Uncle Ted Redux

Here is another view on how Alaskan's feel about Uncle Ted, from Amanda Coyne, Guardian, UK:

Local pollster, Ivan Moore, who is from England but has lived in Alaska for 20 years, goes so far as to say that Stevens doesn't have a "chance in hell" of winning this election. He said this while sitting in a bar in the hardscrabble interior town of Fairbanks. A sign above the bar read: "We love Senator Stevens." Around Alaska, bumper stickers read: "I'll vote for Ted 'till he's dead." One local talkshow caller summed up a fairly common sentiment in Alaska when he said: "I'll vote for a guilty Republican over a liberal any day".

These are the people Moore calls Ted's rock-solid base. He thinks that accounts for about 35-40% of Alaska's populace, which is why Moore doesn't foresee a blow out on election day. He predicts that Begich will win it by about 15 points.

What awaits the diminutive man who wore a Hulk tie on the Senate floor when he was prepping for a fight, always for something for Alaska (roads, more money for septic systems for Alaska Native villages, airstrips and post offices, bus stations and federal buildings)? Maybe it's prison. Maybe it's here, back home, among the people who will always call him Uncle Ted. The people who will say: He might be a crook, but he's Alaska's crook. He's just one of us.

Makes me think that even after he is dead, he will haunt Alaska; a ghosly presence. And what a good halloween costume that would be- ghostly, ghoulish, old Uncle Ted, dragging his ball and chain.

Kleptocracy Convicted: The Fall of a Banana Republic:

I heard the verdict-I was totally in shock. In my head, I thought that he would be convicted, but in my heart I am not sure that I ever really believed it. I was ecstatic! I was amazed. But now, some hours later, I am rather more sad; sad that I lived my entire adult political life in the Ted era. But what has been has been. I have been telling people here in Tucson that I am a political refugee from Alaska, though I don’t think anyone really understood what I was talking about. I came here after two failed campaigns for the legislature, precisely during the era of Republican ascendancy, when Palin began her rise to fame as Mayor of Wasilla, on a right to life platform.
I ran for the legislature to uphold the team, so as not to have uncontested sets on the ticket. But when you lose it’s so personal. Especially when you lose to someone like Pete Kelly a graduate of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, or John Coghill, a Baptist minister from North Pole, now in his tenth year in the legislature. I always thought of them apart of a right wing mafia, even though, 10 years ago, we had no proof. They were all so sanctimoniously smug. Cynthia Henry and Sue Hull both supported Frank Murkowski and year after year, worked for the good of the Ted Stevens machine. For the last ten years Alaskans have said that the economy was a three legged stool, oil money, state money, and ted Stevens. And the last few years, there has been a lot of teeth gnashing over what would happen to the state budget if Ted died.
But when you lose its so personal. You always hope that your race is going to be the one that rides in on a political monster wave. Or that your opponent will make that big mistake, that you will be the El Tinklenberg, who benefits from the major gaffe of Michelle Bachman, who called for the investigation of half of congress for un-American beliefs: Or that you will be the James Webb who rolls into office on the George Allen ‘macaca’ gaffe. Whatever it is, there is always a portion of luck in a campaign and a quantity of hope.
But when you lose its so personal.
Ted’s forty years reign was really a patronage machine, and a kleptocracy; crony capitalism with the spoils spread around to everyone. But the stealing was from the American taxpayers, and the beneficiaries were all Alaskans. Of course, some Alaskans got more than others. It’s really just the sadly typical pattern of a resource colony. Where there is no price to pay for spreading the spoils, because there are no taxpayers.
But the price was paid by those of us who lost the opportunity for political careers. And who had to watch while the citizens turned to spoilsmen, and voted for Ted and Don year after year. I appreciate those democrats who stuck it out through the Republican legislatures. Here is a shoutout to you David Guttenberg, Scott Kawasaki, Johnny Ellis, Les Gara, Ethan Berkowitz, Beth Kertulla, Joe Thomas. You are all tougher than I am.
So what happens next? Ted is still running, and Alaskans, under sway of the Ted can do no wrong mythology may still vote for him. The story they are spreading is the usual: “Its those damn feds, out to get us again. They just don’t understand how we do things up here in Alaska.”
Linda Wertheimer said on NPR today that Alaskans have such love for the man that we call him Uncle Ted. Well, it’s not love, it’s just that he is like the rich uncle that you don’t dare offend.

