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Gov. Mike Dunleavy made the pledge and he’s stickin’ to it. Too bad he is putting national anti-tax politics above tax fairness in Alaska. Specifically, he vetoed legislation this month that would have taxed car rentals through online platforms the same as car rentals from brick-and-mortar agencies with local offices. And he vetoed legislation two years ago that would have taxed vape and e-cigarette products the same as traditional tobacco products. The car rental fairness legislation passed with 51 out of 60 state senators and rep...
We deliver you the Sentinel as one piece, whether in print or online. If you’re reading this in print, just pretend that the sheets of paper folded together are one piece. Regardless of how you read the paper, it has five elements: Paid advertising, news, the Sentinel’s editorial, my personal opinion column and opinions from our readers. Each has different rules and standards. Each is essential for newspapers that want to serve their community. Paid ads are pretty simple: The advertiser, be it a business or an individual or a government agency,...
Remember those perplexing math problems in school? Not the easy ones that required only simple subtraction, addition, multiplication or division. I’m talking about those word problems that told what seemed like a purposefully confusing story about trains moving in opposite directions at different speeds and you had to calculate how far apart they would be in an hour. I figured the purpose was to teach us problem solving. Though in my early school years, the biggest math problem I wanted to solve was how to buy 25 cents worth of candy when I h...
Candidates have long waged election campaigns on catchy slogans, snappy jingles, popular promises and misleading but memorable mottos. It’s getting worse. The music is better but the lyrics are lacking. Vagueness is in vogue. The less specific candidates are with their actual plans to fulfill campaign promises, the less the opposition and analysts can pick apart the flaws. Running for president or Congress? Promise more funding for child care, lower taxes, lower prices at the grocery store, stronger defense, defeating China for jobs and i...
Some of the best times in life are when a bad thing turns into a good thing. When frustration and disappointment transform into happiness. It’s not magic, though it seems magical. It’s when someone you don’t even know steps up and does something nice. I recently flew to Washington, D.C., and being frugal, which sounds so much better than cheap, took a 53-minute train ride from the suburban airport to the stop closest to my downtown hotel, rather than the more convenient but 20 times more expensive taxi. The Metro train station was almost a mil...
To modernize an old expression, Alaskans are fiddling while the Permanent Fund burns. Not literally, of course. The Permanent Fund’s stocks and bonds, real estate deeds, lease agreements and investment contracts are all safely stored. But the fiddling part, that’s true. And because it’s a state election year, we can expect a lot of candidates to turn up the volume on their fiddles. No matter how off-key the music, no one ever loses an election by playing happy tunes about big Permanent Fund dividends. No one wins an election talking about...
Former President Donald Trump has a narrow lead in most polls in a tight race for the White House, but he is far and away the leader in handing out personal insults. This guy tosses out crude nicknames, offensive language and outlandish statements like shark hunters toss out stinky chunks of fish meat to attract their catch. It’s called “chumming,” but there is nothing chummy about U.S. presidential politics. And the “catch” is voters. Trump has a massive mental thesaurus of insulting names for his political opponents, a strategy he has relie...
Gov. Mike Dunleavy has long prided himself on being a fiscal conservative. He has consistently adhered to that mantra, with the exception of his long-standing advocacy for a state checkbook-draining supersize Permanent Fund dividend. As a fiscal conservative, the governor has always talked of keeping a short leash on spending, a tight rein on appropriations, a firm grip on the budget. Too bad that stinginess extends to explaining his budget vetoes. Critics of Dunleavy’s vetoes of legislative appropriations for the state fiscal year that s...
Unbelievable, which is the opposite of what real news should be. But believe it that Elon Musk is pushing errors and false news into the heads of people around the world. Whether for his personal profit, personal ego or personal fun, it’s irresponsible and dangerous. Musk, a serial entrepreneur who is as flaky as cold cereal, believes Grok, his artificial intelligence service pedaled through X, formerly known as Twitter, should be a news source. “What we’re doing on the X platform is, we are aggregating. We’re using AI to sum up the aggrega...
Wrangell is in a Goldilocks situation when it comes to tourists. Too many is no good. It would leave the town feeling stuffed. Too few is what we have, leaving the town hungry to fill its economic bowl. Just enough more visitors to warm up the economy would be the right amount. Too bad it’s not as easy a choice as Goldilocks picking which porridge to bear down on. Wrangell is not a tourism-dominated community like Skagway or Juneau. Nor does it want to be. But a little more sales tax revenue would be a good thing, particularly if those sales t...
The state of Alaska, with all the legal wisdom of a political agenda and the flowing words of a high-priced law firm, has filed a claim against the federal government. Nothing new about that — the state has filed and signed onto more lawsuits against the national government in recent years than President Joe Biden has forgotten dates or former President Donald Trump has told lies. Nothing to be proud of in any of that. The state’s latest legal endeavor came July 2 in a dubious lawsuit — with a few errors and omissions for poor measure — that as...
A long time ago, the Sentinel called out a mayor for taking an action without city council approval (this was before Wrangell became a borough). The mayor had sent a letter to a federal agency, stating the city’s official position on an issue — but it was merely his personal opinion. There was no council discussion, no public notice. It wasn’t that controversial a position, but the point was that the mayor, no matter how well meaning, should not speak for the city without first making sure the elected council is in agreement. The mayor came...
Most everything pays better than newspapers. A lemonade stand in the winter, a barber shop at a convention of bald men, dry cleaning services for Carhartts — even canned farmed pink salmon at an Alaska street fair — all could be more profitable than running a newspaper. I used to think that publishing a quality paper, full of accurate, informative and entertaining news, always taking care to spell everyone’s name correctly, would produce enough revenue to pay the bills. But after reading more about political campaign donations, I reali...
Gov. Mike Dunleavy, his attorney general and others in the administration are spending a lot of time and state money defending Alaska against its perceived political enemies, fighting the U.S. government at every turn of the river, protecting Alaskans from the latest federal regulations and standing up for conservative values. The list includes picking fights with private banks that want to move away from oil and gas lending, egging on fights over library books, supporting the state of Texas in its fight to string razor wire along the border...
There is nothing longer in America than a presidential election campaign. And that is not a good thing. A long vacation is enjoyable. Long summers are a treat. Reuniting with long-lost friends is special. But long campaigns are becoming indescribably painful. Just think of an Excedrin headache that lasts all year for more than 240 million eligible voters. It could be like the supply-chain shortages of the pandemic, with people clearing out store shelves and grabbing for the last bottle of headache medicine. Still not convinced how miserable...
The expression, the best things in life are free, applies to fresh air, the view out the window and a positive attitude. For the next five weeks, it will also apply to the Wrangell Sentinel. Starting this week, the Sentinel has turned off the paywall to its website. Anyone with a keyboard, a mouse, a smartphone, a swiping finger or a voice-activated personal assistant will be able to go to wrangellsentinel.com and read all the news they want. Normally, the online edition of the Sentinel is available only to people who buy a subscription. As old...
A longtime friend who is just a couple of years younger than me called recently to ask some advice. I’m always flattered when someone seeks my opinion. It makes me feel wise and useful, which is more uplifting than my usual specialties of old and opinionated. But rather than some in-depth inquiry into public policy, finances, taxes, politics or journalism, his question made me feel nostalgic, like remembering my younger life of scrubbing whitewall tires, the low-cost joy of replacing a simple key before expensive programmable fobs took over the...
National news stories last week reported that a survey of almost 1,500 Amazon employees across 42 states found that one in three need government assistance, primarily food stamps or Medicaid. The news matches a Government Accountability Office analysis in 2020 that covered nine states and found that Amazon — and Walmart, too — were among the biggest employers of workers whose earnings were low enough that they qualified for food stamps. That Amazon and Walmart would be near the top is no surprise: Walmart is the largest private-sector emp...
The Republican-controlled Alaska House of Representatives last Saturday did their best impersonation ever of the U.S. House, spending all day on legislation that will never make it into law. It was the same kind of political circus that the nation has endured the past couple of years after a skinny margin of Republicans took control of the U.S. House, beholden to a small group who spend more time on social media than doing their schoolwork. Too bad teachers cannot take away their phones. Rather than focus on bipartisan legislation that could he...
One proposal to solve the impending energy shortage for Alaska’s population centers is to go back in time. To the 1970s, when coal was king in the U.S. The governor, legislators, municipal officials and business leaders are worried that the Railbelt — the population corridor stretching south from Fairbanks, through the Matanuska Valley and Anchorage to the Kenai Peninsula — will run short of natural gas before the end of the decade. The region has lived off the nearby underground warehouse of natural gas from the Kenai Peninsula and Cook Inlet...
The state House needed an auctioneer last week. Instead, it wasted three hours in a meaningless bidding war as the Republican-led majority told Alaskans they cared far more than anyone else about supporting education and ensuring state-funded alternatives for correspondence school students and their families. That meant they didn’t want to move too quickly to fix the constitutional problem of state money going to private and religious school programs. Let the millions continue to flow and wait for the Alaska Supreme Court to hear the appeal o...
Less than two years ago, Alaskans voted overwhelmingly against convening a constitutional convention to amend the state’s founding document. More than 70% of voters said no thanks, it’s a bad idea. It was the sixth time in a row, going back to 1972, that voters by wide margins rejected the whimsy of shaking up the constitution as you would a game of Etch A Sketch and redrawing the fundamental laws of Alaska. While they oppose reopening the constitution to a potential wholesale rewrite, Alaskans have approved multiple specific amendments ove...
Neither President Joe Biden, 81, nor former President Donald Trump, 77, is necessarily too old to be president. Their biggest flaws are not their ages, it’s that they are blocking and discouraging younger people from getting a chance to lead the country. It’s because the two nominees are so certain that they are best suited for the job of leading the country and that they, more than anyone else, are best able to manage a nation of 335 million people. They seem to think that younger leaders are not as capable as they are. Their ego tells the...
Who better to talk about education in Alaska than students. They could continue leaving it to school administrators, elected officials, their parents and teachers to speak for them, but that would be the easy way out. It’s also been unsuccessful. Looking to break that losing streak with the governor and state legislators unwilling to adequately fund education, hundreds of high schoolers around the state last week showed they are frustrated at the outcome. From Ketchikan, Sitka, Juneau, in Anchorage, Eagle River, Homer, Bethel and Utqiaġvik, st...
Alaska faces a seriously long list of long-term serious problems. Our population is aging, people are not moving here fast enough to replace those who leave, too many employers lack enough workers to fully staff their operations, and the state’s finances are as stable as oil prices — which is to say not. State funding for K-12 education is frozen in time from the past decade. We maintain our deteriorating public buildings about as well as a teenager cleans their room. And we seem in a contest to see which is in shorter supply in our com...
