Don Mitchell

Bleeding out on the asphalt after being shot by an officer who had no legitimate reason to fire is not a way anyone should die.

The real surprise about Sarah Palin's resignation announcement is that it took her more than 10 months from her first appearance on the cover of People Magazine to make it.

What Ted Stevens did not understand until the jury and Alaska voters explained it to him was not that the world had changed.

For eight weeks Alaska's Governor Girl has been having the time of her middle-aged life crisscrossing America in a private jet with an entourage that includes Amy "So You Think You Can Dance" Strozzi, her $11,000 a week make-up artist, and Angela Lew, who the McCain campaign paid $10,000 to counsel Sarah that she'd look hotter if she abandoned her trademark schoolmarm's upswept bun and let her hair hang down to her shoulders the way Julia Roberts's does.

In passing she reported: "Mark was down here for a fundraiser that I attended a few months ago . . . Barbara Boxer, Bonnie Raitt. Quite a deal." Bonnie Raitt?

On Aug. 20, 2008, Commonwealth North hosted a luncheon at the Anchorage Sheraton Hotel to enable the three or four hundred of us in attendance to watch Wally Hickel award John Katz, the longtime commissar of the Alaska Governor's Office in Washington, D.C., the Walter J. Hickel Award for Distinguished Public Policy Leadership.