Home /

Uncle Ted

/
/
/
866 Views

Shorter Practically verbatim Ted Stevens:

That’s a nice newspaper you have there. Be a shame if something happened to it.

Crikey. Stevens appears to believe that he can cut off federal funding for the Anchorage Daily News.

What’s truly pathetic about all of this is that Stevens is eventually going to be indicted and, I suspect, convicted on corruption charges; he’s also going to run for re-election and win by his usual staggering margin next fall. The state Democratic party doesn’t see much point in actually running a candidate against Stevens, so we’ll probably be stuck with another low-frequency freak show, much as we had in 2002:

Both Democrats running for the right to face Ted Stevens in November’s general election say the state’s senior U.S. senator is out to get them.

In his campaign material, Frank Vondersaar of Homer calls himself “a political prisoner of Stevens and his criminal co-conspirators” since 1986. Theresa Nangle Obermeyer of Anchorage also calls herself a “political prisoner” and claims Stevens “jailed me for 29 days” in 1996, the first time she ran against the Republican U.S. senator. . . .

Vondersaar, a lawyer and engineer, said he worked in nuclear weapons intelligence for the U.S. Air Force from 1972 to 1985. After deciding he was under surveillance by the Department of Defense, he said he wrote Stevens asking for help. Vondersaar said he was sent to a psychiatric ward for six months, discharged and kept under surveillance.

Vondersaar, who lost to Obermeyer in the 1996 U.S. Senate Democratic primary, said since moving to Alaska, “they have me in a bubble.” And he claimed Stevens is part of the “they.”

“I don’t know how closely he was involved in the original conspiracy, but the conspiracy continues,” Vondersaar said from a Homer radio station where he arranged to use the phone for an interview because he has no home phone.

Obermeyer, an educator, real estate broker and frequent candidate who served one term on the Anchorage School Board, has claimed for years that Stevens repeatedly blocked her husband Tom’s attempts to enter the Alaska Bar. She also alleged Stevens’ entry to the bar was improper.

She was charged with disorderly conduct in 1995 after an altercation with a secretary in a federal building in Anchorage. She was placed on probation but served time, including some at an out-of-state federal prison, for violating probation. She also was arrested in 1998 after allegedly disrupting an Anchorage School Board meeting.

“I … have been jailed and targeted for many years for telling the truth. I have weathered a total of 14 fabricated court charges. Alaska Bench and Bar have spent millions to attempt to silence my husband and me,” she wrote in an e-mail message answering campaign questions.

Of course six years later, none of this sounds quite as implausible as it used to.

As it happened, Vondersaar won the primary and received about 10% of the vote, putting him solidly in second place. With an additional six years to mull over his plight, Vondersaar is apparently running again.

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Linkedin
This div height required for enabling the sticky sidebar
Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views :