It’s baseball season and the Haines Borough Assembly is out in left field. COVID and December’s wreckage brought sharp focus to borough meetings, but the assembly is out grazing in the grass now, entertaining a gun-nut resolution. This is where assemblies land when they fail to deliberately and thoughtfully establish their goals. They stumble around like a drunk, opening doors…
All the constitutional scholars on the Haines Borough Assembly, please raise your hands. Great. Thank you. Now please explain, using simple language the rest of us ignorant plebes might understand as well as your knowledge of the discussions held during the passage of the Bill of Rights in 1789: Was it the intent of the founding fathers that “arms” meant…
Oahu, Hawaii – Public officials on this island paradise fret coqui frogs and the pretty girls who primp along the road at the public botanical garden at Kaneohe. Photography is prohibited on the garden road and right in front of us a blonde plops down in the middle of it, spreading her colorful skirt out across the asphalt while a girlfriend…
It’s a sad day for anyone west of the Mississippi. Larry McMurtry, the great voice of western Americana, is dead of Parkinson’s disease at age 84. A career novelist, screenwriter, critic, bookseller and book scout, McMurtry created Gus McRae, Duane Moore and Hud Hannon, outsized characters who leapt from his books to movie screens in the late 20th century. His…
Incoming Haines Borough Manager George Zoukee faces an uphill battle. His resume is short in three critical areas – municipal management, Alaska knowledge and small-town savvy. That means the odds will be against him. Former managers who arrived with similar resumes – including David Sosa and Bill Seward – didn’t last long. To succeed, which for this job might be…
A big dump turned our old, jaggedy gray snow all new and smooth and white again, which counts for some kind of redemption at this time of winter, if not cause for celebration. An old truism goes that on any job, the first 90 percent of work takes the first 90 percent of time and the last 10 percent of…
I bumped into Sarah Palin yesterday while streaming Randy Rainbow videos on YouTube. There she was, our former governor, on an Internet infomercial advertising the services of some investment counselor. Using her Alaska credit card, Sarah was comparing investing in the stock market to hiking in the wilderness, pleading with viewers that they might get mauled on Wall Street without…
Living in Las Vegas for six months, I got to know some of Sin City’s landmarks, most notably its signs. Vegas is a town full of implausible solicitations like “Loose Slots!” and “Breakfast: 99 Cents!” My favorite was one above a strip-mall storefront, in giant block letters, reading: “Free Money!” You can’t fault Vegas for not understanding what people want.…
To understand Alaska politics, it helps to know the politics of capital projects. Big projects – the Susitna Dam, the Juneau Road, Ketchikan’s “Bridge to Nowhere” – consume more than their share of government business in this state. That’s also true on our local level. Consider the numbers of meetings spent talking about boat harbor expansion, rebuilding the firehall, and…
A friend asked the other day whether American soldiers were still dying in Afghanistan. Shamefully, I didn’t know. The responsibility of citizens in a democracy is to keep up on issues and participate in decision-making and there’s no government function more important than deciding to kill people, our people or ones from elsewhere. So why didn’t I know? Because I…