TED STEVENS WOULD APPROVE
The U.S. House and Senate passed a bill last week to address sexual abuse of young athletes. The legislation is to better protect the up-and-coming athletes who have their eyes set on the Olympic Games, making sure their national governing bodies adhere to strict standards to minimize child abuse.
The bill amends the Ted Stevens Amateur and Olympic Sports Act and requires that Olympic-related amateur athletic governing bodies establish rules to restrict all-alone interactions so that opportunistic child predators, like Dr. Larry Nassar, can’t access youngsters.
The original Ted Stevens legislation granted monopoly status to the U.S. Olympic Committee, paving the way for a more coordinated approach to Olympic athletics, and creating requirements for its individual governing bodies.
This new law pertains to those member bodies, no pun intended. The president should sign it.
STATE
EXHIBIT A: APOC TWISTS A JUDGE’S RULING LIKE A PRETZEL
Democrat Alyse Galvin filed for Congress as an “undeclared” candidate against Congressman Don Young. She did so with the full support of the Alaska Democratic Party.
When Galvin filed her candidacy with the Alaska Public Offices Commission, APOC designated her as an Undeclared Democrat (see filing below).
Which is it? What does party-bender Galvin identify with today and how are voters supposed to know what she stands for?
CHUCKLEHEAD AWARD
You’ll only need 20 seconds of this video to hear Juneau Rep. Justin Parish say that as being a legislator goes, he doesn’t quite have the skill set: He thinks, just slowly.
MUNICIPAL ELECTION TRANSPARENCY FAIL
Democracy is whittled away in small bites. But this one is a rather big bite. It’s hard to explain, and it’s school board politics, but give it the old college try:
SWITCHAROO: One of the dirties tricks candidates pull is to make everyone think they are running for a seat, then coordinate with someone who shares their philosophy and pull a last-minute switcharoo right at the filing deadline.
But how can you do that when someone like David Nees, the Anchorage election bird dog, is watching every day to see who filed?
You create a parallel system.
In this case, the Municipal Clerk opened a second election office down in the Ship Creek area, and let everyone know they could file either at City Hall or Ship Creek. That’s not the problem, however.
The problem is no one imagined the Clerk would also keep two sets of logs for who had signed up or withdrawn their candidacy for the April 3 municipal election. Each set would have different information.
School Board member Tam Agosti-Gisler deftly used that system to pull out of the race for her school board seat at the last minute, and put Deena Mitchell in her place.
Meanwhile, school board candidate David Nees, who did not file for Agosti-Gisler’s seat because he knew he could not beat her, asked the assistant clerk why someone’s name was missing in the book, although their name was listed on the web site. She had no idea.
When he went back into the office on Friday, she told him that she had the answer: There were parallel book being kept. They didn’t reflect each other.
HOW IT WENT DOWN: Mitchell was running on Tuesday against Elisa Snelling. That’s how it appeared Wednesday downtown. By Friday, Mitchell withdrew from that race, filed in Agosti-Gisler’s race, and Agosti-Gisler withdrew. The deadline went by safely before David Nees could discover there were two books.
In 2018, it’s hard to imagine why this information isn’t posted online so everyone can see in real time. But even in the old days, it was never acceptable to carry two sets of books and deny the public the transparency is deserves.
As for Agosti-Gisler, she said in a letter to the board that she coordinated the swap with Mitchell and is supporting her candidacy. And now, she’s off to Switzerland for a couple of years. Ta.
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