The Legislature rejected Bethany Marcum, the CEO of the right-wing Alaska Policy Forum, after Gov. Mike Dunleavy appointed her to an eight-year term on the University of Alaska Board of Regents.

Dunleavy is politically aligned with the forum, a group that is no friend of public education, both K-12 and the University of Alaska. The forum is a bottomless well of misleading claims and phony statistics about education.

Dunleavy has returned to the Alaska Policy Forum talent pool to make another selection for the regents, this time former forum board member Seth Church of Fairbanks, who has long been active in right-wing causes.

Read More

Justice Samuel Alito and his buddies on the Wall Street Journal editorial page produced a turgid response to a ProPublica investigation about Alito’s fishy Alaska vacation before they had read it.

Journal editorial writer Kim Strassel, who claims to live half the time in Wasilla, wrote on Twitter that Alito “destroys the silly piece from the hit team” at ProPublica. She is clueless.

Read More

Billionaire Paul Singer brought Justice Samuel Alito to Alaska on his private jet for a fishing vacation at the King Salmon Lodge in 2008, where the going rate was more than $1,000 a day.

It was the first time the two had met.

Singer, a hedge fund titan with a net worth of $5.5 billion, had 10 cases before the Supreme Court in the years that followed, but Alito never recused himself.

ProPublica published a thorough and damning investigation Tuesday night about Singer’s generosity to Alito, and how Alito never disclosed the gift of the trip to the lodge on the Naknek River from a man who became his friend.

Read More

The headline number about Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s vetoes—that he trimmed more than $200 million from the operating and capital budgets—is misleading. It disguises his focus on cutting education at all levels.

More than 85 percent of the real reductions in programs and facility maintenance are in budget items related to education, the most important public service for families in Alaska.

Read More

Gov. Mike Dunleavy vetoed more than $140 million in funding for education at all levels, but refused to explain or try to justify his latest attack on education.

His vetoes included cutting half of the education increase approved by the Legislature to prevent layoffs and cutbacks in districts across the state. Dunleavy cut $87 million from the one-time boost that districts had said wasn’t enough to offset years of not adjusting for inflation.

Read More

There are many public safety questions about turning our highways into industrial mining roads that remain intentionally unexamined by the Dunleavy administration.

The new plan to double Kinross truck traffic from Fox to the mine is the latest evidence of the pitfalls of saying yes without blinking or thinking.

Read More

The six trustees of the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation all live in the Anchorage area, but that’s no reason for the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation to expand its bureaucratic footprint beyond Juneau and waste hundreds of thousands leasing new office space in the state’s largest city.

Read More

We now know more about the alleged “Alaska Office of Family & Life” that Gov. Mike Dunleavy claimed to have created when he promoted philosopher/photographer Jeremy Cubas and set his salary at $110,000.

There never was an office, just a task assigned to Cubas to create a website, oppose abortion and speak about why young women need to have more babies. Cubas resigned two weeks ago. the website was never launched.

Read More

We haven’t been blindsided by the police staffing crisis in Fairbanks. We just haven’t been paying attention to an emergency that has been years in the making. Our elected officials have downplayed the severity of the situation.

Seven years ago, former Police Chief Dan Hoffman said the “department is on the verge of operating at true crisis levels.”

Read More

The City of Fairbanks is moving to a part-time police department in August, ending 24-hour patrols and cutting back by four hours, leaving 8 a.m. to noon with no officers on patrol.

This is alarming, to say the least. If you call 911 in an emergency, what answer can you expect if you are within the City of Fairbanks? Same-day service? Maybe not.

Read More