The Jindal - Kenneth the Page Axis - for Shannyn Moore

Shannyn Moore alerted me to the growing Alaska awareness of the Bobby Jindal is Ken the Page Group at facebook. I was too busy today to spend much time on that, but Jon Stewart nailed Jindal's similarity to the utter simplicity of Mr. Rodgers, on the Daily Show. Hopefully, the Immoral Minority will cover Stewart tomorrow.

Keith Olbermann covered the Jindal-Ken the Page axis, though:


Here are some of Kenneth the Page's finer moments (I guess - it's what the Youtube query came up with):


And here's my favorite Mr. Rogers episode - when he saved PBS in front of congress:


image of the Three Stooges of the Apocalypse by watertiger

Alaska Sen. Mark Begich Responds to Gov. Bobby Jindal's "Volcano Monitoring" Statement

[cross-posted earlier at Oxdown Gazette]

In yesterday evening's GOP response to what may have been the most impressive first major speech by a president I've had the pleasure to witness, Louisiana's Governor, uh, blew it. In Alaska, we were perturbed by his suggestion that volcano monitoring is a wasteful activity. We have hundreds of them. 31 are active right now. They sometimes kill people.

Although the unpredictable eruptor, Rep. Don Young, Alaska's most volcanic national legislator, wasn't at President Obama's speech, both GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski and Democratic Party Sen. Mark Begich (a firedoglake Blue America participant), were in the audience. Young's office claims he was "busy," but some suspect he was still down in Puerto Rico, a destination he shares a fondness for with convicted, imprisoned lobbyist, Jack Abramoff.

Sen. Murkowski hasn't yet criticized Gov. Jindal. Nor, apparently, has Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who somehow was passed over for the job of GOP first responder.

Saradise Lost - Book 2 - Chapter 31 -- Sen. Schumer to Palin: "Take It or Leave It!"

Anchorage Symphony 50% Off Sale TODAY ONLY!

Here's the link for the Redeem Online feature
(click on the picture to get the information in more detail)

John Ziegler Gets Into Some Heavy Dating Malpractice

Progressive Alaska is fascinated with John Ziegler, the maker of the right-wing "documentary" on the 2008 election, starring Sarah Palin, called Media Malpractice.

Last year he was on a dating reality TV series. He didn't last long. Great descriptions of the scenes that ended up on the cutting room floor - here.

On "Palin Suggests Controversial Solutions for Rural Alaska"

Saturday evening, on my way out of Anchorage, after playing in a concert at UAA, I bumped into friend and Alaska Dispatch editor, Tony Hopfinger. We hadn't seen each other in months, so we had a lot to talk about. Tony, his wife (and Dispatch co-editor) Amanda Coyne, and I, all stopped smoking around the same time over the holidays, so we had a hearty "high five" for each other.

Tony asked if I had read "the article" yet. I told him I had not, but hoped to catch the time to do it over the weekend. He remarked that the comments and emails were pretty brutal. I had scanned Palin Suggests Controversial Solutions for Rural Alaska enough to get the idea that Alaska Governor Sarah Palin had been praised, along with ex-Senator Ted Stevens.

I got around to reading the article Sunday evening, then re-read it this morning. Essentially, the article looks at the videos of Gov. Palin, taken before her trip with Franklin Graham, to Marshall and Russian Mission this past weekend (Friday and Saturday), and takes the governor at her word. It then mentions Sen. Ted Stevens' suggestions back around the turn of the 21st century, about consolidating Alaska Native resources into some of the more important communities.

Back in 2007, after a lot of in-depth research, Tony wrote To Live and Die in Wales, Alaska, a very thoughtful article for The Walrus Magazine, about a young man's suicide near a village on the Seward Peninsula. (The article was the subject of one of Steve Aufrecht's most stunning essays, at What Do I Know?) Tony knows Bush Alaska better than most. Yet he has the good sense to view himself as an outsider.

When Tony and I met on Saturday evening, I commented that if he and Amanda were getting flack for seeming to support Palin (and Stevens), one commenter at Progressive Alaska had asked just that morning, why PA never has ANYTHING positive to say about the Governor.

--++--++--++--++--+--

The weakness of Amanda and Tony's article is that it tends to treat Palin's comments last Friday, and Ted Stevens' 2003 remarks as unique, or possibly "controversial" in the sense of being bold or new. They aren't.

