Rare Alaska Storm Packing 100mph Winds Takes Out Power to Half of Anchorage

/0 Comments/in /by

An overnight wind storm with gusts of over 100 miles an hour at high elevations knocked out power to at least half of Alaska’s largest city in the biggest outage in Anchorage’s center in decades, municipal and utility officials said on Wednesday.

“It’s incredibly substantial. A huge proportion of Anchorage is affected,” said Dawn Brantley, emergency program manager for the Municipality of Anchorage.

She said she did not know yet what percentage of the city overall had been affected but called the outage the biggest for downtown Anchorage in decades.

Electricity was cut to at least half of Anchorage, including nearly all customers of the utility that serves the central part of the city, the officials said.

Tens of thousands of homes and businesses remained without power by midday on Wednesday, Brantley said.

Read more from this story HERE.

Anchorage Pays Millions to Settle Lawsuits Over Rapes Committed by Decorated On-Duty Cop

/3 Comments/in /by

Anchorage has paid more than $5.5 million to settle civil lawsuits filed by victims of a former police officer convicted of raping women while on duty, city officials said.

The municipality agreed to pay 11 women who said they were victims of former police officer Anthony Rollins and accused officials of failing to properly supervise him, according to a statement released by the city late on Tuesday.

Rollins, once a decorated officer and spokesman for the police department in Alaska’s largest city, was convicted last year of committing four rapes and one second-degree sexual assault in 2008 and 2009, and sentenced to 87 years in prison.

Some of his victims were women he had arrested for offenses such as drunk driving, while others were women who accepted rides from Rollins in his police vehicle, according to trial testimony and court records.

Read more from this story HERE.

Restoring Liberty Milestone Reached: Site Surpasses Web Traffic of Most Alaskan Media Outlets

/3 Comments/in , , /by

Photo credit: The National Guard

I want to take this opportunity to thank the loyal readership of the Restoring Liberty website. Since July 4th of this year, when we launched our new website, the traffic to JoeMiller.us has skyrocketed.* Our readership now surpasses almost every Alaskan news outlet, save two Alaskan papers. And we’re closing in on them as well.

Yesterday, Alexa.com, the global leader in web analytics, rated Restoring Liberty at 15,578 out of the 100 million-plus websites in the United States.** In some Alaskan communities, our performance is far better with the website ahead of the national rankings of mainstays like Fox News and Amazon.com.

More importantly, our Restoring Liberty site’s Alexa.com ranking of 15,578 exceeds that of the Alaska Dispatch (18,270), the Juneau Empire (27,505), the Mat-Su Frontiersman (106,486), KTUU (19,772), and KTVA (89,468). As noted above, we’re rapidly closing in on the Fairbanks Daily News Miner and Anchorage Daily News, also.

Many Outside readers (an Alaskan term for those of you residing in the lower-48) may not be aware of the history of animosity between conservative-liberty oriented candidates and the Alaskan press. From the beginning of my race against Lisa Murkowski in 2010, my campaign was attacked relentlessly by each of the outlets described above. Repeated, libelous stories were publicized statewide. Despite demands for retractions, the Alaskan press rejected journalistic integrity in favor of the corrupt bidding of their corporate masters.

Reportedly, subscriptions to and viewership of these traditional “news” sources has declined significantly since our 2010 race. Why? Alaskans, and the country in general, are looking for honest reporting, unbiased by the corruption that is destroying our nation.

As the publishers of JoeMiller.us, Kathleen’s and my commitment to you is that we will continue to post liberty-oriented stories, even the unpopular, without regard to the expectations of the Establishment. We fired a shot across their bow with the start of our 2010 campaign on Lexington-Concord Day. The near-upset of their consummate insider, Lisa Murkowski, gave them a real scare. Little did they know that together, with you, our fight to unshackle our nation would continue.

*************************************************
*If you wish to advertise with Restoring Liberty, please click HERE or the “advertise” button at the very top of this page. Our rates are reasonable and competitive.

