The group trying to recall Anchorage Assemblywoman Jamie Allard didn’t file their petitions with the Anchorage Assembly Clerk’s Office because they could not get enough signatures from voters in Chugiak-Eagle River.
The Clerk’s Office gave the Recall Allard group an extra day to gather signatures because of the Martin Luther King holiday on Monday, but it was not enough. The effort was led by Chelsea Foster, who is not in Allard’s district. She told her group on Facebook that cold weather this winter was a factor in not being able to get out of the starting gate.
There’s no telling how many legitimate signatures the group received because the petition is private information until submitted officially to the government, but the signature gatherers ran into a lot of resistance in the conservative stronghold of Eagle River, and the petition itself was ginned up by a couple of people from outside the Assembly district, which didn’t help the recallers make their case.
Allard has served on the Assembly since 2020, and is now a candidate for the Alaska House of Representatives, District 22.
Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s State of the State Address is scheduled for 7 pm on Jan. 25, according to sources in the Administration. The annual address is given annually as an update to the Legislature and the people of Alaska about the general condition of the state and how the governor intends to address problems and opportunities in the coming year.
In 2021, the address was given remotely for the first time in Alaska’s history, due to pandemic and resulting shutdown conditions in the Capitol.
This year, it appears the address will be in person the House Chambers in Juneau, where it is traditionally. Both the House and Senate usually crowd into the one chamber, and the gallery of seats for the public is taken by members of the Dunleavy Administration, his family, and select guests who he wants to introduce. The address is often about 40-50 minutes long and is broadcast on the Legislature’s channel, AKleg.gov. There is always a chance that the Legislative Council will change its mind and shut down the in-person speech, if a number of legislators become contagious with Covid-19.
This year’s remarks may be focused on opportunity, as Alaska comes out of an extended recession followed by a global pandemic that has taken the lives of 955 Alaskans.
The State will be having to manage millions of federal dollars coming for infrastructure projects, which means there will be an abundance of jobs, but a lack of workers and spiking inflation caused by the federal money printing operation. Dunleavy will probably talk about public safety and the increased State investment in Village Public Safety officers, as well as the general state of crime in Alaska, which has been trending down since Gov. Walker left office and Dunleavy reversed his soft-on-crime legislation, SB 91.
And he’ll most likely speak to his goal to fix the mess that is the Permanent Fund dividend, which has become Alaska’s biggest nightmare ever since Gov. Walker cut the dividend in half. He will probably challenge the Legislature to not use “election year” as an excuse for not getting anything done.
(Pictured above, Dunleavy giving the State of the State Address in 2020, with then-Senate President Cathy Giessel, and then-House Speaker Bryce Edgmon in the background.)
The Juneau Empire announced that 30 percent of subscribers to the physical newspaper will start receiving their newspapers by the U.S. Postal Service. The change is a result of the inability of the newspaper to find carriers for certain neighborhoods. The partnership will ensure more on-time delivery for those on Douglas Island, downtown near Basin Road, and in some neighborhoods “out the road.”
The newspaper was an afternoon paper until after 2000, when it switched to becoming a morning paper. Its delivery has been troubled by too few people wanting to pick up routes in the morning. As a consequence, the Postal Service partnership will mean those subscribers will get their news later in the day, said David Rigas, publisher.
Most newspaper carriers in America are no longer kids on bikes, but adults working routes with their cars. Typically the routes are a second or third job for them. Carriers are not employed by the newspapers but act as independent contractors and may get 10-15 cents for every newspaper delivered.
According to David Rigas, publisher of the Empire, about 30% of subscribers will see a delivery change beginning Jan. 18. He said that the partnership with the United States Postal Service will ensure regular paper delivery to areas where reliable delivery by carriers has been lacking for the newspaper that was founded in 1912.
The paper reported that the move to partial mail delivery comes after a months-long effort to find neighborhood carriers for the Empire, which was purchased from Morris Communications by GateHouse Media in 2017. GateHouse sold its Alaska papers to Sound Publications the next year. The printed edition comes out Tuesday through Friday and Sunday.
