For My sweetheart in Chenega Bay

I looked around for the most charming version of this great song from 1967, and this high school choir a capella version is just that.

I Write-in a Polish Name ending with "ski" on My Ballot

The image, taken by my iPhone 1, in a dark voting booth at Pioneer Peak School isn't very good.

As you can see, I succumbed to that great temptation and voted for the Polish-American person for whom friends had been encouraging me to vote.

Below where I've marked my ovals for Scott McAdams, Harry Crawford and Ethan Berkowitz/Diane Benson, I marked another oval and wrote in "Mike Chmielewski."

Kevin Brown - if you haven't voted yet and you read this, I suggest you do the same.

Sorry, Carl.

Write-in Questions Answered

At The Alaska Dispatch, Maia Nolan has posted what may be the most comprehensive FAQ article on what people need to know about the write-in aspects of today's elections.

Two More Reasons to Vote for Scott

Go read Stephen Taufen's brilliant takedown of Lisa Murkowski at Groundswell Fisheries:

I can’t vote for Lisa Murkowski for at least four important reasons. She’s an elitist who supports low value resource extraction from Alaska, who willingly plunged toward real estate sweetheart profits hoping to gain personal advantage from taxpayer funds, while protecting foreign corporations who practice global tax evasion that greatly harms the state and nation. She also leads legislation for Community Development Quota non-profit firms to make only their for-profit subsidiaries free from federal taxes, and is blind to how that will eventually decimate the fishing industry economy.

Murkowski’s right up there leading the GOP goons who are crushing the middle class and more than just dabbling in poverty creation. It’s her kind of politician that keeps Alaska under the knuckles of a Resource Curse global beast and held back by the jackboots of its limited corporate membership. She isn’t a Marxist, just one of those who supports and helps set up all the conditions of disenfranchisement, disillusionment and peonage that ensures anarchy will soon arise because the People tire of living debt flattened lives so a few elitists can live the money fattened life.

And here is Scott, on MSNBC:

Get Your Friends, Relatives and Neighbors to the Polls Today in Alaska

It really does come down to the wire, particularly in the U.S. Senate race. The most recent polls, with one exception, show Miller support waning markedly, and McAdams posting his highest numbers since Lisa Murkowski Ilswokrum Asil (you have to spell it backwards or the optical scan system will misread it) entered the race. Here's the latest Hays Poll:

Miller ---------- 27.1%
McAdams ----- 25.9%
Write-in ------- 25.3%
undecided ----- 21.7% (!)

The PPP Poll that came out late Sunday (Miller 37%, McAdams 30%, Murkowski 30%) is an outlier. Although it had a large sampling group size, it showed over 40% of people of color voting for Miller, which cannot conceivably happen).

This is as good a time as any to review this important analysis of the Alaska U.S. Senate race scenario:


And here's why YOU need to get your friends, relatives and neighbors to the polling place today (21.7% Undecided!):

Is Palin Incapable of Articulating What She Actually Stands For?

Watching about seven or eight of her recent campaign appearances, I've yet to hear anything representing an actual, workable idea for progress. She talks about jobs, getting the government out of our lives, lowering taxes, cutting budgets. She certainly never did that in Wasilla or in Alaska.

And she certainly is preparing to announce on February 6th. Bristol should be almost due by then, eh.

Go - Harry, Diane, Ethan and Scott!

images 2 & 3 - The Mudflats

Tim Lincecum Wipes the Grin off of W's Face

The cameras kept panning onto George W Bush during game 5 of the 2010 World Series. It was impossible not to, as Bush and Laura were seated right beyond the fence behind the batters' box in the Arlington stadium.

Bush was glum after Edgar Renteria hit a 3-run homer in the top of the 7th, to end six scoreless innings. But he started getting animated in the bottom of the 7th, after the Rangers' Nelson Cruz hit a solo homer. After talking with the coach and the catcher, Lincecum struck out two Rangers in a row, retiring the side.

Bush's head was hanging low. He was morose all through the 8th and 9th, as the Giants went on to win the game 3-1.

Little known Tim Lincecum fact: He attended and graduated from Issaquah Washington's Liberty High School in the Renton Highlands. There are hundreds or more Liberty High Schools in the USA. But Tim's school may be the only one named after the USS Liberty, AGTR-5. I hope the survivors know that. They certainly wouldn't have found it out by watching FAUX Sports.

It was the first Giants World Series crown since the franchise moved to California from New York. The last Giant series crown, in 1954, was the first series I watched on TV. A Setchell-Carlson Model 56.

That '54 4-game series against the Cleveland Indians was also the one that featured Willy Mays' "catch," in game one:

Will Dan Fagan Be Back on the Air Today? Of Course - Plus Other Miller Debris

I. After a one-day suspension for electioneering, KFQD-AM Radio talk show host, Dan Fagan, will be back on the air today during his regular time slot. He will have more listeners than usual, mostly praising him for his undaunted "courage" in the face of the big, bad, mean, vicious Lisa Murkowski machine, headed by that ubiquitous attack dog, John Tracy.

I sort of defended Dan here last week. On Saturday, Craig Medred wrote another twice-as-long-as-necessary essay defending Dan for The Alaska Dispatch.

Dan has as much right to free speech, after all, as does Fred Phelps.

II. Funniest article so far, tying Joe the Teabagger's storm trooper fetish, his obsessions with kiddie porn, the bondage thing with the handcuffs, and the cabin in Willow all together into a nice package, by my friend TBogg. An excerpt:

Back before semi-hirsute Joe Miller quit before he was fired from his government job, he started complaining that everyone was out to get him and that sea monkeys were stealing his lunch money and other such nonsense which, in Alaska, passes for “sane enough for government work”. He may well have felt threatened by, say, the Russian mob who operated right across the street in Russia or possibly by Barack Obama’s ACORN Time Traveling Swat Team attempting to thwart the takeover of America in 2012 by Grifter-Americans, but more likely he is just a paranoid schizophrenic which is probably why the military put him on waivers with two years left on his contract.....

III. Alan Boraas has once again showed that he's a keen observer of the interplay in Alaska between members of the militia movement, the Tea Party, and millenialist Christo-Fascism:

Militias went dormant during the Bush Administration and have resurfaced with the election of President Barack Obama. The Alaska Citizens Militia takes its ideology from a strict reading of the constitution backed by fundamentalist Christianity although, as far as I know, not Christian Identity in the mold of the Posse Comitatus. The two constitutional provisions most cited are the Second Amendment "right to bear arms" and Article One providing for a "well-regulated militia." A second Alaska militia is now forming in the Fairbanks area.

The Alaska Citizens Militia claims about 200 members and has a 20-acre compound in Nikiski where they wear camo and shoot guns on weekends. Unlike most Alaskans, many of whom also wear camo and shoot guns on weekends, Olson's group is in training for the Tribulation. In 1995 he told Christianity Today: "Where do we get this idea we are supposed to let a corrupt government get worse and worse. Our Lord told us to contend for the faith and occupy until he comes."

IV. This isn't another defense of Dan Fagan, but Media Matters (where they're keeping up the pressure to get Andrew Breitbart removed from ABC's coverage of election evening and night) has documented over 600 recent instances where FAUX News contributors have either slanted heavily toward the GOP, or have boldly gone where Dan went last Thursday.

Joe the Teabagger Inspires Some Great Cartoons

From Peter Dunlap-Shohl, via The Alaska Dispatch

And below, two of three new cartoons from Jamie Smith, via Wickersham's Conscience