The Mudflats

So, we know at this point that Anchorage Mayor Dan Sullivan just can’t bring himself to fully fund the Anchorage Fire Department. $150,000 is just too darn much money to spend on saving people that fall through the ice, or get lost in the back country, or stuck in the mud, or whatever horrible thing the HazMat team might have to save you from.

So, where SHOULD we be spending our money? Shannyn Moore asks the question.

What the H-E-Double Hockey Sticks?

So, the mayor “respectfully submitted” the purchase of two Zamboni machines, but doesn’t think the “fall through the ice” rescue team should be funded during the winter months? I wonder if his friendship with Assemblyman Dan Coffey has anything to do with it. Coffey is one of the owners of the Alaskan Aces hockey team.

Hey, Anchorage, with the Zambonies we can make ice, just be careful you don’t fall through any if you’re outdoors having a “Big Wild Life.”

What have we learned?

1) There is actually a Mr. Zamboni and his first name is Frank. Who knew?
2) These Zambonies have a tight turning radius which is really impressive.
3) We got these Zambonies at a screamin’ deal because they usually cost more than $77,000 a piece.
4) My city is spending the same amount of money it’s cutting from vital city rescue services that save people’s lives, on having nice shiny indoor ice.
5) My head hurts after I bang it on the desk.

Let’s see… I know there were 10 of them.  (Counting on my fingers) Water to blood, flies, frogs,  death of the first born, ….hmm.  Oh, and diseased livestock, lice…. umm…..thunder and hail, darkness.  And boils.  Who could forget the boils?  That leaves one.  A plague of…..

LOCUSTS!  That’s it!  And not only are locusts a Biblican Egyptian plague, they’re now a plague on Hollywood.  Apparently, even though Sarah Palin condemns Hollywood and all the delicate starlets contained therein, it’s still OK to descend upon the freebies at the Oscar Gift Boutique with her entourage, like the proverbial “locusts.”  So the bonanza was described by those present while the Palins and their entourage scarfed up all sorts of goodies including hair care products, jewelry, watches, sandals, a bathrobe, leggings, and 40 pairs of AIAIAI headphones.  40? Future Christmas presents perhaps?  Would that make Sarah Palin a “regrifter?”

[huge h/t to Black Bag for the hilarious graphic!]

~Mayor Dan Sullivan

So, back in 1982 there lived a recently former mayor in a city in Alaska.  His name was George Sullivan and the city was Anchorage.  And as the mayor of a city, he had a life insurance policy.

And those at the time liked George Sullivan so much that they thought they’d insure him forever… that this life insurance policy would go on until the end of his life.

Fast forward 20 years.

(swooooosh)

Now fix your hair.

…in 2002, Deputy Employee Relations director Karen Moore was baffled when Dan Sullivan, who was on the Assembly at the time, came to the city to make that year’s premium payment, according to e-mails from the time. She asked the city’s insurance carrier about a policy for Sullivan. The company didn’t know about it either. The premiums paid by Sullivan and his family had been deposited into a city account, not given to Aetna.

Top officials in the administration of George Wuerch, who was mayor in 2002, spent months trying to figure out the history of the deal and what to do about it, according to the e-mails, released to the Daily News this week.

The city’s life insurance carrier, Aetna, told the city in 2002 that it had no policy on Sullivan and wouldn’t cover him anyway because its agreement was only for active city employees, according to the e-mails. Aetna made clear it wasn’t liable for Sullivan, who was 78 years old by that time. The insurance company’s legal department recommended the city just return the premiums to the Sullivan family.

Dan Sullivan must have been bummed, seeing as how it looked like the big payday might not happen.  The mayor at the time, conservative one-term wonder George Wuerch listened to the recommendations from the insurance company’s legal department who said to simply pay back the premium to the family and call it a day.  Then he listened to the city’s finance director who also said to simply pay back the premium to the family and call it a day.  Then Wuerch decided that the city just simply had no option but to provide the coverage anyway. And the city attorney at the time decided that Anchorage would become an insurance company, and then Assemblyman Dan Sullivan must have smiled and he continued making the payments knowing that some day the city would have to cough up the money.

