Reply #377: I accept that you have a right to have an opinion on my state as well

[Ken Burch]

I'll try to give straight answers to your questions.

1)We have only one congressional seat, and its incumbent is an "R"-his name is Don Young, and the Dems have actually given him some close races in recent years(although not last time). We also have a sort-of-good Dem senator, Mark Begich(he could be better but he did defeat Ted "Senator-For-Life" Stevens after the old buzzard had held the seat for 40 years.

2)There was a short-lived effort to eliminate collective bargaining for state workers-but it didn't go anywhere(due in part to the fact that our state Senate is split 10-10, with Dems dominating a coalition organization there). We do have to build more grassroots mobilization to fight that in the future(and that also means getting our labor movement here to get off its ass a lot more than its used to doing).

3)We do have Big Oil domination of politics here...and we try to fight it. That hasn't been easy. And I never pretended, for the record, that Alaska politics was a corporate-free zone.

4)Yes, the moron got elected here, due in significant part to the fact that our nominee against her was Tony Knowles(a DLC type who, as governor, did all he could to make sure that Dems didn't do well in any other races during his two terms in office. Knowles also blew what should have been an easy victory against Lisa Murkowski for her daddy's old Senate seat in 2004.)we are still trying to rebuild the party after what Knowles did to it. But there's always some hope for the future.

All in all, I've responded to what you intended as a baiting post with far better humor than you responded to any of my posts, none of which were intended to bait you.