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March 28, 2024

Headlines:

No Time for Tuckerman -

Thursday, August 3, 2023

The Quitter Returns! -

Monday, March 21, 2022

Putting the goober in gubernatorial -

Friday, January 28, 2022

  • No Time for Tuckerman

    Time. It is precious, they say. It flies, they say. And former Republican Party Chair, former Dunleavy Chief of Staff, and now former University of Alaska Regent Tuckerman Babcock has none of it. Again. As Alaska Republican Party Chair, Babcock was the chief architect of the cannibalization of that Party. He loved the purity test, and if you were a Republican in the legislature and you weren’t far-right authoritarian enough, you were in his crosshairs and some extreme fringy candidate would be drummed up to run against you. And those monsters wasted no time destroying their makers. “RINO!” they cried….

  • The Quitter Returns!

    Alaska has lost its longest serving member of Congress, Don Young, who took office in 1973. He was 88 years old and the majority of Alaskans have never known another Congressional Representative. He’s like the Queen Victoria or the Ramses II of the Great Land. Young has yet to be interred, awaiting March 29 when he will lie in state at the US Capitol, and guess who’s already willing to fill his “huge shoes” 72 hours after his death? Yep, the former half-governor has decided she’d like to un-quit politics now. After ditching the governor’s mansion permanently to skip off…

  • Putting the goober in gubernatorial

    POLITICAL THEATER Oh, fantasy! I love that genre! This week’s big dose of live entertainment fiction was Governor Dunleavy’s State of the State address, and thank goodness we didn’t have to pay for a ticket. The state of the state, (often referred to as the SoS) was an SOS indeed, and was met by those who’ve been in the thick of the Dunleavy disaster with slack jaws and utter disbelief. Dunleavy apparently believes that Alaskans have the long-term memory of a goldfish and have completely forgotten the first three years of his administration and the vital state services he fought…

  • TALLZ UNITE!*

    *unless they don’t Today, Donald Trump and whatever remains of his organization issued a proclamation/extortion notice to his BF(maybe forever) Governor Mike Dunleavy. He will completely and totally endorse Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s reelection campaign! Why? Because, the Florida retiree says, he’s a strong conservative. He hearts the Constitution, “including the second and tenth Amendments.” He says Alaska needs Mike Dunleavy “now more than ever” which has earned the Tall One his “Complete and Total Endorsement [sic].” UNLESS Dunleavy endorses Lisa Murkowski. That’s right. Even though Trump proudly endorsed Governor from Wasilla 2.0 the first time and thinks he’s done a…

  • Ex-Palin lawyer reported source of Gosar’s ‘most toxic’ media

    You go for years without thinking about Thomas Van Flein, former Palin attorney and current Chief of Staff of Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Arizona), and then wham – he’s everywhere. And in a very bad way. Van Flein’s boss was censured by Congress yesterday for posting an anti-immigrant anime video which depicted Gosar murdering Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), and attacking President Biden. Censure doesn’t happen very often. The last time the body believed a member deserved that particular level of smack-down was in 1983. Two Republicans voted with Democrats in the mostly partisan vote. While censure doesn’t have legal teeth, it…

Headlines

Crested Guan, Costa Rica

Return of Bird of the Week: Crested Guan

Oct 17, 2020

Last week you met your first Guan, the Black Guan. This week it’s a close cousin, the Crested Guan, another arboreal Cracid. Crested Guan, Costa Rica The Crested Guan is much larger than the Black, and is one of the largest of its genus, coming in at more than two kilograms. The bright red dewlap, red legs, black body, white-scalloped chest feathers and brownish tail make it another very distinctive species. And noisiest: not only does it have a loud, repetitive honking call, when it flies from tree to tree its landing sounds like a train wreck. For a species…

Don Young Touts Phony “Most Effective” Rating

Oct 13, 2020

Amid the flurry of political ads this fall – mostly for Alaska’s hotly-contested federal races – one really stands out for anyone who’s more than an election season quarterback. And it is this: “Don Young was recently rated the most effective member of Congress.” Sorry if I made you spit your coffee. So, how does one achieve this coveted “most effective” rating when, like Don Young, one has not even passed one single bill last session, and barely managed to squeak one by in only the House? Good question. Apparently the measuring stick for this phony rating is that you…

Governor, Senator, & Republicans Caught in the Act

Oct 10, 2020

YOU DON’T WANNA BE LIKE MIKE It’s one thing when the “I wanna be like Trump” Governor decides (hours after telling Alaskans to mask up and keep their social bubble small) to show up at a swanky cocktail party fundraiser on the Anchorage Hillside. But it’s another level of irony to be outed by the bumbling ineptitude of your own propagandist. Dunleavy’s blogger, Suzanne Downing/Must Read Alaska, begins this weird video foray into the underground world of unsanitary Republican fundraisers by looking at the sunset and musing, “An orange, orange view for an orange president… although he looked a little…

Black Guan, Costa Rica

Return of Bird of the Week: Black Guan

Oct 10, 2020

While there are many other species of Curassow, WC hasn’t been able to photograph them, so we’ll switch to another clade of Cracidae, the Guans. And we’ll start with the Black Guan. It’s not a bird you’re likely to confuse with any other: black body, blue nares, bright red legs and bright red eye, it’s an arboreal cracid (WC likes that description and worked to find a way to get it into the blog post). It’s considerably smaller than the Curassows; just 69 centimeters long and weights a little over a kilogram. It’s less vocal than other guans, it’s unusual…

Meet Your Republican Candidates, & Bring the Popcorn

Oct 3, 2020

It’s hard to know where to begin these days, but let’s start with something nasty that’s brewing which will directly affect the policy positions of Republican candidates, and tells us exactly what to expect if Republicans manage to take back the majority in the State House this November. HINT: It’s going to look a lot like the horrific beginning of last session only there won’t be anyone to stop it. WHAT AR THEY DUIN? A strained pun is about the best you can get out of the absolute fiscal disaster the Republican Party is cooking up. Remember when Tuckerman Babcock,…

Bare-faced Curassow Female, Pantanal, Brazil

Return of Bird of the Week: Bare-faced Curassow

Oct 3, 2020

This is a smaller relative of last week’s Great Curassow, found in the Amazon basin and down into Paraguay and Argentina. It’s also sexually dimorphic. The males is black, with a white belly, extensive bare, black skin around the eye and a bi-colored, black and yellow bill. The crest is tightly curled black feathers. The female is a beautiful bird, with a rufous belly, barred back and tail and a splendid crest. This is a crepuscular species, usually out only in the predawn and evening twilight. It usually emerges from the forest into clearings to foage, as these two birds…

Great Curassow Female, Costa Rica

Return of Bird of the Week: Great Curassow

Sep 26, 2020

As promised, we’ll leave the obscure Puffbird family behind and shift the focus to the much larger, but even more obscure family Cracidae. These are the Curassows, Guans and Chachalacas of Neotropical forests. Prized by Native Americans as game birds, they have developed a healthy wariness of humankind. Those that weren’t wary became dinner, after all. There are 54 species of Cracidae; WC has photographed only a bare handful of them. To say they are secretive doesn’t begin to describe it. Birds in this family look somewhat like turkeys or pheasants, but those are distant relatives. We’ll start with the…

Alaska Politicians Exposed – Stooges, Shills & Shenanigans

Sep 22, 2020

TALL TALES from Juneau and the DC Debacle   AND IT’S ALLLL ON TAPE Sometimes you know things, but it’s nice to have them proven right out loud, through dramatic and surreptitious means. Such is the case with the immediately infamous “Pebble tapes.” If you haven’t heard them, make yourself a beverage and get ready to be a fly on the wall as your beautiful state and all its salmon get sold down the river (not the beautiful blue Nushagak of today – the contaminated, cyanide-filled Nushagak of tomorrow). We now know what our elected Republican leadership thinks of us,…