So Assemblyman Dan Sullivan continued to pay $556 every year to the city.  An actual policy with an insurance company would have run  more than $11,000 per year in premiums back in 1982, according to the city’s benefits manager at the time.

Fast forward to last week’s Assembly meeting.

George Sullivan is no longer with us, and it’s time for the Municipality of Anchorage to pay up in the amount of $193,000 to the trustee.  Who is the trustee?   And who gets to sign the check that distributes that big wad of cash to members of the Sullivan family?  Why, look!  It’s Dan Sullivan again.  You remember him… the Assemblyman who was in the middle of the whole situation in 2002.  Well now, he’s the Mayor.

Asked last week about the trust, Sullivan said “it was kind of news to me until a year or so ago when I realized that I was named as trustee for the life insurance trust and that there were payments that needed to be made on an annual basis.”

Well, that’s strange.  Mayor Dan Sullivan is, in fact, the same person as former Assemblyman Dan Sullivan who brought the annual payment to the city that set off the alarm bells that resulted in the city becoming an insurance company.  He didn’t realize he’d been making payments all those years?  How very very convenient odd.

When this little contradiction was pointed out to the Mayor, the furious backpedaling began.

Sullivan said what he meant was that he hadn’t realized that “somewhere along the line it changed from being an insurance product to a contract.”

OK, let’s review this for a moment.

What he said before he realized the ADN knew he made the payment:

“it was kind of news to me until a year or so ago when I realized that I was named as trustee for the life insurance trust and that there were payments that needed to be made on an annual basis.“

What he “meant” after he found out the ADN knew he made the payment:

he hadn’t realized that “somewhere along the line it changed from being an insurance product to a contract.”

Ahh…  Now we get it.  I bet Mayor Dan has a bridge to nowhere he’d like to sell us too.

“But,” you ask, (because you’ve been paying attention)  “isn’t this the same Mayor Dan Sullivan who just cut $150,000 from the Fire Department, and has reduced bus service and police, and library hours, and the arts? And isn’t that the same Dan Sullivan who is spending tens of thousands to help sue the government over beluga whales, and $50,000 more to do a “forensic audit” of city finances to make sure the previous Mayor wasn’t playing fast and loose with our money?”  Yes, it is.  And no, the irony of that last point isn’t lost on me.

Oh, and yes.  It’s the same Mayor who took $12,000 to pay himself for being the “Mayor elect” before he took office, even though we had someone else who was already the Mayor.

And now, it looks like Mayor/Trustee Dan Sullivan will get to sign a check from the city to himself and his family for $193,000 that will come from the city’s general fund.

Hooray for fiscal conservatism and Dan Sullivan, the Mayor/Trustee Hybrid of the City/Insurance Company Hybrid Anchorage, Alaska.

The lone voice of reason from the Assembly on this one was Harriet Drummond.

“If there were enough (Assembly members) who realized this was stupidity and voted no, then Anchorage’s taxpayers would still have $200,000 in the bank,” Drummond said later. “And the Sullivan estate could have gotten the $20,000 in premiums back. Maybe that was the appropriate thing to do. But it was certainly not appropriate for the city to be acting as an insurance company, which it is not.”

Kudos to Drummond for some common sense skepticism, and to Sean Cockerham from the ADN for some great digging on this issue.

Kids are off limits!  Remember?

So, Bristol Palin, one of those Palin children we were all admonished never to talk about because the former VP candidate’s family life was nobody’s damn business, is now going to star in a TV show.  Yes, an actual episode that the whole country can see by simply pressing a button.  It’s called “The Secret Life of the American Teenager.”  Secret?  Presumably the creators of the show feel that the more people that watch and talk about this show the better. One button, and Poof!  It’s Bristol in our living room.

Are we allowed to talk about it yet?

“Why does anyone even care about this?” Bristol was purported to have cried to her mother over the phone when her pregnancy was discovered during the 2008 campaign and instantly became national news.   The McCain campaign, in a desperate effort to “legitimize” the unplanned pregnancy, sent an airplane to pluck the baby daddy off a mountain where he was stalking sheep, hose him off and stick him in a new suit for the “we’re getting married” tour on the campaign trail.  He wasn’t thrilled, but America was, and that’s all that mattered.