2021 had a lot significant events. Most of them bad. The big headline for 2021 was the Covid virus. There are so many negative aspects to this issue it is difficult to know where to start.
Let’s start with President Donald Trump’s Operation Warp Speed, one of the few bright spots, even if was in the year prior. President Trump got a vaccine through the development and approval process in less than a year when it historically takes three to five years. That was quite an accomplishment. He then handed the vaccine and a plan to distribute it over to Joe Biden, who promptly screwed it up.
That is how we started 2021. Good ole Biden had said earlier that having 200,000 people die on a president’s watch should result in that president resigning.
Well, today, over 400,000 people have died on Biden’s watch, and that is with 60 percent of the population vaccinated, considerable experience in treating the virus, and a well-established distribution system for testing and vaccines. According to Joe’s own statement as a candidate, he is the one who should resign. The problem is if he did, we get Kamala Harris, which would be a dubious improvement.
Biden recently said “There is no federal solution” to the Covid disaster. Therefore, the states are on their own as to how to deal with Covid. The pProblem is, the federal government is in control of the vaccines, test kits, and virus treatments. This allows Biden to use the crisis for political gain.
Republican governors, such as Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, get less vaccines etc. so they look bad. Politicizing a life and death situation has to be the lowest thing a president could do.
Masks and other virus protocols are to prevent the spread of the virus unless, of course, you are out protesting and burning down cities or sneaking across the southern border. Apparently, the virus doesn’t attack left-wing protesters or illegal aliens. I should point out, Republicans are also not allowed to attack them.
Next, we have the Christopher Steele Russian “dossier.” This was nothing more than a bunch of lies and distorted fantasies concocted by a Trump hater on the take for FBI and Hillary Clinton campaign money. Nobody could or would check his sources. They just forwarded it to various people who could get it integrated into the government agencies. This spawned the Mueller sham investigation with the drive-by media reporting on every non-proven element of the politically driven exercise in political assassination.
Today, no one wants to acknowledge any association with what appears to be a flimsy hoax. This all played into a concentrated effort to discredit and drive from office a duly elected president.
Now that Igor Danchenko (Steele’s source) and others have been indicted, some of the truth may float to the surface of the Washington D.C. swamp.
Then we have the trusty “woke”, let’s fire-the-cops campaign. The “legalize marijuana” group must have been significantly involved in formulating this plan, while partaking of their product. The results were huge cuts in police budgets in mostly blue cities.
To nobody’s surprise, the crime rate went through the roof. On top of that, BLM and Antifa were occupying and burning down various neighborhoods, federal courthouses, and police stations. The government response was “Move along. Nothing to see here.”
Apparently, there were no laws broken while perpetrating this destruction. Also, those who got killed or injured, it was considered just an accident. The Jan. 6 “riot” was different because they were mostly Republicans, so the Feds arrested and jailed 750 people so far.
All the woke people who sing the praises of BLM and Antifa but keep a 45 pistol in the house seem to be a bit conflicted. It is OK to burn down a neighborhood, but not mine. If you come here, I will shoot you because there are no cops to protect me.
Those people who supported BLM and Antifa and then voted for Biden are sitting in their burned-out neighborhoods watching inflation go through the roof, the virus spreading like crazy, “free” test kits unavailable, vandals running around stealing what they want, supply chain shortages, our foreign policy in the tank (Afghanistan, Ukraine) and public confidence in our government at an all-time low. It could be they may be revisiting their choices. Let’s hope so.
There are several other events I could include, such as blatant media bias. An African American drove a car into a Christmas parade and killed six people, including a kid, was in the headlines for a couple of days. A white guy, probably a Republican, drove a car into a bunch of protesters and killed one person , and those were headlines for two months.
Joe Bidens gaffs are too numerous to cover here.
A million people a year crossing our southern border (very few of them college graduates or skilled labor) putting a huge burden on our welfare system.
This just gets too depressing to go on so, I will close with wishing you a happy new year, hopefully.
