Alaska Sen. Mark Begich Complains to Domino’s Pizza CEO Over Halibut Ad (+video)

Photo Credit: SenateDemocratsNo ifs, ands, or halibuts about it, Sen. Mark Begich is urging Domino’s Pizza to stop “hatin’ ” on halibut.

The Alaska Democrat penned an open letter to the pizza chain’s CEO on Wednesday, writing to J. Patrick Doyle that he wasn’t particularly pleased by a commercial that appears to dis the fish.

In the ad that’s currently airing, Domino’s suggests that innovative ideas often stem from feasts involving pizza. An announcer declares, “No one’s coming up with a world-changing idea over halibut — no way. It’s always been pizza.”

…Begich writes he was “offended” by the commercial.

Read more from this story HERE.

FBI Tapes Indicate at Least 5 Alaska Serial Killer Victims in Washington

ANCHORAGE, Alaska – An Alaska serial killer buried three victims in the state of Washington and submerged two others in a lake there but refused to provide many more details about their whereabouts, according to interviews released Tuesday by the FBI.

The FBI posted more than six hours of videotaped interviews on the Internet that agents, Anchorage police and federal prosecutors conducted with Israel Keyes in the months before his suicide in an Anchorage jail.

The material shows Keyes’ movements across the country before his arrest in Texas on March 13, 2012. However, investigators have had leads run dry on a number of other victims and are seeking the public’s help.

Keyes lived in Washington state before moving to Anchorage in 2007.

In a Nov. 29 interview, just three days before he was found dead in his jail cell from suicide, Keyes asked if investigators had found any knives at his New York property or on a boat he owned in Washington state. He said there were two knives missing from his girlfriend’s home in Anchorage, and he didn’t know where they were.

Read more from this story HERE.

Conoco-Phillips Plans New Well in Alaska National Petroleum Reserve

(Reuters) -ConocoPhillips has applied for permits to develop a new field in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, a vast unit of federal land that has yet to yield commercially produced oil, according to the federal agency managing the reserve.

ConocoPhillips applied to drill a production well at a site it calls GMT1, part of the Greater Mooses Tooth unit established in an area where its exploration wells struck oil, Bureau of Land Management (BLM) spokeswoman Erin Curtis said on Friday.

The company has also applied for a permit to build roads and other infrastructure needed to access the site, Curtis said.

A decision by senior corporate leaders on whether to sanction the project is expected in the second half of 2014, said Amy Burnett, a spokeswoman for ConocoPhillips in Alaska.

The Indiana-sized reserve, on the western side of the North Slope, was established in 1923 by President Warren Harding to provide fuel to the military.

Read more from this story HERE.

William Ayer’s Staff at “Achieve Inc.” Wrote Alaska’s Standards?

Many Alaskans may not be familiar with an organization named Achieve, Inc. but it has been the primary driver in the implementation of Barack Obama’s educational agenda. It is an organization that enshrines the mojo of William Ayers and specializes in the implementation of the common core standards and facilitates the entry of states into one of two consortia: Partnership for Assessing College and Career Readiness (PARCC) or Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC). William Ayers is a long time friend ofLinda Darling Hammond, the Senior Adviser of SBAC. Therefore, it would hardly be surprising that the use of educational consulting firm that enshrines William Ayer’s mojo would then facilitate the writing of a state’s educational standards would result in a state becoming a member of a consortium headed by Linda Darling Hammond.

That is exactly what happened in Alaska.

The Alaska Department of Education continues to insist that the state of Alaska wrote its own educational standards and that they are “Alaska owned” and “Alaska made” and “cutting edge stuff.” The information submitted by the state of Alaska for funding under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) clearly conflicts with that narrative. The ESEA Flexibility document is a tedious compendium of nearly 1,000 pages and is hardly a New York Times best seller; on a summer day in Alaska, it is hardly a choice reading. But as you read the actual document, rather than AK DEED’s cherry picked power point about the document, the truth of the matter emerges.

Of course, you have to get to the appendix attachment 5 of the actual document to find it out. This is a stark contrast to Dr. McCauley laughing at Rep. Wilson’s questions on the Common Core at the 8:11 mark here. The nervous laughter by Dr. McCauley is generally an indication to dig deeper.

The narrative that these standards are “Alaska’s Standards” and they were “written by Alaska teachers” was the marketing ploy decided upon early on by AK DEED. It was part of the plan laid out by Achieve, Inc with Commissioner Hanley. This blog will bear that out.

