What I got out of today's coverage was the deep impression on just how wild Alaska (a state I've never been to) is when it can take seven or eight hours to determine if a very prolific former Senator was indeed dead. In the instanews era, I found that mind-boggling.

and hats off to you Michael for not mentioning some of the more egregious aspects of his legacy on this, the death of his death.

would that some of the Ted Kennedy haters on here in 2009 had shown similar restraint on the day of his death.

Well put.

It is a tragedy. Interestingly, I believe this was his second plane crash. I remember reading that his first wife died in an earlier crash that he survived. Again, showing the perils of living in Alaska not appreciated by those of us in the lower 48 & Hawaii.

A very gracious, generous tribute that speaks well of Michael. The longest serving Republican in US Senate history, "Uncle Ted" was defeated for reelection after Alaskans apparently concluded he'd served himself, kin, and cronies at the expense not just of his country but his state.

Although he can't take with him the Bridge to Nowhere and his over-sized mansion, he retains his title of "Alaskan of the Century" and hero status among the likes of Mrs. Palin, for whom service to the little people likewise has proved less a principle than a posture. My condolences to his heirs.

The 2nd best way to visit Alaska is via an Imax cinema. So far it's a state I have only visited virtually.

Well, there's pork and there's corruption.

I will be restrained and just note that the man who explained that the Internet was a series of tubes met his end in a tube.

Well done, I'm sure Ted Stevens genuinely cared about his state and its people. But wasn't Alaska mostly built on the private sector development of its heaven-sent black gold? I'm sure Robert Byrd also cared about WV, but in spite of his skill at bringing home the bacon, it has remained quite poor.

Very nice article Mr. Tomasky. Thank you. For those of you who have never visited Alaska, it simply cannot be understood by watchiung it on Imax or the movies etc. Fly to Anchorage - rent a car and spend some time there. yeah, obviously you go in the summer.

ng:
Every freedom-lovin' Libertarian-leanin' right-wing-votin' Alaskan resident is on a dole, funded by the Pipeline.
A certain recent Gov. boosted the tax on the operators, to increase that dole, a popular measure with the locals.

So much for 'private sector' wonderfulness, and jutting jawlines and waving flags.

As for Sen. Stevens . . . rest in peace.

Kev, my friend.You are one of the most pleasant people on this site, but where do you come up with some of this crap. Unemployment in Alaska is 7.9%. The US rate is 9.5 %. Nevada's rate is unspeakable even with a heavyweight US senator. Besides, pipeline revenue does not add to the deficit.

Don't you watch "Ice Road Truckers - Season 4"? They have to import fat Canadians for labour.

Later.

Sarah Palin spoke well of Senator Stevens on FOX news today.

NGAVC, with all due respect, Kev did not mean unemployment. The dole in this case is referring to the checks all Alaska citizens get from the oil company revenue. It isn't crap, simply two people using the word dole slightly differently.

NGAC, Kevin is right. Turn off the oil spigot and Alaska returns to the Inuit and Aleutions, the fishermen and sportsmen. Every load those Ice Road Truckers haul in Alaska is equipment and supplies for oil drilling. Turn off the oil and all those fat Canadians go home.
Interesting connection between Alaska and West Virginia. WV has lots of black gold too; coal. The difference is that few of the citizens of WV get the benefits. They just get their mountains chopped offf and their water polluted.

ngavc:
yeah, like they said. :o)

Read my post again. Every adult resident of Alaska receives the Oil Dole, and a certain right-wing hero(ine) increased the tax on the oil companies, to increase the amount of that dole, to buy herself a popularity which later melted away, like snow in the springtime.

And while we're recalling things . . . seven other people died on that plane, and each probably left a family that is grieving tonight.

I wish them all peace.

Folks - What is wrong with the oil spigot? And Alaska has yet to tap ANWR.

Our country was settled for, and developed from, its natural resources. Energy bailed out the Brits and Norwegians. Energy brings jobs and prosperity, and we all like it. If only our president would accept that. There is no shame associated with energy development. I'd love for our population to be employed in stimulating, clean work, but we are not developing that type of workforce. Truth is, most jobs pretty much suck.

Voodoo - Kudos for impressive restraint. Really.

Kev - My apologies if I offended.

raverill - If I may:

US Coal Mine Salaries 2007
Tuesday, March 11, 2008

The 2007 Survey Results of U.S. Coal Salaries, Wages, and Benefits by CostMine gives you the information you need to establish if you are getting a fair salary or wage. Here are some of the numbers from the report that struck me.

