During a House Ways and Means Committee hearing today, Rep. Aaron Schock, R-Ill., grilled outgoing IRS commissioner Steven Miller about the IRS targeting a pro-life group in Iowa.

“Their question, specifically asked from the IRS to the Coalition for Life of Iowa: ‘Please detail the content of the members of your organization’s prayers,’” Schock declared.

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The price of gold has been dropping for six days as of Friday and local miners say the declines haven’t dampened their optimism. The Alaska chapter of the Gold Prospectors Association of America spent part of Friday teaching Anchorage area sixth graders about panning.

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The first commercial opener on the Copper River resulted in a good catch for fishermen brave enough to face strong winds, rain and fifteen foot swells.

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Northwest Territories Industry Minister David Ramsay has reopened debate on an option for moving crude from the Alberta oil sands and Canadian Arctic to Asia by way of Valdez.

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ExxonMobil is starting to make real strides on its Point Thomson development on Alaska’s North Slope. Construction contractors for the oil giant have been focusing on two project components — the central pad, and the pipeline that will tie the field into the existing North Slope oil transportation network to the west.

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A man accused of killing two men at the Coast Guard station on Kodiak Island wants to be released from custody as he awaits trial. James Wells is scheduled to appear in federal court in Anchorage on Monday.

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FAIRBANKS — Starting in August, residents of three downtown Fairbanks housing projects won’t be allowed to light up indoors, including in their own rooms.

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Ice from the Yukon River encroaches on the town of Eagle, Alaska, on Friday, May 17. An ice jam downstream of the small town send floodwaters and ice into the community Friday morning, damaging several homes and destroying other outbuildings. Photo courtesy Pat Sanders, National Park Service

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Alaska State Troopers in Delta Junction are investigating the death of a 22-month-old boy who developed breathing problems after an ATV crash.

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Bryce Johnson, Asst. Bureau Commander, Salt Lake City Police Dept, has accepted the job as Juneau Police Chief. (Photo by Rosemarie Alexander)
Salt Lake City Police Assistant Bureau Commander Bryce Johnson has been selected to head the Juneau Police Department.

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Robert Raymond has run for Congress every election cycle for almost two decades, and now he’s focusing his attention on the electoral process. (Robert Raymond Campaign for Congress/Facebook) There are a lot of rules if you want to gather signatures to get a question on the ballot. You have to be at least 18. You can’t share your petition booklet with other people. And you have to be a resident of the state of Alaska. Now, a man from Wisconsin wants that last part of the law struck down, and he’s taking his case to court. APRN’s Alexandra Gutierrez reports.

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It’s been more than 70 years since Unalaska came under attack during World War II, but you don’t have to look hard to find the remnants. The community is littered with old gunnery installations, battered Quonset huts and bunkers – some of which are being preserved for posterity. But there’s history, and then there’s hazard, and the shells and bombs that keep washing up on Unalaska’s shores fall somewhere in between.

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The state of Alaska is appealing the dismissal of its challenge to a federal roadless rule in national forests.

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ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Joan Naviyuk Kane feels the pull of an ancestral place where she’s never been, a crumbling ghost village built on stilts across the rocky face of a remote western Alaska island.

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The unemployment rate in Alaska continued to fall last month, according to the Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development, which announced that the seasonally adjusted rate of unemployment declined two-tenths of a percentage point to 6 percent.

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The Sealaska Lands bill and a partial settlement went before a subcommittee on Thursday and now head to the full House Resources Committee for review. Several Sealaska and federal representatives spoke before the House Committee on Indian and Alaska Native affairs regarding both bills.

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Morris Publishing Group, LLC announced today the appointment of Rustan Burton to publisher of the Juneau Empire.

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The Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport is putting together a Master Plan Update, to help guide future airport development and it plans an open house for the public Thursday from 5:30 p.m. to 8 p.m.

Ah, who cares? you are wondering. You do. It is a great chance to learn about one of the biggest economic engines in the city and get to know and evaluate development alternatives that could affect many of us.

You will get a say and your comments on the draft alternatives will be used to help the planning team evaluate alternatives and come up with a keeper by September. The evening’s presentation will begin at 6:15 p.m.

Those who live near the airport, or travel nearby or use the Tony Knowles Coastal Trail or simply use the airport and its facilities should be more than a little interested.

