We’ve Been Sullied! (And the Cow is Cleared)
Here’s another wonderful homage to Anchorage Mayor Dan Sullivan who has cut $150,000 from vital city services, including the fire department. Lately we’ve been asking ourselves if he’s actually trying to be a one-term mayor. That’s fine with me, don’t get me wrong.
Here’s the latest. In his latest attempt to fulfill his role as our token evil bad guy, he’s now smacking down people with Muscular Dystrophy. He’s decided to put his political muscle behind squashing the firefighters’ attempt to fund raise for charity. He doesn’t think it’s right to allow firefighters to raise money for charity during their annual “fill the boot” campaign. And he also not keen on city employees donating to The United Way via payroll deduction.
Next, a black cape and long waxy moustache.
The fill-the-boot campaign involves about 300 firefighters from Girdwood to Elmendorf Air Force Base. They volunteer to stand on street corners near their stations, and even go into the street at red lights, to collect donations for MDA. They ask people to drop money in a firefighter’s boot. Fire trucks on scene add to their visibility.
There are only 120 to 130 firefighters on duty at any one time, said Capt. Bryan Grella, who is fill-the-boot coordinator for the Anchorage Fire Department. So more than half the firefighters on the street are volunteers, he said.
They raise about $115,000 in three hours on the Friday afternoon before Labor Day weekend, about one-seventh of the organization’s annual budget, said Sabrina Hoppas, executive director of the MDA of Alaska.
Anchorage is tops in the nation at giving per capita in this event, which has taken place for 20 years, said Hoppas.
And here’s a little mid-day moment of historical trivia head scratchery. Did any of you, like me, learn that the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 was started by Mrs. O’Leary’s cow who kicked over a lamp in the barn?
Think again my friend. Apparently Dan Sullivans throughout the ages have had a dicey relationship with fire safety…
Daniel “Pegleg” Sullivan was a Chicagoan who is often credited with being the first to sound the alarm when a fire broke out in Catherine O’Leary’s barn on October 8, 1871, the beginning of the Great Chicago Fire. More recent evidence suggests that Sullivan may have been responsible for the fire.
In his testimony before the Fire Department inquiry on November 25, 1871, Sullivan claimed he saw the fire coming through the side of the barn and ran across the street to free the animals from the barn, which included a cow owned by Sullivan’s mother.
A study of the layout of DeKoven Street, where the fire began, indicates that Sullivan would not have had a clear view of the fire from where he claimed to have been standing. In October 1997, the Chicago City Council recommended that Sullivan be recorded as the person who started the fire, by accident.
OMG…..can it be another van flea?
Oh Dan, you Slimy Little Worm.
Why don’t you give back the $193,000 “life insurance” policy money that you scammed from the citizens of Anchorage before you start cutting their essential city services? And now, forbidding firefighters to support local charities?? How do you ever manage to live with yourself?
“The Grinch hated Anchorage! The whole Anchorage muni!
Now, please don’t ask why. No one understands “Dan the Puny”.
It could be his head wasn’t screwed on just right.
It could be, perhaps, that his shoes were too tight.
But I think that the most likely reason of all
May have been that his heart was two sizes too small.”
Sourdough Mullet..may YOU..live long and prosper..and truer words..as those just crafted by you..well..I just think you have perfectly ..’captured the situation’!
I cannot believe that Sullivan wants to end this. (Nothing in it he can pocket–huh?) What an enormous
di@k he is. The MD drive happens all over the country and I always look forward to it. (My nephew is fireperson crazy) and he gets uncontrollable when he sees the firemen in the streets and wants to empty all of our pockets.
What kind of dark, nasty world has this man crawled out of. I mean really–he needs to go. I think he’s begging for it.
I hope when the sh*t hits the fan in Ireland, you will all know the names of our bad guys. O’ Sullivan, O’ Leary and there surely is an O’Hara…….
Sorry Alaska!
Wow – I thought we had heartless Republicans here in Kansas, but Sullivan beats them to a bloody pulp in the politician-without-a-heart game. I hope the national media pick up on this. He should be shamed worldwide for these senseless policies.