With 27 coal mines reporting, the average hourly wage for some of the key people at a surface coal mine are as follows: electrician=$25; mechanic=$24; welder=$24; helper=$22;oiler=$24; shovel operator=$25; drill operator=$23; truck driver=$23; and laborer=$21.

That's not bad for semi-skilled work in a low wage state, though the first two seem low.

http://technology.infomine.com/articles/1/2662/salary.mining.coal/us.coal.mine.aspx

G'night.

We've lost a few notable politicians to plane crashes. Senators Tower and Wellstone most recently, and others, sadly. I believe even Ted Kennedy survived a plane crash. It's strange when famous people die in airplane crashes, maybe because we feel a certain link to them, unlike, say, when the headlines read: "50 Die in Crash in Congo." Carole Lombard. The Big Bopper. John Denver. So many others.

I understand how things fly; but, how safe is it, especially if you fly a lot?

ngavc:
apology accepted. It is a very humid summer, with all that warming going on. :o)

As for your salary info, I don't regard most of those job categories as 'semi-skilled'. Heavy equipment operators, electricians, mechanics, welders - these are all highly skilled people.

Hi Kev. What's wrong with a $3,200 tax rebate from energy development?

And I still think she's adorable, as a tweeter, not a president.

Kev - Skilled, but no degree required. How about $22 labourers?

Last word is yours. I'll check back in the AM.

Stevens was against internet neutrality.

Bad boy.

SFMikey: Small planes, especially in mountainous regions are a gamble, and politicians and performers fly a lot.

Levi Johnston appears to want to run for mayor of Wasilla. As Levi puts it - "It's hard to figure me out." Catchy campaign pitch!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-10930423

ngavc:
What gets me about the Alaska rebate is the contrast, rugged individualist rhetoric vs. a statewide welfare payment, which very few current residents did anything to earn by helping to build the pipeline.

As for that certain person, she's too mean-minded and promotes ignorance too much to be 'adorable', for me. Nothing charming about that scene, at all.

As for the pay rates in WV, you characterized several as 'semi-skilled' that I didn't agree with, that's all.

As for ANWR, from the descriptions I've heard, we should never 'tap' it. Certainly we cannot trust BP anywhere near anything that is worth protecting!

***
I'm impressed by the story of the volunteers who rushed to the crash site to help the survivors, CBS told the tale and so did Rachel Maddow.

Final point: Rachel was especially good tonight about the "War on Brains", the anti-science nonsense spewed by so many conservatives. Now they're even after the Theory of Relativity.
Here's a link to that specific segment, her best in days:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3096434/#38650984

Kevin...I've heard they want to repeal the Law of Gravity.

We're going to see a mad rush to drill all over the Arctic. There is seismic work going on in Canada; Greenland wants to drill offshore in 'Iceberg Alley', who knows what is happening in Russia.

Kevin...I just watched that clip of Rachel. Anybody that doesn't believe in the theory of relativity, atomic theory, and quantum mechanics, must logically not accept x-rays, ultrasound, MRI, lasers, GPS, guided missiles, etc.

Every person should die at home in bed. Ted Stevens died in a terrible plane crash. And for the individual, Ted Stevens, I say RIP. Your family and friends will miss you. And tthey should not have to.

As a politician you were a scumbag of the highest order. You and Robert Byrd were some of the worst the modern world has ever seen. You and Byrd were a couple of pork-barrelling scum-buckets. You and Byrd pissed away billions and billions of our tax dollars. For that I will never forgive you.

ngavc, you're right: The critical distinction between WV and AK pertinent to levels of poverty is unrelated to wages. What distinguishes WV from AK is, as Kev well notes, the latter nationalized [statized?] its "black gold".

AK was fortunate in having a role model in Norway unavailable to WV.

Wales is another beautiful land, where hard-working citizens likewise endured poverty, while rich outsiders got richer. The lesson extends to ME, poorest state in New England, which might've statized its piney woods upon independence from the British monarchy, only being monarchs, no check was ever in the mail from them just a revolution. Hence, the bad name state ownership, to this day, has in this United States.

Our history, imo, goes far in explaining our unique collective fear of socialism, so pathological many Americans have come to demonize it, refusing to distinguish it from communism, much less consider its benefits in those few certain areas, where the goals of capitalism have proved so indisputably counterproductive, no other western democracy would consider not considering it.

