Interesting Items by Alex Gimarc, August 2008

1. Begich. One of the things that Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich (D) has been relying on in his bid to be elected to the US Senate is the federal indictment of incumbent Senator Ted Stevens (R, AK) on seven counts of failing to disclose all required financial information. Interestingly enough, Candidate Begich has the same sort of problem with his financial disclosure statements, as there are substantial differences between what he has told the state he has in his candidate disclosure forms and what he told the US Senate in their financial disclosure forms. Hugh Pierre, connected with the Republican P arty of Alaska filed a complaint on July 31 detailing a series of significant omissions by Begich. They include (but are not limited to) the following: Failed to report Public Employee Retirement System income for both himself and his wife to the state; failed to disclose bank account and dividends to the state; failed to report savings bonds and income for his wife to the state; failed to report his wife’s position in the National Bank of Greece to the state; failed to report a variety of stock and bond holdings – including the natural gas pipeline contractor TransCanada – to the state; failed to report his ownership and income from a “Hot Springs, Limited Resort” in Carson City, Nevada to the state. Ever heard of the Bunny Ranch north of Las Vegas? The business conducted in Carson City is rumored to be the same. If you total the dollar amounts not reported by Mayor Begich, they st art approaching the qu arter million dollars that Ted Stevens has been indicted for failing to report, leading locals to question why Mr. Begich has not been similarly scrutinized or indicted by the feds. This is probably not the outcome that neither Mr. Begich nor the DSCC wanted. The Begich campaign responded as expected, first by calling the complaint filer a p arty hack (so what, especially if what he has filed with the State of Alaska is accurate?) and then noting that the failure to disclose was all done at the state level, so it is a state issue rather than a federal one. Note that I am not writing this in defense of Ted Stevens, as he will go through the prosecution and trial and the jury will have its say at the end. And I am not doing the Clintonoid “So’s your old man” routine. However, if you are running as the paragon of virtue; running as the cleanest of the clean; running on reform, goodness, sweetness, motherhood, and apple pie, you bloody well ought to be squeaky clean yourself. Mayor Begich is playing fast and loose with his financial disclosure and getting a free pass by local, state and national media simply because he is a clean-cut, young, smiling democrat. He will likely get a similar pass from the federal prosecutors investigating corruption in Alaskan politics, simply because he belongs to the right p arty. The difference between democrats and Republicans continues: If a Republican has legal problems, you will always know, and will be able to remove him or her from office immediately. With a democrat, you will never know, and they will always get a free pass from a friendly media. I expect the double standard, as it helps us jettison the bad guys on our side of the political fence. It does make it more difficult to clean up the other side of the political divide, but what else is new?

2. Ice. A pair of stories on Arctic sea ice this week. The first comes from the Strata Sphere Thursday which noted that 2008 had the largest arctic sea ice extent in the last four years. The data was released by the feds on August 15. The second was the very next day on Friday, an AP story in the local fishwrapper, the Anchorage Daily News about federal wildlife monitors in the Chukchi Sea spotting nine polar bears swimming in the ocean. The story went on to attempt to justify listing of the bears as endangered because all arctic ice is predicted to be gone in 50 years. I think they drew the wrong conclusions, for if the wildlife monitors managed to spot this many bears in a short period of time, perhaps it is because their numbers are increasing rather than decreasing. If the solar astronomers are correct and we are entering a period of decreased solar activity, the problem in the arctic will be with too little open water for the bears to hint seals in rather than too much open water.

3. Ayres. You can always tell a man by the friends he keeps. And Barack Obama is no different. One of his good friends over the last couple decades in Chicago is a convicted terrorist, a Weather Underground radical who p articipated in bombing the Pentagon in the 1970s, William Ayres. Today, Ayres is a tenured Prof at the University of Illinois and completely unrepentant about trying to blow up the Pentagon. He is also a long time political collaborator with Barack Obama. The extent of that collaboration is unknown at this time because the University library has decided to stonewall freedom of information requests for documents of their collaboration on the Board overseeing the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a vehicle for funneling private donations to schools. Normally this sort of murky setup serves to enrich the university leftists and other insiders involved with funneling money here, there and yonder. Perhaps this is why Friends of Barack and William Ayers don’t want the information to see the light of day. Hot Air, Weds.

4. Infanticide. Barack Obama has also managed to bring the issue of abortion back into the forefront of the presidential campaign with yet another pair of missteps. The first took place a week ago at a pseudo debate at the Saddleback Church in Colorado. Obama was asked when he thought that life began. He responded that the answer was well above his pay grade and he could not make that decision. The second comes with his support for infanticide in Illinois and his lies about that support. There is an abortion procedure used in Illinois which induces labor on the mother. About 10-20% of the babies are born alive and then put aside and allowed to die. Lifetimes for these poor, unwanted innocents range from minutes to hours. This has been going on for years and years in hospitals throughout Illinois. While Obama was in the Illinois State Senate, the scandal burst, and legislation was pushed to require normal medical assistance to be rendered to these children born alive. Obama fought that legislation with every inch of his being, successfully killing it in 2003. He has since lied about both the intent of the legislation and his efforts to kill it. Those lies have been exposed and Obama now has to defend himself. Democrats appear to be on the verge of nominating their most life-hostile candidate in history. Hot Air, Mon.

5. Schumer. Former employees of IndyMac Bancorp, the California bank driven out of business after a leaked letter of concern by Chuckie Schumer (D, NY) hit the streets, filed a complaint with the State of California Attorney General over the leak. The Attorney General, former California Governor Jerry Brown will look into the complaint and possibly mount an investigation against Schumer. Schumer’s letter of concern was sent to the FDIC and Office of Thrift Supervision based on his role as a member of the Senate banking Committee, and as with most things Schumer, was intended to get face time for him on the drive-by media. Unfortunately this letter triggered a run on the bank, which had a substantial home mortgage portfolio in the subprime market. The run on the bank triggered a federal bailout on those that were defaulting on their loans. The run on the bank also hosed those mortgage holders who were paying their loans on time. We will hope that Schumer gets his just deserves. I am not holding my breath, however. LGF, Thurs.

1. Palin. One of the techniques that democrats and their toadies in the drive-by media have perfected over the last 40 or so years is the art of politically inspired investigations, indictments, and the incessant drumbeat of allegations – true and otherwise – in local and national media. Eventually the conservative target of such an assault runs out of money, gives up, or is hounded from office in disgrace. Democrats do this well. They are raised on it. And they use it their primary vehicle into higher office. Such is the game here in Alaska, where Governor Palin, who ran as a squeaky-clean candidate, willing at the drop of a hat to demand instantaneous resignation of any Republican with any question of impropriety. Last month, Palin fired Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan. The firing came as a surprise to most observers, as Monegan was popular and appeared to be doing his job well. As the days went by, information st arted dribbling out of the state government that he was fired because he refused to remove from state employment a state trooper who was Palin’s former brother in law. The trooper had been involved in a very nasty divorce and custody fight, and the fight was family-wide, with various Palin family members filing nearly 40 official complaints against him over the course of a couple of years. The event has opened Palin into charges of abuse of office, for while she does have the ability to hire and fire her political appointees at will, she does not have the ability to reach down into the state bureaucracy and do the same thing. We are now at the point where there are over 1,100 e-mails being sequestered by the governor. We have democrat state senators demanding and getting a special investigator appointed to look into it. We have the legislature getting involved. And we have the involvement of Palin’s husband in state business. The event has progressed to the point where Palin aides have claimed that they were the ones who were pressuring Monegan to fire the trooper. Finally, Palin has contacted the Attorney General to st art his own investigation. One of the local political observers (anti-Palin) pointed out late last week that this has progressed to about the point that Watergate had prior to the infamous Saturday Night Massacre in 1973. A few observations are in order. First: Never, ever run on a platform of being clean as the driven snow, as you will make yourself far more vulnerable to being removed from office over ethical lapses than someone who runs on other issues. Second: Be very, very careful about demanding resignations of people on your side of the political divide, as you will look a bit silly when you are caught up in an accusation (and if there are leftists involved, there will ALWAYS be accusations made against you), and don’t resign. Third: This is a small state, and people have long memories. If you dish it out, you probably ought to be able to stand up and take the return fire. Finally: When anything like this comes up, come clean, and do it immediately. Otherwise, the democrat investigation / scandal machine will crank up and eat you alive. Don’t know how this is going to work out. It has opened the door for Palin’s political opponents on both sides of the political divide to go after her. It has opened the door for democrats to crank their scandal machine, which is their best historical vehicle back to political power.

