to say who is an actual member of the party, in terms of being the actual Republican nominee.
The State Central Committee may have an intense debate over this proposed rule change later this month, which would be aimed at preventing Sen. Murkowski from being able to fly under the Republican banner. In 2021, the party sanctioned her, censured her, and asked her to actually leave the party. The State Central Committee’s vote against Murkowski, due to her actions against President Donald Trump, did not have an effect; she remains a registered Republican today and, as the incumbent, is running hard to beat Tshibaka, who is endorsed by the Republican Party.
The Biden Administration announced today that the mask mandate for transportation has been extended for 15 more days. It was set to expire April 18, after a month-long extension in March, the third extension since the order went into effect, as ordered by the Biden Administration for travel on planes, buses, trains, and taxis in January of 2021.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is blaming a sub-variant of the omicron variant of Covid-19.
“Since early April, there have been increases in the 7-day moving average of cases in the U.S. In order to assess the potential impact the rise of cases has on severe disease, including hospitalizations and deaths, and health care system capacity, the CDC Order will remain in place at this time,” the CDC said on Wednesday.
The CDC has ordered the mandate to remain through May 3.
Airlines have asked the administration to end the mask mandate, which has caused hard feelings between travelers and the airlines. Employees who are forced to enforce the mandate have suffered verbal abuse and resistance from passengers in the 15 months since the federal mandate started.
On the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, election prognosticators said that former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is not a shoo-in for winning this year’s election for Alaska’s lone congressional seat, open since Rep. Don Young died on March 18.
“It’s been nearly 14 years since Sarah Palin rocketed to one of the best-known and most polarizing politicians in the country as John McCain’s running mate in the 2008 presidential election,” said Galen Druke, FiveThirtyEight’s podcast producer and reporter.
Since then, Palin has hinted at comebacks, but her decision to run in this year’s U.S. House election is her first return to electoral politics.
The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast analysts explain why Palin may not be a shoo-in for the seat left behind when Rep. Don Young died in March. For one thing, she quit the job as governor when the going got tough.
The analysts cited top-line finding from an Alaska Survey Research poll from last October, which tested Palin’s chances against Sen. Lisa Murkowski. The survey found that just 31 percent of Alaskans have a favorable opinion of Palin. That’s the same approximate rating found by the Must Read Alaska poll, conducted by by the national pollster Remington Research Grouplast week:
“Among broader electorate, she might have issues. She’s not terribly popular,” said Sarah Frostenson, FiveThirtyEight’s politics editor. With the new election system, including an open primary and ranked choice voting general election, “she may not be able to build the coalition she needs to win statewide.”
In the primary, all candidates run together, then appear on the general election ballot in ranked choice voting.
If Palin is the lone republican against a democrat, she’ll win, but if up against a more moderate republican, the electorate could team up against her. But with such a fast turnaround on the special election, Palin has the advantage at least at the beginning, because some of the other candidates don’t have well-known names.
The group acknowledged Alaska’s election system is now very confusing under Ballot Measure 2, and that there are other Republicans in the race and the 2020 Democratic nominee Al Gross.
Nate Silver, who runs the FiveThirtyEight, posted an explanation of Palin’s challengesin this video:
FiveThirtyEight is a website that focuses on opinion poll analysis, politics, economics, and sports blogging.
File this one under “Parents Who Care Made A Difference.”
A liability waiver on a form that Alaska Association of Basketball Coaches had parents sign was practically an invitation for students to be abused, some parents say. Parents were being asked to sign away their rights to hold responsible anyone involved in the organization for sexual misconduct or abuse of their children.
The form outlined the abuse that parents could not hold the organization responsible for:
“Sexual Misconduct is defined as: ‘any act, including, but not limited to, any verbal, nonverbal, written or electronic communication or physical activity, directed toward or with a child regardless of the age of the child or student that is designated to establish a remanding or sexual relatioship with the child or student. Such acts include, but are not limited to: (1 sexual or romantic invitation; (2) dating or soliciting dates; (3) engaging in sexualized or romantic dialogue; (4) making sexually suggestive comments; (self-disclosure or physical exposure of a sexualized or romantic erotic natures; or (6) any sexual, indecent, romantic or erotic contact with the child or student.”
It wasn’t even in the fine print — the conduct was outlined directly above where parents or guardians were required to sign for their student to take part in the All-Star Games. And it seemed to absolve everyone of all responsibility.
