Republican gubernatorial candidate Charlie Pierce will introduce his running mate on Saturday at a meet-and-greet fundraiser at Pizza Paradisos restaurant in Kenai, starting at 5 pm.
Pierce let it slip on the Dan Fagan Show (650 KENI) that he would be making the announcement this weekend. Pierce, who is the mayor of the Kenai Peninsula Borough, joined the race in late January and is running on the slogan, “Results, Not Rhetoric.” Before being elected mayor of Kenai, he was on the Assembly and was a business executive with Enstar, a natural gas company.
The campaign has been mum about who the lieutenant governor candidate will be. In past elections, candidates for governor and lieutenant governor would run separately for the primary, and then join as a ticket for the general election. But with Ranked Choice Voting, governors must pick a lieutenant governor to run with them.
“This will shake the political landscape in Alaska,” a campaign source told Must Read Alaska.
Meanwhile, a Charlie Pierce for Governor sign was spotted in Utqiagvik (Barrow), the furthest north town in America. Could the running mate come from the Arctic? Pierce is not saying.
Utqiagvik business sports a Charlie Pierce for Governor sign.
Pierce, in his second term as Kenai mayor, is challenging incumbent Gov. Mike Dunleavy and Rep. Chris Kurka, and also no-party candidate Bill Walker and Democrat Les Gara. Others are expected to join the race. Dunleavy has not announced his lieutenant governor running mate, while
Much as it did in 2008 when oil prices were high, the House Democrat majority has revealed its plan to pay qualifying Alaskans a one-time “energy relief check” in addition to the annual Permanent Fund dividend, whatever amount the Legislature agrees to pay Alaskans out of the 2023 budget.
“The check will help supplement Alaskans who are hurting from rising fuel costs, record inflation, and recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic,” the House majority said in a statement.
The reality is, this is the other half of the dividend that was due Alaskans in 2021, when the legislative majority only paid half of what was statutorily due.
“Between the negative economic effects of COVID and escalating energy costs, our residents are suffering,” said Speaker Louise Stutes. “With the influx of new revenue, we are in a position to provide an Energy Relief Check to Alaskans and that is exactly what the House Coalition intends to do.”
“The cost of fuel is skyrocketing across the country, but nowhere is that more acutely being felt than in rural Alaska,” said Rep. Neal Foster, the Democrat who co-chairs the Finance Committee. “An Energy Relief Check of $1,300, on top of the Permanent Fund Dividend, is exactly what Alaskans need now.”
“As the Co-Chair of the House Finance Committee, I see the budget impacts that high energy prices are having on Alaskan families,” said Rep. Kelly Merrick, the Republican from Eagle River who has joined the Democrat-led caucus. “With the amount of revenue coming through the state right now, providing an Energy Relief Check is the right thing to do.”
“Fuel prices could very well double by the end of the year,” said Rep. Bryce Edgmon, a Dillingham Democrat who re-registered with no party. “This Energy Relief Check will provide immediate assistance to the Alaskans who are bearing the brunt of these sharply climbing energy costs.”
In 2008, the Legislature approved an Energy Rebate, which was agreed to by then-Gov. Sarah Palin. But that year, they also received their entire Permanent Fund dividend.
Americans are tired of politicians shouting “racism” to stir up emotions and create a scapegoat for their failed policies. It’s a card some politicians play just before elections.
Anchorage is in a politician-manufactured war over race again, just as the April municipal election approaches. If you thought we had moved beyond labeling people and judging them on the color of their skin, think again. If you thought we had agreed as a society to value people simply because they are people, the race racket promoters have news for you.
Recently, Assemblywoman Meg Zaletel accused the Anchorage School District, its principals, vice principals, and safety resource officers, of being racist toward “black and brown” children.
Zaletel wondered out loud if school resource officers target “black and brown” children. She claimed, “ASD has disproportionately disciplined black and brown children, low-income children and children with disabilities for years…” She implied that SROs are the tools these allegedly racist adults use to discriminate against children, funneling them into the school-to-prison pipeline.
These comments are confounding, because Zaletel has voted for funding the SRO and Anchorage Police Department programs; she apparently supports our police officers through these votes.
She is also an outspoken supporter of the current far-left school board members, the very people who have been running the school district for years, choosing its leaders and defining its policies. These are the very same people she now accuses of treating students unequally based on skin color.
So which is it? Are her leftist buddies on the school board directly responsible for addressing the racism she claims is being carried out by the officers? Does she still support the safety resource officers through her funding votes?
