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Lisa Murkowski, the moderate but mostly plain ol’ conservative Republican from Alaska, has had a pretty interesting electoral —and not electoral — history. In 2002, after she’d served two terms in the Alaska House, she was appointed to fill the US Senate seat that had been held by her father, Frank Murkowski, who had been elected governor. Oh yes, in a detail of her career that I had somehow either forgotten or never known, that appointment was made by Gov. Frank Murkowski, which seems pretty darn tidy all in all.
Dang, the stuff you find when you look at the Source Of All Knowledge to check when a senator took office. Did I know that? Did you? My memory is a sieve, and my wife is a hat.
The nepotism pissed off Alaskans so much that in 2004, voters approved an initiative stripping governors of the ability to directly appoint replacements to an open US Senate seat. Naturally enough, the measure appeared on the same ballot on which Murkowski was running for her own first full term. Oh, and in 2006, Sarah Palin beat Frank Murkowski in the GOP primary. Since then, Palin and Lisa Murkowski kind of hate each other forever. Surprisingly, Palin never resigned from the feud.
Murkowski narrowly won the 2004 election, but then in 2010 —this, I remember! — she lost the Republican primary to Joe Miller, and then decided to run as a write-in candidate in the general election, leading to all sorts of fun ads explaining how to spell her name. Murkowski actually managed to beat Miller in the initial vote count, and the election was finally settled when a judge threw out Miller’s lawsuit demanding that ballots be discarded if voters misspelled Murkowski’s name, because duh, someone writing in “Lisa Murcowsky” had clearly made their intent known.
No, we really don’t want to think about how today’s Supreme Court might handle that case. Also, have we mentioned that Sarah Palin and Lisa Murkowski fucking HATE each other? Palin recently claimed in an op-ed that Alaska voters passed ranked-choice voting in 2020 “for the express purpose of making sure that Republican-in-name-only Sen. Lisa Murkowski could keep her job.”
Anydamnway, here’s the debate, in which Murkowsi will face her batshit insane MAGA challenger Kelly Tshibaka, who believes that God invented government agencies, because the Book of Genesis says “‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the Earth.”
“‘Subdue’ and ‘rule’ are government words,” she added. “What are we ruling and subduing over? The fish, the birds, and every living thing. Guys, in government, what department is that? God created the Department of Fish and Wildlife Services! I didn’t make it up! It’s right there!”
Yes, really. Here is your video from Alaska Public Media; also debating tonight will by sacrificial Democrat Pat Chesbro, who doesn’t have a chance in hell but we bet we’ll like.
As is traditional, when tonight’s debate is over, your Open Thread will once more be Evan’s Hero Yells At Homophobes story, and I will do things that will direct you there, because we aren’t afraid to be servicey.
As far as we know, there’s no debate scheduled for Friday night. Or maybe there is and we forgot.
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