Alaska Republicans: The Arctic Crackers Crumble

For those non-former Alaskans among us, it's a little hard to convey the sense of accomplished revenge we get from the goons at VECO oil field services company copping a series of felony pleas for bribery, extortion and mail fraud. These chuckleheads turned our beloved frontier homeland, a place with a clean slate, great education and a boatload of money, into a sort of third-world cash cow for the most rapacious companies on earth.

Almost certainly Former State Senate president Ben Stevens is next in the indictment chain, referred to in the plea agreement as "Senator B,". And what should follow is a long series of investigations, going back through decades of VECO's political activity. These charges stem from the FBI monitoring one hotel room in one session. I speculate confidently that this was not the only set of nefarious instances.

VECO has ties to Ted Stevens beyond his boy, the enfant terrible of right-wing Alaska politics, and even to Mike McGavick, the Safeco CEO who ran as the GOP Senate candidate in Washington state last year who was forced to return $12,000 in VECO contributions after the FBI raids last year. The elder Stevens, trying to get revenge on Maria Cantwell (note below) for her work to keep ANWR an actual wildlife refuge, organized the contribution in a fundraiser in Alaska in April 2006, according to a 2006 article in the Seattle Times.

Note that Democrats are not blameless in this, although many Democrats stood up against the worst excesses.