Biting Remarks

Don Young, the Alaska Congressman who once bragged that he was going to stuff the highway bill "like a turkey," before earmarking some $400 million for the now-infamous "Bridges to Nowhere," was in rare form on the House floor today, directing thinly-veiled threats at his colleagues. Young's sputtering tirade was mainly directed at New Jersey Republican Scott Garrett, who introduced an amendment that would strike funding from a native Alaska and Hawaii education bill. You really have to watch the 'speech' to believe it, but here are some highlights from his remarks:

Apparently the students in New Jersey are trying to take money from Alaskan students. Splitting state against state instead of talking about education. We are a new state. I have poverty you don't even think of. And yet you say you want my money. My money! For my students that need to be educated... If we continue this we'll be called biting one another, very much like the mink in my state that kill their own. There is always another day when those who bite will be killed, too. And I'm very good at that."

Young, you will not be surprised to learn, is no friend to environmentalists. As Rolling Stone reported in a feature on the "10 Worst Congressmen":

He once called environmentalists a "self-centered bunch of waffle-stomping, Harvard-graduating, intellectual idiots" who "are not Americans, never have been Americans, never will be Americans." And during a debate on the right of native Alaskans to sell the sex organs of endangered animals as aphrodisiacs, Young whipped out the eighteen-inch penis bone of a walrus and brandished it like a sword on the House floor.

Wow! Too bad I can't find that on You Tube.