Sooooiiiieeeee! Part 2, or, Don Young's Way

You -- or at least, the Vega -- can't make this shit up.

The highway legislation that passed the House on Thursday night and the Senate around sundown on Friday, the most expensive public works bill in the nation's history, has almost $1 billion for special projects in Alaska.

About one-fourth of that money will be spent to build one of the biggest bridges in the United States, a mile-long, 200-foot-high span that will connect Ketchikan, a town with fewer than 8,000 people, to an island that has 50 residents and a small airport.

Another $230 million will be spent on a bridge across an inlet in Anchorage, and it will be named Don Young's Way.

And as an added sweetener for Mr. Young, a Republican who is chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, the bill includes almost $3 million to produce a documentary film "about infrastructure that demonstrates advancements in Alaska, the last frontier."

Like so much else in the bill, the money for the documentary was added by a few senior senators and representatives who met in private as a conference committee to reconcile the differences between the House and Senate versions of the legislation.

The mammoth legislation was not available for public inspection until just before the votes, and it is safe to bet that none of lawmakers, not even the main authors, had read the entire package.

It's Tom DeLay's America. We're just paying for it.