Things were going a bit slow a week ago, Alaska GOP corruption scandal-wise, but they perked back up to the surface Thursday and Friday, as people speculated about a lot of new information. A week ago, the hasty departure of the publisher of the Anchorage Press might have made the news, but - hey! Frank is back, and raring to add to his impressive list of recent achievements.
Don is getting creamed by his opponents 10 to 1 - $317,431 to Young's $28,350. But as much as the four opponents raised last quarter, it wouldn't buy Young's attorneys their lunch while working on the Dom's case for the past year.
Ex-Veco ex-CEO Bill Allen is being implicated in the demise of AIH's ex-head. And, once again, the spectre of the FBI telling local or state investigators to "back off!" rears its fierce head.
The Exxon Stedman and Exxon Huggins continue to try to negotiate the narrows between Bligh Reef and Bligh Island. Hey, skippers, it's been tried before! The audacity of pushing SB 242 forward within hours of Exxon posting record profits, and as the date for hearing the class action lawsuit against Exxon over the 1989 spill nears, is impressive. Maybe Bert and Charlie can line up for a photo with the big oil big guys at the end of the session. Maybe not.
Next week's party caucuses will be the most heavily attended in Alaska history. Probably by a very wide margin. With so many candidates pulling out as their funding withered (listening, Don?), interest has focused on far fewer issues and personalities.
And, of course, many expect more indictments of Alaska politicians, most likely to be a list further dominated by GOP luminaries.
Reporters are all of a sudden on overload. McClatchy and the ADN are reeling from McClatchy's very bad 2007. The company lost more than half its value, six per-cent last Friday added to 2008's news. So they're cutting back.
More and more, reporting is being done by smaller news outlets. Independent writers in Alaska are being picked up by outside media. Bloggers are sharing information far more effectively now than a year ago..
There is a helluva lot of information out there! The difficulty of sifting though the incredible amount of accurate and inaccurate stuff coming in is awesome.
The way the police and investigators keep on bumping into each other, with the Feds shooing everyone else away, deserves a comic book rendition. If Ray Metcalfe's story of the White House trying to interfere with the US DOJ's corruption probes is accurate, and I believe it most likely is, this subject deserves a comic book series.
And the Feds, preferring to bully everyone else into letting them have primacy, are undoubtedly on even more overload than the press. Ultimately, this aspect of the current timeline of cascading scandals will be one of the most fascinating, bizarre and important chapters of current Alaska history.
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