The waiver form caught the attention of some parents, who thought it was out of line. They contacted the AABC organization, created a petition, and then helped the coaches’ group create a form that takes an entirely different — and more stern — approach to the topic sexual abuse and misconduct:
The new form that parents and the AABC organization crafted cooperatively.
Along with the waiver for accidents and needed medical attention that could occur during the all-star game, the new form says: “Additionally, the Alaska Association of Basketball Coaches takes sexual misconduct and abuse seriously. We have a responsibility to ensure the safety and wellbeing of all participants/helpers. We believe AABC is a sub-classification of the education profession, and as such follow professional standards and practices including mandatory reporting.”
“Sexual misconduct, as defined below will not be tolerated, encouraged, or instigate day the staff or faculty of AABC. Any known, rumored, reported, or witnessed incidents of sexual misconduct will be investigated by the Directors and reported to proper legal authorities. Parents or legal guardians will also be immediately notified,” the form now says. The definitions are the same as the original form.
The Alaska Association of Basketball Coaches has since apologized for the original form, agreeing that it was poorly conceived:
“The Alaska Association of Basketball Coaches regrettably put together a general liability waiver form that was poorly worded. For this, we sincerely apologize. A concerned parent brought this to our attention. In consultation with an attorney, we have edited the form so that the language is more appropriate and understandable. You will find the new form attached. Additionally, in order to host the Senior All-Star game, our liability insurance required us to have a sexual misconduct portion in our release form.T o be clear, our association is run by volunteer coaches/teachers who care deeply for the athletes across the state. Our intent has always been to positively impact the basketball community and protect student-athletes, volunteers, coaches, and board members. Over the past 13 years, we have helped hundreds of student-athletes across the state secure college scholarships. During those 13 years we have never had an incident of any kind. Perception is reality and we understand how some could have perceived this waiver form. Again, we are taking steps to rectify this misunderstanding. We wish to move forward and put the focus back on the student-athlete who deserve this recognition and this moment. We look forward to an incredible All Star game and once again helping student-athletes in the state realize their dreams of playing at the collegiate level,” wrote David Porter, AABC president.
Cate Morris, a parent who took action on the original liability waiver, wrote on Facebook: “I want to say thank you for everyone who called, emailed and petitioned the AABC to rewrite their permission slip/waiver for their All star basketball tournament. I am happy to report that they accepted my amended permission slip and have made it the new slip for their organization. Much thanks to Keenan Morris, for creating the petition and the many friends and community members who made calls and sent emails!! This is a win for parents, students and the AABC!”
Morris was the only parent who didn’t sign the waiver for her student athlete. She took the original waiver, scratched out the things she didn’t agree with, and returned to the organization her edited form, which the group rejected. She then called and spoke to an officer of the organization, “who was very kind,” and explained she could not sign that particular waiver. The group had been using the form for over six years, without a complaint, the woman said.
“As we talked it through I said, I’m not trying to assign any intent to your organization, I don’t think you mean to do any harm,” Morris said. The group emailed to her a different form that coaches sign, which is more clear about the boundaries. Coaches are required to sign a pledge that outlines their own behavior requirements and legal responsibility.
Originally the group told Morris that all the other parents had signed the form, and since she would not sign it, her daughter could not play. That’s when Morris decided to check with parents on Facebook, asking people if they would sign such a waiver. It caught fire on Facebook, and through advocacy on social media, the organization changed direction. They adopted the new permission slip that Morris wrote for them.
The 2022 senior all-star game is scheduled for Grace Christian School on Saturday, at 2 pm, 3:45 pm, 6 pm, and 7:45 pm.
It’s not just your imagination: The cost of living has gone up under President Joe Biden at a rate unmatched in two generations. Overall, the consumer price index, or CPI, is up 8.5 percent over last year, including:
Gas: +48%
Electricity: +11.1%
Energy, Generally: 32%
Proteins – Meat, Poultry, Fish: +13.8%
Milk: +13.3%
Eggs: +11.2%
Bread: +7.1%
Coffee: +11.2%
Used Cars: +35.3%
Car and Truck Rentals: +23.4%
Airline Fares: +23.6%
Shelter: +5%
The shelter index rose 5% over the last 12 months, the largest 12-month increase since May of 1991. The index for household furnishings and operations increased 10.1% over the past year, its largest 12-month increase since the period ending July of 1975. The CPI index is found at this link.