**The Alexa.com ranking fluctuates almost daily and reports both global and national rankings. Of course, only the national statistics are of value here. Curiously, some sites, like the online-only Alaska Dispatch, have a significant following (over 30%) in foreign countries and therefore have a much higher international ranking vis-a-vis Restoring Liberty. Significant foreign followings of unique, Alaska-oriented sites may indicate something other than normal traffic. For instance, employing foreign users to increase website traffic statistics is not unheard of. And given the Dispatch’s multi-million dollar budget, it has many tools available to it to artificially increase the appearance of readership.

We Don’t Need No Stinking Warrant: The Disturbing, Unchecked Rise of the Administrative Subpoena

/2 Comments/in /by

When Golden Valley Electric Association of rural Alaska got an administrative subpoena from the Drug Enforcement Administration in December 2010 seeking electricity bill information on three customers, the company did what it usually does with subpoenas — it ignored them.

That’s the association’s customer privacy policy, because administrative subpoenas aren’t approved by a judge.

But by law, utilities must hand over customer records — which include any billing and payment information, phone numbers and power consumption data — to the DEA without court warrants if drug agents believe the data is “relevant” to an investigation. So the utility eventually complied, after losing a legal fight earlier this month.

Meet the administrative subpoena: With a federal official’s signature, banks, hospitals, bookstores, telecommunications companies and even utilities and internet service providers — virtually all businesses — are required to hand over sensitive data on individuals or corporations, as long as a government agent declares the information is relevant to an investigation. Via a wide range of laws, Congress has authorized the government to bypass the Fourth Amendment — the constitutional guard against unreasonable searches and seizures that requires a probable-cause warrant signed by a judge.

In fact, there are roughly 335 federal statutes on the books passed by Congress giving dozens upon dozens of federal agencies the power of the administrative subpoena, according to interviews and government reports.

Read more from this story HERE.

Gigantic Footprint in Denali Park Sheds Light on Prehistoric Alaska

/0 Comments/in /by

Photo credit: Anthony Fiorillo

A recent discovery of an enormous, ancient footprint in Denali National Park is being seen as another indication of how busy the Alaskan landscape was with prehistoric animals coming and going for seasonal food hunting. Anthony Fiorillo is the curator of earth sciences at the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas. He says the first dinosaur print in Denali was found in 2005. He says that discovery, now on display at the Murie Science & Learning Center was the tip of the iceberg in terms of realizing how much dinosaur activity Denali once contained.

“Every year we’ve been going up there and every year we’ve been documenting dozens or hundreds of new localities. So at this point it’s safe to say that Denali national park actually has thousands of dinosaur foot prints throughout part of the park,” Fiorillo said.

Fiorillo says the new find, a Therizinosaur track was beyond Fang Mountain.

“Once you cross the sanctuary river and looked to the south side of the road, you would be looking all the way out to Toklat camp and even a little bit beyond that, you would be driving through some of the best dinosaur country, anywhere,” Fiorillo said.

Fiorillo says the feathered Therizinosaur was related to both Tyranasaurus rex and the chickadee, with four forward facing toes and peg like teeth suited for chomping vegetation.

Read more from this story HERE.

EPA’s Alaska Power-Grab Will Hurt the Nation

/3 Comments/in /by

Photo credit: NPCA Photos

That’s because the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is about to lock some of America’s poorest communities into a permanent economic depression as a favor to national environmental groups. If the EPA succeeds, what happens in Alaska won’t stay in Alaska – there will be huge economic and employment consequences for the rest of the country.

The Pebble Project is a proposed copper mine about 15 miles from my hometown of Iliamna in southwestern Alaska. The Pebble deposit contains one of the world’s largest discoveries of copper, and if the proposed mine secures more than 60 different regulatory approvals from about a dozen state and federal agencies, the project would create about 2,000 construction jobs and 1,000 permanent positions. For permitting, the developers will have to prove to regulators the project will not harm the surrounding environment, including Bristol Bay’s sockeye salmon population.

