Parnell, Murkowski & West Virginia
Pop Moore was born and raised in West Virginia. I’m proud of our family heritage in a state that includes the original Rednecks in the Battle for Blair Mountain. That’s where my grandfather fought to unionize the coal mines after getting buried in a slide. When I was growing up, we’d go visit my grandmother in a tiny town in Boone County. It was humid and friendly. Tomatoes from the garden tasted delicious, and the people talked funny. The center of town was the yellow line that ran through it. I loved sitting on the porch swing listening to stories….
Bird of the Week – Just Kidding Around
Sometimes we forget that birds have their own agendas, which is usually the task of making more birds. This hatchling Willow Ptarmigan was just coming into his adult plumage in late June. The little guys are almost impossible to see on the tundra, but on the gravel bars you can sometimes spot the kids, with mom and pop doing their best to make you pay attention to the adults instead. For more bird photos, visit Frozen Feather Images.
[Open Thread] Subway to the National Parks
Wouldn’t it be awesome if this was really a thing? Imagine just hopping on a train and catching the express from the Badlands and connecting at the Shenandoah to the Everglades. It’d certainly be better than my commute when I lived in Queens. After looking at this I really need to step up my park visiting game. I’ve only been to the Badlands, Redwoods, Kenai, Denali, Everglades, and the Grand Canyon. Time to get back on the road. How many have you been to? Hat tip to Treehugger
Fox News Nicknamed the Palins. Yikes.
You probably heard reports a while back revealing that Roger Ailes, the “deeply paranoid paterfamilias of Fox News” thought Sarah Palin was an “idiot” and “stupid.” That didn’t stop him from hiring her, though. Because he also thought she was “hot.” And if there’s one thing that the head of Fox knows about his audience, it’s that they loves them a hot idiot. And if they watch, he makes money. Welcome to the fold, Mrs. Palin. More was revealed about attitudes toward Sarah Palin and her husband Todd in a new book, The Loudest Voice in the Room, by Gabriel Sherman…
Strange Bedfellows
Let no one say we don’t have range. It’s not every week one is prominently featured on both Daily Kos and Joe Miller’s Restoring Liberty blog. The former gave us some love for the final installment of a certain seasonally themed literary travesty. The latter, though our politics couldn’t be more different, showed some good sportsmanship and humor about having his retirement mistakenly reported on MSNBC.
MSNBC Reports Wrong Miller’s Retirement
If you were watching MSNBC Live this morning, you might be wondering why former and current Alaska Republican senatorial candidate Joe Miller is retiring in the middle of his campaign. It’s an unorthodox political strategy for someone who is not currently embroiled in scandal, and who stands a reasonable chance of walking away with the nomination for a second time. It appears that reports of his political death have been exaggerated. And so has his conversion to the Democratic Party, his relocation to California, and his service to the United States Congress since the early 1970s. Someone at MSNBC confused…
Bill Seeks to Silence Constituents (My Testimony)
Saturday at 9:00 am, members of the public stood in long lines to sign up to testify at the Loussac Library. It was the first public meeting of the year for the Anchorage Legislative Caucus. The meeting was called so the legislators could hear from their constituents before they headed off to Juneau in two weeks for the start of the legislative session. It was clear that the main issue on the minds of the majority of the approximately 150 people who showed up, was education. Teachers, parents, students from the Service High Seminar Program, professors, doctors and other members…
Bird of the Week – Willow Ptarmigan
We’re still months from Spring, but it probably doesn’t violate Mudflats Rules to think about Spring. This male Willow Ptarmigan is in transition from winter to summer plumage. It’s an alpine bird, on the east end of the Denali Highway, where the spring comes a little later. The male trails the female’s molt by a few weeks, serving as a more obvious target for predators than the female, huddled on the eggs. For more bird photos, please visit Frozen Feather Images.
Good Tidings & Great Pain – The End!
I finished Sarah Palin’s Christmas book. I started it on November 19. It took me 49 days to read a 6″x8″ book with 209 pages of text, not including recipes. I admit, I’m not the fastest reader in the world, but bear in mind that I wanted to finish this book. I committed to reading the whole thing, and so completing it was the only way to make it stop. And now I have, and I can confidently say that Good Tidings and Great Joy is the most powerful misnomer for a book title I’ve ever encountered. It’s also the…
Good Tidings & Great Pain – Ch. 6, Christmas Future
We all know someone who does it. We may even have been guilty of it ourselves. I call it the “I had a dream” speech. It usually goes something like this: Oh my God! I had the weirdest dream last night. It was so freaky, but it felt really real. I was wearing roller-skates, and I was trying to skate down the hall of the place I used to work, but the carpet was really thick so I couldn’t, and then my mom showed up, but she wasn’t really my mom… and she was only wearing underwear, and speaking some…