Bob Gorrell is a nationally-syndicated editorial cartoonist distributed by Creators Syndicate, Inc.

There’s an immeasurably deep cleavage between left and right in America, illustrated vividly in the way Americans regard the Benghazi scandal and outrage. It’s in the DNA.

Democrats generally and liberals in particular can’t understand what the noise from Benghazi is about, though they’re willing to concede that the deaths of the American ambassador and three colleagues was a shame and maybe even a tragedy. The families of the dead deserve the nation’s thoughts, and even the prayers of the guns-and-religion clingers, and if any of the families can find condolences in mass-produced cliches, they’re welcome. But whatever bad happened in Benghazi was a bureaucratic failure and the word at the White House is that bureaucrats can fix it.

Republicans generally and conservatives in particular can’t figure out why the ambassador and his three colleagues were allowed to twist slowly, slowly in the toxic smoke of the burning consulate, and can’t understand why everyone else is not as outraged as they are. How much is a human life reckoned to be worth?

The left, which weighs everything on the scales of political expediency, can’t understand why American “special operations” forces standing by in Tripoli were so eager to fly to the rescue. Liberals and lefties can’t understand why, after being told to stand down, the soldiers were “furious,” as Gregory N. Hicks, the No. 2 diplomat in Tripoli, eloquently described them in his testimony to the House committee inquiring into the episode. The ambassador and his colleagues died pleading for help that never came because the president’s men and women were too surprised, too timid, too frightened to send it. “None of us should ever have to experience what we went through in Tripoli and Benghazi,” Mr. Hicks told the panel.

Ordinary Americans have thrilled with pride to the stories of blood and flesh spent to attempt the rescue of the helpless, whether the exploits of the famous 7th Cavalry riding through heat and choking dust to save the settlers and their families on the plains, or Gen. George S. Patton’s 3rd Army racing through ice and snow to relieve the 101st Airborne at Bastogne at Christmas 1944, or the Marines fighting retreat from the Chosin Reservoir in similarly frozen Korea in the winter of 1950.

Soldiers throughout the nation’s history have redeemed the promise that no one will be left behind. The retreat from the reservoir, though not a triumph of arms, is rightly regarded as a special moment in the history of the Marine Corps. The photographs and newsreel footage of the Marines bringing out their wounded and frozen dead, stacked on their tanks, are iconic reminders of the debt fighting men owe to each other. Somebody tried.

The besieged defenders of Bastogne owed their rescue to Patton, often reckless and always spoiling for a fight. The Americans were trapped at Bastogne, having been ambushed by the Germans in a last attempt to force a negotiated surrender. They seemed on the lip of success. Patton promised the skeptical Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme allied commander in Europe, that he could turn his three divisions around overnight and fight their way more than a hundred miles to the rescue: “The kraut’s got his head stuck in a meat grinder, and this time I’ve got hold of the handle.” Ike gave the word, Patton gave the order, and Bastogne was soon relieved. Thousands of Americans were saved and the Germans never again mounted a sustained offensive. Somebody tried.

This is the lesson of the fighting spirit that seems no longer prized in certain precincts in Washington. There’s no evidence that this White House appreciates courage, reckless or otherwise, and the can-do spirit that saves causes otherwise lost. Barack Obama prefers to lead from behind. He’ll take the credit if everything works out OK — and if nothing good works out, he’ll make a nice speech (though lately even his gift of gab has departed from him). He’s willing to mock the guns-and-religion clingers and still hasn’t figured out where the nation’s enemies are.

Hillary Rodham Clinton, celebrated at the Clinton White House for throwing lamps and for her contempt for anyone in uniform, has always had trouble recognizing enemies, too. (She thought it was the vast right-wing conspiracy in the media.)

Maybe we can’t blame these folks. It’s in the DNA. But a nation won’t long survive inability to recognize enemies and indifference to incompetence. It has to defend itself from all enemies, foreign and domestic. Let the investigations begin.

Joe Miller announced setting up an exploratory committee for a possible run for U.S. Senate in 2014 against Mark Begich. This is glorious news to the Millerites and Paulians he has ingratiated himself with over the last couple years, but I am skeptical that this is anything but bad news for the rest of Alaska.

