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What’s Wrong With Alaska’s Congressional Delegation?

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Most Alaskans know that their congressional delegation is pretty liberal, with the some-times exception of the ethically-challenged Don Young. Anyone watching this past week’s Senate votes by Senators Lisa Murkowski and Mark Begich would have a hard time disagreeing with that conclusion.

Here’s a recap:

Photo ID for Elections. Sen. David Vitter proposed an amendment requiring photo ID for voters. Only two Republicans voted against it. Yep, you guessed it: Lisa Murkowski was one of them, joining her Democrat colleague Mark Begich in sending the measure to defeat.

Abortion Mandate for Religious Groups. Pro-abortion Democrat Jeanne Shaheen offered an amendment reaffirming the requirement that religious groups, notwithstanding their sincerely-held moral objections, must provide abortion drugs and birth control to their insureds. The measure passed with both Murkowski and Begich’s supporting votes.

Banning Former Illegal Aliens from Healthcare Benefits. Sen. Jeff Sessions offered an amendment that would have banned former illegal aliens from receiving government medical benefits. His effort failed. Both Murkowski and Begich voted against the proposal.

United Nations Funding/China’s Abortion Policy. See this article on Murkowski and Begich’s votes opposing Senator Cruz’s point of order against funding the United Nations as long as any of its member nations have a policy of involuntary abortions.

Finally, both Murkowski and Begich supported President Obama’s controversial anti-gun judicial nominee, Caitlin Halligan. That support went down in defeat this week with Obama’s withdrawal of the nominee after a lengthy GOP filibuster.

Begich and Murkowski’s Support for Obama’s Radical Anti-Gun Appellate Court Nominee Ends in Defeat

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Yesterday, the Obama Administration admitted defeat in withdrawing its left-wing nominee, Caitlin Halligan, for the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals. Republicans successfully filibustered the nomination, pointing out that Halligan had argued as New York’s solicitor general that firearms manufacturers should be held liable for violent crimes committed with their guns.

The National Rifle Association vigorously opposed Halligan’s nomination. Curiously, the NRA’s darling in the senate, Lisa Murkowski, was the only Republican to support Obama’s nominee. All other Republicans joined the filibuster effort. Begich, of course, joined with the other gun control advocates in the Senate.

Halligan isn’t just known as an anti-gunner, she also is marked by her pro-gay marriage, pro-abortion, open border, radical environmental, and affirmative action views.

Of course, this isn’t the first time that Alaska’s senior senator has backed a leftist judge. Last February, Murkowski joined with other RINO’s and Begich to confirm Jesse Furman to the Federal Court of Appeals. Furman infamously blamed America’s violence on its “fascination with guns.”

The first test of how Alaskans will embrace the anti-gun votes of their elected federal officials will come in 2014 with Mark Begich’s reelection efforts. But Murkowski will face the same test just two years later. Both should be sent packing.

Outrage: Alaska’s Senators Support Transfer of F-16’s and M1 Tanks to Muslim Brotherhood Government in Egypt

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While Egypt burned, Alaska’s United States Senators voted yesterday to table an amendment that would have blocked the sale of advanced military weaponry to the Muslim Brotherhood-controlled Egyptian Government whose leader has recently made headlines for calling the Jews “bloodsuckers” and “descendants of apes and pigs.”

Apparently our delegation is impervious to the fact that the very organization that spawned Osama Bin Laden, and the terrorist organization Hamas, will be the recipients of US arms. The goal of these dangerous extremists is a global caliphate.

One has to wonder how putting such dangerous weapons in the hands of an anti-Semite whose credo calls for jihad and martyrdom will help to stabilize a region that is already in turmoil.

In case you’re wondering, the Muslim Brotherhood’s creed reads as follows: “Allah is our objective; the Quran is our law, the Prophet is our leader; Jihad is our way; and death for the sake of Allah is the highest of our aspirations.”

The amendment in question was put forward by Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky.

See video below:

Porkulus: Senator Begich Gets $150 Million Dollars for Hurricane Sandy Relief in Alaska?

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photo credit: afge

The Senate’s emergency spending bill to cover costs from Hurricane Sandy includes millions of dollars that will never touch the affected Northeast — including money for salmon fisheries in Alaska, cash for an expansion of train service into New York, and funds to preserve and repair historic properties.

Lawmakers begin debating the bill Monday on the Senate floor, where the first thing they will confront is the size and scope of the $60.4 billion package, which aims to repair damage and to build protection against storms.

President Obama submitted his wish list to Congress, but senators added their own priorities. For example, Mr. Obama asked for $32 million to repair part of the Amtrak rail system not covered by insurance, but the Senate multiplied that request more than tenfold, to $336 million, with the extra money going to cover Amtrak’s operating losses and to increase train capacity into New York City.

The Sandy recovery bill also includes more than $500 million for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which amounts to a full tenth of what the agency spends per year, nationwide.

Part of that is $150 million for “fishery disasters,” which means money could flow to Mississippi’s blue crab and oyster industries, and to Alaska, where one senator said Chinook salmon have suffered.

Read more from this story HERE.

Alaska’s Governor & Delegation, Party to Empowering Tyrants & Terrorists

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Do we want to redistribute America’s wealth to State sponsors of terrorism while hamstringing our defenses? Passing the Law of the Sea Treaty would do just that, enabling the United Nations to further raid America’s treasury, rob her sovereignty, and further empower the despots of the UN.

Here’s a question for the two Senators from Alaska: why would you be a party to empowering the tyrants and terrorists of the United Nations? Why would Alaska’s Governor Sean Parnell and Lt Governor Mead Treadwell also favor passing this treaty?

Our state’s leadership supports a treaty that would be catastrophic for America.

There have been three UN conventions on the Law of the Sea (LOST), the first in 1956, the second in 1960 (both held in Geneva, Switzerland), and the third in New York, 1973. The third convention finally concluded in 1982. The international treaty became enforceable in November, 1994, one year after the sixtieth state, Guyana, ratified the treaty. 162 countries have ratified LOST.

In its current form, the Law of the Sea consists of 17 parts, containing 320 articles and 9 annexes, governing ocean space, boundaries, environmental control, marine research, economic and commercial activities, transfer of technology and royalties, and the settlement of disputes relating to ocean matters.

In past administrations, the main obstacles to US Senate ratification have been the provisions in Part XI, articles 133 through 191 of LOST defining the area subject to international jurisdiction, and part VI, article 82, describing royalty distribution. All disputes would be resolved at an international tribunal headquartered in Hamburg, Germany.

The US Senate has never ratified the treaty. The Obama administration recently revived it and, although the Senate didn’t actually vote on it, LOST supporters were only one vote short of the 67 needed to ratify it (in the US, treaty ratification requires a two-thirds vote in the Senate and the President’s signature). LOST is sometimes called the ‘Zombie treaty’ because it keeps resurfacing after being rejected by the US Senate.

From my perspective, one of the biggest problems with the treaty is its re-distributive policies. America’s generosity has always been superior to that of any other country. Americans have freely given untold sums of aid to those in need. But now the US is supposed to sign a treaty mandating that Americans must give more, potentially sending trillions of dollars to ‘less developed’ countries, some of whom are known state sponsors of terrorism!

Resource exploration and development in effect becomes distribution of wealth to an ‘international authority.’ Of course, the resource extraction itself can only be done after receiving permission from that ‘authority’ to do so. Beyond our Continental shelf or ‘exclusive economic zone’, a percentage of revenue from resource production such as oil, would be distributed to the UN.

Resource development thus becomes the fuel for global power, a power that will further raid America’s wealth, redistributing it as well as the LOST resource revenues, to our enemies across the world.

I am also very concerned that ratifying LOST would greatly degrade America’s defense capability. The security of our allies throughout the world would be compromised. Access to ocean or maritime areas presently used and protected by the US Navy could be lost as sovereignty is lost to the UN. At risk is peace and liberty for many countries. America must not submit to the power of despots within the United Nations.

As noted above, not only does Governor Parnell and Lieutenant Governor Mead Treadwell strongly favor LOST, both of our US Senators do as well. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry, D-Mass., is pushing for ratification of the treaty, with a vote planned for the lame-duck session after the November elections. Alaska’s two Senators have said they’ll vote for it.

When you analyze treaties such as the ‘Law of the Sea’, the ‘UN arms treaty’, or proposals and policies found in things like the UN’s ‘Agenda 21’, or Coastal zone management, you find a common thread binding them together: internationalism. Either our elected representatives are ignorant, corrupted by special interests that gain from the new regimes, or they are globalists. More likely, they’re a bit of each.

Alaskan Combat Military Veterans May No Longer Qualify For PFD, But Murkowski, Young & Begich Do

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In a unanimous decision yesterday, the Alaska Supreme Court determined that former-Alaska Attorney General Wayne Anthony Ross’s son, an Annapolis graduate and active-duty Marine, no longer qualifies for an Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend. As a result, his minor children also lose their Permanent Fund Dividends.

This decision was reached even though there is no dispute that Lieutenant Colonel Brian Ross has been a life-long Alaskan resident. He was born and raised in Anchorage. After graduating from Service High School in Anchorage, he attended the United States Naval Academy.

