It’s surprising how different it feels to have our Governor give a speech where all of the statements make sense and the ideas flow logically from one to the next. Where the national media doesn’t deconstruct every statement, and where it’s clear there’s no major hidden agenda relating to his career. In short, a cogent speech, the focus of which is Alaska and not the speaker.

Even if I’m not always with him 100% on policy, I had forgotten how nice it feels to have a full-time Governor.

Sorry, not interested, Ethan. What's next, Mafia Wars?

I mean, I guess he must not have anything better to do these days, but still?

Joe Blanchard prepares for an interview after winning a seat on the Fairbanks Borough Assembly. Blanchard is a past president of the UAF student government, known as ASUAF.

Sorry for my absence over the course of the last month.  I’ve been sidelined for a variety of reasons, most of which have to do with reporting I’m doing on the student government at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.  I’ve been doing a series of stories for the UAF paper – the Sun Star – on the efforts of some members of the student senate to remove the student president.  The experience got me thinking about student government and its relation to “actual” politics.  Is it a jumping-off point where future politicians can get their feet wet, or is it a backwater where political science majors with no hope of a career in real politics can stroke their egos and hold rein over their own little corner of the universe?

More after the jump.

The following is an excerpt from  a longer piece I wrote dealing with the subject:

Many university student politicians take their political career seriously – most of the delegates to the legislative conference in Juneau [editor's note: this is the conference I went to to advocate for UA funding] talk seriously about what it will be like when they take the reins in the c    apital, or beyond – but few go on to hold elected office in the “real world.”  A quick survey of past ASUAF presidents shows that only a few of the past 40 or so have ever held office after graduating from college, and there are no real statesmen on the list.  Alaska’s great men and women, the Ernest Gruenings and the Bob Bartletts and the William Egans, may have come from somewhere, but they didn’t come from student government at UAF. 

That said, at the Juneau conference, one thing that struck me was that there were at least a half-dozen legislative aides who had been involved in student politics at UAF.  Also, Joe Blanchard (a former ASUAF president himself) was recently elected to the Fairbanks North Star Borough Assembly, and Scott Kawasaki (D-Fairbanks) of the State House was a former ASUAF representative, so maybe there’s hope for student politicians in the “real world” yet.

I’m not sure about that. Don Young’s friends aren’t always a group of which I want to be a part.

I also ran across a rumor going about that there is some secret clause in the stimulus requiring registration for all guns.  This is patently untrue, from what I was able to find out – the one major gun-related item in the package appears to be enforcement money for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms to attempt to stem the flow of illegal guns into Mexico.  Which doesn’t sound like universal registration to me, but then I just belong to the regular NRA and not the tinfoil-hat NRA.  As most of the residents of Alaska carry their tinfoil-hat NRA badge with pride, however, I expect to see this rumor spread like wildfire.

Did you catch Obama’s first prime time press conference the other day?  Yeah, neither did I, but I did read the transcript, and was struck by something: not only does The Huffington Post apparently have a reporter in the White House press pool, the President called on them for a question.

Online news has come a long way.

I have been selected by UAF’s student government (of which I am not a member) to take part in the University of Alaska’s advocacy efforts in Juneau.

The trip will take place later this month, and I plan to report on the process both here and for UAF’s weekly student newspaper, the Sun Star.  It should be an interesting trip for me, as I’ve never been to Juneau before.  It’s one thing to talk to legislators on the phone, and entirely another to talk to them in person.  I’ve heard it’s beautiful down there, and that they’ve been getting a ton of snow.  I’m excited.

In case you’re wondering what exactly we’re advocating for, the short answer is full funding for the university.  To expand a bit, we’ll be asking for increases in maintenance allocations (the governor’s budget only allocated $10 million of a requested $50 million for upkeep of existing facilities), funding for a life science research and teaching facility at UAF (which has been UA’s number one capital funding priority for at least five years and has thus far received no funding), funding for K-12 outreach programs (did you know that Alaska has the worst high-school-to-college matriculation rate of any state in the nation?), and a host of other budget issues related to education.

I don’t expect that this trip (for which the university will foot the bill) to substantially change my opinion on education issues- I’m already a pretty strong proponent of education funding, which is probably why I was selected to go- but I did think that anyone who reads this blog deserves to know about the trip.

