Columns 2016

Our Alaska Legislature has spent the past three months trying to curb sex education, get guns on college campuses, and find a way to justify staying at the Taj Mahawker. Now it claims there is simply no time left to create the long range plan needed to keep Alaska on a healthy financial footing. Legislative “leaders” say they’ll squeeze this project in next year. Could this have anything to do with this year being an election year?

If JFK wrote his book, “Profiles in Courage”, about our Alaska Legislature, it would have been a much, much shorter book. It would

I have to assume most readers will not be shocked to find out that Senator Dan Sullivan and I agree on very little. Political viewpoints don’t get much farther apart than our respective philosophies. But there are two things on which we completely agree. One is that the Marine Corps rocks. The others is that no government should be negotiating away justice for juvenile victims of sexual assault.

The stench that arose from the investigation of Senator Ted Stevens is hard to ignore. The worse of that stench is the possibility (probability?) that the government’s chief witness against Stevens, Bill

Conservatives who feel government should stay out of their way but should be all up in a woman’s business often confuse me. They think it’s wrong for government to regulate how private business is conducted. If a person running a bakery doesn’t want to bake a cake for a gay couple, then by golly, the state should not be able to force that person to do so. But if a woman wants to conduct private business with her doctor concerning her body and her reproductive system, then they feel the government should be right in that exam room handing the

If the noises emanating from Juneau are real, then we can only conclude that our legislators have it in for anyone with the audacity to be poor, needy, old or very young in Alaska. You are apparently only welcome if you meet their criteria for residency in this state. You need to be moderately young, healthy, educated, employed and in no need of any government assistance. And it probably wouldn’t hurt to be a Caucasian male or an oil company.

I’m one of those seniors who struggle each month to make ends meet so I can stay in this state.

Wow. It’s as though the legislators read my columns and decided to test my resolve to not write any advocacy pieces for programs I don’t think should have further financial cuts. I made a promise to myself that, given our current fiscal situation, everything had to be on the table in order to resolve our budget crisis. Then some committee recommended cutting all of public broadcasting funding. And further cuts were discussed for programs that help the most vulnerable in our society.

Public broadcasting has had an uphill funding battle at the state level ever since we lost the oil

According to the U. S. Department of Transportation, consumer complaints about airlines continue to flow in at astounding rates. The number of complaints about fares alone doubled in the past year. A spokeswoman for the airline industry group Airlines for American said, “despite the increase in complaints, the total number of complaints remains low relative to the number of air passengers.” (ADN 2/20/16)

This poor, delusional woman seems to think that the number of complaints in some way relates to general consumer satisfaction with air travel. Let me assure her that it doesn’t. Go to any airport in this country

Alaskans like to whine sometimes, but not always about things you’d expect them to whine about. Our whining tends to make people from the lower 48 stare at us in stunned disbelief. Yes, Donald Trump is annoying. Yes, the fact that our legislators think there is still something to be debated about the Taj Mahawker is annoying. Yes, the fact that Marco Rubio sounds like a bad R2D2 reboot is annoying. But what is most annoying this winter to Anchorites, what they are whining most about, is that it is winter and there is no snow. None. Nada. Barely a

Remember that old adage, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, there is a strong possibility that it IS a duck. You don’t need science or complicated mathematical analysis to figure that out. Most of us are mere common folk who do not wander the hallowed halls of Juneau pretending to some superior ability to complicate things that should be simple. We prefer the old KISS formula. Keep it simple, stupid.

All this comes to mind as I read the dueling reports coming out of Juneau over the relative merits of moving

My maternal grandparents were married on the same date that would, years later, become my birthday. Given that I am the grandchild of immigrants with no connection to the families left behind in Italy, any little piece of information like this is another thread tying me to people I never really knew.

My grandparents emigrated a little over 100 years ago. They came to America with no money, no English and limited skills. The only things they had was their traditions and the hope that this new life would be better for their children than what they’d left behind. Three

There are some who will claim that this weekend’s earthquake was the result of some natural phenomena concerning plate tectonics or some such thing. There are others who will claim it is nature’s reaction to Trump and Palin being in the same space at the same time – some sort of cosmic overload. I think it was God’s way of telling us we were becoming much too complacent. Just because She’s been sending most of her disasters south recently, we shouldn’t assume She doesn’t have a few left for us.

I reacted as I usually do in an emergency. First