The federal mask mandate for travel has been extended three times since President Joe Biden made his ruling in January of 2021. It is now poised to expire on April 18. But will the White House extend it into the summer?
“The American people have seen through the false logic that COVID-19 only exists on airplanes and public transportation. They see it every day when they go to a grocery store, restaurant, shopping mall, or movie theater with no masks in sight, leading them to demand unneeded mandates come to an end. In response to this outcry, 21 states have filed suit to put an end to this egregious transportation mask mandate overreach,” wrote a group of U.S. senators and congressional representatives to the president last week.
“In addition, you’ve received letters from various transportation stakeholders urging you to put pandemic-related travel restrictions behind us. Specifically, the White House received letters from the U.S. Travel Association, Airlines for America, and the American Bus Association, all of whom are imploring your Administration to either repeal the transportation mask mandate immediately or let it expire.”
The April 8 letter was signed by Republican Reps. Sam Graves (Mo.), ranking member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee; Garret Graves (La.), ranking member on the Aviation Subcommittee; Republican Sens. Roger Wicker (Miss.), ranking member of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee; and Ted Cruz (Texas), ranking member of the Aviation Subcommittee.
While most of the country has dropped mask mandates in workplaces and schools, the Biden rule says nose and mouth coverings must be worn in airports, planes, bus stations, buses, railroad stations, and trains.
Complicating the decision this week is that many Democrats in the ruling class in the nation’s capital have contracted Covid, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Seventy-two high-ranking political leaders who attended the Gridiron Dinner (an annual event for the political elite held at an exclusive, invitation-only journalism dining club called the Gridiron Club) subsequently came down with the virus, including Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, and . It was the first Gridiron Dinner since 2019, and all guests were required to show proof of vaccination.
In March, the White House official and TSA said that during the month extension, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would work with agencies to “help inform a revised policy framework for when, and under what circumstances, masks should be required in the public transportation corridor. This revised framework will be based on the COVID-19 community levels, risk of new variants, national data, and the latest science. We will communicate any updates publicly if and/or when they change.”
On the NBC Today Show on Monday, White House Covid-19 Coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha said the mandate for masking travelers “is absolutely on the table.”
As the Biden Administration evaluates its options, attorneys general from 21 Republican-led states, including Alaska, sued the federal government over the travel mask mandate, arguing the rule is federal overreach. CEOs of major airlines including Alaska Airlines wrote to the Biden Administration that the mask requirements are out of step with “the realities of the current epidemiological environment.”
The masking rule has led to an outbreak in defiant behavior on commercial air carriers that has resulted in airlines developing no-fly policies for those who won’t comply, and to asked the Biden Administration to create a nationwide “no fly list” for passengers who are identified by the airlines as being overly unruly, or for those who attack flight attendants, gate agents, and fellow travelers. Mask mandates are the origin of an estimated three-quarters of bad behavior by travelers, the airlines told the Administration.
The sticking point is that defining unruly behavior can be subjective and violate travelers’ constitutional rights.
Of 5,981 such reports to the Federal Aviation Administration last year, 72% were related to masks. The agency started investigations of 1,105 of those cases, which was 300 percent more than any year since the FAA began collecting data in 1995.
The FAA took enforcement action in 390 cases since the mask mandate went into effect in January of 2021. Prior to that, several airlines already had a mask mandate in effect for travel on their carriers.
On Monday, 37 Alaska Airlines flights were canceled, about 4 percent of the airline’s scheduled flights. Some 183 flights had delays, about 24 percent of all Alaska Airlines flights. 13 flights have already been canceled for Tuesday. Many of the canceled flights are for those to or from the airline’s main hub, SeaTac. Sixteen flights from SeaTac and 17 flights to SeaTac were canceled Monday, although not all of them were Alaska Airlines flights.
The airlines has suffered from cancellations since April 1. More cancellations are expected Tuesday and Wednesday, as a shortage of pilots continues to plague the company. The airlines has begin to trim its spring schedule, eliminating 2 percent of its flights. Some of those eliminated flights are showing up as cancellations.
Alaska Airlines and the union that represents its pilots have been stalled for three years and is now the subject of federal mediation.