Along the way, I found myself explaining the story many times in very simple terms to people who didn’t know the particulars, which was just about everybody.  What I found is that different people had different reactions, but there were a few common threads:

• Just about every voting-age Alaskan, contrary to Rep. Fairclough’s assertion,  is acutely aware of the role that resource development plays in the state economy.
• A lot of people, particularly conservative people, agree with Rep. Fairclough- not just about university students/faculty, but in general.  In some conservative circles, there’s a definite “love-it-or-get-out” sentiment with regard to development- that is, anyone who doesn’t support oil, gas, mining, and timber development shouldn’t get to share in the proceeds.
• Many people I talked to seemed to focus on the development at the expense of the actual heart of the matter, which I see as being this: the reason this story blew up the way it did is that no matter how students feel or vote, there is something deeply wrong with making a link- even a speculative one- between political beliefs and education funding.  

Anna Fairclough touched that third rail, and although she probably won’t suffer much political consequence from it, she brought a dangerous idea out into the open: why not stifle your political enemies by cutting, or threatening to cut, their funding?

The issue is deeper than Fairclough on both sides of the political spectrum, and I feel like we’ll see more of it before we see less.  The trick is recognizing it when you see it, because it’s not always as obvious as, “So help me here in understanding how I should advocate funding more for an entire group that really doesn’t want to see development go forward?”

Fairclough is the chair of the UA Funding subcommittee, so many observers interpreted this as a sort of shot across the bow.  Fairclough denies that she meant the comments as a threat in any way.  I’ll write more on this soon, but for now, here’s a transcript of what Fairclough asked Hamilton:

Last year I had many passionate students come to my door and ask for support for the scholarship program that was out there- to support that.  And I had many passionate university instructors and staff from across the university.  And I found it amazing that there was a large disconnect in where the dollars from the state of Alaska comes from on a regular basis as far as the production of oil on the North Slope and how that is turned into revenue for the state of Alaska and in turn is invested in the university system.

  President Hamilton, if I asked university staff, the people who are educating our future leaders, if they support the Chukchi Sea development, Red Dog Mine, Pebble Mine, or any type of industry along those lines, a stereotypical response is that they are in opposition.  If I asked- or I did ask- I asked them when they came through the door, each different group- the students that were passionate- the same questions.  Whether they supported it, whether they thought their friends supported it. 

Predominantly, each of the student groups that came through said they opposed all the things that I just said- oil exploration, expansion… and they were concerned, in a very idealistic way, about our environment, which I greatly appreciated, but the question I ask you, is when you come to us asking for more dollars for the university and the system itself is creating- those that are engaged in the system may be creating an inability for us to provide those resources to you- what can I do to help clarify inside of that population that if you want more money, you can either choose- because I asked them if they wanted to tax themselves, too, and that wasn’t a good solution either. 

So help me here in understanding how I should advocate funding more for an entire group that really doesn’t want to see development go forward?

-Representative Anna Fairclough, 2/3/09

Sarah Palin has been busy with the media lately, giving interviews to whoever wants them.  In these interviews, she mostly criticizes the same people who are keeping her fifteen minutes of national fame alive- the media.

She’s come out really strong lately against bloggers, probably (and I’m only guessing here) because the majority of the high-quality blogs out there weren’t particularly supportive of her political ambitions.  In an interview with Esquire, Palin let this little gem fly, “Bored, anonymous, pathetic bloggers who lie annoy me….I’ll tell you, yesterday the Anchorage Daily News, they called again to ask — double-, triple-, quadruple-check — who is Trig’s real mom. And I said, Come on, are you kidding me? We’re gonna answer this? Do you not believe me or my doctor? And they said, No, it’s been quite cryptic the way that my son’s birth has been discussed. And I thought, Okay, more indication of continued problems in the world of journalism.”

Upon the publication of Palin’s attack on their reporting, the ADN released a lengthy, point-by-point response- published, fittingly, on the editor’s blog.  In their response, the ADN claimed that the only reason their reporter was asking about Trig at all was that the paper was working on a story debunking conspiracy theories about Palin and her campaign.  Furthermore, the paper claimed that they had to abandon the story due to lack of cooperation from Palin’s family and office.  The ADN characterized Palin’s attack as at best factually incorrect, and at worst intentionally misleading.

Sarah Palin, though, tends to move in only one direction once she’s going, so she hasn’t backed down on the anti-blog rhetoric.  In an interview with Alaska Report published today, Palin opined that bloggers aren’t held appropriately to account when they lie.

The subject of people not being held to account when they lie, especially in the world of politics, is an area which has become rich with examples over the past five or ten years.  Given this, it’s extremely tempting to caustically turn Palin’s words right back at her.  I think that in this particular instance I’ll take the high road, though, and leave you to pick your own favorite person who hasn’t been held to account for lying to the Alaskan and/or American people.  I feel like bloggers don’t rate very high on the list, but maybe I’m too close to the topic.