Sarah Palin and the Bridge to Nowhere

Josh Claybourn at In the Agora:

Skepticism surrounding Palin's opposition to the infamous pork-funded "Bridge to Nowhere" has been repeated continuously on Leftist blogs, and Obama himself has criticized a McCain ad which highlights Palin's opposition to the Bridge. Biden took it a step further and called the ad an outright "lie." Now if this is true it greatly concerns me, but who is to be believed?

Apparently, no one ever questioned that Palin stopped the infamous Bridge until she was selected/considered as a running mate. On February 8th of this year the Anchorage Daily News reported the following:

Let's count how many things Gov. Sarah Palin's predecessor did that she's undone.

It's quite a list.

The state-owned jet: Sold.

The proposed Gravina Island "bridge to nowhere" and a pioneer road to Juneau: Won't be funded.

The same newspaper had this to say on March 12th:

Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens is aggravated about what he sees as Gov. Sarah Palin's antagonism toward the earmarks he uses to steer federal money to the state. ... A common target for earmark snipers is the so-called "bridge to nowhere" plugged by Alaska Rep. Don Young into the five-year transportation bill in 2005. Congress stripped the earmarks directing the spending but let the state keep the money to use on the bridge if it wanted.

Palin ruffled feathers when she announced - without giving the delegation advance notice - that the state was killing the Ketchikan bridge to Gravina Island, site of the airport and a few dozen residents.

The so-called 'paper of record', the New York Times, had this account in September of 2007:

Gov. Sarah Palin ordered state transportation officials to abandon the ''bridge to nowhere'' project that became a nationwide symbol of federal pork-barrel spending. The $398 million bridge would have connected Ketchikan, on one island in southeastern Alaska, to its airport on another nearby island. ''Ketchikan desires a better way to reach the airport,'' Ms. Palin, a Republican, said in a news release, ''but the $398 million bridge is not the answer.'' She directed the State Transportation Department to find the most ''fiscally responsible'' alternative for access to the airport.

Here's another similar account from USA Today. But media sources aren't the only ones to attest to Palin's actions. On a website created to attack Sen. Ted Stevens, the Alaskan Democratic Party indicates that it was Palin who stopped the Bridge:

Gov. Palin recently cancelled the Gravina Island Bridge near Ketchikan that would have connected the Alaska mainland with Gravina Island (population: 50).

Thus, until Palin became the Republican candidate for Vice President, no one seemed to question that she was the principle force stopping funding for the "Bridge to Nowhere." To be fair, Gov. Palin still accepted the same amount of federal dollars, but did so while demanding that no earmarks or requirements dictate millions going to the Bridge.

In my opinion as a fiscal libertarian/conservative, Palin's continued acceptance of the federal dollars, even without earmarks or strings, would be just grounds for criticism. But Barack Obama and Joe Biden are in no place to level it. "Sen. