Jim Rittenhouse's semidaily journal of news, commentary and reports
Apparently, she’s resigning the governorship at the end of the month (at a picnic?!) and neither she nor the new Lieutenant Governor who will replace her will run in the next Gubernatorial election. Nothing about 2012 and the national scene.
Base-jumping the Burj Dubai. One of these dudes went back and did it again a couple of days later and got caught by the cops; not bright. Proportional discussion graph over the WATCHMEN movie. Strangely, I didn’t think that way, but… Killing off a rat-ridden island in the Alaskan Aleutians – or, rather, eliminating the [...]
Bristol Palin has decided that she’s had enough of Levi Strauss Johnston and chased him off to the Alaskan bush. Details in the 10 o’clock news. Hedge funds, no longer magically able to make money from thin air, are laying off tens of thousands of employees. Give them bonuses! The UK economy is looking at [...]
< snark switch turned on > As a Person of the Illinois Persuasion, I see no reason why we should pay for volcano sensors in Louisiana, or landslide detectors on the Chicago beaches, or hurricane detectors in Alaska. And protecting polar bears in Florida is just wrong. I did notice ‘things to do in case [...]
Lobbyists are gnashing their teeth and rending their garments; what are they to do without having a ready-made place to grease palms now that Ted Stevens is leaving the Senate? To maintain an open line to Mr. Stevens, the association hired Ms. Sutherland, who left Mr. Stevens not long after delivering those warnings to open [...]
Big story in the Anchorage Daily News on the failings of Alaska education. • Alaska’s dropout rate, at 8 percent, was double the national average in the 2005-2006 school year, according to the latest figures available from the U.S. Department of Education. • 38 percent of today’s ninth-graders will have no high school diploma 10 [...]
This works for either me or Meredith. There’s some question as to whether Susan has been in Mexico; if she was, it was to take two steps over the border in Tijuana or something. This is Mere’s states. California from when we brought her home, Massachusetts from a trip to the Boston Worldcon, and the [...]
The AP and others are now declaring Mark Begich, the Mayor of Anchorage (D), has beaten Senator Stevens for the Alaska Senate seat. The margin is too wide for a free recount, and it’s unlikely that the GOP will pay for it or Stevens can – or that it would make any significant difference. The [...]
Begich (D) is up 814 votes over Senator Stevens (R), with another 38,000 votes to go – in strong Democratic districts in Alaska.
Alaska Senate: 221,173 votes were already counted; a new estimate shows that the uncounted votes there are around 90,600 – about 30% of the total! (PDF with the details as to what sort of votes and from where) And this isn’t complete; absentee votes are still trickling in in the mail. They’ll start counting these [...]
Alaska: Still 81,000 uncounted ballots (absentee, some early ballots and the ‘provisional’ ballots) to go to be checked out in the next couple of weeks. The gap is presently around 3,200 out of 210,000 cast. (PDF of where the present votes came from) Minnesota: With a 221 vote gap out of 2,500,000 ish voting, there’s [...]
…for a few things to be resolved, elections wise. The Presidential vote in Missouri and the 2d Congressional district of Nebraska. The former leads a very narrowly for McCain and the latter for Obama. This would be the first time that the kinky division of electoral votes by Congressional district (which only figures in Maine [...]
The Republican leader of the Alaska State Senate is incensed at the McCain campaign’s intrusion and efforts to stonewall the Troopergate investigation, and is looking at calling the State Senate back into session to force the matter. Quotes after the cut:
Highly recommended blogger: Mudflats Alaska legislator Les Gara on the McCain campaign’s push to stonewall the Troopergate investigation by the State Legislature. State Senator Charlie Huggins, (R-Wasilla) was the Republican to vote for the 13 subpoenas against Todd Palin and the state employees over Troopergate. “I say let’s just get the facts on the table, [...]
And reformers can be undone by machines, when they trade their aspirations for power: