The program Pick. Click. Give. announced today that 10 donors’ names will be drawn for a dividend doubling sweepstakes.

 

The Alaska Community Foundation is sponsoring the sweepstakes. The foundation is one of the four nonprofits that run the Pick. Click. Give. program. Foundation president and CEO Candace Winkler says the contest was partially motivated by lower participation rates in January.

“Which is our heaviest period for people to file for their Permanent Fund (dividend),” Winkler says. “We were hearing from several people that they were actually kicked off the website before they could pick, click, give.”

The Permanent Fund Dividend Division’s website had some technical problems that month.  The problems were fixed, but Winkler says it’s a challenge to get people to revisit the dividend website.

“We wanted to do something to incentivize them to go back in,” Winkler says. “We know that it’s much easier for people to use it while they’re filing. To actually motivate people to go back in and add a gift if they weren’t able to is a little bit harder. And so, you know, the sweepstakes is certainly a way to do that.”

The Pick. Click. Give. program has grown since it began in 2009. Last year, about one in 20 dividend recipients donated nearly $2.5 million.

Last week, the Permanent Fund hit a record high value of more than $50 billion. Winkler estimates dividends will be worth between $1,400 and $1,800 this year. The foundation is covering the prize payout through a grant from the Rasmuson Foundation. Winkler says it’s unclear at this point if the sweepstakes will be a recurring or one-off promotion. The foundation will track a variety of data points to gauge the sweepstakes’ success.

“We will certainly be looking at whether we see an increase in the percentage of people who, both go back in and add a gift, and also to see if, you know, in the last month of filling, if we see a significant increase in the percentage of filers who are making gifts,”  Winkler says.

The dividend application and donation period closes March 31. To be entered, donations cannot be made anonymously.

(Full disclosure: KTOO is an eligible Pick. Click. Give. charity.)

It’s an election year for Alaska’s Democratic Sen. Mark Begich, and there’s been no shortage of television attack ads from groups supporting his opponents.

The first-term senator chuckles and offers a polite apology to television watchers.

“I think that’s the lay of the land now, and I think these outside groups like the Koch brothers, who, you know — the same group that’s laying off 80 employees up in Fairbanks and not figuring out how to clean up the water they’re leaving there — are groups that are gonna just try to influence the politics of Alaska and, try to, you know, buy states,” Begich says.

The Koch brothers are David and Charles Koch of the multibillion dollar Koch Industries, based in Kansas. Begich’s layoff reference is to the imminent closure of Koch Industries’ Flint Hills oil refinery in North Pole. The Koch brothers have spent millions supporting right-wing political campaigns across the country.

“Which is somewhat disturbing in the sense of the political process. But from my perspective, I know Alaskans will focus on what I’ve done, and a larger picture, not just these outside groups that wanna, you know, twist the facts and twist the information for their own political gain,” Begich says.

Begich urges Alaskans to verify information through independent sources and specifically names PolitiFact and C-SPAN‘s websites.

“I think those will be great sources of unbiased, nonpartisan information,” he says.

Monday, Begich will deliver his sixth address to the Alaska legislature as a U.S. senator. Gavel Alaska’s live television, web and radio coverage begins at 11 a.m.

Begich has at least two other public stops planned in Juneau on Monday. He’ll attend a Native issues forum sponsored by the Tlingit and Haida Central Council at 12:15 p.m. at the Juneau Arts & Culture Center, and cut the ribbon on the Boochever Courthouse in the federal building at 3 p.m.

Juneau-based Alaska Robotics put out its second of six satirical news shorts on the web Tuesday.

Here are some highlights from the latest episode of the Kickstarter-funded series.

• The cause of the persistent fog that disrupted Juneau flights for more than a week is revealed — flatulence from Alaska Robotics team member Lou Logan.
• Beth Kerttula, the Democratic representative from Juneau who recently resigned to take a position at Stanford University studying ocean policy, delivers a zinger at BP’s expense.
• Gov. Sean Parnell’s 28-minute State of the State Address is boiled down to his 25 uses of the word “strong” and its variants.
• A passive-aggressive correspondent gives an uncomfortable lesson in Alaska Native history to a news anchor desperately trying to find a positive news angle.

Alaska Robotics is a label Pat Race, Aaron Suring and Lou Logan use for their creative projects.

Watch the full episode here:

Alaska Robotics is a label that Pat Race, Aaron Suring and Lou Logan have been using since 2007 for creative projects. That includes short films, comics and drawings that they put out on the web, film festivals and their retail shop in downtown Juneau.

One of their many creative projects began in 2002 when they founded the Juneau Underground Motion Picture Society. They’ve been holding popular local film festivals ever since.

They recently ran a successful Kickstarter campaign to take their humor and satirical political news up a level. They’ve committed to putting out six video news shorts on the web over the course of the 2014 Alaska Legislative session.

Alaska Robotics was in the studio on Wednesday talking about the project on Forum@360. They shared some of their past shorts, talked about using Kickstarter for the first time, using satire as way to fool people into learning something, running into Sen. Lisa Murkowksi after lampooning her father, and more.

