Wickersham's Conscience

Another scary Hallowe’en story:

Joe Miller, unindicted criminal, defeated senatorial candidate and chronic resumé exaggerator reports he is “presently chairman of the Western Representation PAC, Restoring Liberty Alaska PAC and Restoring Liberty Action Committee.” So WC will call him PAC Man for short.

Pac-man Screenshot

For those who are new to these events, Joe Miller has a footnote in Alaska history as the first major party Alaska political candidate to lose to a statewide election to a write-in candidate. His candidacy careened from one disaster to another, as one of his avowed principles after another crashed on the rocks of his opportunism.

He’s still calling himself a judge, even if he was never more than a magistrate. For a partial listing of his bizarre history, visit WC’s 95 Theses.

This time he is railing against “Alaska Native Corporations,” and his acid resentment that they supported Lisa Murkowski drips from every sentence. But he seizes on old events and recent events to characterize Alaska Native Corporations generally as “crony capitalism.” His argument is a mash-up of several arguments.

The first is that it was unfair for the Native Regional Corporations to gang up on him in a super-PAC. The argument would be embarrassing coming from a guy who boasts about chairing PACs, but even someone new to the strange world of PAC Man recognizes he has no more sense of self-reflection than a rabid stoat. If he was surprised that the Native community reacted strongly when he attacked their rights, he’s even more naive than WC thought.

PAC Man has conveniently forgotten that in addition to the big regional corporations he references there are about 198 village corporations, and all of them are eligible for §8(a) contracts. The contracts have netted jobs and impressive shareholder dividends to the regions and villages involved. The distribution of wealth hasn’t been uniform, but the thing about capitalism is that not everybody wins. In any event, this is old news: the Washington Post investigation and Senator McGaskill’s investigation were in 2009. PAC Man also fails to note that the three largest Regional Corporations have called for reform. Perhaps Miller only became aware of it now?

The second argument PAC Man makes involves two instances of alleged misconduct by specific Native corporations: Sealaska Corporation’s bid to swap for some National Forest land in southeast Alaska and alleged corruption by two U.S. Army Corps of Engineers officers that allowed two employees of a Native corporation subsidiary to embezzle serious money from the Department of Defense.

Sealaska wants a land swap for Tongass National Forest land. WC thinks the idea is dead on arrival; the days when this kind of deal could be slipped through by Uncle Ted are long behind us. It’s not a crime, or even crony capitalism, to try. It’s politics. You can bet that if PAC Man had won the election, and the Koch-owned North Pole Refinery has approached him for some kind of special deal, Senator PAC Man would have accommodated his biggest benefactors. Yes, WC thinks the whole quid pro quo business with campaign contributions is dirty and corrupting, but it’s nothing new or notable.

The embezzlement scheme involved two allegedly corrupt Corps of Engineer mid-level managers and a subsidiary of Eyak Corporation, the Cordova village corporation. There’s no evidence anyone at Eyak itself knew or benefited, so far as WC knows. And the reported $20 million scheme, big as it was, doesn’t even make the Top 10 List of biggest embezzlements in U.S. history. The federal officials who were supposed to keep watch were corrupt; PAC Man doesn’t explain how Section 8(a) caused the problem, or why the whole program should be thrown out because crooks stole money. Reformed, yes. But thrown out? PAC Man is indulging his penchant for hyperbole again.

And from these two instances and his acid resentment of Lisa Murkowski and the traitor Alaska Republicans, PAC Man ran this opinion piece under the headline “Alaska: Poster State for Crony Capitalism.” Excuse me? Using “capitalism” and “Alaska” in the same headline? And PAC Man is fumbling with a mighty big brush and precious little tar. It’s almost as if John Lindauer were railing against investigative reporting. Alaska seems to be able to avoid electing these idiots and charlatans, but they don’t shut up, do they?

Republican Presidential Wannabes

WC wanted to have a scary post for Hallowe’en. WC can’t think of anything much scarier than the current batch of Republican presidential wannabes.

After careful study of the field, WC has arrived at a simple list of the qualities and beliefs currently required to be a Republican candidate for President. As a service to his readers, WC sets them out here:

1.Stretch your arms wide. Assume the geologic history of the earth is the width of your reach. 4.6 billion years spread over about 72 inches. An inch of arm then equals about 64 million years. If we start with year zero as the fingertip of your left hand, the dinosaurs vanished from the earth a little past the knuckle on your right fingertip. A moment’s effort with nail clippers can obliterate the entire time the Homo genus has been on the planet. A single pass of a nail file obliterates recorded history. Being a Republican requires you to believe the dusty bit from the nail file is the complete history of the planet. You have to ignore all of the rest of the arm span.

2. The world is burning fossil fuels – coal, petroleum and natural gas – at the rate of 130 Mtoe (Megaton oil equivalent) per year. That’s injecting 35 gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year. And the rate is increasing. To be a Republican, you have to pretend that isn’t happening. You have to be able to say, with a straight face, that volcanoes (from 0.13 gigaton to 0.44 gigaton per year) are the source of any increased CO2.

3. CO2 is a greenhouse gas. A grade school kid can demonstrate the greenhouse effect in a classroom experiment. But being a Republican means denying CO2 is a greenhouse gas.

4.Ice in Greenland, Antarctica and continental glaciers is melting. The ocean level is rising. The island nation of Tuvalu is at risk of being completely submerged. Satellite data show unequivocally that the ocean levels are rising. A Republican has to be able to deny this is happening. Pay no attention to the water; it isn’t really there.

5. There is overwhelming, uncontroverted evidence for evolution. Evidence derives from the fossil record, from changes to DNA, from biology and anatomy, from dozens of other sources. It’s been observed and documented in the field. Being a Republican requires you to deny evolution exists, to deny that it is responsible for the diversity of life on the planet and the existence of Homo sapiens.

6. You are required to believe that by taking in less money by reducing taxes you can not only balance the federal budget but reduce the deficit. Presumably that also requires you to believe you can afford a better home by quitting work, that less is more and that trickle down is anything more than the dog peeing on your leg.

7. You are required to be able to say with a straight face that it is “class warfare” to point out that income inequality is at near record levels in the U.S. You are required to ignore recent data from the Congressional Budget Office pointing out that all but the richest 20% of Americans have suffered a net decrease in purchasing power from 1979 to the present. And you have to be able to say, again with a straight face, that taxing the richest Americans will make the disparity worse, not better.

8. You have to be able to accept tens of millions in campaign contributions from rich, right wing ideologues and tell voters that the contributions won’t affect the way you treat the rich SOBs.

Whew.

The White Queen, Alice and the Red Queen

Even Lewis Carroll’s White Queen could only believe six impossible things before breakfast. Of course, the voters sometimes remind WC of chickens clapping for Colonel Sanders. But that would be a different story. And maybe that’s just the secret herbs and spices talking.