Paul Jenkins

PAUL JENKINS

EPA jumped gun with its Pebble mining project report

It is bothersome when a supposedly neutral federal agency jumps the gun to help anti-development forces trying to derail a project even before it can be defined.

PAUL JENKINS

Why is North Dakota No. 1? Fair oil taxes

It is hard to know whether to laugh at or cry for Alaska, where calculated, myopic oil tax policies and crass political greed are combining to reduce the state to the nation's third-largest oil producer, behind Texas and North Dakota. Third-largest. Behind North Dakota, for crying out loud -- and dropping.

PAUL JENKINS

Oil tax logic continues to elude Democrats

Imagine my surprise as I read the letter-to-the-editor headline: "Democrats are looking out for Alaskans while Republicans continue to fail them." Who would have guessed, especially after the Legislature's last special session?

Hijackers of Alaska GOP did Begich a huge favor

Today must be sweet indeed for Sen. Mark Begich, a guy whose 2014 re-election chances until recently were as bleak as winter in Shaktoolik. He is, after all, a very blue guy in a very red state.

PAUL JENKINS

Parnell was unprepared to sell oil-tax reform bill

Well, it's over. A special legislative session called by Gov. Sean Parnell in part to reform Alaska's oil tax abomination is el croako -- done in by recalcitrant senators' greed and the governor's ineptitude.

PAUL JENKINS

'Stand your ground' laws are freaking out the Left

A businessman slid out of his car in a dimly lighted parking garage in a sizable Florida city years ago, only to be confronted at arm's length by a robber armed with a pipe. The guy did the world a favor and shot him dead.

PAUL JENKINS

Group picked to probe APD is as wrong as it can get

For the briefest moment the other day, there was encouraging news: Mayor Dan Sullivan was hiring an independent agency to look at the Anchorage Police Department in the wake of the nightmarish Anthony Rollins case.

PAUL JENKINS

Want to fix our schools? Give vouchers an opportunity

After flailing around for years, doing the same tired things and spending billions, does anybody today really believe Alaska produces the best-educated kids in the United States? What was the tipoff? The dropout rates? Graduation rates? College entrance rates? We have a problem.

PAUL JENKINS

Prop 5 creates unnecessary patchwork of special rights

The Prop 5 imbroglio in Anchorage would be amusing if not so bitterly sad. Gays, lesbians and transgender people, despite the incessant yammering and misleading ads to the contrary, already have rights -- identical to yours; identical to mine. We are -- Surprise! -- all equal.

PAUL JENKINS

Tough-talking letters build street cred

So, who writes letters anymore? The quaint practice bit the dust with the advent of computers and email and Twitter. Letters? On paper? Really? Does the Post Office not have one foot in the grave because letter-writing is, well, déclassé?

PAUL JENKINS

Where did all conservatives go now that we need them

While Alaska stampedes toward a precipitous fiscal cliff, we should ask: What happened to all the conservatives? What happened to the folks who promised in the last election to curb spending, shrink government and get Alaska moving?

PAUL JENKINS

Murkowski voted the way she was supposed to

In most newspapers, opinion columns published above the fold on the front page are as rare as lizard lips. It only happens when something big, big, big happens. The start of a war. Aliens invading. The sun exploding. Something humongous.

PAUL JENKINS

Jenkins: It's obscene to balance budget on backs of vets

I knew this guy in college. He had just returned from Vietnam, or, more accurately, his long, painful hospital stay after Vietnam. Long hair. Bushy beard. A grunt, he had lost his right leg just below the knee and carried scars and bits of jagged metal in his body.

PAUL JENKINS

Nowadays, rumor and fear may be Alaska's best friends

Here in the Frozen North, fear is our closest friend. It powers state government and the economy. It sends each of us -- every man, woman and child -- sizable checks every year. It pays for nearly everything.

PAUL JENKINS

GOP pushes aside Romney for sideshow like Santorum

If the economy continues limping along or perks up a bit, Barack Obama -- whose minions and a willing media largely spin that news -- will become a two-term president. Why? Republicans do not have the sense God gave a goose.

