Here’s a comment from a reader—nominally edited–on the piece I wrote on Senate candidate Dan Sullivan’s seeming lack of knowledge of healthcare. I found it particularly interesting because the writer, like me, is insured under ObamaCare. And although this person has realized the benefits of the program, he/she still remains opposed:

I appreciate your analysis and personal touch in this article. I somewhat ironically remain opposed to the ACA despite being on the exchange for the better part of a year. I can appreciate the benefits the ACA brings to the under-served and marginalized portions of the population–especially in terms of the relativity cost effective Medicaid expansion and emphasis on preventative care. My experience on the exchange was not terrible. It was difficult to navigate, but I didn’t really experience any of the horrible glitches. Going on the exchange allowed me to work as a private contractor and cut my hours from 45 a week to 38 and I appreciated having that flexibly.

My problems with the ACA stem less from the practical merits Continue reading →

• FiveThirtyEight came out with their own Senate Forecast on Alaska’s U.S. Senate race resulting in Dan Sullivan having a 76% chance of winning in November. Harry Enten wrote a supplemental article to explain the details of the poll’s results.

• The Washington Times has a review about the new book on the prosecution of Ted Stevens, written by Rob Cary, a lawyer on the Stevens defense team. Full disclosure: the review is written by my father, who, if you read it, you can tell is a big fan of mine.

• In the coming years, politicians will determine the finer points of how ObamaCare affects our medical care. U.S. Senate candidate, Dan Sullivan has shown fundamental lack of understanding regarding this very important issue. His lack of healthcare knowledge has also been highlighted by the Dispatch and now by the HuffingtonPost.

• FactCheck.org has found that two of Senator Mark Begich’s ads are bogus regarding his claim that he “voted against Obama’s trillion-dollar tax increase.” In actuality, Sen. Begich voted against a resolution as part of fiscal year 2013’s spending levels. The particular ads in question are his campaign’s “Two Views” (otherwise known as Cheap Chic) and “Reprise”.

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Full disclosure: I’ve been a longtime supporter of ObamaCare, if nothing else because of my own personal experience with trying to get healthcare as a self-employed female with a pre-existing condition. Until the healthcare law was passed, I was one of millions of Americans who were caught in the outlandishly expensive and capricious mess of high risk health insurance pools, ones whose monthly premiums were twice my mortgage, and didn’t cover anything anyway.

In other words, I’m a little biased. But then again, so might be roughly 15,000 Alaskans, many of whom have affordable health insurance for the first time in their lives under the Affordable Care Act.

Senate candidate Dan Sullivan has run a pretty decent campaign so far. His philosophy has, by and large, gelled nicely with a large hunk of the electorate. And he has lived a life, apparently, that’s been able to hold up to scrutiny. Mostly, he hasn’t made a huge gaffe, which is pretty impressive considering that this is his first time running for office, ever. Continue reading →

For those of you who still have an interest in the infamous Palin family brawl, you can click here to read the witness statements released by the Anchorage Police Department. Some of the details are contradictory, but basically the outline of the story is consistent with what was initially reported: There were two big fights. Alcohol was involved, Track was shirtless and was bloodied. Todd entered the fray. Bristol punched the host repeatedly in the face. But what REALLY seemed to really tick everyone off was that people were calling each other names. All that’s missing is Sarah yelling at fighting crowd, “Do you know who I am?” But then again, that’s not something you’d think to tell the cops.

• CNN/ORC International has just released a new poll on Alaska’s Senate and governor’s race. According to the poll, Dan Sullivan is ahead by 6 percentage points, and Bill Walker leads with 51 percent of the vote. Needless to say, the internet is going gangbusters: Read Politico, Bloomberg, 12NewsNow, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal for more.

• Not to be outdone, Fox News has come out with their own poll on U.S. Senate races including Alaska’s. According their results, Dan Sullivan has a 4 percentage point lead over Sen. Mark Begich. The Hill has an article about both the Fox News and the CNN/ORC International polling results.

• Anchorage Mayoral candidate, Dan Coffey is mad at Lt. Governor Mead Treadwell for misrepresenting his stance on AO37.