Why would I say such a thing about a self-professed staunch defender of liberty, a tea party favorite and someone who Craig Medred has reported to be in the middle of the recent internal wars within the Alaska Republican Party for the last three years? Answer? Because it is true and accurate; all of that and more.

For the record, I was an upfront supporter of Miller’s bid for U.S. Senate in 2010, burning no small number of bridges with Lisa Murkowski via a number of strong articles supporting Miller in The Alaska Standard during that election.  I took great exception to Murkowski’s going back on her word that she would support the party’s nominee. She didn’t. Instead, she tacked hard left and turned the entire leftist machine on Miller and beat him to a pulp.

It long has been said that hard times do not make character; rather it reveals it.  Miller’s actions, and, most importantly his reactions, to the onslaught revealed everything about him – little of it positive. He revealed himself as someone who sneaks around, uses the legal system to hide things, and someone who makes excuses. Not a single time during the festivities did he stand up and say “I screwed up. I did this. And this is what I learned from it.”  And there were endless opportunities.

Instead, he apparently decided that the lesson learned from his loss was to take control of the very party apparatus that strongly supported him in 2010 and chose to expend his energies orchestrating a pair of attempts to take over the Alaska Republican Party; the first fronting for Palin in 2010 and the most recent attempt working with the Paulian-Occupy Wall Street Democrats in 2012. Medred, in the Alaska Dispatch, wrote extensively about both events. (Note to putative Republican leaders: It is never a Good Thing for a Republican to be prominently mentioned in the leftist rag that calls itself the Alaska Dispatch.)

My bottom line on Joe Miller is this: In my humble opinion, he lost what was an easily winnable U.S. Senate seat in 2010. He screwed up. He got paranoid. He chose to cover his backside rather than to tell Alaskans the truth about himself and win the election. He hid things and events. He went to court. Since then, what has he done to become a better candidate? What has he done to appeal as a conservative and as a Republican to a wider group of Alaskans?

If his actions in multiple party takeover attempts over the last couple of years are indicative,  the answer to that is simple: nothing.  And what is there to gain from controlling the herd of cats that calls itself the Alaska Republican Party other than to control the stage for his next electoral run? Note that I first heard this observation by Super Dave Stieren, broadcasting on his afternoon KFQD talk show. Looking into it brought me into complete agreement. What has Joe Miller learned? What has he demonstrated that makes him a better candidate this time around? Nothing.

Miller’s actions have been focused over the last three years on getting even with imagined political enemies in the Republican Party rather than destroying Democrats. As such, he has demonstrated he does not have the ability or the temperament to analyze the threat to liberty and freedoms posed by Democrats in office and then take steps to remove them from office. And as such, Miller becomes the problem rather than the solution.

My suggestion to Joe Miller? Go home. Prove to one and all that you have learned from the recent festivities and ride to fight another day. Sadly, I don’t think that is going to happen any time soon.

NBC’s Lisa Myers reported earlier today that the IRS chief knew for a year about the corruption. Worse, if that is possible, the agency along the way lied to Congress about the scope of its activities.

Even after the agency’s Inspector General briefed top IRS officials on its findings, they did not disclose them – even to Congress. If they had released the information, say in September, Myers says, well before the election, “The terrain would have looked very different.”

Indeed, it would have.

As the pieces of the scandal are made public, President Barack Obama must be wondering, “Where will this end? How much trouble am I in?”

Here is a good gauge: That bastion of integrity, Democrat Rep. Charlie Rangel of New York, says, “This is wrong to abuse the tax system.”

That’s right. Charlie Rangel. He is noted – and was censured – for failing to pay taxes for 17 years on rental income from a villa he owns in the Dominican Republic. For years, he also filed bogus inancial disclosure reports in which he did not fully disclose his assets.

If even Charlie Rangel gets it, Obama is in trouble. He should clean out the IRS and insist the wrongdoers go to jail. Congress should move to ensure this does not happen again. Ever.

