The whole GOP barrel is rotten

Valdez also served as the chair of the Anchorage Young Republicans since January 2025.

  Alaska Beacon

Now do Trump and his administration.

 

Lisa Murkowski would like to have her soul intact when she leaves Congress

 She's not up for reelection until 2028, but I'm guessing she's getting ahead of the game.  She's being challenged by Governor Dunleavy, a Trump supporter, then.  Maybe she figures at the rate things are going, Trump will still be an albatross for the GOP in 2028.  Or, if she loses anyway, she'd like to be remembered as an actual conservative.

FEMA? You're on your own

 

Keep it up, America

Looks like Lisa Murkowski won't be running again either

 

Bold move.

But she did just vote to push forward the Big Beautiful Billionaires Bill.

But wait...

The Senate’s rewritten domestic policy bill faces new hurdles after the parliamentarian advised senators Sunday that several provisions violate the chamber’s strict rules for budget reconciliation bills.

The rulings, released in a memo from Democrats on the Senate Budget Committee, come as Senate Republicans are still trying to ensure they have the votes for final passage of their signature legislation.

Two provisions added to the bill just days ago — and tailored specifically to boost Medicaid payments to Alaska and Hawaii — have been ruled to violate the Senate’s Byrd rule.

  Politico

UPDATE 07/02/2025:

 

Going down

 

You can't escape the heat

 

MAGA regret - Part whatever

 

Still undoing Trump damages

One step forward, two steps backward

Biden reacting to criticisms of being too far left?

(As if he is, but that's a commong criticism.)

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Did Sarah Palin see them coming?

Sad Sarah

Democrat Mary Peltola will represent Alaska's lone U.S. House seat, after winning a special election that was determined by a ranked-choice voting tabulation on Wednesday. She will become the the first Alaska Native in Congress.

  NPR

As the world burns

Europe has joined the US and Australia in widespread forest fires.

UPDATE:

UPDATE 7/19:

Even Alaska.

Alaska has seen more than 500 forest fires since the beginning of April, which have forced the evacuation of mining camps, villages, and remote cabins.

By 15 June, more than 1m acres (405,000 hectares) in the state had already gone up in flames, about the amount of acres that would normally burn in an entire fire season. By mid July, more than 3m acres of land had been torched, putting the state at risk of breaking its 2004 record of 6.5m acres (2.6m hectares) burned.

Today 264 individual fires are burning across the state.

  Guardians

Sarah Palin is running for the House from Alaska

She'll fit right in with Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Joe keeps blowin' it

Last summer, in the final months of the Trump administration, the Department of the Interior approved a 211-mile industrial access road that would run across much of interior Alaska to the Ambler mining district, a massive but remote deposit of high-grade copper and zinc. Ambler’s underground riches are so highly prized that when Gates of the Arctic National Park was created in 1980, the Alaska delegation made sure a provision for possible road access across the park was written into the legislation. The last time a road of this size was built through an undeveloped part of Alaska was in the early 1970s when the 414-mile Dalton Highway was put in to connect Prudhoe Bay, on the north slope of Alaska, with an existing network of roads near Fairbanks.

Ambler Road is similarly ambitious — and equally fraught environmentally. The road would ultimately enable the extraction of more than 43 million tons of copper and zinc over at least 12 years, creating thousands of jobs, say the Ambler mining interests, and pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into state coffers. But even before the first load of copper is removed, the road itself would irrevocably transform a vast region of Alaskan wilderness, potentially disrupting the migration patterns of the state’s largest caribou herd and polluting some of the state’s most important spawning grounds for salmon and whitefish. It would also threaten the way of life of Alaska natives who have lived in the region for thousands of years and depend on those resources as their primary food source.

The Alatna is “the main tributary for life and water down to all of the people on the Koyukuk River,” Gaedeke said. “So they’re pretty worried about that crossing.”

[...]

It was on similar grounds that President Joe Biden, on his first day in office, put a temporary moratorium on oil and gas development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The Trump administration had rushed the lease sale, downplaying scientific evidence of the social and environmental impacts. Biden’s dramatic reversal of a project Donald Trump had made a keystone of his energy policy was celebrated by the conservation community, who saw it as a clear signal that Biden was prioritizing the environment over the needs of industry.

But the Biden administration has been conspicuously silent on the Ambler Road project, showing no intent to interrupt the approval process despite vocal opposition from multiple groups in Alaska.

[...]

After meeting with the Department of the Interior and White House officials in July, Natasha Singh, general counsel for the Tanana Chiefs Conference said, “We hope Biden is not going to defend President Trump’s failed process.”

But that is precisely what the Biden administration appears poised to do

  Politico

Every time an industry complains about jobs versus conservation, I get ticked off anew. Here, they're talking about jobs for 12 years. Versus a lifetime of environmental damage. It's crazy-making. 