It is a mistake to cling to an ideology so fiercely that you are unable to change. As we have seen with the progressive mindset, especially when it comes to accepting new information about Covid-19, they are more interested in dog whistles and emotionally manipulating voters before elections than they are in seeking truth and working together to solve problems.
This problem is not a racial problem. This is a racket that is determined to destroy and deny the importance of the family unit. This problem is a parenting problem. We need to support parents, teach parenting skills, build community where students have mentors and role models, not depend on government institutions to raise our children. And we certainly should not make race a scapegoat for a society that lacks the family values that grow healthy, successful people.
Zaletel says “SROs exist for the comfort of adults, not students.” She implies that nurses and counselors could handle the infractions of students. She asks, “What can they do that a nurse or counselor cannot?”
How about break up gang fights between 20-30 students at West High School? How about apprehend a 21-year-old suspect after he assaulted a female student on school property? How about respond when an elementary student brings a knife and a loaded gun to school?
School resource officers keep students safe. Schools are safer places because of them. They are not racist sharks out to get black and brown kids in trouble. They are there to hold criminals accountable for their actions, and prevent harm from happening to students.
I do not understand how the Assembly’s biggest champion of worthless face masks would mandate masks on our students just for the illusion of safety, but would attack school resource officers who provide actual safety. This is what “woke” thinking looks like.
It’s a simple ask: Quit playing the race card. Look beyond the color of skin and address the real problems. Start with the financial hole that is the bloated, top-heavy Anchorage School District budget that produces some of the worst student scores in the nation. Start with the mental health crisis that two years of abusive Covid policies have created. Start with curriculum that pushes these woke ideologies on students to the detriment of society. Let’s start there.
Jamie del Fierro Allard, who is of Latina heritage, is on the Anchorage Assembly, representing Chugiak-Eagle River.
Assemblyman Felix Rivera on Tuesday introduced a resolution that would have the Anchorage Assembly support certain state bills offered by Sen. Elvi Gray-Jackson that put restrictions on police actions. The package of legislation, Senate Bills 1, 3, 3, 4, 7, and 46, relate to how police perform their duties when they are in the middle of a serious police response. Police would be prohibited from using choke holds, and would be required to use “de-escalation techniques.” They would have to warn someone before shooting them. They would not be able to shoot at a moving vehicle.
The measure introduced at the Anchorage Assembly would give the nod of approval for the variety of measures in these bills, but the resolution didn’t make it far.
Assemblywoman Jamie Allard quickly moved to table it indefinitely. No one seconded her motion, but East Anchorage member Forrest Dunbar nearly simultaneously moved to postpone the vote until April 12, and that received a second from West Anchorage member Austin Quinn-Davidson, who sits beside him on the dais.
Although Allard’s motion was made first, Chair Suzanne LaFrance didn’t recognize it and ask if there was a second, but instead recognized Dunbar’s motion.
It was an effort by the liberal Assembly members to not have to go on the record between now and the April 5 municipal election deadline, when members Dunbar, Meg Zaletel, Kameron Perez-Verdia, and John Weddleton are up for reelection. In the end, the move to postpone passed unanimously, with Allard maintaining that her motion to postpone indefinitely had not been properly recognized.
Democrats in the Alaska House are busy trying to rectify history. While Rep. Geran Tarr has offered a bill to rectify “outdoor equity,” Rep. Zack Fields of Anchorage has offered to rectify the name of the Glenn Highway, because, according to him, it’s named after a war criminal.
HB 352 would have the Alaska Department of Transportation set up a consultation process with tribes to rename the Glenn, likely into an indigenous name offered by the tribes of the area.
The bill itself is simple. It “amends the uncodified law of the State of Alaska to establish a process for consulting Alaska tribes, Alaska Native organizations, and communities along the Glenn Highway to provide input for renaming the Glenn Highway.”
But the reasoning is where it gets complicated. Fields provides documentation from the Anchorage Daily News, The New Yorker Magazine, and his own reasoning that Edwin Glenn tortured Filipino suspects during interrogations while serving in the Philippine-American War.
Fields reports that the Glenn Highway was along a trail used by Dena’ina, Knik and Eklutna tribes for trade and commerce between Cook Inlet and the Copper River Valley. The road itself was built and completed in 1942 to help defend Alaska against invasion by Imperial Japanese forces. Glenn was a judge advocate and captain in the Army who commanded the initial expeditions to chart the route.
Later, Glenn was sent to the Philippines, where he was a warrior in the style of his generation. He was said to have waterboarded the mayor of one town, and ordered another town burned to the ground — both actions not unheard of in wartime.
President Theodore Roosevelt had Glenn returned to San Francisco to face court martial. He was found guilty and relieved of his command for an entire month, and fined all of $50.
“Further, Glen’s conviction as a war criminal should disqualify him on being the namesake for one of Alaska’s longest highways,” Fields said in his explanation for wanting to change the name.
“Alaska has more Native American language speakers than any other state, and over 200 existing languages today. In combination with precedent in state and federal law for tribal consultation, the State should consider consulting with local communities and tribes along the highway to consider a more appropriate name for the Alaskans who live there,” Fields said.
So far, the bill has only Fields as a sponsor and has been referred to the House Transportation Committee, where it was heard on March 1, with invited public testimony from groups and individuals supportive of the change, including Anchorage Daily News columnist David Reamer, who has written about what he sees as a problematic name.
Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski issued the following statement following President Joe Biden’s first State of the Union speech, which was given on Tuesday evening in the U.S. Capitol:
“We just listened to President Biden’s first State of the Union address to Congress. And I believe he started his address appropriately and with the right tone, indicating that the world is watching the devastation in Ukraine, the atrocities that we are seeing delivered by President Putin out of Russia, reminding us all as a nation that we cannot stand by, the United States cannot stand by, the free nations of this world cannot stand by while Russia invades an innocent country, with innocent lives being lost.
“It was a reminder to us again of the strength of the spirit of the Ukrainian people and a reminder that democracy is something to fight for every day, and we will stay committed to that fight and the Ukrainian people and the many around the world are coming together.
“So, I think the emphasis the President placed at the outset was very, very important for us in the United States but for the world to hear as well.
“I wish that there had been a greater emphasis, however, on the role of the greatest sanction of all. I certainly appreciate what has been put in place with financial sanctions, but we see how Putin has used energy as a weapon, as a tool in this effort in Ukraine and clearly with Europe. The President has chosen to not engage, to not engage literally with energy as a means of sanctions. He has made the announcement this evening that additional reserves from the Strategic Petroleum will be released to help alleviate temporarily the pressure that we are seeing on prices.
“But, this is inconsistent and, in my view, almost hypocritical that we would allow Russia to be able to provide this country with oil while we provide dollars to Russia to help them finance this war against Ukraine. This was a missed opportunity of President Biden tonight and one that I hope in the days ahead he sees the light and he recognizes that this is an area that we must look if we wish to really put the directed twist to Putin.
“He attempted to point out those areas of common ground, those areas that we should seek bipartisan unity. And I think he highlighted a few key areas where we have good work to do. There’s good support to addressing the issue of burn pits to help our veterans. He spoke to the issue of mental health and what more needs to be done. He raised the issue, again, of something that I care very much about and that’s violence against women and what more we can be doing when it comes to public safety. So those are areas that I think he was right to point to.
“But it was a bit incongruous when he cited specifically to some measures that have been taken before the Congress and resoundly defeated on a party line basis. And he’s asked us to basically run that play again. That to me doesn’t deliver the kind of unity that we need. That to me is not where we want to be focusing our energies.
“We need to be working together on these areas of common ground. We need to be working together to, again, show the world a unified front when we are engaged in aspects of a very, very difficult situation in Europe. We need to be behind our military, behind our veterans, behind those that are truly putting everything that they have out on the line for us.
“The President hit some good points when it came to Ukraine and Russia, but I think he failed when trying to bring the nation together in a manner and a way that strikes the right chord on unity.”
Republican Senate challenger Kelly Tshibaka was not as charitable toward the speech — or toward Murkowski. She issued the following statement:
“Of course, what we needed to hear from Joe Biden was exactly what he didn’t say. He should have said he was wrong to attack Alaska’s resource industries because he now sees that squandering our energy independence has disastrous ramifications on the world stage. He should have said he was wrong to prioritize a pipeline that Vladimir Putin wanted over the production of energy back home. And he should have said he intends to sanction Putin’s energy industries as punishment for invading Ukraine, while increasing our own energy output to compensate.
“But he didn’t say any of those things because he can’t. The radical environmentalists who are in control of him and his administration won’t allow it. This means that, fundamentally, environmental radicals are in charge of America’s foreign policy.
“Biden is a failure of a president, but incredibly, Lisa Murkowski continues to enable him. She cast the tie-breaking committee vote to advance Interior Secretary Deb Haaland to final confirmation, putting Haaland in power to lead Biden’s energy-annihilating agenda. Murkowski’s excuse is that her vote really didn’t matter because all this was going to happen anyway with Biden as president. This ignores two things: first, Murkowski helped enable Biden to become president by vocally opposing President Donald Trump, and second, the job of Alaska’s senator is to fight for Alaska, regardless of who is president.
