Columns 2009

Ah, April 15. Tax day. The day all good Americans get to show their appreciation to their government for all it does for them. Smile as you mail that return. In fact, use little smiley faces on all punctuations that call for a dot on your check. 

This year, perhaps more than most, ordinary Americans have cause to give pause as they mail their return in and wonder which executive at which failed financial institution will be getting that money in their bonus to encourage them to keep up the good work.  Yep, it’s enough to make paying taxes an

It’s so good to have our governor and the legislature back at each other’s throats where they belong. For a brief moment there last year, when everyone but a few disgruntled dissidents in the legislature were involved in one group love fest, it felt as though we’d somehow fallen through the looking glass.

But we’re back now. No more love fest. No more cooperation between the governor and the legislature. The gloves are off, let the sniping ensue. And all of us pundits could not be more thrilled because, honestly, there is nothing quite as boring as peace and cooperation

In Barrow, the prosecuting attorney is thrilled to get a conviction against a man who raped a woman when both had been drinking together. According to this prosecutor, many in Barrow apparently feel the state should not even pursue that as a crime. The prosecutor adds that it’s also hard to sit women on these juries because so many women are victims of sexual abuse themselves. 

In the state legislature, the debate over parental consent for abortion for girls under 18 once again wends its tortured way through both houses of government.  Proponents of this bill have not produced any

I thought the placement of two letters in the Letters to the Editor section of the paper last Thursday was very interesting. One letter spoke to the need for training Alaska Natives so they can take some of the thousands of jobs available through their corporations and their corporations’ subsidiaries.  The hitch to shareholders getting those jobs, aside from the training component, was the fact that they are often spread across the entire world, many thousands of miles from the village the shareholder calls home.

The very next letter was about the silence emanating from the Native corporations and other

We call him Kodi because he came from Kodiak Island. He’s a Northwestern crow, one of the stars of Bird TLC’s education program. And this Saturday night, if you head over to the Captain Cook Hotel, you’ll be able to see him doing what he does best – accepting cash from all donors to help pay for his fellow birds when they are sick and injured. Hand him a bill – preferably a large one – and he will drop it in the cash jar at his feet. Hand him a worm after that and he will love you forever. 

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. The state makes a lousy parent.  It rarely remembers your birthday and it almost never takes a turn having all the relatives over for the holidays. But if you’re a kid stuck in state custody, it’s often all you have in the way of a parent except maybe for an ever changing cast of foster parents.

This is not a condemnation of the state or its system of caring for children in its custody. Given the resources we are willing to provide for this service, and given the needs of the

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread. Based on that, I’m about to be the biggest fool since…well, since the last time fiscal conservatives suddenly discovered that debt incurred by their opponents was bad as opposed to the debt incurred by their leaders.

But I digress.

The topic of this column is one that I enter upon with great trepidation for fear of the ungodly backlash that will ensue once I have made my feelings known. The subject is not the death penalty or parental notice for teenage abortions or even whether we should finally give the Malamute its

Welcome to the world as we know it, Joseph Patrick Kanayurak Stuermer. Your portion of the bill for our national debt with interest will be approximately a gazillion dollars, no personal checks accepted. Please have a certified check for the amount made out to your favorite Uncle Sam ASAP.

OK, I guess I should back up just a minute here and start at the beginning. And, thinking about it, I guess the beginning was back in 1968 when I realized that I could get a scholarship to go to nursing school in Brooklyn and a part time job that would

I was channel surfing the other night when I came upon Hugh Hefner and some young blond women promoting a show in which they appear. As best I could tell from the few moments that I sat there watching with my mouth agape and all belief in human intelligence suspended, this show was about those very young women being that very old man’s girlfriends.

The young ladies in question were about what you’d expect.  They couldn’t successfully fill out an application for Hooters but they are qualified to be Hefner’s special friends. They spent most of their airtime exhaling these

There has been quite a bit of humor surrounding the introduction of a bill by state Representative Berta Gardner to name the Malamute the Alaska state dog. I just hope the kids who worked so hard to get this bill introduced don’t find the laughter too discouraging.

You see, I think the great triumph of the Obama campaign was not its message or the medium it used. To me, its greatest triumph was the ability to get an entire generation involved in politics that had, until then, been pretty apathetic and disaffected.

Obama found a spark and nurtured it into