Coconut Don and Florida congressman’s chief of staff go at it
May 2nd, 2008 by Zaki
From the Naple’s News Daily: There’s now a dispute over who’s telling the truth and who’s ducking between Rep. Connie Mack, R-Fort Myers, the congressman who had invited a more senior house colleague to visit Lee County in February of 2005, and Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, who took the floor of the House on Wednesday to defend his support for the Coconut Road interchange study.
Young said he backed the project because it was what people from the area told him they wanted, and those were views he heard at Mack’s invitation.
“It was supported by the congressman from that district,” Young said of the $10 million earmark to study a new place to access the interstate. “And there’s letters to back that up.”
Mack, who represents Lee County and parts of Collier and Charlotte counties, has said on many occasions that he was not involved in pushing for an earmark for Coconut Road.
Jeff Cohen, Mack’s chief of staff, said Thursday that it was clear his boss was being singled out.
Young’s speech to the House was “absurd” and “inaccurate,” Cohen said. “Perhaps we don’t just need a committee on ethical standards, but one on psychological standards as well,” he added.
According to several reports, shortly after a vote in which the House approved the Senate’s call for a Justice Department investigation into the altered congressional appropriation for the interchange study and redesignated the $10 million for widening I-75 in Lee and Collier counties, Mack confronted Young over the remarks.
Cohen described it as “a passionate discussion between passionate people.”
Young put it differently to Alaska Public Radio Network: “He just said I was a liar. I don’t understand because I’ve got all the letters. Pull them up on the Web site. He’s running away from an issue because he’s got political heat.”
One more nail in the political coffin of Don Young. No honor among thieves is there. It’s the old political shuffle, of I didn’t do it and put the blame on someone else. What really amazes me the most, is that many here in the Great Land are still walking around with blinders on to it. Hear no evil, see no evil, and speak no evil.
I want to thank Dennis and the AlaskaReport for being there to keep the spotlight on this kind of corruption. It takes a certain amount of courage to print the truth.
Most news organizations are like that little figurine of glass in his and are afraid of being crushed by the arrogance of those who feel they are above the law.
young is a liar and deserves one last term…in jail. It will be gratifying to see him tried and convicted.
We love a good Congressional Feeding Frenzy! Young threatening all the Ds and Rs about the other 6300 earmarks in the same bill he/staff doctored. Since when did we elect “an unnamed earmark clerk” and give them more power than the entire Congress?
Economics Professor Charles Plott warned the NPFMC about Crab Ratz and said it would be going down a slippery slope (duh!) too, but Don and Ted ignored such inconvenient expert advice. Alaska’s fishing crews and many communities got a trainwreck of a program. Now Don uses the slippery slope hammer on 500 or so elected officials and their thousands of staffers to tell them to obey accepted protocol for “how things get done” in DC.
It’s a good time to ignore Don and cronies, and let the finger-pointing feeding frenzy rise to an indictment crescendo…