It may be true that Alaskan teachers wrote standards. It may be true that these standards were on a server for public comment. But that is not what was adopted. There are multiple iterations of the standards, and only the initial drafting involved teachers. Achieve’s staff was consulted at each phase of the process.

The Final Standards are not the ones written by the teachers and differ in substantial ways. I won’t bore the reader with gory details of Alaska’s standards that have been discussed by SBAC and in the blogs of other states, but after this article, the curious reader will readily see that these standards were actually not written by Alaskan teachers. With rare exception, they are word for word identical to the Common Core. There never was any intent on the part of Commissioner Hanley to adopt standards written by Alaska teachers. There was an intent to engage in a misinformation/publicity campaign calling the standards “Alaskan Made” as noted in the discussion of the Alaska Board of Education meeting minutes under 4 A1 on page 3 in December of 2011. But this was before the standards were even adopted, and even then they were admitting that the Common Core was the source document. By January of 2013, they were morphed and massaged into the Common Core standards publically licensed by CCSSO.

This is the same tactic that was used in Utah.

As detailed in a letter dated June 7, 2012 from UA President Patrick Gamble to US DOE Secretary Arne Duncan, Alaska’s journey into the Common Core process was tightly scripted. The implementation of the Common Core Standards began in 2010. Alaska DEED, under the direction of Mike Hanley, began planning the implementation of the common core with the assistance of William Ayer’s Achieve, Inc. This can be found buried in the ESEA Flexibility document. For convenience of the reader, this document is listed separately here. Gamble states

“…Alaska Department of Education and Early Development Staff coordinated with Achieve, Inc in the initial planning stages, of the standards revision process in 2010. Staff from Achieve reviewed Alaska’s revision plan and provided feedback via phone conversations and teleconferences. Achieve provided critical guidance for consideration of appropriate stakeholders, identifying key decision makers, and process-specific tasks, which Alaska incorporated into the review.”

Achieve, Inc. is nowhere mentioned in the ESEA Flexibility power point presented to Alaska’s Finance Subcommittee on Education. Indeed, Achieve Inc is not mentioned in the main narrative of the document, except in Patrick Gamble’s letter. Yet the process in Alaska clearly followed the guide written by Achieve Inc. to implement the Common Core.

I wonder how much in consulting fees was spent on that activity by the State of Alaska? The flexibility document discusses $300,000 spent on meetings, but does not list the consulting fees paid to William Ayer’s firm.

Achieve, Inc instructed AK DEED’s staff via telephone consultations at every part of the process. In the initial phase, teachers were pulled together and asked to compare the Common Core Standards to the existing Alaska Grade Level Expectations (AK-GLE). Standards were scored based on a rubric of anywhere from full alignment to not aligned at all. If not aligned, educators were then asked if the Alaska standard was more rigorous or less. Clearly then, the subsequent step would be to involve educators into accepting the Common Core Standards, or nearly so, while leaving them with the impression that they actually wrote them, or at least had a personal investment in them.

According to Patrick Gamble’s letter, Brian Gong and Karin Hess of the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment were meeting facilitators. Brian Gong does have a background in psychology and worked for Educational Testing Services (ETS) before his work in Kentucky. Karin Hess’s work is in learning progressions. One could view leading educators from their own GLEs to the Common Core as an application of a learning progression. One could speculate on why psychologists were used to facilitate these meetings, but that is left for the reader to investigate. The process seemed to follow the path that is in the Achieve’s Path to Implementation document on page 20.

After the initial round, the Alaska English standards magically emerged nearly perfectly aligned with the Common Core but lacked informational texts listed in the common core. The Alaska’s math standards had very little in common with the Common Core, perhaps suggesting that psychological maneuvering and jedi-mind tricks are not easily used on math teachers. The reports and scoring of these “teacher driven” standards still exist in archive form.

The creation of the draft standards was probably the last that most teachers involved in the process saw of the standards until they were published in their final form for approval. By December of 2011, the new standards were made available for public comment, according to page 3 of December 15-16 minutes of the Alaska State Board of Education. The Commissioner also indicated in this meeting that the Common Core was used as the starting point and that they intended to promote the Common Core standards were “made in Alaska.” There was also a discussion of a publicity campaign to gain further support for the “roll-out” of the standards as “Alaska made.”

