Is Alaska Actually Mystified By Its Bad Image?

Longtime PI political columnist Joel Connelly, from the safe distance of Puget Sound, rakes the Alaska leadership into the compost pile.

Young fund-raisers were held at the MCI Center skybox in Washington, D.C., of convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

It was Young who blocked House action on a bill that would have made the garment industry in the Northern Mariana Islands comply with U.S. labor laws.

Abramoff represented the garment makers.

Were he a more astute man, Murkowski would recognize that a dose of reality lies behind Alaska's image problem.

In 2003, federal spending amounted to more than $12,200 per resident of Alaska.

Doesn't the rest of the country have a right to question waste, and to insist that the money not be used to degrade values that make Alaska such a unique, wonderful and largely unspoiled place?

Damned right it does.