Alaska survives by taking life, power and value from outside of the towns and cities, and bringing those things to market.

Life, in the forms of salmon, King crab, Walleye pollock, halibut or oysters.

Power in the forms of crude oil, natural gas, coal and hydroelectricity.

Value in the sense of the above resources, and ivory, nickel, copper, gold, silver and other precious metals.

In the sense of a long-term, sustainable Alaska, people in Wales, Emmonak, Marshall, Russian Mission and Nunam Iqua, get "it" no less than do people in Anchorage, Fairbanks, Juneau or Seattle.

The direct ancestors of Tikagaq people who live in Point Hope have lived there since well before the English, French, Spanish or German languages as we might even vaguely recognize them existed.

The direct ancestors of the Tlingit have occupied parts of Southeast Alaska for thousands of years, far longer than any written human language now extant has been in use.

Native Alaskans survived quite well for thousands of years without non-Native assistance. Tony Hopfinger's The Walrus article about Wales documents the generations of heartbreak White contact have brought that community. There is no lack of other articles and books that do the same.

Gov. Palin, during the press conference in Juneau on February 11th, made reference to "Cluster Villages" as a solution to problems in hundreds of isolated, small Alaska Native villages. I think we've seen them already, at least the predominately Native American versions. At best, they are named Gallup, New Mexico. At worst, Rosebud, South Dakota.

The concept of moving Alaska Natives from place to place to educate, train or indoctrinate them has been tried year after decade after generation after century. It has seldom worked.

Diane Benson has explored various aspects of these attempts and failures in some of her dramatic work. So have other Alaska Native artists. I prefer reading or listening to people like Benson, Desa Jacobson, Heather Kendall-Miller or Writing Raven on these issues, to Hopfinger & Coyne. Certainly Palin is better analyzed by Kendall-Miller on this, than by Hopfinger & Coyne. Coyne should know that, having written one of the best profiles of Kendall-Miller there is.

There was far more pre-journey coverage of the Palin-Graham-Provo missionary trip than there has been post-journey coverage. That may change, as impressions from people who witnessed their efforts are just coming in and being published here and there.

The reality of people from faith backgrounds like Graham, Prevo and Palin, though, is that unlike early Christianity, during its expansion into non-Christian areas, the Graham-Prevo-Palin version of that religion has no intention whatsoever of adapting any aspect of its doctrine to the people it seeks to "help." Rather, it is that faith's expectation for those it seeks to "help" to be converted, through evangelical activities, to their very restrictive world view. Prevo, Palin and Graham all represent a narrow subset from within Christian doctrine, that expects the world to end soon in a cataclysmic event.

Some Alaska Natives all over the state have already been exposed to these peoples' brand of Christianity. It is expansionist, and regards the growth aspect of its existence to be far more important than assisting any single aspect of any Alaska Native culture to survive in a meaningful way, let alone the package represented by the spiritual independence of Alaska Native cultural renaissances here and there .

Regarding creating "Cluster Villages," one needs look no further in Alaska than the coastal fisheries management practices as created with the extensive help of Sen. Ted Stevens, or to the buildings occupied - but not owned - by Native Corporations, to see how well Palin's, Hopfinger's, Coyne's, Graham's and Prevo's visions might work. Outsiders from Seattle would own the means of production, distributing crumbs, called "IFQ's" until they chose to stop distributing them. And the "Cluster Village" headquarters and administrative offices would be owned by a Jon Rubini-esque developer, who would rent or lease these facilities out to the Alaska Natives at a higher rate than they would have had to pay to end up owning them over the course of a generation.

How do you tell people who have been around a few generations, that their ideas on how to manage the affairs of people who they have all but ruined, but have been here for millennia, haven't been proven?

This Morning's Today Show Interview With John Ziegler

Welcome, Katmai Winter McKittrick!

erin and hig are proud parents.

Here's a photo of their brand-new son, their Valentines Day gift.

erin describes Katmai's birth:

A few highlights from his birth… I managed to shock/impress/flabbergast the whole nursing staff by walking up the hill from the hotel to the hospital while in labor–arriving at about 8 cm dilated. We also walked back the day after he was born. Only this time his dad got to carry him. Finally!