2. Begich. Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich just gave his Republican opponent in the November election (likely Ted Stevens) a couple issues that may very well turn the election against him in November. The issue is bears and his response to their marauding in local parks. Following the second mauling of a jogger in Far North Bicentennial Park last week, Mayor Begich ordered the trail closed, ceding control of the land to the wildlife. He did not order the bears hunted and killed. He removed access for the general public. How may this turn against him in the general election? The US Senate has the responsibility to declare war, fund armed conflict, and provide for the common defense. If Mayor Begich is not up to the task of standing up to bears mauling citizens in city parks – a local public safety issue – how can he possibly be up to the task of providing for the common defense of this nation? If Mayor Begich cannot stand up to the bears here in Anchorage, how can we trust him to stand up to Kim Jong Il, Vladimir Putin, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hugo Chavez, Al Qaida, Bin Laden or a thousand other nasties that hate us and wish us harm as a nation? Another way to look at this would be from an environmentalist standpoint. Begich is beholden to the greens for p art of his major support. And the greens don’t want the bears turned into rugs (killed). If Mayor Begich is unable to stand up to the greens when public safety is on the line, how can he possibly stand up to them on state and national issues like mining, fishing, logging, oil and gas exploration, roads or bridges? In this test of his ability to lead, he has failed and is clearly not up to the task. We will see if the other campaigns notice it.

3. Georgia. There were a couple fun essays last week regarding our response to Putin’s invasion of Georgia. The first came out of Dr. Jack Wheeler’s To the Point Monday and made the case that we need to turn Georgia into Putin’s Afghanistan. The Russians and Putin are far overextended in this affair, and it is time to give them a bloody nose. Wheeler suggests making Putin’s $40 billion in Swiss bank accounts disappear. He proposes turning our military hackers loose on the Russians, as the invasion was preceded by a Russian hacker assault on Georgia. He suggests that we supply anti-aircraft missiles and advanced anti-tank man portable weapons to the Georgians. Finally, he suggests that we supply the Georgians with every bit of electronic intelligence possible. Charles Krauthammer in his weekly column suggested a different set of approaches. His suggestions include more international, formal actions. I tend to like Wheeler’s suggestions, as they will allow Putin to pretend that nothing is wrong on the international stage, while getting his backside handed to him on the battlefield in Georgia, financially, and in cyberspace. It appears the Russians are not doing as well as they claim, and that the Georgians are doing a whole lot better. The Georgian President has been doing superbly so far. A couple final comments on this are in order. I believe this assault represents yet another stunning intelligence failure, as the assault took months to plan, the lines and rows of tanks were sitting out there in the open, available to all satellite imagery, and I do not recall seeing anything in the media or online about possible attack. The second failure is once again, in the State Dep artment, as they have managed to do little other than talk. Finally, the drive-by media appears to be simply parroting all Kremlin propaganda on this, passing along as truth, every press release from Moscow. How is it that our drive-by media is now an echo chamber for Russian pro-invasion propaganda? The next president needs to do a substantial housecleaning in the CIA and State Dep artment. We should have seen this coming and been prepared to do something about it beforehand. Perhaps the incumbents in those agencies were too busy trying to get Barack Obama elected president to do their jobs.

4. ESA. The Bush Administration is going to propose changes to the way the Endangered Species Act reviews are conducted by various federal agencies. The stated reason is that they do not want the Act to be used as a back door vehicle to implement rules to control carbon dioxide emissions. Today, all federal agencies are required to consult with the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service on every environmental impact statement. The new rules acknowledge that each agency now has their own internal expertise and will get to use that internal expertise first, asking for outside review if necessary. The administration noted that anything proposed always ended up in court, so oversight of environmental impacts would not be harmed. Of course, the greens are screaming like stuck pigs, and congressional democrats are making dark threats in response. The proposed new rules are expected to be releases shortly, followed by a 60-day public comment period. They may be put into effect before the election.

1. OODA Loop. Colonel John Boyd was the father of modern fighter aircraft, fighter training, strategy, thinking and tactics. He created the concept of energy maneuverability. Most importantly, he created the idea of the OODA Loop. OODA means Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. You do this over and over again. If you can complete the cycle quicker than your adversary, in other words get inside his decision loop, you can defeat him no matter what he does, simply because you can make decisions and more importantly corrections faster than your adversary. As Boyd was a fighter pilot in the Pentagon fighting LeMay’s Bomber Generals, during the 1960s, these concepts were first applied to the fighter business. Over the years, they were expanded into maneuver warfare used in Iraq by both Schwarzkopf in 1991 and Franks in 2003. Most recently, it has been used by Petraeus as p art of his surge strategy and execution. A lot of people who have been in the military have some familiarity with the concepts and are applying them in the outside world. Last week, it looked like the McCain Campaign, headed up by the old Naval Fighter Pilot John McCain, got inside Obama’s OODA Loop with a couple of ads. The first ad compared Obama to a rock star, not unlike Paris Hilton. The second, released a day or two later, was entitled The One, painted Obama as the Chosen, included the Obama Presidential Seal and Charlton Heston as Moses. The ad ended with the question “But can he lead?” Obama, his campaign, his toadies in the drive-by media, and other leftists howled with screams of pain. Obama was at his humorless worst, even though they trotted out a very quick, but whiney response. For a little while, the McCain campaign was working well inside the OODA Loop of the Obama campaign – and it was funny, effective and powerful. If they can do more of this, do it regularly, when and where they choose to do it, Obama and the democrats are toast in November. Colonel Boyd passed away in 1997 and is buried at Arlington. You can find a superb essay on Boyd and his application to current combat in Iraq on the Eject! Eject! Eject! Under the title of Forty Second Boyd and the Big Picture, January 1, 2008. http://www.ejectejecteject.com/archives/000172.html

2. Vickers. One of the little games democrats have been playing for years and years is running faker conservatives during contested primaries, splitting the vote, winning the primary, and laying down during the campaign during the general election and handing the seat to the democrats. The technique always has a well funded unknown showing up saying all the right conservative things. They usually run a guy in a closely contested primary, where money is important and the ability to win a plurality of votes in a 3-5 way split. This primary season here in Alaska has one of these guys showing up in the Republican senatorial campaign. Ted Stevens (R, AK) is running against Dave Cuddy, a local banker in the state primary August 26. Stevens defeated Cuddy fairly handily last in 1996. A new guy showed up named Vic Vickers. He has around $750,000 available for his campaign. He has been saying all the right things regarding ethics, controlling of spending, and doing the right thing in Washington DC. Come to find out that he moved into Alaska last January and immediately registered as a Republican. Local research into him found that he was a lifelong democrat. One of the local talk show guys, Eddie Burke, got him on the air and questioned him a while. Eddie got some interesting answers. For instance, he believes that Ginsburg, Breyer and Stevens are the best SCOTUS justices. He gave the standard leftist responses to the rest of the questions. I don’t think he is going to do too well in the primary. But be forewarned, if it can happen here and in Arizona, it can then also happen in your state. Why? Because winning a primary is far cheaper than winning a general election campaign. It is a great way to leverage precious campaign cash and steal a hotly contested seat.

3. Hillary. With the democrat convention in Denver only a few weeks away, the Hillary and Obama campaigns are far from an agreement on how the convention will be orchestrated. The Obama campaign does not want to hold a floor vote for the nomination, as it will demonstrate just how close the primary campaign really was. It will not demonstrate to the rest of the country that Obama was not the Chosen by the many states, but selected by the p arty insiders, it will undermine his Potemkin village appearance of inevitability. The Hillary campaign is rightfully demanding a floor vote, a roll call of the states as we see every national convention. Over the course of the last week or two, both sides have been releasing damaging memos on the other side. Add to this, the growing realization that the drive-by media sat on their knowledge of the John Edwards affair, and did not report the story so that the Hillary vote would be split two ways, and you now have the Clinton campaign whining that they would have won the Iowa primary had Edwards’ affair be known at the time (which it most certainly was to reporters). I am not all that impressed, as nobody but nobody plays politics dirtier than the Clintons, and had they had the information about Edwards, and thought it would have helped them, they most certainly would have released the information to the general public. So their dirty tricks machine was either incompetent and didn’t know, or it did know about the affair, and chose not to use it for their own self-serving reasons. Either way, this is going to be a fun convention. Bring your popcorn.

4. Intimidation. Nothing like a little threat via the mail to fire up conservatives. Ed Morrissey in Hot Air Friday wrote about a threatening letter to be sent to over 10,000 large dollar right wing donors. The letter is an attempt to head off formation of right wing 527 groups in response to Soros-funded 527s working this election. The letter will reportedly promise exposure, left wing investigators digging through their private lives, and other forms of harassment should the targets decide to p articipate in democracy this campaign season. Bring it on.

5. Georgia. Russian tanks rolled into the Republic of Georgia over the weekend. The attack, over a division in size, was nicely timed to coincide with the st art of the Beijing Olympics over the weekend. Georgia is a US ally, with troops in Iraq. The attack was justified on just as thin grounds as the invasion of the Sudetenland 70 years ago. Based on the numbers of tanks involved, planning must have been under way for several months prior to the invasion. This attack has two goals: The first is control of an oil pipeline into Europe through Georgia; second, it is intended to intimidate every single former Soviet Socialist Republic that left the fold in 1991. If Putin can roll the tanks through Georgia without anyone in the West doing anything about it, he can roll tanks into any other nation (except China) bordering it. Control of the pipeline will keep Europe from doing anything or supporting any military action against Russia. The political response to the invasion was predictable, with the typical leftists blaming everything on the Bush administration. John McCain immediately blasted the action in very harsh terms. Obama blamed it on the Bush administration, saying we didn’t talk enough with the Russians. After French President Sarkozy brokered a cease fire, Obama spokesmen took credit for the announcement, thanking the French President for ding what Obama asked them to do. The only thing Obama didn’t do was to ask how things are in Atlanta, like a democrat candidate for US Senate did over the weekend. This is going to be pretty ugly before it gets any better. Next up to bat for Putin is the Ukraine.

1. Ted. Federal prosecutors in Washington DC indicted Alaska senior US Senator Ted Stevens (R) on seven counts of filing false financial disclosures. Each of these is a felony count. Penalty for conviction is five years in jail. The indictment came a day before the one-year anniversary of an FBI raid on Stevens’ home in Girdwood, Alaska (30 miles East of Anchorage). The view here in Alaska it that the indictment was a political act by Clinton holdovers in the Dep artment of Justice intended to deliver Mark Begich (D) into the US Senate in November. The initial reaction among Republicans and Stevens supporters was to close ranks around him. Local talk show hosts were split, ranging from hugely supportive to resign now. Before the indictment, the Begich bid for US Senate has about an 8% lead over Stevens. After the indictment, that number bounced up to around 20% based on a poll from the local democrat pollster. Senator Stevens has been in the US Senate for a very long time, and has built a pretty good reputation and base of support in the state. His political opponents have called him every name in the book – some of them earned. His political supporters have done the opposite in support. I find it quite interesting that Mark Begich, who needed a retroactive change to local election law here in Anchorage to get elected Mayor for the first time, has any statewide support outside of Anchorage or our only other leftist hotbed in Juneau. Given that Anchorage is half the population of the state, Begich would have to carry over 60% of the vote in Anchorage (not unlike New Orleans or King County, WA) to have a hope of getting elected. National right wing bloggers were almost unanimous, along with National Review Online, blasting away at pork, corruption and demanding Stevens’ immediate resignation. The rationale given for that is his support of pork for Alaska, most notably the Bridge to Nowhere in Ketchikan. I was one of the few in the blogosphere that wrote in strong support of that project. And here’s the rationale: The state of Alaska has over 570,000 square miles of land and just over 14,000 linear miles of paved roads. Do the math, and you end up with about 45 square miles of Alaska per each linear mile of paved road. The next closest state in the union is Wyoming with around 3 square miles of land per linear mile of road. Washington DC has 0.04 square miles per linear mile of highway. Alaska is a new state. We are very large. We have very few miles of roads and sorely need infrastructure. We as an electorate have charged our congressional delegation with bringing us up to the national average in miles of roads, bridges and similar infrastructure. It is easy for those in p arts of the country with roads and bridges to everywhere to deride bridge and highway construction into undeveloped areas in Alaska as bridges and highways to nowhere. And we Alaskans would be happy to do it ourselves on our own dime. Sadly, congress changed the agreement from the Statehood Compact in the late 1950s, giving Alaska a 90%-10% split of all natural resource development (oil and natural gas) on federal lands (60% of the total area of Alaska). They moved it down to a 50%-50% split. If congress reneges unilaterally at a later date on their solemn agreement at statehood, why should we here in Alaska not respond accordingly? I will note that for the record, not a single congress critter that ran their mouths against wayward bridges in Alaska turned down a single dime of highway money for their respective states. Back to Ted Stevens: His first move in court was to attempt to move the trial back to Alaska where all the evidence and witnesses are located. His second action was to move to a speedy trial, which may be difficult, given that the Justice Dep artment dumped over 50 gig of data on his lawyers. Both motions are under consideration by the presiding judge. Interestingly enough, Mark Begich and the democrats have been very, very quiet following the indictment which is most interesting. The Republican P arty of Alaska filed a complaint last Thursday against Mark Begich for failing to disclose a variety of income and monetary interests on his financial disclosure forms - precisely the same thing Stevens has been indicted for doing. The indictment was dropped a full two months before it should have been dropped, as late September would have been ideal for the democrats, which means something was up internally at the Justice Department. A politicized investigation targeted Conrad Burns in 2006, threatening an indictment and corruption charges against a squish conservative so that he ended up losing to a faux-conservative – John Tester. Ted Stevens has a pretty solid track record supporting Alaskan interests. Overall, that track record is not all that conservative, but far more conservative than what his various opponents would have done over the years. As a result, he has driven some conservatives like me nuts over the years, but has been for the most p art honest, straightforward and honorable. The indictment alleges over $250,000 of unreported gifts, income, and other goodies; mostly in an upgrade to his Girdwood home. The indictment does not note that the upgrade to his home was of such shoddy quality that it had to be removed and rebuilt afterwards. I do not think this is going to go the way that the leftists think it is going to go. And if I were a conservative blogger, I ought to be far more concerned about politicized indictments of sitting US congress critters – all of them Republicans - just before elections than I would be about pork. Both are unpleasant. But the former has the ability to undermine both the law and the justice system.

2. Revolt. The democrat majority in the House of Representatives decided that they didn’t want to debate an energy bill, so they reneged on an agreement with the minority to allow debate, held a hasty vote to adjourn and bugged out of town for a five-week vacation last Friday. House Republicans decided that they were not going to be rolled, ignored or bypassed, and chose to continue the debate on the floor of the House of Representatives. And debate they did, hanging on for the rest of the day. Democrats and their staffers were furious, cutting the electricity, the microphones, lights and emptying the House gallery and press. House Republicans kept on talking, and it appears that they will try to talk from now until the democrat convention late in August. This is great theater. It is a huge embarrassment to both the House democrat leadership – whom all conservative democrat House members chose to caucus with – and all House members who have chosen not to attend the festivities. The drive-by media has not been reporting the protest, the debate, who is there or what they have been saying. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is on a book tour, trying to sell her award-winning book on her speakership. I suspect the sales may be a bit lower than anticipated. All the Republicans are asking for is a vote, and the democrat majority does not seem to be willing to allow either a vote or a debate on drilling and exploration for more oil and natural gas as a solution to the current energy crisis. Speaker Pelosi managed to do her best Marie Antoinette impersonation when being asked why she has not scheduled either a vote or a debate, that it was left to the Republicans imagination. This will be a great sound bite, with Pelosi responding to those who are paying twice the price per gallon of gasoline since she has assumed her position as Speaker (Squeaker) with a “let them eat cake” attitude. With each imperious action by the democrat majority in the House, Republicans get another step closer to retaking the House majority in November. This election is not going the way the drive-by media or the democrats want it to go. I think we will be in for a surprise should this foolishness continue too much longer.

3. Caribou. A final reminder that all humans are indeed human comes from the village of Point Hope, Alaska, where 120 caribou were massacred and half of them wasted as the herd moved through the area a couple of weeks ago. We so often hear that the natives are one with the e arth, friends of Mother Gaia, and other crap. Nothing could be further form the truth. This is a little story about run-of-the-mill wanton waste of the resource, but of a tribal cover-up, and refusal to out or prosecute the perpetrators. The locals even managed to blame the State Troopers for being unpleasant during the investigation. Alaskan Natives are afforded all kinds of deference for being one with the E arth and One with the resource. Yet they manage to green ‘em up and kill wantonly just as badly as any cowboy on the Great Plains during the nineteenth century. And afterwards, they close ranks and cover the collective backsides of the perpetrators. We are all human. And this is what we do - as ugly as it may always appear. Not a single one of us is any closer to the e arth than any one else. Any claim otherwise is sophistry. ADN, Weds.

"If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen."
- Samuel Adams, speech at the Philadelphia State House, August 1, 1776.

Note: Interesting Items can be found at the following locations:
The Alaska Standard http://thealaskastandard.com/
MatSu Valley News http://www.matsuv alleynews.com
District 28 http://www.dist28.com/
subscriber and supporter Elbert Collins at http://thatselbert.wordpress.com/
and the home page: http:/ /home.gci.net /~agimarc
Rod Martin's The Vanguard site is also a long-time supporter of this column: http://www.thevanguard.org/

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