The Pebble Partnership has invested $120 million so far on environmental and socioeconomic studies that will be used to develop a formal permit application, which regulators will spend three to five years reviewing. But that’s not good enough for the national environmental groups who oppose the Pebble mine. Instead, they want the EPA to take the unprecedented and probably unlawful step of using Section 404 of the Clean Water Act to preemptively veto the project before any permit applications can be filed. The EPA appears to be following those marching orders, because in May the agency issued a draft report stating that a copper mine in the Bristol Bay Watershed would likely harm salmon populations. If the draft report is finalized, the EPA could then veto all mining activity in the region.

The State of Alaska is deeply troubled by this potential EPA power grab, as the Pebble site is located on state-owned land that’s been set aside for mineral development. The EPA’s draft report is essentially a literature review that contains no new or on-the-ground scientific research conducted as part of the assessment. Without a permit application, the EPA made up its own mine plan, assuming environmentally harmful technologies and practices “from the late 1800 and early 1900s” – historic examples that do not apply directly to a modern mine under current regulations , according to Alaska’s Department of Natural Resources. The draft report presents a “biased picture of only adverse impacts of a hypothetical mine,” and key sections “start with conclusions, and then subsequently follow with facts that support the conclusion,” which is “inappropriate for a scientific document developed by a regulatory agency.” But of all the State of Alaska’s criticisms, this was perhaps the most revealing: “No reference to, or consideration of, winter freezing or permafrost is provided in the risk assessment.” That’s right – the EPA wrote a report about Alaska and forgot the part about winter.

Read more from this story HERE.

Alaska Pursuing Shale Oil to Fill Pipeline

/0 Comments/in /by

Canada may have its Albertan oil sands, and North Dakota has its Bakken oil formation. But don’t count Alaska out when it comes to producing unconventional oil.

Alaska, which has fallen behind North Dakota in oil output and whose Prudhoe Bay oil fields are waning, is exploring the possibility of extracting oil from the source rock on the state’s North Slope. The state has leased more than half a million acres of its land to exploration companies, and even some environmentalists believe that the shale oil development could be the best way to increase output with relatively modest damage to the environment.

As in shale developments in Texas, North Dakota and elsewhere in the lower 48 states, the key to unlocking Alaska’s shale oil is a combination of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, a method of injecting a mix of water, sand and chemicals at high pressure to free up captured oil and gas.

As in Canada and North Dakota, a pipeline is playing a key role in the public debate over this new technological frontier. But whereas a new pipeline — the Keystone XL extension — is needed to get oil to markets in the lower 48, the quandary in Alaska is how to fill the existing Trans-Alaska Pipeline System. That pipeline is operating at less than one-third of its total capacity, as the Prudhoe Bay fields decline.

For the moment, it remains unclear whether Alaska can replicate the shale oil boom that is reshaping North Dakota and parts of Texas. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) issued its first assessment of the North Slope’s shale rock resources in February, estimating that the region contained between zero and 2 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil, along with between zero and 80 trillion cubic feet of gas.

Read more from this story HERE.

Remote Alaska to Stockpile Food, Just in Case

/1 Comment/in , /by

Photo credit: Christie 13

Alaska is known for pioneering, self-reliant residents who are accustomed to remote locations and harsh weather. Despite that, Gov. Sean Parnell worries a major earthquake or volcanic eruption could leave the state’s 720,000 residents stranded and cut off from food and supply lines. His answer: Build giant warehouses full of emergency food and supplies, just in case.

For some in the lower 48, it may seem like an extreme step. But Parnell says this is just Alaska.

In many ways, the state is no different than the rest of America. Most people buy their groceries at stores, and rely on a central grid for power and heat. But, unlike the rest of the lower 48, help isn’t a few miles away. When a fall storm cut off Nome from its final fuel supply last winter, a Russian tanker spent weeks breaking through thick ice to reach the remote town.

Weather isn’t the only thing that can wreak havoc in Alaska, where small planes are a preferred mode of transportation and the drive from Seattle to Juneau requires a ferry ride and 38 hours in a car. The state’s worst natural disaster was in 1964, when a magnitude-9.2 earthquake and resulting tsunami killed 131 people and disrupted electrical systems, water mains and communication lines in Anchorage and other cities.