Our public almae matres, local libraries, mighty military, Medicare, Social Security and sundry other entitlements are cherished despite the fact they belong to us. I dare say, we love them more for being ours. We don't, for example, treasure Blackwater or whatever their alias is the way we treasure our troops, right?

What's wrong with a $3,200 tax rebate from energy development?

I thought taxing businesses and spreading the wealth around was an evil socialist thing.

SFMikey you left out Payne Stewart!

But as mikedow comments, its small planes, especially in inclement weather, and in dangerous geographical areas, that are dangerous. Most of those famous deaths you mentioned occurred in small aircraft.

RIP Ted Stevens, Mike's tribute was far more moving and thoughtful than anything I could manage. And to add to the earlier (slightly snarky) comments, it would have been nice if more on the right could have managed something similar on the news of Senator Kennedy or Senator Byrd's deaths.

@Kev

I watched your clip, then actually looked to the Conservapedia site, hoping to find the calculations that disputed the Einstein's theory. Fuck me, all they have is Bible quotes to dispute it.

hbbf - You do have dangerous, socializing tendencies. I don't want to wander into areas where I'm rather ignorant, but isn't drilling and development entirely private, with a high corporate tax that is partially paid out to residents, rather than controlled by the state?

Ian70 - I woke up this morning thinking that if the $3,200 had remained under state control, my leftist friends would have thought the pipeline tax just fine. To me, the payout means Alaska government stays small, a good thing.

saintlymark
11 Aug 2010, 12:07PM
Mike's tribute was moving. But go easy on the bloggers, we are not professionals and don't have whole workdays to write this stuff. Our sympathy to the families.

ngavc, I was kind of saying that I was about to be snarky as well! It was being snarky at those right wing bloggers who seemed to spend the days after the deaths of two great Senators reminding us all about their flaws. I wasn't trying to be unkind to any commenters on this thread, and if any took offense, I apologise!

Kev - Did you know Harry Reid said, "I don't know how anyone of Hispanic heritage could be a Republican, okay. Do I need to say more?". This from the senior senator who also said,"that Barack Obama does not have a "negro dialect." A Republican would be skewered for such racist remarks.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/harry-reid-i-dont-know-how-anyone-hispanic-heritage-could-be-republican

Why on earth would anyone question science. Science is always right. I mean look at Phrenology and Eugenics. Oops, thats a bummer.
Now why would anyone have bashed the author's beloved Ted Kennedy? Oh yeah, a conservative columnist died that week and the day after the author did what? Yup, tear him to shreds. Turn about is fair play.

ngavc:
How can 'drilling and development' of oil fields be "entirely private" when you propose it to take place in a National Wildlife Refuge??

(Or, for that matter, on leased public property, e.g. every single offshore well.)

My turn to ask where you get this stuff. :o)

***
And NG, Harry Reid's comment was about the racism overwhelming the GOP, not Hispanic citizens. Please don't try to change the subject (yet again).
Reid has proven, by his behavior over decades in public life that he is not a racist. In fact, he has stood by disenfranchised people here in Nevada all his life. The contrast with a person such as, for example, Gov. Jan Brewer is quite stunning.

You should worry more about Tom Tancredo, or Rand Paul, or whether Sharron Angle will ever get control of her amazing verbal outbursts. This election here in Nevada is becoming a farce on the Republican side.
And we're still waiting for the indictments in the Ensign Affair.

***
gwillikers:
There is a huge difference between legitimate skeptical questioning of new theories, and the wholesale rejection of established science which the Right is now addicted to. It began with the religious kooks refusing to accept the facts of evolution (yes, i wrote deliberately, FACTS of evolution), has become dangerously toxic on the subject of climate change, and now has reached the point where Phyllis Schlafly's son is questioning Einstein.
His reasons for doing this are quite hilarious.

look, an aeroplane is just a series of tubes ...

Extreme right wingers should be disbarred from modern medical services and obliged to use homeopathic concoctions, that's what Jesus would do.

mikedow:
My final entry for the day, have to work.

Yes, True Beleeevers who reject evolutionary science (e.g. all of modern biology) should at least be consistent, and reject any use of antibiotics, which are all the result of research based on evolutionary insights.

ngavc, I stand corrected on the status of oil in AK. It is just a tax, and my guilty "socialist tendencies" were merely wishfully thinking but to the charge of their being dangerous, I must plead innocent. Their warm and fuzzy essence I'd hoped was self-evident in my stating it's only "those few certain areas where...capitalism has proved so indisputably counterproductive, etc." that, to clarify, all except medical care and natural resources ARE socialized, with no conservative with a wide following, so far as a I know, having proposed the abolition of any of them.