Wayne Anthony Ross told Restoring Liberty that his son “graduated as the top Marine applicant of the Class of 1994. He served in Iraq three times. He always continued to maintain himself as an Alaskan resident, registering his cars, voting, keeping his Alaska driver’s license and hunting licenses here. He owns land and a lodge herein Alaska and has returned home almost every year. He intends to return home here after getting out of the Marine Corps.” Mr. Ross said that, in 2012, his son returned to Alaska three times.

Unfortunately for LTC Ross, who entered active duty in 1990, our ethically-challenged state legislature decided in 1998 that Alaskan residents who have been absent from the state for more than ten years should no longer qualify for an Alaska PFD. Exceptions were made for our royal congressional class (at the time Senator Murkowski, Senator Stevens, and Representative Young), their immediate families, and even their staff, but no exception was made for Alaskan military veterans deployed outside of the state.

Mr. Ross argued that this different approach for congressional members and their families was a violation of equal protection. Obviously, if the legislature is willing to permit Senators and our lone Representative to continue to collect the PFD even though their residences have been in the Beltway for far more than ten years, veterans deployed in the service of their country should have the same treatment.

The Alaska Supreme Court unanimously said “no.” This decision should come as no surprise given the fact that this same Supreme Court chose to ignore equal protection violations during the Miller-Murkowski senatorial race in 2010. There, our royal Senator received a hand count of her ballots while Mr. Miller’s vote result was established by a Diebold machine count even though it was an established fact that the Diebold machine count was inaccurate.

Our Supreme Court unanimously said that it did not matter that over 60% of all Alaskan votes (McAdams and Miller votes) were counted differently than Murkowski’s.

The Alaskan electorate needs to bring accountability to the Alaskan judiciary. And a tool to do that is available. It’s called the retention vote. Vote “No” this November.

Sen. Mark Begich: I’m worried about Joe Miller & the entire national right-wing attack machine

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Photo credit: aflcio

Sen. Mark Begich is worried about Joe Miller and “the entire national right-wing attack machine.” Those are words he used in a recent letter soliciting funds for his 2014 reelection bid. Instead of starting with his positions on current issues and a list of his accomplishments, Begich devoted the first dozen sentences of the letter to how his opposition is preparing to take him down. But the underlying message in this uninspiring introduction is how the commercialization of our society is corrupting our democratic process.

As a Democrat in a Republican leaning state, Begich knows he’ll likely be the underdog in the race to retain his U.S. Senate seat. What will make his battle more difficult, he says, is that the GOP will be “spending millions of Washington dollars to distort [his] record and promote Joe Miller.” It’s a scenario he should be partly familiar with because that’s how the Democrats helped him four years ago while the FBI was investigating possible corruption by the late Sen. Ted Stevens. And just as he claims the GOP at the national level doesn’t “care about what’s important to Alaskans,” the D.C. Democrats back then didn’t either.

What will be different in his 2014 race is how campaign money will come into the state from undisclosed sources. That’s because the 2010 Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case equated political contributions with free speech. The transparency problem created by the ruling could have been corrected before the election that year. Indeed, the Supreme Court actually advised Congress to pass new legislation that would have required sufficient disclosure so the voting public could determine which candidates might wind up beholden to special interests. But Senate Republicans defeated such a bill crafted by Democrats in 2010 and more recently shot down a similar proposal.

Begich may be sounding early alarm bells because Alaskans really won’t see much of the effect of Citizens United in this year’s national elections. But around the rest of the country, billionaires, large corporations and every other well financed special interest group are prepared to spend enormous sums of money to influence the outcome of other races. And while political analysts believe Republicans will benefit most from the lack of transparency in campaign spending, blaming them for the deterioration of our democratic process is too easy. There are other entities who for decades have been contributing of demise of our electoral politics.

Let’s start with the advertising industry. They’re drooling at the prospect of revenue from record breaking spending this year. It would be one thing if they were hired to honestly portray a candidate’s record and position on the issues. But the vast majority of their television and radio ads will be totally void of substance. Worse yet, the most effective ones are often those that slyly distort the truth. In other words, the most sought after advertisers are those who can legally deceive most of the people most of the time. New York Times columnist David Brooks put it this way — “the ad-makers now take dishonesty as a mark of their professional toughness.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Law of the Sea Treaty, Supported by Alaska’s Governor, Lt. Governor & Congressional Delegation, now DOA

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The United Nations Law of the Sea Treaty now has 34 senators opposed to it and thus lacks the Senate votes needed for U.S. ratification, a key opponent of the treaty announced Monday.