“When I’m the next senator from Alaska, I won’t just throw up my hands in futility. When something is bad for us, I’ll fight like hell for Alaska and do everything in my power to stop it.”
Alaska Airlines’ partnership with the Russian Airline company S7 came to an end today, as the company said that it was concerned about Russian aggression against Ukraine.
” We are deeply concerned by the humanitarian crisis taking place in Ukraine. As a result, we are temporarily suspending our partnership with the Russian airline S7, a fellow oneworld member,” Alaska Airlines said in a statement. “Starting today, March 1, our guests will not be able to earn miles on S7. Our ongoing work to enable redemptions on S7 will also stop.”
Alaska Airlines also suspended the more limited “interline relationships” with Aeroflot, the largest carrier in Russia. Interlining allows passengers on one airline to be ticketed on a competing airline for various issues, such as bad weather.
In Washington state, where Alaska Airlines is headquartered, Gov. Jay Inslee said the state will sever ties with Russian entities doing business with Washington agencies, and he urged private businesses to end ties with Russian entities as well.
At tonight’s meeting of the Anchorage Assembly, the Assembly leadership has placed the reapportionment public hearing at the end of the agenda, when most of the public will have left the meeting.
Reapportionment is the redrawing of the Assembly districts, a process that takes place every 10 years. A public hearing is scheduled for Tuesday, March 1, but the item is 14I on the agenda. There are eight other public hearings in front of it. Assemblyman Chris Constant, who serves as the chairman of the reapportionment committee, is also vice chair of the Assembly, and is pushing forward his maps, as he tries to take the military community away from Eagle River.
At the Feb. 25 meeting of the reapportionment committee, Constant said that the Hillside of Anchorage was full of privileged people who were bound and determined to get their way on the redistricting maps.
“We’re going to allow the people of privilege to get their way for the next 10 years,” he said, objecting to the map that many feel is appropriate, allowing Eagle River to retain its ties to the military neighborhoods of JBER.
The hydrogen bomb and I were born in the same year, 1949. I grew up surrounded by major military bases including a strategic air command base– the guys with the nukes — about 75 miles away. Today, the U.S. military has a few hundred active duty aircraft at any given time, but in the 1950s and 1960s, it had several thousand.
A major military exercise produced an aluminum overcast. Our fields and lawns were littered with strips of aluminum foil; the WWII term was “window,” that they dropped to confuse radar. Let me assure you that a B-52, an 8-engine, intercontinental range nuclear bomber with a 180-foot wingspan is a very impressive sight and sound at 500 feet over your head when you’re a young boy.
There was a mid-air collision involving a B-47, a smaller 6 engine cousin of the B-52, a few miles off Tybee Island, Georgia, on Feb. 5, 1958. The B-47 was damaged but still aloft, so it dropped a 7,600-pound Mark 15 nuclear bomb load offshore to lighten its load; the bomb has never been found, or at least nobody has admitted finding it.
To a 10-year-old boy who loved trucks, trains, boats, and planes it was an almost idyllic existence. For a boy who hadn’t yet really discovered sex, it didn’t get much better than a B-58 Hustler, 4-jet, delta wing supersonic bomber flying over at the better part of a thousand miles per hour with a wall-shaking sonic boom in its wake.
But there was a price; every couple of weeks you heard the piercing scream of the air raid sirens and got to dive under your desk at school and wait for the blinding flash of the nuclear bomb. Major buildings all had that yellow and black sign that designated a “Fallout Shelter.” People who were wealthy enough built and supplied personal bomb/fallout shelters. The rest of us took the traditional Southern “God will make it right” attitude and went about our lives, but for most who still lived very close to the land, food and survival supplies were just what you put in for winter every year.
In October of 1962, I had just turned 13; I was grown, and I knew everything there was to know, and just wanted to be on my way to ruling the world. In the election of 1960, John F. Kennedy had made politics into a popular television show. NBC’s Huntley-Brinkley Report and CBS’ World News Tonight with Walter Cronkite dominated American dinner tables and opinions. Only if you lived in a major urban area did you have the choice of one or the other; most of America had one TV channel in those days, and a good bit of the country still had no television service.