The Legislative Budget and Audit Committee called in Alaska Permanent Fund Board Chairman Craig Richards for grilling on Monday. LBA Committee Chair Sen. Natasha von Imhof characterized it as a fact-finding mission, rather than an investigation, into the board’s firing of Permanent Fund CEO Angela Rodell, who says she was let go due to “political retribution.” Von Imhof cautioned members of the committee to reserve judgment.
Since the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation board voted to fire executive director Rodell in December, some state lawmakers and many news and opinion writers in the mainstream media have contended or insinuated the decision was politically motivated. Rodell has threatened to sue over her dismissal.
For his part, Richards said the hearing itself was political. The corporation is an independent agency of the State of Alaska.
On Monday, members of the committee tried to get Richard to explain the board’s reasoning in detail. Richards, a former Alaska attorney general, maintained that Rodell was an at-will state employee and he would not discuss specifics of her performance.
“You brought up the chairman of the board to grill me pretty good, I might say, about essentially a personnel decision involving an at-will employee,” he said. “It’s your right to do it, but … you know, there’s politics going both ways here,” Richards said to the committee.
Richards was appointed to the Permanent Fund Corporation Board of Trustees by former Gov. Bill Walker, and was reappointed by Gov. Mike Dunleavy in July of 2021.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” Richards said, referring to the overwhelming board vote to fire Rodell. Only one of the six members of the board voted to retain Rodell, who was fired as Commissioner of Revenue by Gov. Bill Walker, but later hired by Walker as CEO of the Permanent Fund. “Obviously, there were some performance issues and we made a change.”
Senate President Peter Micciche said trustees need to be focused on growing the fund. It has had record growth during a stock market in which most funds experienced meteoric rise.
“Do we actively separate politics from maximum returns, which is your mission, your vision, because a lot of this sort of reeks of something else,” Micciche said.
Some members of the committee maintained that with such successful growth of the fund, Rodell should be retained and rewarded.
“At the end of the day, it’s important to understand the executive director did not handle investments. Ultimately, it is the CIO that is responsible,” Richards noted.
Richards pointed out there were negative performance reviews of Rodell going back four years. Her entire personnel file was released to the media last week and is rife with instances that demonstrated a growing break in the trust relationship with the board, stretching back to at least 2019.
“I am truly shocked that I am here. This is, this is a new one to me. We have an at-will employee that reports to the board who years of documented evidence demonstrates that there were trust problems going both ways between the board and the executive director,” Richards said.
“As the executive director, she was a critical part of the team, and she did a lot of things very well that contributed to the fund’s success … Some of the administrative stuff was really good for the fund, and that helped the fund, and it contributed to the fund. My point was only that her responsibility was not the direct supervision of the investments,” Richards said.
Rep. Andy Josephson an Anchorage Democrat and lawyer, cautioned that Rodell may be able to sue the state and win, which could cost the state money.
“We’re not here, prepared today to go into an in-depth, detailed analysis of here’s everything she did right and everything she did wrong,” Richards said at one point.
“That’s most unfortunate, because you had a month to prepare,” responded Chairwoman von Imhof.
“Ms. Rodell was a highly compensated executive-level employee, and at the end of the day it is the board’s prerogative,” Richard said.
Anchorage Democrat Rep. Chris Tuck, the vice chairman of the committee, commented that just because you can do something, like fire someone, doesn’t mean you should: “And that’s what we’d like to find out, is whether you should.”
Richards remarked that the committee itself is now politicizing the job of the Permanent Fund CEO, new territory for the Legislature.
“What is best for the fund is to move on,” he said. Richards had already answered the committee in writing, and revealed nothing more in the Monday grilling than he had already written to the committee.
The over two hour meeting of LBA can be watched at this link.
Face masks are back in fashion in many places in Alaska, particularly in Juneau, and also are now required to enter the Alaska Capitol, per a Monday decision by the Legislative Council, which is chaired by Juneau Democrat Rep. Sarah Hannan.
Legislators and their staff must also be tested for Covid-19 every fourth day of the session, although this requirement is based on the honor system and whether it can be enforced is a question. There is no testing for members of the public and the building is open — for now.
