An Open Letter to Brendan Joel Kelly

Dear Brendan,

As I've told you, your energy and excitement about helping the Anchorage Press back onto its feet is being warmly welcomed by me and by the local press. But you're already getting a reputation as being a bit, shall we say, "sensationalist." I suppose that goes along with the schtick of writing for a weekly in a town of 300,000.

I've got to say, though, that next time you call me late on a Wednesday morning - deadline time - with a series of questions about a candidate, don't expect me to believe you're going to give my answers the context they warrant. You cherry-picked our telephone conversation yesterday in a highly meretricious way. And, you then used what you kept to illustrate a questionable meme.

As I've told all three candidates in the AK-AL primary contest, the unprecedented interest in this election is a unique opportunity to build the Democratic Party in Alaska. To win in November, we have to attract young and alienated voters back into the booth to vote for our women and men.

Diane Benson has known this since filing last summer. When I drove Jake Metalfe and his staff from the Sitka ferry terminal into that town on the last day of August 2007, that is what we discussed - building the party. In a long talk I had with Ethan Berkowitz after he spoke to Mat-Su Democrats early this year, that is what we talked about. And I'm working on that in my role within the Party structure.

To even vaguely or loosely tie either the Jake Metcalfe campaign or the Diane Benson campaign to these nutty web sites that have sprung up with Ethan as their butt, is questionable journalism. Both campaigns know about them, because we've gotten the same e-mails others have received. And we get a lot of other junk like that, all of which gets stuffed away. We've even heard the nutty idea that Ethan's campaign is seeking to gain the Democratic Party's delegates to the upcoming convention to endorse his campaign on the floor, at the expense of the other two candidates. But we know his campaign wouldn't attempt that.

To use Markos Moulitsas' comment about my most recent DailyKos article without printing my reply was not very considerate. It wouldn't have fit your subject, though, would it have? Nor did you mention that my concerns about the PAC donations Berkowitz received from Rahm Emanuel's machine have also raised a flag in the eyes of key progressive thinkers in the Democratic Party like Howie Klein, or in the mind of Jeff Cohen, a national figure who you could have walked only a few miles to interview yesterday. He was on Shannyn Moore's KUDO program for two hours, Brendan!

Your article, Fragging Berkowitz, makes it seem like I haven't engaged Ethan directly on this, but you knew better. I wrote about talking to Ethan about my concerns over Rahm's PAC at the beginning of the week. I guess I should have been more wary, when you referred to Rahm as a "moderate." I've also praised Ethan Berkowitz at Progressive Alaska, in case you hadn't noticed.

We'll hash it out over lunch, soon, I suppose, Brendan. But what pisses me off the most is that I hoped to use what little free time I have had this morning to write about Ted and Lisa shoving it to the female workers of Alaska yesterday, in their vote on a Motion to Invoke Cloture on the Motion to Proceed to Consider H.R. 2831.