The Quarter Million Dollar "Salmon-Thirty-Salmon"

It took a team of 30 painters 24 days to adorn the 120-foot-long Boeing 737 passenger jet with the shimmering likeness. The average 737 takes about a week to paint.

The plane already needed a new paint job, and Alaska Airlines covered about $75,000 of the tab, company spokeswoman Amanda Tobin said.

The federally funded Alaska Fisheries Marketing Board paid for the rest of the roughly $300,000 project, said Bill Hines, the board's executive director.

Hines, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration official, has led the board since Congress created it in 2003 to give Alaska's then-struggling salmon industry a boost.

"Three years ago, the salmon industry was at rock bottom. Now demand exceeds supply," Hines said during a recent tour of the Goodrich Aviation Technical Services plant in Everett, where the plane was being repainted.

Last weekend, Seattle's Alaska Airlines rolled out its new "Salmon-Thirty-Salmon," the world's most intricately decorated jet. It took a crew of 30 — including three Hollywood set-design specialists — almost a month to paint a giant chinook on both sides.

It cost five times the standard rate. The airline's marketing director, Greg Latimer, enthused: "There is no way we could even entertain such a project if we had to incur this cost ourselves."

So — and you knew this was coming — we picked up the tab. The paint job was paid for with a $500,000 federal grant designed to encourage people to eat Alaska salmon.

The Alaska Fisheries Marketing Board, which made the grant, has doled out $29 million the past two years, all of it taxpayer money to urge people to buy Alaska salmon.

Screw those poor hurricane victims down south, they probably don't even eat salmon.
Remember this when you start hearing Republicans calling for de-funding public broadcasting and eliminating Pell Grants to enable more young people to attend college in order to pay for Katrina and Rita.