It was a beautiful natural birth in the Homer hospital with a great midwife (Julie), nurse (Jean), and of course Hig. The first stage was easy, but the second one wasn’t! It was a good thing that I spent the whole of this little guy’s incubation time walking and hiking–I needed all that endurance for the more than three hours it took to push him out.

Congratulations!

Climate Change Skeptics - Are They Dangerous?

Katrina Vanden Heuvel, Editor of The Nation, in this ABC This Week clip (from March, 2006), quotes the British Commissioner for Pollution, as stating, "Those who deny global climate change [are] 'climate loonies.'" It is an exchange with Washington Post columnist, George Will, a long-time climate change skeptic loony.

Here's the March 2006 exchange:


Will's February 15th, 2009 WaPo column, Dark Green Doomsayers, claims that scientists widely believed the earth's climate was cooling, during the 1970s. He uses that erroneous claim to once again launch into a foray against reason. Complaints to the WaPo ombudsman, and the ombudsman's pathetic reply, have been the subject of many blog posts through the late week and weekend.

Will couldn't keep from trying to pontificate about the economy on TV this morning, prompting Nobel Prize-winning economist, Paul Krugman, to quickly, but p0litely smack Will down:


Back to so-called "climate change skeptics." They sometimes rant about how dangerous those who are concerned about global warming are. Dangerous to the economy, dangerous to personal freedom, dangerous to religious ideas, and so on. Scientists and public policy figures concerned about the dangers of global warming, and industrial practices which exacerbate that change, sometimes do sound more militant about forcing change than is likely to make the general public comfortable. But that doesn't change the fact that in most cases they are right - drastic public policy changes are needed very, very soon.

Locally, in Alaska, the organization that has put the most energy into criticizing the validity of climate change research has been Exxon-Mobil. Interestingly, British Petroleum has come down on the other side of the argument quite often.

The Alaska Legislature contains people with all kinds of views on climate change. Sen. Ted Stevens slowly warmed to the scientific viewpoint. Both Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Mark Begich take the reality of global warming seriously. Here's Don Young, in full denial mode, back in April, 2007:


Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has been all over the place on this issue. She appeared to come around to admitting human influence upon conditions creating global warming during the 2008 presidential campaign. In 2007 her administration created a sub-cabinet to deal with climate change issues, but it has done very little.

Of far more impact have been anti-science stances by her administration, most notably those involving Polar bear research information access.

The Alaska media appears to be, by and large, accepting of the vast majority of scientists, and of their concern about the impact of climate change upon Alaska. The exceptions come mostly from marginal outlets, such as right-wing talk personalities. Some of these people are given more of a pulpit from which to launch damaging attacks than are others.

The climate change skeptic who has gotten the most air time, column inches, and now his own web presence, is Anchorage talk show host, Dan Fagan. His new on-line blog, The Alaska Standard, has brought some of the weirder writers from the Mat-Su Valley News on board, to write about their views on the subject.

On and off, since the early 1990s, I've asked myself, "Will it get to the point where people who try to stop action mitigating global warming are actually responsible for increased mortality on a wide, trackable scale?"

By early in this century, I was adding the corollary, "Should environmental catastrophes created during war be considered 'war crimes'?" Saddam Hussein's intentional torching of the Kuwaiti oil fields in 1991 was a great example. The 2006 intentional bombing of the Jiyah Power Station's fuel storage tanks by the Israeli Air Force was another. Our uses of depleted uranium munitions in Kosovo, Serbia, Afghanistan and Iraq are yet another.

As I've attempted to become knowledgeable about the wide habitat of Yukon and Kuskokwim salmon runs, I've asked several scientists if they feel the Yukon River salmon runs are salvable. Some say they are. Others say they are not. In the latter category, one's answer struck me as surprising, even in the context of severe climate change. He said (I'm paraphrasing):

By the time we could bring a positive change to the Yukon - say 20 years - questions like that will be meaningless as we witness the deaths of so many ecosystems worldwide, the deaths of hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of people, because of other aspects of climate change and related economic disaster.

on that cheery note, I'm off to play in a concert at UAA...

Gov. Howard Dean on Olbermann Talks About GOP Governors Who Posture on Accepting Obama's Jobs Bill $$$