Help me out with this. If I work in the real world and have a boss who hands me a priority assignment and a deadline, doesn’t my future in that job pretty much depend on getting it done in a timely fashion? Seriously, how many of us have bosses who would allow us to routinely ignore their priorities? How many would just keep giving us extensions because we decided we had our own priorities, priorities that weren’t necessarily what our boss had in mind. I’m guessing that out there in the real world, your boss would start questioning your importance to his or her organization. Your job might even end up in jeopardy.
So how is it that our Legislature has once again found itself absolutely surprised and astounded that the session is ending and they haven’t managed to do anything about the one thing their constituents actually think is the most important priority of the current session? How is it we watch this year after year and never question our sanity in sending these people back down there and hoping this once they’ll get it done on time?
I’m not saying that some of the bills that actually got passed weren’t important. But sometimes it seemed some legislators were hell bent on creating problems that didn’t exist in order to craft solutions that served very specific special interests, interests that might have deep pockets for their upcoming re-election bids. Other times they seemed simply tone deaf to what their constituent were saying.
Maybe I’m not getting it, but given the staunch opposition to abortions among some of our legislators, how do they justify trying to keep people out of our schools that have the best chance of teaching teens how to not get pregnant? And if anyone even tries to reference that old canard about abstinence being the best way to go, I think they need to do two things: One, think back to their teen years and two, Bristol Palin. If you want to stop abortions and STDs, then you teach teens how to handle the incredible forces swirling around them, from peer pressure to hormones, and you give them the tools they need to make safe decisions. Teens have been having sex since sex was invented. Like with the War on Drugs, just say no is not a very viable solution.
But there’s more. At a time when they should have been solely focused on digging us out of the multibillion dollar hole in our budget, they were busy trying to get guns on UA campuses despite the objections of just about anyone with an ounce of common sense. Seriously, guns, teens, drugs and alcohol… what could possibly go wrong?
Finally, my all time favorite decision to come out of this ship of fools: Let’s not build that school they need in Kivolina, let’s buy ourselves a glass walled building so we can look down with disdain at the peons with the pitchforks. Their torches can’t burn glass.
So here we are again, at a time when the session should be at an end. Instead we hear talk of extended sessions and special sessions because if there is one way to dig us out of the fiscal hole we’re in, it’s by running up the bill for legislative sessions.
The Republicans are saying they have a bill they could pass on the budget if those darn Democrats weren’t holding things up. Really? You just now realized that pretty much ignoring them throughout the regular session wasn’t a good idea? You thought you’d wait until the last possible moment and then pick up the phone and say “Oh yeah, BTW, did you want to have any input into the budget since we need your vote to get money from the Constitutional Budget Reserve?”
In the real world, these clowns would have been fired a long time ago. Alaskans sent them to Juneau with the clear priority of balancing our budget. Survey after survey shows the majority of Alaskans know the free ride is over and we have to start bearing our share of the burden. In fact, the only people who don’t seem to know this are the Republican majority in Juneau. Which is the best argument you will ever hear for not sending this clown car full of the same bozos back there next year.