Slipped in among the Christmas gifts last year was a sneaky nod for Frankenfish by the FDA. The Food and Drug Administration chose the holidays to release its environmental assessment saying that genetically modified salmon made by a company called AquaBounty won’t have any significant impacts on the human environment and is unlikely to harm wild fish.

How do you create jobs in Seattle and Alaska? By building fishing boats here and hiring workers who might otherwise only get jobs in fast-food restaurants.

In the interest of in-flight safety, as well as sparing travelers to details of personal conversations, Sen. Mark Begich, D-Alaska, has come out in opposition to permitting cell phone calls during commercial flights.

Lawmakers from Alaska and Washington have introduced language in a federal defense spending bill that would authorize the building of four new heavy polar icebreakers.

In a tough new advertisement from the Koch brothers-backed Americans for Prosperity, an unnamed woman looks directly into the camera and upbraids Senator Mark Begich. But there is a slight problem with the commercial. The woman is not from Alaska. She is actually an actress who lives in Maryland.

Senator Mark Begich is proposing a change to the Affordable Care Act that would make cheaper insurance options available.

Sen. Mark Begich (D-Alaska) criticized Alaska Gov. Sean Parnell (R) for announcing on Friday that he would decline federal funds to expand the Medicaid program in his home state.

Alaska’s congressional delegation is seeking $150 million in federal aid for fisheries disasters.

Last week’s Alaska Federation of Natives convention featured speeches from all 3 members of Alaska’s Congressional delegation. Senator Mark Begich used his time to talks about a number of issues including supporting tribal courts and making fixes to the new health care law. KDLG’s Mike Mason listened in and filed this report.

here are any number of reasons for this disappearance — partisan gerrymandering and closed primaries being the two most obvious — but the numbers are unbelievably stark, particularly when you consider that roughly 30 percent of the electorate consider themselves political independents. (According to exit polling, 29 percent of people named themselves independents in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections.)

The slide above also explains why there will be no grand or even big bargain on debt and spending — or much of anything else — anytime soon. The political incentive to make deals simply does not exist in the House and, in fact, there is almost always a disincentive for members to work across the aisle. (This is less true in the Senate where a centrist coalition — Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Kelly Ayotte, Joe Manchin, Mark Pryor, Mark Begich etc — exists although that coalition has shrunk in recent years too.)

The deal-makers — as we have seen from the last month in the House — are largely gone.