The mess created by problems with the Statewide Transportation Improvement Plan has had its first clear financial consequence—the state stands to lose tens of millions in federal funds because it didn’t have the paperwork in order for projects to spend it on.
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Gov. Mike Dunleavy has yet to fill the vacancy on the Alaska Permanent Fund board created by the resignation of Gabrielle Rubenstein, which followed disclosures about her questionable dealings with the staff of the corporation.
Ten people have applied this year to serve as trustees.
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Nick Begich’s biggest holdings are in three limited liabilities companies and one limited partnership that he says are worth in total between $4 million and $20 million—FarShore Partners LLC, FarShore Ventures II LLC, FarShore Ventures III LLC and Listen Ventures III, LP.
In 2023, he said he received no income from those companies.
His largest other asset is his share of a Begich family business owned mainly by his dad that has long promoted conspiracy theories and peddled pseudoscience.
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Nick Begich the Third, who finished second in the primary election for Congress, has adopted the Sen. Dan Sullivan canard that the Biden “administration has crippled our economy by restricting resource development and has now issued 66 executive orders specifically targeting Alaska.”
This is part and parcel of the lie that there is an “unprecedented war on Alaska,” a long-running Republican fantasy.
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Alaska journalist Craig Medred continues to investigate the death of veteran bicyclist Matt Glover, which doesn’t make up for the lack of an official investigation by the Fairbanks City Police.
Read MoreWhen Donald Trump adds a new lie to his act, he repeats it so often word for word that he probably is soon unaware that he is lying. Take for example, his favorite lie about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge—that it contains more oil than Saudi Arabia.
He repeated his fairy tale while boasting with Elon Musk: “I got ANWR in Alaska approved. Ronald Reagan couldn’t do it. Nobody could do it. Everybody tried. Nobody could do it. I got it approved. The first thing that Biden did was unimprove it to get rid of it. He ended it. His secretary went in and she ended it. And what a disgrace. That’s ANWR. That’s bigger, or they think it could be bigger than Saudi Arabia in Alaska.”
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Alaska’s leading Republicans, with the notable exception of Sen. Lisa Murkowski and some others, accept the gibberish of Donald Trump as the price of membership, never daring to question his competence or identify his lies.
Sen. Dan Sullivan, Gov. Mike Dunleavy, Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom, Nick Begich the third and the entire Republican Party apparatus—from Carmela Warfield and Craig Campbell to Cynthia Henry and Cheryl Markwood don’t dare openly discuss the matter of whether someone who rambles incoherently about sharks and electric boats and World War III can be trusted with the power to order a nuclear holocaust.
Discussing that in the open would require them to confess that Trump’s mental state, as expressed in the dear leader’s lies, should disqualify him from the presidency. As close as any of them come to backing Trump’s behavior is the often-expressed excuse from Sullivan that “maybe the rhetoric wasn’t so great.”
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The Dunleavy administration remains at odds with local government agencies responsible for developing plans to spend federal highway dollars in Anchorage, Fairbanks and Mat-Su.
The bureaucratic fog is still thick enough to prompt a dozen Democratic and independent legislators to ask Transportation Commissioner Ryan Anderson to cancel road planning changes announced in July to the State Transportation Improvement Plan. They said the wide-ranging changes in projects and allocations will put the 2025 road construction season in the three areas at risk.
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Even during his Indiana high school days at the Culver Military Academy boarding school in the early 1980s, Dan Sullivan must have learned about the complicated history of the Vietnam war.
And he certainly couldn’t have finished his studies at Harvard and Georgetown without knowing about the institutional failures within the nation’s political and military institutions that led to the worst U.S. foreign policy disaster of the last century.
But here we have Sullivan asking the U.S. Senate to conclude that “the Vietnam war was an extremely divisive issue in the United States, as a result of certain biased and shameful attacks from some in the media, academia, politicians and many others.”
That is not why the Vietnam war was an extremely divisive issue in the United States.
Read MoreAT&T says that declining phone business in rural communities from Akutan to White Mountain is prompting it to propose an end to Alascom intrastate long distance telephone services in 42 villages, which will affect 500 residential and 1,400 business customers.
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