NBC’s Lisa Myers reported this morning that the IRS  deliberately chose not to reveal that it had wrongly targeted conservative groups until after the 2012 presidential election:

The IRS commissioner “has known for at least a year that this was going on,” said Myers, “and that this had happened. And did he share any of that information with the White House? But even more importantly, Congress is going to ask him, why did you mislead us for an entire year? Members of Congress were saying conservatives are being targeted. What’s going on here? The IRS denied it. Then when — after these officials are briefed by the IG that this is going on, they don’t disclose it. In fact, the commissioner sent a letter to Congress in September on this subject and did not reveal this. Imagine if we — if you can — what would have happened if this fact came out in September 2012, in the middle of a presidential election? The terrain would have looked very different.”

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Michael Ramirez is a two-time American Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.

According to recent polls, younger Americans are increasingly disillusioned with government and cynical about the political process. Maybe they will finally realize that they are being played for patsies by the Obama administration.

After all, on issue after issue, President Obama has fed younger voters a steady diet of high-minded rhetoric and then delivered policies that leave them holding the bag.

The most recent example is Obamacare.

For one, in order for the president’s health-care law to work properly, large numbers of young people will have to buy insurance. Those young and healthy individuals, with their low claims costs, are needed in the insurance pool in order to offset the expected inflow of sick people.

The law prohibits insurers from denying coverage to people with “preexisting conditions,” that is, those who are already sick. Those newly enrolled sick will make the overall insurance pool more costly, and unless those costs are offset by an equal inflow of the young and healthy, we are likely to see an adverse-selection “death spiral,” in which sick people in the insurance pool drive up premiums, causing the healthiest members of the pool to drop out. The pool then becomes even sicker, leading to still higher premiums. The healthiest remaining participants drop out, and so on, until the entire market collapses.

As noxious as the individual and employer mandates are, the penalties — or taxes, according to Justice Roberts — are too low to force participation, which has the administration worried.

As Ezekiel Emanuel, the brother of Rahm, and one of the principal architects of the Affordable Care Act, wrote in the Wall Street Journal, if young people don’t participate in Obamacare in large numbers, it “could start the negative, downward spiral of exchanges full of the sick and elderly with not enough healthy people paying premiums.”

At the same time, Obamacare’s “community rating” provisions prohibit changing premiums based on health status and limit the degree to which insurers can charge based on age. Insurers cannot charge their oldest customer more than three times as much as their youngest, despite the fact that those older customers typically cost six times more in claims. Thus, premiums will rise more slowly or may even be lower for older and sicker individuals, but will shoot up for young people. In fact, a study in the American Academy of Actuaries’ magazine found that 80 percent of young adults aged 18–29 in the individual market and not eligible for Medicaid will face higher costs, even after exchange subsidies.

Even HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius admits that “some of the older customers may see a slight decline, and some of the younger ones are going to see a slight increase.” Or, not so slight. According to a survey by the American Action Forum, healthy young people in the individual or small-group insurance markets can look forward to rate increases averaging 169 percent.

Under Obamacare, then, young people have to pay far more than is actuarially fair in order to subsidize premiums for those who are older and sicker. There is an added irony to this, given that those younger Americans are actually less likely to be able to afford higher premiums.

It’s not just Obamacare that will leave young people paying more. The president’s big-spending is also being charged to their credit card.

Each young American currently owes at least $53,242 as his share of our national debt. And if one throws in the unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare, that debt rises to as much as $401,000 for each of them. (That sort of puts their college loans in perspective, doesn’t it?)

Moreover, that debt might be a bit hard to pay off, since young people are having a very tough time finding a job in Obama’s economy. Overall unemployment in this country may finally be improving — albeit slowly — but unemployment among those under age 30 hovers around 13 percent, nearly twice as high as for the population at large. This is particularly damaging since research shows that workers who are unemployed as young adults lose valuable work experience and opportunities to develop skills. As a result, youth unemployment can lead to lower wages for many years even if young people do find a job. And many young people who are working are in low-paying jobs or jobs unrelated to their college degree.

By all accounts, the president remains personally popular with younger voters, a group he won by 23 percentage points in 2012. With a few exceptions, such as Rand Paul, Republicans have done little to reach out to these voters. Besides, young people are unlikely to respond to Republicans as long as the party resembles a cross between their curmudgeonly grandfather and the preacher from Footloose.

But there is an opening here. Despite their recent voting patterns, there is no reason to presume that young people will inevitably vote liberal or Democratic. If the GOP can bring itself to become more open, welcoming, and (especially) tolerant, it might find an audience willing to listen.