Midweek Ramble

Quote of the day:

Try to halt violence by restricting gun ownership and you won't halt violence. But you will create entire classes of new criminals – people who make paperwork errors, violate technical specification of the law, or rebel against the new restrictions. And you'll create new bureaus, new enforcement arms, new prisons to punish them. You'll make hordes of lawyers and bureaucrats very happy. Organized criminals will be grateful to the naive moral crusaders ("useful idiots") as they profit by selling an illegal product. And ordinary street criminals will bless fools, legislators, and "leaders" for making their job so much safer.

~ JPFO's "Bill of Rights Sentinel", Fall 2001

* * * * *
Our legislature is up to its usual impractical - and occasionally improbable - suggestions. It's exactly what you'd expect from a bunch of frontier-minded libertarians, although most of them would probably deny being such.

The latest is a suggestion that additional districts be added to cope with our slowly growing population; 8 new representatives, and 4 new senators, to be precise. The problem lies in the expenses involved. But expense be hanged: it's more important that we do it before the 2012 redistricting due to the census results.

Just what we need: increase the number of participants in our annual free-for-all.

There's room in the legislative building to add new offices, saith the director of legislative affairs. It would require that the governor's and lieutenant governor's offices move to another building, existing offices would be shuffled, and some might get downsized.

"She estimated that the price to the state of adding the legislators would be about $6 million in the first year. The annual cost after that would be about $4.5 million, she said, including salary and per diem, travel and relocation expenses, hiring of staff members, office supply purchases, even the hiring of an additional janitor."

Some proponents of the change say that without it Alaska could have problems with the U.S. Justice Department, which scrutinizes redistricting to ensure that the political representation of Alaska Natives isn't harmed under the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Advocates use Angoon Democratic Sen. Albert Kookesh's district as an example of how bad it is already. Kookesh's district covers 126 communities and about half the geography of Alaska. It's by far the largest in the nation, ranging from Metlakatla in deep Southeast Alaska up into the Arctic and west nearly to Bethel.

So what's the problem? I thought we had unlimited funds. Oh, wait.

* * * * *

Here's a bit of Iditarod history*: this year's race will be the 38th since its beginning in 1973. The Iditarod Trail had been in use since the 1920s as a major route from south-central Alaska to the west coast town of Nome, and to gold fields & villages in-between. It was navigable only by dogsleds in the winter.

Dorothy G. Page of Wasilla (yes, that Wasilla) conceived the idea of racing its length to commemorate the desperate delivery of diphtheria serum to Nome, and to preserve the tradition of sled-dog racing.

The race has begun in Anchorage only since 1983. It was originally conceived as a medium-distance run to the ghost town of Iditarod, but in 1972 the Army opened the remainder of the trail to Nome. Race promoters Joe Reddington, Sr. and Dorothy Page decided that the race should travel the whole 1,100+ miles.

No one believed that it could be done, when the first plans were announced. Why, it's uninhabited! It's huge! It's vast and unknown!

Exactly. And only 30 days to go until the 38th running.

* This is not intended to be an exhaustive nor complete history, but rather just highlights. Besides, if I tell it all today, what would I write about, tomorrow?