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March 29, 2024

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No Time for Tuckerman -

Thursday, August 3, 2023

The Quitter Returns! -

Monday, March 21, 2022

Putting the goober in gubernatorial -

Friday, January 28, 2022

Anchorage Redistricted with No Public Input

It was a big night at Tuesday’s Anchorage Assembly Meeting. The Anchorage School District Budget was passed, as was both the Municipal Operating Budget and the Municipal Capital Budget. However, I was there for the item that was slipped in towards the end. It was the first, last and only public meeting dedicated to Municipal Reapportionment…another word for Redistricting. You may be surprised to hear that the Assembly has been working on Reapportionment at all. You are not alone. If you remember the gerrymandering farce known as the State Redistricting process, the public meetings went on for months before anything…

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Oyster Roundup Deluxe Election Smorgasbord!

This is really more like a bag of Halloween goodies than an oyster platter. Enjoy! Quote of the Week: “Please, I’m begging you. Go vote for this guy. He’s awesome!” ~Bob Lester of the Bob & Mark Show on KWHL about State Senate candidate Ron Devon. Party’s Over! Remember the breathless complaint that was filed against Senator Hollis French, and Putting Alaskans First? The Party Planner was all in a tizzy because they used the same APOC savvy bookkeeper, and the same production company to do their commercials. Ergo, they must be in cahoots and illegally coordinating the two campaigns,…

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Treadwell Oversees & Meddles in Elections

‘Tis the season of the robocall. We all get them at some point – reminding us about a fundraiser, or from a candidate seeking our vote. Occasionally a candidate will get someone to call on his or her behalf. It’s usually not the sitting Lieutenant Governor. Yes boys and girls, if you live in the Valley, you may have gotten a robocall from Lite Gov Mead Treadwell singing the praises of local Tea Party types Larry Devilbiss for Mayor and Ron Arvin for Borough Assembly. Here’s what one of them said: “This is Mead Treadwell. The Mat-Su Borough has made…

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Muni Played Favorites With Ballots (*Update*)

In last week’s installment of the Municipality of Anchorage’s continuing 2012 Election debacle, new Municipal Clerk Barbara Jones made a disturbing find while attempting to (quite literally) clean up the old Municipal Clerk’s mess…141 unaccounted-for ballots. This has led the trusty Election Commission to meet this coming Thursday and review the ballots they missed the first two times around. While all of that has been going on, members of our Recount Observation Team have continued to research and slowly pursue the auditing process the Municipality has refused to provide. …and it’s been free of charge… The latest bombshell was discovered…

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The Wrath of Captain Zero

Well, somebody’s still mad. After he didn’t get his way during the legislative session, he broke his crayons and went home. After Governor Sean Parnell’s embarrassingly botched special session that cost Alaskans upwards of $30,000 a day, in which his woefully underprepared administration tried in vain to get the Alaska Senate to green light his second $2 billion dollar a year, no-strings-attached, prezzie to the oil companies, he’s now got another plan. Revenge. It didn’t register with the governor that Alaskans actually didn’t like his oil tax plan. They didn’t like the idea of moving $10 billion over the next…

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Election Commissioner and Deputy Clerk Should Be Relieved of Duty

Brad Friedman, an award-winning investigative journalist and expert on issues of election integrity, and the Diebold AccuVote system used in the recent Anchorage Municipal election, had comments about inaccuracies told by the Election Commissioner Gwen Mathew at last night’s meeting of the Assembly to certify the election. His outrage, and call for both Mathew, and Deputy Clerk Jacqueline Duke to be removed from their posts immediately, is a sentiment shared by a growing number of Anchorage residents who are becoming more informed regarding their ineptitude and outright misinformation. Here are Friedman’s comments after watching Mathew’s testimony at Thursdays Assembly meeting,…

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Alaska Republican Convention Gets Paulverized

I don’t mean to gloat. I’m not generally a gloater. Schadenfreude is not my thing. But if I were going to gloat, now would be the time. Hypothetically. It seems… how shall I put this delicately… the the Alaska Republican Convention has turned into what their one time golden child Sarah Palin would call – “a cluster.” @AnchTeaParty on Twitter was kind enough to tweet live from the convention: 17:20 Still no results on election of #Alaska Party Chair. Saying we must leave the hotel ballroom now. 17:21 Chair just declared the convention adjourned with no vote to adjourn and no…

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Parnell Kills His Own Special Session. Blames Senate. Pouts.

Things aren’t going well for Sean Parnell. It all started last week when he called the legislature into special session to talk about three things, the most difficult and contentious of which was oil and gas production taxes. The governor sent his team to Juneau with a bill. For purposes of readability, we’ll refer to this bill (SB3001) as what it is metaphorically – a cow pie. Hatching the Idea What the governor wanted in this new “hybrid” bill was to give all kinds of breaks to big oil companies for fields that are already producing, and not so much…

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Quitter 2.0 – Parnell Breaks Hockey Stick, Says ‘Puck You.’

    And the crowd goes wild! Remember when I compared the Resources Committee meeting of the State Senate to a hockey game, and said I thought that they ought to have a rule just like in the peewee leagues, where when one team is like 20 points up they just call the game so the other side can slink away and lick their wounds instead of continuing to endure the public humiliation? Well, guess what? Even though that rule doesn’t exist, Bryan Butcher, Bruce Tangeman, and Co. have been recalled back to the locker room. That’s right – Parnell’s…

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Municipal Election Commission Releases Report – Let the Whitewashing Begin!

~The security seal used to secure memory cards into Anchorage’s insecure Diebold AccuVote machines. Today in the Mayor’s conference room in City Hall, the Election Commission released the results of its report and recommendations, including revised numbers that say that 65 of 121 precincts ran out of ballots at some point during the day – a higher total than the 55 previously reported. The commission’s report came after two meetings with voters and poll workers who spoke one-on-one with an individual election commissioner. Mudflats contributor Elstun Lauesen was there today when Commission Chair Gwen Matthew read the entire report aloud….

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