Two motions by Sen. Lora Reinbold to make masks and testing optional failed, although it had the support of Sen. Peter Micciche and Reps. Cathy Tilton and Chris Tuck.
Legislative Council sets the rules for the building, and required masks in the Capitol and its annexes during the Covid-19 pandemic, except for six months between May and October, 2021.
Congressman Brian Mast, who represents the 18th Congressional District of Florida, is the keynote speaker for the Alaska Republican Party convention in Fairbanks on April 21-23.
Prior to his election to Congress, Mast served in the U.S. Army for more than 12 years, earning medals including The Bronze Star Medal, The Army Commendation Medal for Valor, The Purple Heart Medal, and The Defense Meritorious Service Medal. While deployed in Afghanistan, he worked as a bomb disposal expert under the elite Joint Special Operations Command. The last improvised explosive device that he found resulted in the loss of both of his legs.
While lying in bed recovering at Walter Reed Medical Center, Brian’s father gave him advice that has stuck with him to this day–to ensure the greatest service he gave to our country and the best example he set for his children was still ahead of him. Brian took this advice to heart and dedicated himself to finding new ways to serve our country and his community.
Brian remained on active duty following the injuries and provided expertise to the National Nuclear Security Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms during his recovery process. After his retirement from the Army, he continued working in counter-terrorism and national defense as an Explosive Specialist with the Department of Homeland Security. Brian subsequently received a degree from Harvard University and volunteered to serve alongside the Israel Defense Forces to show support for the freedom Israel represents throughout the Middle East and the world.
In Congress, Brian strives to serve as he did on the battlefield: without regard for personal gain or personal sacrifice. He is a member of two committees:
The Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, where his priorities include fixing the pressing water quality issues stemming from Lake Okeechobee; and
The Foreign Affairs Committee, where he uses his military expertise to help strengthen the safety and security of the United States
The Alaska Republican Party officers today unanimously endorsed Gov. Mike Dunleavy for a second term.
There was no consideration of Republican House Rep. Chris Kurka, who has challenged Dunleavy. No one among the party’s leadership made a motion to offer Kurka for an endorsement.
The nomination for Dunleavy’s endorsement was made by Ron Johnson, who is region representative for Region 2, the Mat-Su. Cynthia Henry of Fairbanks, who is the party’s National Committeewoman, seconded the motion.
Dunleavy appeared at the party’s quarterly meeting, held in Juneau to thank the party for its endorsement. Attending were over 50 members of the party, representing districts from Ketchikan to Barrow. Dunleavy, in his remarks, reminded the room that it’s been 44 years since the state has elected a Republican governor to a second term. And he thanked the party for its endorsement, and for Republicans and their efforts on behalf of the state.
Dunleavy told the room that he became involved in politics as a Mat-Su Borough school board member, before being elected to the Legislature just 10 years ago. He assumed office as governor on Dec. 3, 2018.
In the nearly 300 pages of the personnel files of former Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation CEO Angela Rodell, there’s everything from jury duty reports to usual financial disclosures. But in the most recent performance evaluation in December, there are numerous remarks about how she managed her staff and how she managed her relationship with the trustees.
In short, it wasn’t all roses. The board stated it felt Rodell pushed her own agenda and controlled what information she gave to the trustees.
She was fired by the trustees on a vote of 5-1 in December, and has stated that the firing was politically motivated. Board chairman Craig Richards has said it was due to performance, but did not elaborate. But upon request, the Permanent Fund Corporation has released Rodell’s personnel file to news agencies who have asked for it.
The matter of Rodell’s firing has become a fascination of the liberal-dominated media in Alaska and is the subject of a Legislative Budget and Audit Committee meeting on Monday, for which Chairwoman Sen. Natasha von Imhof has requested answers from the Board of Trustees. APFC Chairman Richards submitted his answers in writing late last week in advance of the Monday hearing, most of which is likely to be behind closed doors in executive session.
Rodell has sought to clear her name and has told the mainstream media that she may sue over her dismissal in order to restore her professional reputation.
She said the board “…got rid of me so they can have someone they can control and manipulate in the executive director’s seat.”
