"Kiss my _ _ _!" Congressman Don Young

Alaska's Congressman Don Young has been winning a lot of accolades lately. Conservatives from the Wall Street Journal to Michele Malkin have been critical of the $500 million in pork barrel spending that Young loaded into the recent transportation bill. This money will go to build two Alaskan bridges that will serve no purpose. There is no one who is remotely connected with the communities involved or the government in general who doesn't see Young's bridges as plan pork for some big construction companies.

When asked if he would reconsider the half billion dollars and try and use that money the rebuild the Gulf Coast, Young's answer was "kiss my ear (ass)."

"They can kiss my ear!" Young boomed when Sam Bishop, Washington correspondent for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, asked him about the many pleas to redirect the bridge money.

"That is the dumbest thing I've ever heard," Young went on, noting that Louisiana did quite well in his highway bill.

And, the congressman said, he helped the seafood industry donate more than $500,000 for hurricane victims. (That was at the "Seafood Invitational," a charity golf tournament Sept. 9 in Roslyn, Wash., Bishop reported Friday.)

"I raised enough money to give back to them voluntarily," he said, "and that's it!"

What a guy. But wait, there's more from Representative Young.

Faced with the massive aid bill for Hurricane Katrina, Young added a few interesting amendments. One would make it more difficult to build a wind energy facility in Nantucket Sound. Another give the Coast Guard $400,000 to "carry out an assessment of and planning for an Arctic Sea Route on the indigenous people of Alaska." And, a third would require that the Coast Guard homeport the cutter, Healy, in Anchorage, Alaska.

Not in the same class as half a billion in pork, but from the same sleazy and corrupt source.