Instead, what's proposed is the govt pay for private alternatives. IOW, all the costs of socialism with none of the benefits of increased accountability to us who've had to pay for what is nothing but a welfare payment, e.g. school vouchers. This is what "Obamacare"/HCR/ACA came down to - except no public option (!) All that stupid squabbling over using taxes for $300 abortions...or to pay doctors $100 to counsel patients about end-of-life alternatives... or <gasp> increasing the accountability of private insurers to us, the Americans, who'll be financing them but the pubic option? Meh, unceremoniously circular filed.
,
Congressional priorities got in a panty-twist after the fringe took over the GOP base. And now they've got Republican heads in a headlock, apparently cutting off oxygen to their brains, which understandably has Dems worried they'll be next. Cause for celebration or early warning?

I have close ties to Alaska.

My father was born in Anchorage (grandfather was in the Aleutian islands in WWII), before Alaska was a state. Back then, apparently having a phone book in Alaska was a pretty big deal.

Nearly 60 years later, phone books are no longer luxuries, but roads still are. A former roommate and good friend is a photographer in Northern Alaska. If you want to visit her at her cabin in Northern Alaska, you have to first take a flight to Anchorage, then two personal chartered flights (read: you in a Cessna with one other dude and some boxes flying through canyons in arctic weather) and then hitch a ride 30 miles to a town where my friend will pick you up after hiking 20 miles and crossing a river, herself. Oh, and it'll cost you more than $4,000, which is more than a flight to Europe, let alone most places in the world. It really is that bad.

Alaska is a place all of its own- if you ever have the chance to visit, go.

I wonder if the evolution question in the Republican Party is kind of similar to the abortion question for the Democratic Party. For Democrats, on one hand they can't say what is patently true, that it is at the very least deeply regretable to have an abortion, for fear of offending a crucial constituency of voters, and yet they do see the point of view of those who disagree with the party's stated position and so come up with a politically convenient compromise (safe, legal and rare) (although actually their are good practical reasons for S, L and R as well.)

However it is slightly different for Republicans. Its not the Party platform they are concerned about but something that those voters in the crucial subset of the party hold far more dearly. The Bible. So what is a Christian Conservative to do? Well one thing they can do is what Huckabee did it that Maddow clip. Bend the science. Evolution does not say we are descended from Apes. At best it may say we have a common anscestor with apes, but that is not quite the same thing. Evolution says that animals adapt to there environment. Thats not hard to understand, and see in every day life. If a christian conservative is taking a literal view of the bible, how come human beings come with different skin colors? Because they have adapted to their environments. All evolution is is adaptation occuring over thousands and thousands of years. We have just adapted to our environments in different ways from our 'cousins'.

The war on knowledge thing is interesting though, and Schlaffly's contribution is interesting. It seems to me that actually it has nothing to do with Einstein and relativity. It has more to do with questioning the whole business of science. By doing so, it seems to me that the right can create doubt over a whole maze of policies, and come up with politically more explainable positions over a range of policies.

By creating a false conflict between science and religion, it means that those of a particularly religious bent are always going to side against science, in almost every case. So a doctor says 'healthcare reform is good' and the natural sdisinclination towards science means that many on the culturally conservative side might ignore that, as an example. And that can be done over a range of policy issues. The sidelining of experts may be politically convenient, but hardly leads to good policy.

Um, gwillikers, you appear to have something in your eye like a mote preventing you from seeing what's glaring in your examples of phrenology and eugenics. Scientists have openly stood corrected on both, just as as they will stand correcting on any theory discredited by research, including Darwin's. This is their professional duty.

In telling contrast are those whose duty is to promote the inerrancy of the Bible, which means protecting its vulnerable parts from the continual march of scientific knowledge. Flagrant scientific bloopers litter the Bible, but to point them out is to be ignored, verbally attacked, or, in the case of Christ-like Christians, feel guilty for making them uncomfortable. You can drive them to speculate some scribe mistranslated passages such as those that clearly have God believing the sun circles the earth - in one instance, He threatens to stop the sun on the dark side and let all living creation starve in the dark. But no good will come of it. There's no duty to truth much less knowledge but to a fixed idea.