Longtime Alaskans recall that the first live TV broadcast ever in Alaska was the moon landing in 1969 and it took the entire resources of the Congressional delegation and the US Department of Defense to bring it to Alaska. If it is any comfort, I was going to college in Southeast Georgia about 100 miles from a good sized city; I watched the moon landing on a small black and white TV with rabbit ears and a very snowy picture. Nobody had 200 HD channels in those days. When I came to Alaska in 1974, the evening news was at 7 am the next day — if the plane from Seattle got in with the reels.
I lived in the Huntley-Brinkley World; we didn’t have one of those rotators that could turn your TV antenna toward a different city. I climbed up on the house to turn it to the CBS station to watch The Beatles on Ed Sullivan a few years later. If you were a kid in those days, your information was the evening news, whatever there might be on “educational TV” at school, and whatever you got from your parents at the dinner table.
Most families took the paper, both the daily from a nearby big town and the local weekly, and they read it cover to cover and the covers too, especially the local paper. Everybody understood what the political bent of a particular paper was. In Georgia, the Atlanta Constitution was the paper the Yankees loved; liberal, by Southern standards, and was New Deal supporting. The Constitution won Pulitzers. The Atlanta Journal was the business-oriented paper, but not business enough to be seriously considered a Republican paper. The Augusta Chronicle was old-time Southern, as was the Macon Telegraph. The Savannah Morning News was the one and only Republican paper in Georgia in those days. You made a political declaration by the newspaper box on your mailbox, just as you once did here in Anchorage.
Radio was still somewhat important but not so much as it had been a decade before. Radio had become more of an entertainment medium than an information medium, but if you had the radio on in the car, you got their minute or two of what passed for news. We had a lot less information in those days, but in my view it was better if not always objective information.
Even if you were a kid, you couldn’t escape world events. The movie “October Skies” was very real and we all went out at night to see Sputnik tracking across the sky. It was as good an education as federal money provided to Southern schools. The first telecommunications satellite went up that summer, Telstar, which brought the first live transatlantic television and other modern telecommunications.
In retrospect, it might seem a tense period, but in reality, it had been a tense period for our whole life, and we were accustomed to it. And then it got tense. The news started to bubble up that the Soviets were placing nuclear missiles in Cuba. It was still unsettled in those days just what Fidel Castro was; some said a Cuban patriot, some said a Soviet puppet. Soviet missiles 90 miles from the U.S. settled that question. The Soviets/Cubans shot down a U.S. U-2 reconnaissance plane trying to take a peek, which only increased the tension, and this wasn’t long after the Soviet shoot-down of a U-2 over the Soviet Union, so nerves were raw.
The truth was as rare then as now, and nobody knew that the US had nuclear missiles in Turkey as close to Moscow as the Soviet missiles in Cuba were to Washington. The U.S. demanded the removal of the Soviet missiles from Cuba and the Soviets said “Nyet.”
The interstate highways weren’t yet finished in The South in 1962, so the way to Florida was the two lane blacktop of the old federal highways. My home town has the singular distinction of being the first place that two transcontinental federal highways intersected. US 80 from San Diego to Savannah and US 1 from somewhere in Maine to Key west cross at the Courthouse Square in my old home town, though the courthouse isn’t there anymore and there isn’t much traffic. In 1962 there was still a lot of traffic and soon came a lot more.
In October of 1962, my world turned olive drab green. The roads were clogged with military convoys headed for Florida. Soon our intersections were supervised by MPs and we were limited to only certain hours on the major roads. Endless miles of convoys of troop transports and transports for tanks and other military vehicles. The rickety old Georgia and Florida Railroad, built to haul Florida watermelons to Yankee markets, carried never before seen traffic as it hauled tanks and heavy vehicles south to Florida. The skies were filled with aircraft.
I don’t know that I was afraid; I was a young teen and immortal. But my parents were afraid. They heard from their grandparents first-hand memories and recollections of Sherman’s troops in the yard; they knew something about war. And then calmer minds intervened. The Soviets agreed to remove their missiles, maybe, from Cuba. The U.S. agreed to remove its missiles from Turkey so long as it didn’t have to admit that it had them, and the Soviets went along.
The hydrogen bomb and I have had a good run; we’re still here after 70-odd years. For a few years there, I thought we were done with this. Nikita Khrushchev was a rational actor, as was John F. Kennedy. I’ve long said that we are all alive because the Russians loved their children. In my 72 year,s this is the first time that I’ve heard a Russian leader threaten nuclear war out right, and I’ll confess to being afraid.
Art Chance is a retired Director of Labor Relations for the State of Alaska, formerly of Juneau and now living in Anchorage. He is the author of the book, “Red on Blue, Establishing a Republican Governance,” available at Amazon.