PAUL JENKINS

Senate benefit pension plan would commit state for years

Why in the world would a state in its right mind, after pounding a stake through the heart of its costly, underfunded defined benefit pension plan, even toy with the notion of bringing it back to life?

PAUL JENKINS

Senate has the ACES ball -- now, what will happen next?

It appears something is happening in the endless, grinding effort to amend the Alaska's Clear and Equitable Share oil tax abomination. Or not.

PAUL JENKINS

Backing Newt guarantees another term for Obama

It is my sad duty to report that Republicans -- even ultra-conservative tea party loons and people who should know better -- are lost. In a desperate bid to dodge Mitt Romney as their presidential candidate, many are embracing, unbelievably, Newt Gingrich.

PAUL JENKINS

President blundered in blocking Keystone XL

When you consider President Barack Obama is in the re-election scrap of his life, with polls showing a chihuahua named Muffy could beat him later this year, it is almost enough to make you laugh that he sacked the Keystone XL oil pipeline.

PAUL JENKINS

Capitalism, like Twinkies, allows room for failure

Republicans who skedaddled out of New Hampshire, dragging their dead and wounded behind them into South Carolina for the Jan. 21 GOP primary, could find themselves facing a test of bedrock capitalist principles.

PAUL JENKINS

GOP needs to back the guy who can beat Obama

No matter what else we agree on -- commies and real Americans alike -- how about this: Barack Obama must go.

PAUL JENKINS

Occupy's vow to interrupt candidates is disturbing

If you harbor niggling doubts about what the vaunted Occupy movement -- a clown car of divergent, uninformed, leftist wackiness -- is about, the Iowa caucuses this week should give you crystalline clarity.

PAUL JENKINS

Bumbling GOP snubs Romney as president rises in polls

Here's a wonderful Christmas present from the GOP to desperate Democrats: President Barack Obama's poll numbers are inching up. Pushing a bogus jobs message and running against Congress, the president -- perhaps among the worst in this nation's history -- is starting to look like a political phoenix, thanks to Republicans.

PAUL JENKINS

Defense act aids troops, doesn't limit our rights

Watching the left unravel like cheap carpet while the National Defense Authorization Act slogged through Congress in fits and starts was fun. You would have thought from all the commotion the world was ending.

PAUL JENKINS

High taxes cut the flow of Alaska's lifeblood: oil

The ongoing, maddening ruckus over whether state senators finally will reform Alaska's Clear and Equitable Share oil tax and get the state's economy back on track is only partly about the rapacious levy. It also showcases warring philosophies of how governments should tax.

PAUL JENKINS

Folks entitled to their rude, unbecoming web postings

An alarming number of us, especially those who wallow in the blogosphere's slop, tend to embrace bad manners, vulgarity and uncivil discourse as evidence of unchained intellect. They confuse passion with a childish lack of discipline. Perhaps that is why they so adore little Emma Sullivan.

PAUL JENKINS

Stevens report corroborates misconduct by prosecutors

The only reason mobs are not arming themselves and swarming into government offices is that most of us are too lazy, fat and addicted to Facebook to be bothered. It just takes too much effort to round up all the necessary revolution stuff and join with guys like the militia knucklehead in Fairbanks and his loser pals. Besides, it's freezing cold.

PAUL JENKINS

Keystone line delay shows feds have lost their marbles

It is painfully clear the federal government has gone stark, raving mad and is little more than a puppet for green interests.

PAUL JENKINS

Too many of us embrace ignorance as a good thing

So, a friend laments, he knows this kid who tells his 17-year-old girlfriend Smokin' Joe Frazier has died. Who? she asks. He's astonished, assuring her Frazier, a heavyweight boxing champ, was a great fighter, the guy who beat Muhammad Ali on points in the much-ballyhooed "Fight of the Century."

PAUL JENKINS

State needs to get off the dime on LNG, or lose out

Gov. Sean Parnell, it turns out, is not Sarah Palin. He is his own man -- or he is Wally Hickel, or maybe Bill Walker. Whoever he is, he is looking like a guy who maybe sees the handwriting on the gas line.