Liberals and Commies and McCarthy, oh my
By PAUL JENKINS
Anchorage Daily Planet
Wow! Ya gotta love a good Assembly meeting. Last night’s was one of the best. The gay thing from a few years back may have been better, but, hey, not by much.
Politicos last night were tossing around inflammatory 1950s rhetoric with utter abandon, epithets such as “Selkregg manifesto,” and the true classics - “communist,” “McCarthy,” “classless society,” and a personal favorite, “social equity.”
It was like “Saturday Night Live” without the good music.
What was it about? The Assembly was looking at Mayor Dan Sullivan’s six-year plan, a 15-page blueprint required by law that lays out the mayor’s spending priorities and vision for the city.
The Assembly, including its left-leaning six-member majority that believes it’s the mayor, was expected to listen politely to public testimony about the city's embattled $420 million, 2010 budget.
Instead, Sheila Selkregg started trying to amend Sullivan’s plan, adding stuff like "Social Equity."
History will show this is just about when the nastiness erupted.
Assemblyman Bill Starr, bless his heart, pretty much said she was a commie, trying to move us toward a classless society, whatever that might be. She, of course, denied it. Pinkos always do.
Not one to let a sleeping accusation lie, she fired back that Starr was a follower of the notorious Red Scare, commie-fighting Sen. Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin, (some whose most vicious detractors now admit he may not always have been all that wrong).
The six-member majority went ahead, defying reason, common sense and God, and passed the amendments commifying Sullivan’s six-year plan, but the mayor put the kibosh on it all with his trusty veto pen. He said Selkregg and her fellow travelers had not even talked to his office about the changes.
At some point, when all of this is not so funny, we are going to need to clean house on the Assembly. We went to the polls, or at least a few of us did, last year and voted Sullivan into office. He replaced Mark Begich, a tax-and-spend liberal who left the city a fiscal wreck. Why did we vote for Sullivan and not another liberal? We were tired of tax-and-spend, tired of being cash registers for the city, and Sulllivan promised another path.
At the same time, some of us voted into office people who individually represent only their tiny enclaves; not the entire city. They apparently did not get the memo about the rest of us wanting change.
Immediately, six of the new Assembly members banded together and decided they could supercede the wishes of the rest of the city to do things like keep alive Anchorage’s useless inspection and emission program and spend like there is no tomorrow.
They voted to give away the city treasury to the city’s labor unions and want to keeping increasing the tax cap. There is no amount of money in your bank account they would not like to spend - and now they want to usurp the mayor’s duties.
It struck me that we vote for School Board members area-wide. Some of us in dark moments believe that should be changed to voting by district so that voters actually would have some sway over individual board members. That battle remains for the future.
When you look at the Assembly majority’s shenanigans, at the damage a group from relative small areas of the city can do to the rest of us, you wonder if perhaps voting for them by district should not be changed to area-wide to negate that power. That is also something for another day.
In the meantime, again there is this advice to the Assembly majority: Sullivan was elected mayor; you were not. Let him be mayor.
You pinkos, you.
Paul Jenkins is editor of the Anchorage Daily Planet. Published Nov. 4, 2009
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