The state House censured Republican Rep. David Eastman Wednesday on a 35-1 vote, with Eastman providing the only pro-Eastman vote.
Despite the near unanimous vote, however, let’s admit that a motion to censure is symbolic, not significant. The House refused to take real action against Eastman for belonging to an anti-government militia, but it should at least remove him from the judiciary committee and find a better legislator to fill that seat.
Read MoreRep. David Eastman had plenty of chances to apologize for his remarks about the long-term “benefits” to society when a child is killed by an abuser. That Eastman refused to do so is another reason why someone of his ilk doesn’t belong in the Legislature.
Read MoreAssembly Presiding Officer Aaron Lojewski fired the volunteers on the climate committee as his first action last fall. The friends and Republican allies he named to the committee are now supporting vague and innocuous recommendations that are packaged with enough hedge words that they contain no clear action plan for dealing with climate change.
Read MoreGov. Mike Dunleavy and state transportation Commissioner Ryan Anderson need to be honest with the public about the new plan to spend $200 million or more on road and bridge upgrades between Tetlin and Fairbanks to benefit the Kinross trucking plan.
Read MoreThe new Alaska elections director, hired for the job with no experience running elections, is off to a bad start.
Carol Beecher, a Republican and longtime state employee, claims she doesn’t know enough to say whether President Joe Biden was rightfully elected in 2020. And she refuses to say whether she believes Trump’s lies about the vote.
Read MoreThe balloon shot down over the Yukon Territory remains a former UFO, but the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade fears the Air Force has burst its world-traveling balloon, according to Aviation Week & Space Technology.
Read More“So the estimated 50 to 100 unsheltered people who live in Fairbanks find ways to survive. They walk all night in bunny boots, trying to stave off frostbite. They crowd into motel rooms 10 at a time. They build forested encampments and dig snow caves. They squat in abandoned houses and sleep in cars.”
If you haven’t done so, read the investigation of homelessness in Fairbanks in the winter by one of Alaska’s top reporters, Michelle Theriault Boots of the Anchorage Daily News.
Read MoreThe Alaska Policy Forum has long peddled the claim that the easy cure-all for public education in Alaska is to spend less money on it and redirect the money so it can be spent on private schools.
Read MoreSen. Dan Sullivan, at his boarding-school whiniest, comes across as if someone took his puppy in his inquisition of Gigi Sohn, nominated by President Biden to the Federal Communications Commission in October 2021 and opposed by all Republicans.
Read MoreThe problem with these events is not that Dunleavy went to a rodeo in Texas and to a hunting conference in Michigan, but that state employees felt the need to hide this from Alaskans when there were questions about his statement attacking Biden over the balloon affair.
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