Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan made exaggerated claims about the exact location of the 11 military vessels from China and Russia tracked in the north Pacific last week, then launched into their standard refrain about why the U.S, needs to spend a lot more money in Alaska on the military.
Their standard refrain never includes any suggestion about how they intend to pay for what they want.
Read MoreRarely have we seen a clearer example of the state misusing state law about public records than the clumsy effort to cover Curtis Thayer’s tracks in the firing of University of Alaska researcher Gwen Holdmann from the Dunleavy energy task force.
Holdmann is the founding director of the Alaska Center for Energy and Power. She was vice chair of the task force, appointed by Dunleavy March 22, a perfect choice for that volunteer position.
Read MoreDunleavy administration recycles flawed plan to allow governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general to approve free legal aid for each other. The proposal does not mention that when this idea last surfaced four years ago, all of the public comments were negative.
Read MoreIt turns out that Temporary Regent Tuckerman Babcock wasn’t really interested in serving on the University of Alaska Board of Regents at all.
Babcock quit the volunteer post Wednesday, one of the most important in Alaska higher education, without attending a single meeting of the regents.
He did attend an orientation program, but that’s it.
Read MoreThe Alaska Republican Party and the leading Alaska Republicans, with the lone exception of Sen. Lisa Murkowski, are in lockstep with Trump.
Sen. Dan Sullvan and Gov. Mike Dunleavy stand out for their political cowardice and their silence about Trump’s lies. They support Trump, even though he tried to overthrow the government.
Read MoreLast week Sen. Dan Sullivan whined in print that if the Democrats in the Senate really think having no leader of the U.S. Marine Corps for the first time in 164 years is a problem, then Sen. Chuck Schumer should file the cloture paperwork to force a vote.
There is no confirmed leader of the Marine Corps because of an abortion protest by Sen. Tommy Tuberville, the former football coach who is blocking Pentagon nominees under one of the arcane rules of the doddering institution of 100. The total of promotions and transfers blocked by Tuberville is now 301 and rising.
Read MoreA news account in the Wall Street Journal Tuesday says what Alaska politicians won’t: “Japan and South Korea have rebuffed U.S. overtures about joining a proposed $44 billion Alaska natural-gas project that would be one of the biggest energy investments in American history.”
The story quotes Sen. Dan Sullivan as saying the Alaska gas pipeline is closer than ever, which is a claim that Alaska politicians have been making since long before Sullivan moved to Alaska. Sullivan says that private buyers in Asia are what the state needs.
Read MoreThe Alaska Permanent Fund, now valued at near $80 billion, is not about to run out of money.
But the so-called earnings reserve of the fund, which is the only portion that the Legislature can appropriate for paying dividends and running state government, could run out of money in a few years if inflation remains a problem and investment returns are low.
Read MoreThe portion of the Permanent Fund that can be spent by the Legislature at any time, and includes the source of money to pay dividends, the so-called “earnings reserve,” could be empty by 2026 or 2027, depending upon market returns. This looming pressure on what is now the major source of state government revenue is not mentioned by the bond rating agency.
There is far more reason for caution than celebration in the bond report, which warns that the “state’s operating budget remains exposed to oil price volatility, and longer-term, an overall shift to less carbon-intensive energy.”
Read More“Sullivan couldn't be more wrong. The number one factor in warfighting and lethality is recruiting and retention of troops. I know there's been a lot of uproar about AI lately, but I'm pretty sure that we're many years away from AI and robots being anything more than an adjunct to actual human troops.
“Recruiters from all branches of the service have had an increasingly hard time finding enough qualified people to fill their quotas. A recent House Armed Services Committee hearing featured Army, Navy, and Air Force leaders stating that they would all be thousands of recruits short of their goals this year.”
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