But the treaty’s main Senate proponent denies the treaty is sunk, saying plenty of time still exists to win support before a planned late-year vote.

The Law of the Sea Treaty, which entered into force in 1994 and has been signed and ratified by 162 countries, establishes international laws governing the maritime rights of countries. The treaty has been signed but not ratified by the U.S., which would require two-thirds approval of the Senate.

Critics of the treaty argue that it would subject U.S. sovereignty to an international body, require American businesses to pay royalties for resource exploitation and subject the U.S. to unwieldy environmental regulations as defined.

The list of treaty opponents has been growing, and on Monday, Sen. Jim DeMint, South Carolina Republican and a leader of efforts to block it, announced that four more Republicans have said that they would vote against ratification: Sens. Mike Johanns of Nebraka, Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, Rob Portman of Ohio and Johnny Isakson of Georgia.

Read more from this story HERE.

Photo credit:  Department of Defense

Time for Alaska’s Congressional Delegation to Stop Discriminating Against Alaska Natives

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For the last four decades, Alaska’s congressional delegation, in concert with so-called Native leaders, has taken actions that discriminate against Alaskan Natives.

In 1976 corporate leaders successfully exempted Native corporations from federal security laws. When seeking the exemption, corporate officials told Congress they would obtain State legislation that would provide their shareholders protections from corporate mismanagement, misrepresentations and omissions. Of course, this false promise was never fulfilled. To this day, Native shareholders receive no protections from federal security laws and the State of Alaska refuses to enforce the Corporate Code against Native corporations.

Fundraisers and corporate perks to politicians paid off in 1986 when Senator Stevens enacted special legislation for the Native corporations to sell net operating losses (NOLs). Sen. Stevens told Congress the legislation would cost the federal government a loss of about $50 million. His payoff to the corporations ended up costing the US government more than $1.25 billion. It was reported that Native corporations sold properties at losses of approximately $3 billion. Native stockholders were never informed of the properties that were sold, selling prices, appraisals, losses, or even the names of the purchasers of the properties. And the shareholders did not get to vote on the sales of their properties at huge losses. For any non-native corporation, this would have violated a host of federal and state disclosure laws.

Native corporations spent large sums of corporate money to lobby for the ANCSA Amendments of 1987. Many of the amendments were harmful to Native shareholders. The amendments extended stock restrictions, extended the exemption of federal security laws, and shareholders lost rights that were included in ANSCA. This was done without the knowledge or consent of Native shareholders. The amendments to ANCSA have placed corporate management in a position where they control and dominate their shareholders.

In 2010, Native corporations directly donated over $1.2 million (and untold millions in indirect donations) to defeat Joe Miller who had consistently argued in favor of Native shareholder rights throughout his campaign. In 2012 CIRI hosted a fund raiser for Senator Begich and rose over $100,000. Native corporations do not disclose the amounts of corporate funds that are donated to politicians and the donations are not brought before the shareholders for a vote.

ANCSA divided Alaska Natives. Natives born before the Act were directly awarded shares but those born after the Act were not. The number of shareholders is increasing in the Native corporations but at the same time, the number of shares held by Native shareholders is decreasing. For example, CIRI’s original shareholders numbered 6,280 and now numbers over 8,100. Approximately 500 shareholders are non-natives and 1,000 shareholders own 10 shares or less. In another generation, our Native children and grandchildren will own fewer shares. With corporate managers selling lands and resources, there simply won’t be much left for our grandchildren.

The main benefactors of ANCSA have been the managers of the corporations. Many of them have become multi-millionaires and politically powerful by using the wealth of the shareholders. For example, in 2000, CIRI’s five senior managers were paid an astounding $16,875,848.

It’s time to end discrimination and misuse of Native corporation monies, land and resources. Alaska Natives need to stand up and demand equal rights, unrestricted stock, constitutional rights, fair elections, accountability and transparency in regards to their moneys, lands and natural resources.

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Bob Rude is a lifelong Alaskan native who has seen the transformation of Alaska through statehood, ANCSA, and the Ted Stevens legacy.  He was one of the founders of the Cook Inlet Regional Corporation and a Director for close to 30 years, in addition to being founder and past president of Cook Inlet Tribal Council. He’s been a Director of Anchorage Native Assembly, Crime Stoppers, and Alaska Federation of Natives Human Resources Board. He is the co-author of “ANCSA: Sovereignty and a Just Settlement of Land Claims or An Act of Deception” (1999). In 1957, he was chosen Alaska’s Most Valuable High School Basketball Player while attending Anchorage High School.