Sad Super Sarah Sunday

Well, they convicted stevens today, and I am thinking about a post to celebrate, but while I get in the mood, check out this Sad Super Sarah Sunday in a bunker in Anchorage's Kincaid Park, from an Anch. blogger on Daily Kos

Ted Stevens and Bill Allen

Ted Steven’s may be correct that he didn’t know about and didn’t want the gifts which Bill Allen, and others, bestowed on him. (See Dana Milbank in theWashington Post and Anchorage Daily News) But that’s the problem, Stevens has been in office so long, that it seems he feels immune to the rules. And he was friends with Bill Allen so long, that he seemingly could no longer separate Bill Allen’s interests from his own. They operated as a unit, a team. Bill Allen and his lackeys built a deck, hoisted an expensive barbeque onto it, dropped off furniture and expensive sculpture. And Bill and his friends felt free to use the house. It was all done in a “what’s yours is mine” style that Stevens would have us believe is “the Alaskan way." That Allen was a contractor and Stevens a powerful U.S. Senator probably came to be seen merely as convenient to this long standing friendship. That, I repeat, is the gist of the problem. That Stevens failed to report the gifts, the added expense, is just the symptom of the problem. But that is how the typical prosecution for corruption goes. Rarely is the principal fingered for actual “corruption.” Instead, convictions come on ancillary charges: failing to report, or failing to pay taxes. In this case, the charge is not based on a quid pro quo: the prosecutors have alleged that Allen received favors, but they are not trying Stevens on these charges. But again I repeat, the problem was, is, that Stevens has no notion of separation between what is good for Bill Allen and Veco and what might be in the interest of the state.

Sarah Palin and the AIP

You really have to check out this new item on Progressive Alaska,
Saradise Lost - Chapter One Hundred-Thirty --
Video of David Neiwert, the Pacific Northwest's leading expert on Right-wing terrorists, on CNN today: He and Max Blumethal of Salon have been doing a lot of digging into Sarah's connections with the AIP- my favorite conspiracy theory.
He calls them a group much like the Patriot groups.
for all you deeply committed conspiracy stalkers, here is a link to David Neiwert's own blog, with much more detail.

Debate Number Three

The debate was just generally boring. I thought that McCain was weakest on health care. I just can’t understand why Obama does not hit him on the issue of people with pre-existing conditions. What happens to them? (Us, actually)
And on education, the only idea McCain has is vouchers, but not everyone can get vouchers; vouchers are actual an expensive solution, and the only other thing he says is we can’t throw money at the problem, which is the oldest idea in the Republican playbook.
Obama was good in responding to the expected Ayers attack by responding with who he does associate with.
And I thought that McCain was sarcastic. especially towards the end. And McCain is acting like ACORN is some kind of subversive organization, like a communist front. The truth is that they are just a community development organization.
And then the Republicans are the only ones who could drive the economy into the toilet, by cutting taxes, running a war, and shoveling money out the door for all their special interest friends. So they run up a ginormous deficit, and then complain that the other guys are going to raise taxes!
Of course they are going to raise taxes on someone! Someone has to pay for all of this

Stevens is Corrupt

Ted Stevens protected $350 million for projects the Pentagon did not want, wasting taxpayer money on what would become dead-end ventures.
With the protection of Stevens and other Senators, one Mr. Cantrell, engineer for a defense department contractor became his own lobbyist for programs the Pentagon did not want. Eventually, he decided to work the system to benefit himself, keeping dozens of programs going, each one kicking back thousands of dollars between 2001-2007. Until he was indicted.
Mr. Cantrell had placed several friends as lobbyists or consultants working on his behalf with friendly contractors, allowing them to bill the government for the costs, even though federal law prohibits paying any expenses associated with lobbying.
As the Eric Lipton in the New York Times presents it: Corrupt individuals working networks of defense department contractors and willing Senators to keep unwanted programs alive simply to generate profits. Or was it Senator Stevens and others using men like Cantrell to keep projects and programs in the pipeline, keeping them real enough to generate home state funding?
Here is the meat of the matter- Uncle Ted Stevens, protecting giant useless Alaska projects, larding up the Pentagon budgets, while keeping up a steady drumbeat of fiscal conservatism, All this while attacking Democrats for being “tax and spend liberals,”
The whole project of missile defense could continue its wasteful ways because, with Republicans in control, there was no one to investigate. Even when the Pentagon itself tried to investigate, Stevens called them off.
This is the crony capitalism that Stevens has supported for forty years, while Alaskans keeps sending him back because we get our kickback too.
Pentagon officials tried to kill the project. “Stevens’s office called to insist that the Kodiak project proceed, Admiral West and Lt. Gen. Edward G. Anderson, then the head of Army Space and Missile Defense Command, said in interviews.”
The military men backed off, and the construction at Kodiak continued.
Mr. Cantrell said he knew that building a new launching facility in Kodiak was wasteful. “It doesn’t make sense,” he said. “The economics of it, they just don’t work.”