• Is pot wining by 18 points or is it down by 10? Two different  local pollsters have two different numbers. I report, you decide.

• The AFL-CIO has an article that gives 4 KEY reasons why U.S. Senate Dan Sullivan is the worst candidate for workers.

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The Dispatch and APRN have joined forces to sue Gov. Sean Parnell’s administration to get public records relating to the National Guard scandal. The Dispatch and APRN claim:

…the governor’s office has been wrongly denying public records requests that could help voters verify whether Parnell acted swiftly in dealing with numerous allegations about mishandled sexual assaults, harassment, fraud, favoritism and other misconduct, including abuse of power, within the guard over the past several years. The two media outlets made the decision to sue after public records requests by their reporters were met with long delays and ultimately rejected by Randal Ruaro, the policy director and special counsel in the governor’s office, in broad-sweeping denial letters.

It took the state four months to deny APRN’s records request, and more than three months to deny Alaska Dispatch News’ request.

They’re also asking the court to order the Parnell administration to turn over emails related to the scandal that Parnell’s chief of staff, Mike Nizich, received on his personal account.

As I’ve said before, Parnell couldn’t have handled this in a worse way.

In response to Ivan Moore’s poll showing that the ballot measure to legalize pot was up by an eye-popping 18 percentage points, Dittman Research, whose firm has historically been accurate in its polling, released its own poll that showed that the measure was losing by 10 percentage points, 43 percent to 53 percent. Moore’s question was paid for by the group that is working to legalize pot in Alaska. Dittman is working for the group fighting against legalization.

Dittman’s poll was conducted Sept. 30 through October 3. Six hundred likely registered voters were surveyed. The margin of error is plus or minus 4 percent. Dittman’s sample, as was Moore’s, was representative of the general election voter population in Alaska in age and party affiliation. Thirty one percent of Dittman’s sample were contacted via cell phones.

Moore’s poll was touted by the pro-legalization group as the only public poll released so far that reflects the language that is going to be on the ballot, and the only poll that had a true representative sample of “cell phones only” users, which Moore said is “highly significant.”

However, in his poll, Moore’s question includes the phrase “constitutional protections,” which isn’t in the ballot initiative language. (See the exact initiative text below.) Moore’s poll also asks if they “favor” or “oppose” the initiative, as opposed to whether or not they planned to vote “yes” or “no.”

Here’s the Dittman poll question, Continue reading →

David Holthouse, editor of the Anchorage Press, broke yet another highly damning story about the Alaska National Guard. Holthouse somehow got a hold of a confidential military report that focused on Lt. Col. Joseph R. Lawendowski, who is the guard’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations and Training. The March 3 report says that he was recommended for “other than honorable” discharge, for, among other things, allowing “recruiters to sexually assault and harass female soldiers, recruits and civilians,” while he was commander of the Alaska Army National Guard Recruiting and Retention Battalion (RRB).

And there’s more, including the fact that Lawendowski was the owner of a pornography company and co-founder of an “’end times’ fundamentalist group. Read the must-read here.

According to a question on a poll conducted by local pollster Ivan Moore, Ballot Measure 2, which would tax and regulate marijuana like alcohol, is winning in the state by about 18 percentage points, 57.2 percent to 38.7 percent The question about the measure was paid for by the group working to legalize pot in Alaska, and was asked as part of a larger poll that Moore was conducting. The sample size was 568 likely voters, and was conducted Sept. 26-30. The margin of error is 4.1 percent. (I’m waiting for the complete demographics.)

Taylor Bickford, who’s running the legalization campaign, said that the numbers seem a little optimistic to him. Older internal polls showed the campaign winning, but by a slimmer margin, he said. However, the poll is significant in that it’s the first public poll that asks the question exactly as it will appear on the ballot. A highly touted August PPP poll which showed the measure losing messed up the wording in the question. Further, the PPP poll didn’t call cell phones, which are a key demographic in this race.

Here was how the question was phrased:

There is an initiative on the General election ballot that would tax and regulate the production, sale, and use of marijuana in Alaska. Criminal penalties would be removed for adults over the age of 21 who possess up to an ounce of marijuana, and constitutional protections allowing home cultivation would be preserved.

