This is Senator Ted Stevens. He's a Republican from Alaska, the longest-serving Republican senator in American history. He's also in a lotta hot water right now, what with the FBI raiding his house and charges of bribery and favoritism being bandied about. Mark my words, he's going down.
Senator Stevens is famous for other reasons as well, including earmarking $315-million to build a "Bridge to Nowhere" connecting Ketchikan, Alaska (pop. 8900) with Gravina Island (population 50). If that weren't absurd enough, the "Bridge to Nowhere" would have bumped funding to repair the Interstate 10 bridge across Lake Ponchartrain wiped out by hurricane Katrina. Senator Stevens pulled out all the stops trying to get the funding for his bridge:
"I will put the Senate on notice -- and I don't kid people -- if the Senate decides to discriminate against our state, to take money only from our state, I'll resign from this body," he said. "This is not the Senate I came to. This is not the Senate I've devoted 37 years to, if one senator can decide he'll take all the money from one state to solve a problem of another."
The proposal failed on an 82-15 vote.
Then there was Stevens' memorable explanation of how the Internet works:
Ten movies streaming across that, that Internet, and what happens to your own personal Internet? I just the other day got... an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday, I got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially.
[...]
They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
That Ted's a funny guy, in a Ted Baxter kinda way, I guess.
Here's the entire clip of the "Series of Tubes" speech, as it has come to be known.
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