During all of this, we were left with the distinct impression that these two young lovers simply wanted to be left alone to live their lives.  Bristol, we were told, didn’t like being the center of attention and would have preferred to just hole up in Wasilla on her very own self-imposed media blackout.  Understandable.

But then, came “the abstinence tour.”  Bristol, sponsored by Candies (see below), traveled the length and breadth of the land talking about the consequences of having sex when one doesn’t want a child.

Her former fiance and father of little Tripp, Levi Johnston, was disparagingly referred to as “Ricky Hollywood” by Sarah Palin for his various appearances on Entertainment Tonight, the Joy Behar Show, The Tyra Banks Show and Larry King Live.  Clearly Levi was exploiting his accidental fame for even more fame, and fortune.  Humph.  And while he was at it, he talked about birth control and how abstinence doesn’t work, and how Sarah Palin quit being the governor so she could make a lot of money.

But back to Bristol’s TV show.

The episode will feature Bristol Palin as herself, friend to the show’s protagonist who is struggling with teen pregnancy.  This brings us back to the whole uncomfortable narrative that nobody really knows how to deal with.  It goes something like this:

Nobody should have to go through what I went through.  It’s really hard, and I made a bad choice.  But, I love my adorable baby and wouldn’t trade him for anything in the world, except that I’d do things differently if I knew then what I know now, even though I know that I love my child and wouldn’t trade him for anything except the chance to go back and do it again in which case I wouldn’t ever even have had sex.  Or a baby.  Did you see my People Magazine cover with my sweet little Tripp?  And have I mentioned that I’m never having sex again because I learned that terrible terrible lesson and that’s the only way to make sure I don’t have another baby I didn’t plan for.  Isn’t Tripp just the cutest thing?  Gosh I love him.

“I am thrilled to be on this show and to be part of a program that educates teens and young adults about the consequences of teen pregnancy,” Bristol said in a statement.

And so, Bristol Palin will do her best to frame her child as something other than “a negative consequence.”

Yes, this is the same child who was supposedly going to be traumatized by having his custody battle open for the world to see.  The Palins, who fought to have the proceedings sealed, feared that media exposure might come back to haunt the young lad as he grew, they said.  Clearly, he did nothing to deserve this scrutiny and attention.  And clearly it couldn’t do anything but make his life a little more challenging than it otherwise would be.  How dare he be subjected to the magnifying glass, and all the potential psychological scarring it might bring!

After a judge’s ruling, the custody battle goes on in the light of day with the Palins filing motions right and left, and asking Levi for $1700 a month in child support.

So, I’d like to present once again that question that the younger and more innocent Bristol Palin asked all those months ago. “Why is this news?”  And the answer simply is that it is not news.  The Palins have not only crossed the line from news to entertainment, they’ve leapt across it with abandon.

Sarah is a commentator for Fox News, and best-selling author.  Todd continues his status as Iron Dog celebrity.  Levi is a Playgirl centerfold and pistachio nut spokesmodel.  Bristol is a TV star and abstinence cheerleader.  Trig is a press release topic, stage prop, and a tool for bashing bloggers and Hollywood media.  Tripp is a “consequence,” a cautionary tale that has spawned a TV appearance by his mom, and a tool of irony to get back at his father for going on TV.  The custody battle itslef is a reality show wrapped in Court TV wrapped in a soap opera.

The poor nation is doomed.  Let’s face it. We have no choice.  It’s like driving along the highway minding your own business and seeing something on the highway median – Look, it’s dancing dogs, and prancing ponies in spangles with women in bikinis standing on top, and shirtless men lifting giant weights, and a ferris wheel, and exotic creatures with stripes and spots, and a woman juggling bowling balls and hack saws,  and fireworks and clowns riding around in small cars, and banjos and balloons, and guys swallowing swords and fire, and having someone in the back seat saying “Don’t look!”

The reality is that as long as the Palins continue to wear rainbow wigs and ride around in small cars, and take their shirts off, and juggle power tools, America will keep watching.

And after a couple seasons of “The Palins” when it’s all starting to get a little predictable, fear not.  Willow and Piper are waiting in the wings.