Here’s the results:

• Favor: 57.2%
• Oppose: 38.7%
• Neutral/Undecided: 4.2%

• Katie John’s son, Fred John Jr., has a moving compass piece in the Dispatch about his mother’s legacy to preserve Alaskan Native rights and the role Dan Sullivan played by suing her and taking the state’s case to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

• Scott Kawasaki and David Guttenberg were the two Interior legislators that said at the Greater Fairbanks Chamber of Commerce that they were backing Ballot Measure 2, the initiative to legalize recreational use of marijuana. The Fairbanks News Miner has the lowdown on where the other Fairbanks area candidates stand on 2, and on the other ballot measures.

• LA Times columnist Doyle McManus calls Mark Begich’s Jerry Active ad “the worst Democratic attack ad of the Senate race.” And TIME calls it one of the five most dishonest political ads of the year.

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Senate District C’s delegation is likely to return to Juneau with at least one, if not two new faces representing the district. The district combines parts of Fairbanks with rural Interior Alaska. It’s a cold and unruly place, with an incredibly involved and unpredictable populace. Talk to them one minute and you think you’re among ruby-red Republicans. Another and you’d swear that everyone’s a Karl Marx disciple. And let’s not forget the villages, which offer their own unique flavor of politics. It’s my idea of heaven, for one day anyway, in July, armed with bug dope.

Here’s an overview of the Senate race and the two House seats in the district, and my take on the state of the races, for what it’s worth: Continue reading →

Here’s the results from the three mayoral races–the Kenai Borough, the City of Wasilla, and the North Slope Borough–that I profiled earlier: 

From the Peninsula Clarion:

With 26 of 29 precincts reporting, unofficial election results show Mike Navarre retaining his seat as Kenai Peninsula Borough mayor in Tuesday’s municipal election. Navarre has 53.42 percent of the vote. Challenger Tom Bearup collected 36.62 percent of the vote, while Carrol Martin has 9.43 percent.

From the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman:

The contested mayor’s race went to Deputy City Administrator Bert Cottle who pulled in nearly 75 percent of the vote, raking in 566 votes to city planning commissioner Loren Means’ 188. This will be the second time Cottle has been mayor of a city; he previously served as mayor of Valdez.

From the North Slope Borough:

Incumbent Mayor Charlotte Brower wins against former NSB Mayor George Ahmaogak. Here’s the unofficial total, with all villages counted but without 67 absentees that still need to be counted:

• Brower: 935
• Ahmaogak: 816

Here’s Brower’s statement on her win: Continue reading →

For all intents and purposes, the constitutional ban on gay marriage in Alaska and other Western states was struck down on Tuesday by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

The court overturned bans in Nevada and Idaho specifically, saying that such bans violate gay couples’ equal protection rights. Alaska is part of the 9th Circuit, so presumably that ruling stands in this state as well.

The State of Alaska is likely to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. However, it’s improbable that the high court will overturn the 9th Circuit’s decision, just as it didn’t overturn another circuit’s ruling on Monday.

The state voted in 1998 to amend its constitution to include the gay marriage ban. A case challenging that ban is scheduled to be heard in federal court in Anchorage on Friday.

I’ve got calls into the Department of Law, the governor’s office and the ACLU. I’ll update when I get more information.

Updated: A spokesperson for the Department of Law said that the department is still reviewing the decision and as of today, the state still plans to challenge the case on Friday. Gov. Sean Parnell declined to comment pending DOL’s review. Josh Decker, executive director of the ACLU of Alaska, said that the court “squarely and conclusively rejected” Idaho’s and Nevada’s marriage bans. He also said that there is “no daylight” between what Idaho and Nevada were arguing in defending their bans, and what Alaska has argued defending its ban. And because the 9th Circuit controls Alaska, the state should declare Alaska’s ban unconstitutional. To not do so would be to “continue to waste taxpayer dollars,” Decker said.

If the state continues to insist on defending the ban, it’ll be very interesting to see what U.S. District Judge Timothy Burgess does with this on Friday afternoon. There a possibility that he could rule from the bench, which would be a lot of dramatic fun.