... and turns out Santa supports Bernie Sanders.
This from April.
full: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...un-santa-claus
Sarah Palin announced her candidacy for Alaska’s only seat in the House of Representatives this month, entering a race with dozens of candidates. She certainly brings name recognition to the contest – but another contender may have her beat in that department.
His name is Santa Claus.
He lives, of course, in North Pole – a town of about 2,000 in Alaska. He has a big white beard and a kindly manner, and Santa Claus is indeed his legal name, though, as a Bernie Sanders supporter, he does not exploit elf labor. He won a city council seat in 2015, to the delight of observers around the world. Now he’s ready to take his political career to the next stage.
He’s running to complete the term of the long-serving Republican congressman Don Young, who died last month at age 88. A special primary will be held on 11 June.
As for Claus’s politics: he’s been called “a bastion of blue on a city council as red as Rudolph’s nose”. He says voters who look at Sanders’ policy platform can get a pretty good idea of his own, including support for Medicare for All, racial justice, corporate accountability, and free and fair elections. That includes ranked-choice voting, which will feature in the second round of the coming election. “That’s what’s given me the opportunity here,” he said. Ranked-choice voting “gives people with name recognition such as yours truly, and even Sarah, for that matter, a slight advantage”.
But Claus hasn’t always had that name. “Seventy-four years ago, I didn’t pop out with a beard,” he says. In fact, Claus changed his name from Tom O’Connor in 2005. He was living in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, at the time, and pondering what he should do with his life, as Julia O’Malley wrote in a 2015 Guardian profile. He had previously worked in law enforcement, where he’d witnessed kids falling “through the cracks” of the foster care system, and he wanted to do what he could to help them, he told the Anchorage Daily News in 2020. He’d already grown the beard, and as he prayed for guidance, someone in a car nearby shouted, “Santa, I love you!”
(left out because I'm too lazy to cp an entire article)
His name is Santa Claus.
He lives, of course, in North Pole – a town of about 2,000 in Alaska. He has a big white beard and a kindly manner, and Santa Claus is indeed his legal name, though, as a Bernie Sanders supporter, he does not exploit elf labor. He won a city council seat in 2015, to the delight of observers around the world. Now he’s ready to take his political career to the next stage.
He’s running to complete the term of the long-serving Republican congressman Don Young, who died last month at age 88. A special primary will be held on 11 June.
As for Claus’s politics: he’s been called “a bastion of blue on a city council as red as Rudolph’s nose”. He says voters who look at Sanders’ policy platform can get a pretty good idea of his own, including support for Medicare for All, racial justice, corporate accountability, and free and fair elections. That includes ranked-choice voting, which will feature in the second round of the coming election. “That’s what’s given me the opportunity here,” he said. Ranked-choice voting “gives people with name recognition such as yours truly, and even Sarah, for that matter, a slight advantage”.
But Claus hasn’t always had that name. “Seventy-four years ago, I didn’t pop out with a beard,” he says. In fact, Claus changed his name from Tom O’Connor in 2005. He was living in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, at the time, and pondering what he should do with his life, as Julia O’Malley wrote in a 2015 Guardian profile. He had previously worked in law enforcement, where he’d witnessed kids falling “through the cracks” of the foster care system, and he wanted to do what he could to help them, he told the Anchorage Daily News in 2020. He’d already grown the beard, and as he prayed for guidance, someone in a car nearby shouted, “Santa, I love you!”
(left out because I'm too lazy to cp an entire article)
full: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...un-santa-claus
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