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Highlights

Pat Race on why political satire is important:

“I think political satire is something that helps people digest complicated issues. I think that it — sometimes it oversimplifies them, but it gives you a thread to hang on to when you maybe don’t understand. There are so many big issues in Alaska, I mean, if you look into oil, say the oil tax, Senate Bill 21, and all that and everything it entails, I don’t think there’s any one person in Alaska that can understand every aspect of that. …

And so, I think political satire is a way of kind of lassoing people, and bringing people into a question. So maybe it’s something funny and absurd at first, but then they start asking, ‘OK, what’s the joke here?’ And to understand the joke, you have to understand the issue.”

Lou Logan on the prospect of getting rich off of satirical news:

“Our hands aren’t in the legislators’ pockets yet.”

Pat Race on why some people privately donated to their satirical news project:

“My favorite one was this guy came riding his bike down the street and handed me a brown paper bag when I was walking home from lunch. So yeah, we’ve got some people because of their like, political affiliations or they work for the government, or whatever it is, that they couldn’t participate in a public, become a public sponsor of the project, but they wanted to say, like, ‘Hey, I support what you’re doing, and I can’t have my name on it, but please, go do it and make it happen.'”

Aaron Suring on who supported their Kickstarter:

“I was really surprised by the number of people I didn’t know on the list. I was expecting that it was all going to people that I’ve met in one capacity or another, supported some other projects, or I’ve been introduced to along the way. But yeah, there’s actually a fair number of names I had never heard before.

Pat Race on using humor in a productive way:

“We don’t want to be, I don’t want to be a bully. Like a schoolyard (bully) like, ‘Uh, I’m making fun of you ‘cause your last name is hard to pronounce.’ Which I do – but I don’t want to just do that kind of humor. I want to do the type of humor that invites discussion.”

Pat Race on poor timing and poor taste:

“There’s been times when I’ve been kind of ashamed of what we’ve done. But at the time I was really happy with it. …

So I made an animated zombie Ted Stevens thing and then he died shortly after that. So I felt kind of bad about that. But then, what I felt really bad about, I used it again after he died. That was really awful. So yeah, I do feel sometimes I am critical of my own work.”

Pat Race on keeping the audience in on the joke:

“Everything we say should be taken with a grain of salt. Like, that’s the nice thing about our format. We are doing a satire news program. And so, please don’t run out and buy shotguns and canned foods because, ‘Oh no! The end is coming!’ And so, it’s very much in this safe area.

And actually, I have a huge problem with people that take it outside of that. Like, there’s the big, like, fake Shell Oil thing. Where they — like, Green Peace brought in a bunch of people that have this like, to act like they were Shell. And then like, had this horrible media mishap gone wrong, it turned into this big viral video. I don’t like that kind of thing. …Where you represent yourself as the truth in a context where people will misinterpret it as the truth and then go and make decisions based on that.”

Pat Race on how Alaska Robotics answered a question about their media diet:

“Man, we answered this question a lot better than Sarah Palin.”

Aaron Suring on his 2nd place world title for his Alaskan Whaler beard:

“So in 2009, the World Beard and Mustache Championships were in Anchorage. And we thought that was just too interesting and too near to like, miss. So we had to go up there and film it. And if we’re going to go up there, we can’t just go up there as clean-faced yahoos. Nobody’s gonna like, look at us and answer our questions. So we started growing beards. They didn’t take it very seriously, but I grew and ended up competing and I got second place in my category.”

Update 6:48 p.m.:

Mary Breffeilh says her dog Gizmo has been found. She attributes friends and Facebook for getting the word out and connecting the right people.

 

 

The original story has been updated to correct the spelling of dog owner’s last name. It’s Breffeilh, not Bresel.

Corrected original story:

Mary Breffeilh is looking for her lost 16-week-old mixed black lab puppy.

Breffeilh says the male dog was not wearing a collar and was last seen around 9:30 this morning near River Road and Whitewater Court, which is off Back Loop Road. She says she has paperwork to show she is the rightful owner.

You can contact her at 209-2979.

Republican Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn’s annual “Wastebook” released Tuesday purports to document cases of wasteful federal spending.

No. 59 in the 100-item list is a $450,000 federal grant awarded to Juneau’s Alaskan Brewing Company. The Wastebook says the grant gives the already successful company “a big profit boost courtesy of the federal government.”

The money covered a quarter of the cost of the brewing company’s first-of-its-kind boiler that generates heat from the spent grains used to make beer.

Andy Kline is the spokesman for Alaskan Brewing.

“So that was a significant risk to be the first, you know, brewery in the world to try this system, and the USDA’s grant helped us mitigate a portion of that risk.”

They’re taking the listing in stride.

“I think it gives us an opportunity to talk about a project that we’re incredibly proud of,” Kline said with a chuckle. “You know, I think this guy has his opinion, but, in fact, it’s barely negative.”

Kline says the environment and federal government also benefit.

“Part of the point of what the senator said is that we’re a successful brand and we’re enjoyed in 15 states. We’re happy with that success, and that success lets us pay about $2 million annually in federal excise taxes. So on a dollar figure alone, the federal government’s getting a pretty good return on that investment.”

Kline says no one from the senator’s office has contacted the company about the listing.

(Full disclosure: Alaskan Brewing sponsors many public radio events in Juneau and Kline often volunteers his time.)