Just how does he think charities come up with funds? Republicans are always clamoring to cut governmental services because, after all, there are safety nets called charities. They rant about this over and over ad nauseum. To have a Republican cut city services AND be against private charities??? A new low! A really low low.
Not everyone agrees with the United Way – a lot of right-wingers hate it – but gosh, when you take out money through payroll deduction, you usually are given a choice from the roster of organizations under the United Way umbrella. There is something there for everyone. Plus, a payroll deduction gives a better foundation for the charities to plan for the coming year and seems less painful for the employee.
This is a first, though, in my many decades of life – to hear a politician want to stop charitable contributions by the public and by public employees. This from a man who uses his religious affiliation (Christian) as a badge of honor. Oh, I do hope there is a day of reckoning, because despite the many things I wish I had done differently over my lifetime, I think it would be worth being judged just to see the fury that will hit this sorry excuse of a human being.
Palin, Parnell, Sullivan – what have Alaskans done to be stricken with this karmic abuse?
What was his justification for doing all this?
P.S. Has he sold the Zamboni ice machines yet? Didn’t they cost almost as much as the cuts he’s making now?
What is wrong with Alaskans?
The heathen should be tar, feathered and run out of town on a pine rail.
Honestly why do Alaskans put up with these festering boils on the buttocks of humanity?
Ah, I love that phrase, “. . . festering boils on the buttocks of humanity.” So apt in this case.
Festering boils everywhere are deeply insulted at being compared to Sullivan.
(I see the bubos pouting)
What an ignorant man he is. Must be a closet tea bagger. Or maybe he’s planning on running for governor? His platform would be “The Quitter promised smaller government, but I delivered,” I can see him bragging about standing up to those United Way people and said NO! The man must be geneticaly related to Quittypants.
Oh AKM, I can visualize the chain of events. You go to the Googles and type in “Dan Sullivan and fire department” and up comes, among other things, the story of Pegleg. You’re right about the City Council finguring him back then. Which was fine because we didn’t have any other pressing issues at the time that they could be dealing with. Not. It’s a good Parlor Game and one of the local law schools put the whole thing on trial a couple of years later and old Peg walked, or limped, away with a not guilty verdict.
I am continually amazed at the lengths that these “small government” advocates are willing to go. And how contradictory they are. And how they go against their own legitmate self-interests to prove a stupid point.
Hopefully this whole wave of crazy, right-winged, intractable ideology will run it’s course and “normal” Republicans (some of whom sadly I’m related to) will see it for what it is.
November is going to be very interesting. We need to get our 2008 mojo back. I know almost everyone is disappointed by where we are but we need to gear up and get Fired Up and Ready to Go.
I thought that was a sendup – but no, there really was a Dan Pegleg Sullivan!
How do you do it, AKM? Brilliant post!
Idiot mayor.
Good Lord. Just when you think it can’t get worse…well…it does. Dan Sullivan is shameless.
I think it’s even worse than that. I think he is truly clueless. He does not seem to understand that this is a really awful kind of attitude to have, or why…. I believe he thinks that this is “normal, acceptable behavior and mindset.”
And that is why he keeps on topping his own record-breaking “low points”
“We’ve Been Sullied! (And the Cow is Cleared)”
Hmm. Isn’t this the same headline for your post on the Alaska Fund Trust recently?
HA!
Oh, hey, just so you don’t feel too badly about $P Lite, for the past two or three years in Montgomery County (Maryland), the proposal has come up to charge people for ambulance rides to the hospital. Right now, it’s fee-free. Very few call 911 complaining of chest pains (or bleeding out due to the car accident in front of the Home Depot at the intersection of Georgia and Connecticut Avenues) for kicks.
It keeps getting squashed, but why in the hell does it keep coming up? Particularly as Maryland has a pretty robust volunteer/paid firefighter system. Even in Montgomery County.
Hold your breath, keep your mouth at just the right angle, and don’t move: a headline on HuffPo says the oil leak has been capped — for now.
