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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.

Blaming the Tea Party for Mayhem: “Journalistic Malpractice”

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ABC News’ Brian Ross speculated this morning that the alleged shooter who attacked a Batman premier in Colorado might be a member of the Tea Party. His suggestion — since retracted by ABC — continues a trend of media figures wrongly tying such tragedies to the Tea Party since 2010.

In February 2010, Joseph Stack became a Tea Partier for purposes of the media after he committed suicide by flying his small airplane into an IRS building in Austin, Texas. New York Magazine, after reading his online suicide note/manifesto that day, immediately declared that “a lot of his rhetoric could have been taken directly from a handwritten sign at a tea party rally.” The Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart added that “his alienation is similar to that we’re hearing from the extreme elements of the Tea Party movement.”

Neither Capehart or NYMAG mentioned that Stack quoted the Communist Manifesto approvingly and denounced capitalism as a system that teaches, “From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed.” That would seem to put him at odds with the Tea Partiers, who often attacked Obamacare as a socialist government program.

A few months later, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg speculated that the failed attempt to bomb Times Square was carried out by someone “with a political agenda who doesn’t like the health care bill or something.” The would-be bomber, a Pakistani immigrant, said in court “If I’m given 1,000 lives I will sacrifice them all for the life of Allah.”Most famously, politicians and media figures attacked Sarah Palin and the Tea Party after the Tucson shooting that wounded Rep. Gabby Giffords, R-Ariz., and killed six others. Palin was faulted for having put “crosshairs” over Giffords’ district when she was targeting Democratic seats that might be vulnerable to Republican takeover. Even a year after the shooting, Democratic National Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., was willing to cite the shooting as proof that politicians need to “tone things down, particularly in light of” the Tucson shooting. “I hesitate to place blame, but I have noticed it take a very precipitous turn towards edginess and lack of civility with the growth of the Tea Party movement,” she said.

Read more from this story HERE.

Publisher’s Note:  Please also read the Wall Street Journal’s excellent article, Extreme Prejudice.  It gives a brief background on the innocent Jim Holmes (he “is a 52-year-old Hispanic conservative who joined the Tea Party after becoming disillusioned with the Republican party. . . . He disconnected his telephone and says that he is worried about members of his family who might be contacted by the media”) and notes that

There was one other factor, and this is what makes the ABC error not just amateurish but sinister: the innocent Jim Holmes’s involvement with the Tea Party. For more than three years liberal journalists have falsely portrayed the Tea Party as racist and potentially violent. After the January 2011 mass shooting in Tucson, Ariz., speculation immediately began that the suspect was a Tea Partier. Even after it was proved that he was not, the New York Times published a despicable editorial blaming conservatives anyway.