the whirlwind By JOEL CONNELLY, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST
Of course, there’s Alaska’s temperamental,
vengeful GOP Senator-for-life Ted Stevens.
Stevens has just introduced a bill to roll back federal protection of Puget
Sound — clearing the way for more tankers and refineries.
The old bastard shakes down [Washington state’s] business interests
for $250,000 in donations whenever he seeks another term. And this is what we get in return.
Evil deeds backfire.
National Pork Service By Richard Cohen
after … a $223 million bridge from Ketchikan (population 8,900) to Gravina Island (population 50), was mocked as the “Bridge to
Nowhere,” Stevens properly turned the issue into one of virtual civil rights. He recalled the days when Alaska was a mere territory with
few of the usual rights of states and said that now, once again, it was being accorded second-class status: “It will not happen,” he
thundered. “It will not happen,” he bellowed.
The statue of Stevens will note that he was the first senator in American history to
take himself hostage. His threat to resign — an action of vast indifference to all of mankind with the possible exception of the 50
people on Gravina Island — would have deprived the Senate of a reverse Gold Rusher, someone who came down from Alaska to mine for gold
in Washington. His speech, in which over and over he bemoaned the pitiful nature of his state’s modest road system, made no mention of
how Alaskans pay no state income tax and are awarded a piece of the state’s oil revenue. The state is No. 1 in per capita federal aid,
which is a tribute of sorts to Stevens’s ability to game the system at the expense of us all. …
But it is his threat to resign
— “I don’t threaten people; I promise people” — that shall forever be memorialized. It is a model of insistence, of selfishness, of
seeing the government no differently than Huey, Dewey and Louie saw their uncle, the fabulously rich Scrooge McDuck.