The standards “sat on the server” for public comment and were submitted to the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) for review. This is where the magical transformation of the standards took place. The first set of standards was apparently not quite close enough to the Common Core for approval by the CCSSO and suggestions were made to bring about a greater alignment of Alaska’s standards and the Common Core. That is when another set of standards emerged. These are probably the changes suggested by “stakeholder comments” that are discussed in the ESEA Flexibility document. It is in this period that the Alaska math standards morphed into the Common Core practically verbatim. Pythagorean Theorem, multiplication table memorization, and a host of other math concepts were purged from the state standards. The Common Core informational texts were brought into English Language Arts (ELA) standards and the literature not part of the Common Core removed. EPA manuals and UN publications took the place of British literature and other American classics. These are, quite frankly, major document changes that were undertaken by DEED with little oversight by the legislature, the taxpayers, the parents, and the teachers.

While it may be true that the document sat on the server for public comment, it really doesn’t seem that the AK DEED promoted it much. Certainly it sent out emails to the regular suspects, but these were all pre-defined by Achieve, Inc. Voters, taxpayers and parents didn’t seem to be a priority for DEED. They can spend $300,000 for meetings to fly all over the state to obscure areas, but heaven forbid they spend $5.00 on a promoted post on Facebook that could reach the whole state, or go large and spend $85.00 on an ad on Drudge or Facebook. They didn’t even advertise in papers outside of Anchorage, nor consider the free publications in the state that appear to garner substantial readership in the outer reaches of the state. You can believe that every educational consultant on the planet knew about them, and you can bet these “stakeholders” were submitting comments.

In June 2012, the Final Standards were approved. By August 2, 2012, the exchange between the CCSSO and AK DEED show that the final standards are quite closely aligned, but perhaps not close enough. The Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) Executive Committee approved proposed changes to the SBAC Governance document on 9/18/2012. Under this provision, states that had standards that were “substantially identical” to the common core could enter the consortia. This action allowed Alaska to be considered for membership status. However, the state would have to prove that the standards were “substantially identical.”

By January 22, 2013, Scott Norton, Strategic Initiative Director of the CCSSO issued the memo stating

“…analysis showed that the final Alaska ELA and Math Standards track nearly exactly with the Common Core, employing the same structure and language used in the CCSS, with nearly all the CCSS being used verbatim in the Alaska Standards.”

This should put to bed the notion that Alaska’s Standards were written by Alaskans, owned by Alaskans, or originated in Alaska.

The truth is that the plan was in place long ago by Commissioner Hanley and Achieve, Inc. to call the Common Core standards “Alaska made and owned” and not the common core. Then the state would be entering the consortia and proving their standards were substantially identical while telling the Alaskan public that they were not the common core. After all, the teachers attended the meeting where they were drafted right? So they will defend them, to their own detriment and that of Alaska’s children, parents, and taxpayers.

Are there some minor differences between Alaska’s Standards and the Common Core? Of course, every state is allowed to 15% either in the form of an additional sentence or an additional clause to a sentence to provide clarification. Alaska doesn’t have nearly that much variance from the Common Core. Never fear, Achieve tells states how to deal with that 15% on pages 23 of implementation guide. Anything that is not part of the Common Core is to be ignored. It won’t be on the Consortia tests. As Brian Gong notes in his 2012 presentation, the Consortia drive the process. Retention and promotion for teachers and principals are now tied to the results of the SBAC tests. Only the Common Core content will be on that test, not the “state content.” Thus, anything that varies from the Common Core will be merely letters on a page.

The ESEA Flexibility money totaled $69 Million for Alaska. In exchange for that money and Alaska’s right of self-determination and freedom, they agreed to enter a consortia program that is going to cost billions to implement. Well, now I understand why the state’s finances are in such a bad state and why virtue is so lacking.

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Dr. Barbara Haney is an economist, political activist, and social media consultant in Alaska. She has previously served as a program director and faculty member at University of Alaska, Eastern Illinois University, University of Notre Dame, and other colleges and research institutions. In addition to her university experience, Dr. Haney has served as an ABE educator and a home school educator. She has served as a district chairman, national delegate, and campaign volunteer in various Republican campaigns. Dr. Haney receives mail at [email protected]

Senators Murkowski, Begich Vote to Confirm Obama’s Radical UN Ambassador Samantha Powers

Photo Credit: US Mission GenevaThe Senate confirmed President Obama’s nominee to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

On an 87-10 vote Wednesday, the Senate approved the nomination of Samantha Power. Nearly 30 GOP senators voted with Democrats to approve her nomination.

“Having a strong voice in the United Nations is imperative,” Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) said ahead of the vote. “Power possesses the type of character, type of strong background, is a person of intellect and has the right kind of way to communicate to represent us at the United Nations.”

GOP Sens. Marco Rubio (Fla.), Rand Paul (Ky.), David Vitter (La.), Mike Lee (Utah), Ted Cruz (Texas), Tim Scott (S.C.), Mike Enzi (Wyo.), Dean Heller (Nev.), Richard Shelby (Ala.) and John Barrasso (Wyo.) voted against Power’s nomination.

Power, who serves on Obama’s National Security Council, came under criticism for remarks she made during her academic career about Israel and “crimes” the United States has committed. She has since recanted those remarks.

Read more from this story HERE.

Democrats Successfully Lobby Murkowski to Change Vote on “Explosive” ATF Nominee

By Meredith Shiner. Democrats and their allies lobbied Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska for more than an hour Wednesday to change her vote on the nominee to head up the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and the pressure worked.

Murkowski flipped and voted to advance the nomination of B. Todd Jones to be the ATF’s new director. With her vote change, Murkowski both averted a filibuster, and perhaps more importantly, staved off Democratic threats to end the minority’s ability to filibuster executive branch nominees. Just weeks ago, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., backed away from using the “nuclear option” after a number of Republicans, including Murkowski, began voting to beat back filibuster attempts led by their own party.

That tentative agreement was imperiled Wednesday by the struggle to get 60 votes for Jones. Murkowski originally voted “no,” but after conferring with Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, John McCain, R-Ariz., Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., and Reid, among others, the Alaska Republican switched to “yes.” Read more from this story HERE.

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Minnesota’s B. Todd Jones is an explosive choice to lead ATF

By Kevin Diaz. The choice of Minnesota U.S. Attorney B. Todd Jones to head the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and Explosives (ATF) made him the face of a national anti-violence agenda growing from the shock of the schoolhouse shooting massacre in Connecticut…

To Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, the ranking Republican on the panel, Jones has a lot to answer for. Grassley has tried unsuccessfully to force Jones to testify about Fast and Furious, a troubled ATF gun-tracking operation on the Mexican border that Jones was brought in to clean up. Grassley also sought to tie Jones to a controversial Justice Department deal to drop two whistleblower cases against St. Paul as a means of averting a civil rights showdown before the Supreme Court over the city’s rental code enforcement…

The criticisms have become personal as well. Republicans have delved into anonymous complaints from lawyers in the Minneapolis U.S. attorney’s office who accuse Jones of an overbearing “militaristic” management style that has fostered a “climate of fear.” An internal ATF video warning of “consequences” for those who go outside of the chain of command was interpreted by some critics as a threat against potential whistleblowers.

Also “disturbing,” Grassley said, was a letter from Donald Oswald, a former head of the Minneapolis FBI office, accusing Jones of “poor leadership” and an “atrocious professional reputation”…

Since 2006, when the agency split off from the U.S. Treasury Department, the gun lobby has objected to every ATF nominee, including the choice of former President George W. Bush. In that sense, some analysts say Jones is as much a symbol as the active head of the ATF. Read more from this story HERE.

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Senate preserves fragile filibuster deal after Murkowski switches her vote to OK ATF nominee

By Susan Ferrechio. The Senate appears to have narrowly avoided blowing up a recent agreement on filibustering executive branch nominees by securing the 60 votes needed to advance the nomination of B. Todd Jones to be director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

“It was close,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., said after convincing Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, to switch her vote to support Jones. ”The fact that we have this good spirit of bipartisanship to move these nominations forward is what guided us here.”

The Senate advanced Jones’ nomination later Wednesday by a 60-40 vote after Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., flew back to Washington to add her “yes” to the tally. The Senate later formally confirmed him, 53-42 making Jones the first person in seven years to be confirmed by the Senate to fill the ATF position.

The deal to approve Jones nearly fell through earlier in the day, which would have not only left the job vacant but torpedoed a deal struck earlier this month between Democrats and Republicans to move forward on executive branch nominees. Jones was not specifically included in the deal but if the GOP had blocked him Wednesday, it would have re-ignited a years-long fight over the minority’s increasing use of the filibuster and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s threat to change the 60 vote threshold to block a filibuster on executive branch nominees to 51 votes.

The vote on Jones was so close, Democrats held it open for hours to accommodate Heitkamp. She cast the 60th vote. Read more from this story HERE.

The Lake at the North Pole, How Bad Really Is It?

Photo Credit: NSF’s North Pole Environmental ObservatoryThe pictures are dramatic — a camera at the North Pole Environmental Observatory, sitting in the middle of what appears to be either a lake or open ocean, at the height of the summer sea ice melt season. Set against the backdrop of the precipitous decline in sea ice cover in recent decades due in large part to global warming, this would seem to be yet another alarming sign of Arctic climate change.

These images have attracted media attention, such as this AtlanticWire post and this Daily Mail story, both of which portray the images as potential signs of an intensifying Arctic meltdown.

But before concluding that Arctic climate change has entered an even more ominous phase, it’s important to examine the context behind these images.

First, the cameras in question, which are attached to instruments that scientists have deposited on the sea ice at the start of each spring since 2002, may have “North Pole” in their name, but they are no longer located at the North Pole. In fact, as this map below shows, they have drifted well south of the North Pole, since they sit atop sea ice floes that move along with ocean currents. Currently, the waterlogged camera is near the prime meridian, at 85 degrees north latitude.

“It’s moved away from the North Pole region and it will eventually exit Fram Strait,” said Mark Serreze, the director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colo., in an interview. Fram Strait lies between Greenland and Canada, and is one of the main routes for sea ice to get flushed out of the Arctic Ocean.

Read more from this story HERE.

Chaplain Ordered to Remove Religious Essay From Military Website

Photo Credit: FacebookA chaplain at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Alaska was ordered to remove a religious column he had written titled, “No Atheists in Foxholes: Chaplains Gave all in World War II,” because it allegedly offended atheists serving on the Air Force base.

Col. Brian Duffy, the base commander told Fox News the column was removed “out of respect for those who considered its title offensive.”

“The 673d Air Base Wing does not advocate any particular religion or belief set over another and upon learning of the complaints from some readers, the article was promptly removed,” he said. “We regret any undue attention this article may have brought to any particular group or individuals.”

Lt. Col. Kenneth Reyes confirmed to Fox News that he wrote the original essay that appeared in his “Chaplain’s Corner” column on the base website.

Reyes recounted the origin of the phrase “There is no such thing as an atheist in a foxhole.” Father William Cummings has largely been credited with uttering the phrase in Bataan during World War II.

Read more from this story HERE.

Eight Charged in Cigarette Tax Scam

Photo Credit: KTVAEight Anchorage residents are accused of scamming the Municipality of Anchorage out of more than $1.3 million in tax revenue.

Prosecutors say the defendants are owners and operators of retail stores who collectively purchased cigarettes from two wholesale distributors in Anchorage and lied about where they were going to resell the products in order to avoid paying MOA taxes.

Court documents reveal the scheme took place from 2009 until October 2012.

Wholesale distributors rely on merchant customers to be honest about where they plan on reselling cigarettes. Federal prosecutors say the defendants told the wholesalers in Anchorage that the cigarettes were destined for retail stores in Kenai and Sterling, where there are no taxes on tobacco products.

Read more from this story HERE.

Alaska’s Senators Murkowski and Begich Both Complain that there is “Stubborn Opposition” in US Senate to Law of the Sea Treaty

Photo Credit: L.C. Smith and S.R. Stephenson, PNASAt a meeting in Washington last week, top U.S. Arctic officials at the Coast Guard, Navy, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and other agencies acknowledged that the U.S. lags behind other nations in dealing with the rapidly changing Arctic environment. The agencies are facing serious deficiencies in the ability to map the sea floor and develop enforceable environmental policies, as well as construct onshore infrastructure that would be used for search and rescue and oil recovery operations…There is also a big void in diplomacy, and how the U.S. will deal with other countries on issues involving the Arctic.

The U.S. has not ratified the United Nations agreement that irons out how countries make claims to offshore Arctic resources. That’s despite the agreement having the overwhelming support of the military and both political parties.

Ratification of the treaty, which is known as the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea or UNCLOS, has been a top priority for national security officials for several years, but it remains stalled in the Senate due to a handful of senators’ concerns that it would compromise U.S. sovereignty…

[US Navy Oceanographer Rear Admiral Jonathan] White and others said the U.S. needs to ratify UNCLOS by 2015, when the U.S. takes over the rotating two-year chairmanship of the Arctic Council. Otherwise, he said, the country will speak with a weaker voice as Council president, since the U.S. is the only Arctic Council member nation that has not ratified the treaty. Such a scenario would be “sort of like driving a bus without a driver’s license,” he said.

Senator Murkowski, and fellow Alaskan, Sen. Mark Begich (D), who also addressed the conference, said they hope to try again to get the treaty through the Senate in the coming year, but that there is still some stubborn Senate opposition to it.

Read more from this story HERE.