“We have a different motivation to do this, because help is a long ways away,” said John Madden, Alaska’s emergency management director.

Read more from this story HERE.

Jihadists Call for Alaskan Navy SEAL’s Murder; His New Book Slams Obama for Taking Credit for bin Laden Hit

/3 Comments/in , /by

Bin Laden apparently was hit in the head when he looked out of his bedroom door into the top-floor hallway of his compound as SEALs rushed up a narrow stairwell in his direction, according to former Navy SEAL Matt Bissonnette, writing under the pseudonym Mark Owen in “No Easy Day.” The book is to be published next week by Penguin Group (USA)’s Dutton imprint.

Bissonnette says he was directly behind a “point man” going up the stairs. “Less than five steps” from top of the stairs, he heard “suppressed” gunfire: “BOP. BOP.” The point man had seen a “man peeking out of the door” on the right side of the hallway.

The author writes that bin Laden ducked back into his bedroom and the SEALs followed, only to find the terrorist crumpled on the floor in a pool of blood with a hole visible on the right side of his head and two women wailing over his body.

Bissonnette says the point man pulled the two women out of the way and shoved them into a corner and he and the other SEALs trained their guns’ laser sites on bin Laden’s still-twitching body, shooting him several times until he lay motionless. The SEALs later found two weapons stored by the doorway, untouched, the author said.

Read more from this story HERE and Bissonnette’s statement that the Navy Seals knew Obama would improperly take credit for the raid. They feared he might be reelected as a result. Also, Jihadists have published Bissonnette’s photo and demanded his killing since Fox News disclosed his identity.

Alaska Right-to-Life Endorsed Candidates Win 8 of 11 Races in GOP Primary

/3 Comments/in /by

Photo credit: utsfl

Anchorage, AK – It was a good night for the pro-life cause around the state of Alaska. In all, eight of eleven candidates endorsed by AK Right to Life PAC won Republican primaries, with one race yet undecided in House District 6, where the incumbent Eric Feige holds a 114-vote lead over his pro-life challenger, George Rauscher.

There were four contested Senate primaries in which AK Right to Life PAC candidates were endorsed. Headlining the night was a pair of Senate races featuring incumbent members of the Pro-abortion Democrat-controlled bi-partisan working group. Both sitting Senators lost to more conservative pro-life challengers.

In Senate District D, Mike Dunleavy handily defeated Senator Linda Menard by a margin of 58.22% to 41.78%. Many expected the race to be much closer, but at the end of the day with less than 16% turnout, Republicans went resoundingly for Dunleavy. And in Senate District O, challenger Peter Micciche easily defeated incumbent Senator Tom Wagoner by more than nineteen points. Micciche is currently the Mayor of Soldotna. Neither Dunleavy nor Micciche have Democrat challengers in the general election. Incumbent Senator Cathy Giessel also won easily in Senate District N.

On the House side, AK Right to Life PAC endorsed in 7 contested primaries. Five of those races were in the Mat-Su Valley. Four of the five won by twenty points or more: Wes Keller in District 7; Shelly Hughes in District 8; Lynn Gattis in District 9; and Bill Stoltze in District 11. Incumbent Peggy Wilson also won by double digits in District 33. As mentioned above, District 6 challenger George Rauscher still trails by a narrow margin with 10% of precincts not yet reporting.

While two races were decided against AK Right to Life PAC’s endorsed candidates, there is good news even there. In House District 26 where our endorsed candidate, Larry Wood, came in second, the winner, Lora Reinbold, is also a strong pro-life conservative. And in Senate District C, where AK Right to Life PAC endorsed long-shot candidate David Eastman, the winner, Click Bishop, is also pro-life with some exceptions.

On behalf of Alaska Right to Life, I would like to offer our sincere congratulations to the winners of tonight’s primaries, and many thanks to all the pro-life candidates who stood up and were counted in this election cycle. May God bless you for your efforts. Onward and upward!

*****************************

Matt Johnson is the executive director of Alaska Right to Life.