Who knows if it will last to the morning? Who knows if there will be a methane gas buildup and explosion?
But we can hope. Right now, I can’t think of anything else we can do, do you? I will take any speck of good or hopeful news and clasp it tight to my bosom and nurse it through the night.
I’ll get the kids to fiddle with the foil-wrapped bunny eared antennae and then “freeze!” for the night. That’s gotta help.
If I thought it would help, I’d do that, too. I simply do not trust BP to come up with a solution that works permanently, but at this point, hey, maybe something will be a small improvement – at least for a while.
What I really want is those three judges who own stock in the oil companies to lose their jobs. They never should have ruled on the moratorium. Where is the judicial ethics commission in that state? They should be stripped of the right to rule on any case because they exposed their lack of ethics by not recusing themselves. Sorry – off topic, I know, but I don’t want to go through another nightmare oil spill if we can avoid it.
Well – knew it, knew it, knew it! Drats and double drats.
The leak was capped only briefly. The damn oil is leaking again. Sigh.
So, Dagian, put the kids to bed without the bunny-eared antenna. I will let my bosom relax (it did enough nursing in its day).
Is Mayor Sullivan involved in the leak in any way? Gosh, it sounds just like his mode of operation – spreading hurt whenever he can.
Well- made it through 5 so-called pages of comments on this story at the ADN…
Sentiment running pretty heavy against the Sully-one.
‘Bout time …
Had me worried there, ANC.
Interesting, I bet if Franklin Graham were to come here for a fund raiser he would be promoting it. I wonder if Dan Sullivan ever got a citation from the fire department at his bar/restaurant for some kind of fire hazard and he has a resentment? Maybe he doesn’t like Jerry Lewis.
Am thinking he so desperately wants to appear like he’s protecting public monies and is fiscally prudent that he doesn’t realize
he’s piddled down his own leg…
Might be something else but that’s my take on it
after fleecing the city for 193,000 of those public dollars, “protecting” them now seems a little like shutting the barn door after the horse escaped.
For the past 28 years, I have worked and volunteered in recreation and sports programs for kids with physical disabilities. Every year we would lose at least one child from complications during surgery, illness or disease progression, often as a result of MD.
One of the most heartbreaking situations I remember was a family with two sons who were 2 years apart. The youngest son was only a baby when the older one was diagnosed with a rapidly progressing form of MD. They had the younger one tested and he too had the same disease, which often ran in families. During the years the boys were in my program, I watched them become less and less mobile as the disease progressed, from ambulatory to walker to manual wheelchair to power chair. One year, the younger one arrived at a camp weekend alone. His brother had died that spring.
The worst part of it all? The younger one knew exactly what was going to happen to him. A couple of years later, he was gone as well.
It’s a horrible, devastating disease that takes young people just as their lives are beginning. I would love to see Dan Sullivan explain to a family like the one I knew why he decided that the firefighters would no longer be allowed to collect money for MDA.
Well, before I jump on the bandwagon and add another curse on our fine mayor, what exactly did he say about the the fill the boot issue and payroll deduction for United Way? Did I miss his comments somewhere above?
http://www.adn.com/2010/07/09/v-printer/1360369/assembly-feels-pressure-to-allow.html
Anything in blue is a link. Slightly different than the old format.
Thanks for the link, for whatever reason, there wasn’t a blue link anywhere that I could see.
Good grief. I’m not a fan of my mayor (he’s too much of a nanny, and I don’t think adults should be treated as if they need one), but he could not get away with pulling a stunt like this.
This ridiculous imitation of a mayor needs to go.
I wonder if there’s a chance Brian’s better-half would mosey over to Sullivan’s neck of the woods and grace us with a really good present-day Dan Sullivan/cow story.
Putting Sully and a forgiven cow in one post shows me that it’s the cow I care about! I hope someone apologized to all those little bovine offspring who inherited such a bad rap before the truth was revealed.
So sorry Anchorage – I weep for you!
Martha, careful what you say or you’ll be the next head of the State Department of Agriculture. You’re more than qualified.
Or at least qualified to run a dairy business in Alaska!