Just like the timber industry and the coal industry, these jobs are on the brink of extinction anyway. Finite resources mean finite job opportunities. The better answer would be to sink money into to environmentally sustainable industries and retrain the people who now have jobs that are being phased out. 

For the love of Pete, we are so shortsighted. And corporations are so greedy. As long as there's a dime left to be profited, they intend to be there to get it.

Officials at the Department of the Interior have continued to process permits for predevelopment work this summer, including geotechnical drilling at proposed bridge sites on three major rivers, allowing the road construction to move toward its intended start in 2024. That work continues in spite of the allegations in both lawsuits that the Trump administration cut corners in the environmental review process to hasten approval of the road project, skipping important steps.

[...]

[Interior Director, and Native American, Deb] Haaland, who said during her confirmation hearing that the United States needed to reduce its dependence on foreign suppliers of critical minerals and that mining can be done responsibly, declined to be interviewed for this story. The Interior Department also declined to answer detailed questions about the handling of the environmental impact statement, and a spokesperson said the department had “no comment on ongoing litigation.”

[...]

If the road is built, it will pit the administration’s green-energy agenda against promises it has made to protect ecologically sensitive regions.

In early June, the Biden administration announced that it was establishing a task force to address the supply of critical minerals and emphasized the need to scale up domestic production to “meet national and global climate goals.” Large quantities of rare earth metals and other minerals, including copper, are needed for electric vehicles, solar panels, wind turbines and batteries — all critical to achieving the administration’s ambitious green-energy goals. Over the next few decades, global demand for copper is expected to soar by as much as 270 percent, with the needs of manufacturers outstripping supply by 2050, according to one estimate.

And as long as there's copper to be mined, we won't look for alternatives.

On August 18, a judge in Alaska voided permits for a major ConocoPhillips oil and gas development project on the North Slope, also backed by the Biden administration, because the review process was deeply flawed. The same judge has ordered the Department of Justice to prepare a brief by mid-November in defense of the impact statement for Ambler Road.

Cross your fingers.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The Lincoln Project bump

This is a pretty good ad...

Dr. Gross (what a name) asked for campaign donations to keep it on the air.  The Lincoln Project posted in with Dr. Gross' Twitter followers at 7,000.  An hour later, he had 20,000.

Burn it all down

The Trump administration reportedly plans to end an Obama-era rule banning the use of controversial hunting methods in Alaska's national parks.

According to a Monday report by The Washington Post, the rule change is set to be published in the Federal Register on Tuesday and would go into effect 30 days later. The rule would end a five-year ban on baiting hibernating bears from dens with doughnuts and on using artificial light in wolf dens during efforts to kill mothers and pups.

The change would also end bans on shooting swimming caribou from boats and hunting animals from airplanes and snowmobiles.

  The Hill

Disgusting. The Trump brats want to go hunting, I suppose.

Also...

Meatpacking plants in the U.S. remain hot spots for coronavirus outbreaks in the wake of President Trump’s order declaring them essential businesses that must remain open.

Although meat production has rebounded since the order, the number of cases tied to such facilities has since increased by more than 100 percent to 20,400 infections across 216 plants in 33 states.

  The Hill

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Republicans losing their democracy first

President Trump will be the only candidate to appear on the Georgia Republican presidential primary ticket, the party chairman announced Tuesday.

Georgia Republican Party Chairman David Shafer said the State Executive Committee met to consider a potential list of five candidates submitted for consideration by Nov. 22, as required by law.

The committee unanimously voted to have Trump appear on the ballot, and he is the sole candidate who will appear, Shafer said.

[...]

Former Illinois Rep. Joe Walsh (R), who is running against Trump for the nomination, hit the party leaders for the decision.

“The Republican Party apparatus has effectively become an instrument of despotism, a cult of personality, calcifying around a cancerous criminal who has done little more than manipulate public office for his own personal gain,” Walsh said in a statement.

“Rather than uphold our values and embrace healthy political debate and discourse, the Georgia Republican Party bosses have chosen to disenfranchise their own voters simply to protect a man who is unfit for office,” he added.

Walsh was among five candidates the Georgia GOP said were submitted for consideration, along with former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld. Weld also called out the decision, likening it to Russian President Vladmir Putin’s “approach to elections.”

[...]

The Minnesota Republican Party announced in October that Trump will be the only candidate on the ticket, and Kansas, Alaska, South Carolina, Arizona and Nevada have all canceled their primaries or caucuses, citing unnecessary costs of an election when the overwhelming majority of Republican voters support the incumbent.

  The Hill

And if the GOP and Trump are not stopped, overwhelmingly defeated in 2020, how long before federal elections are run the same way?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Ready to burn it all down

YOU are Mr. President.  How many times does he have to be told.



Awaiting your go-ahead, King.

Bolton is going to be super mad he wasn't in place for the attack on Iran.








UPDATE: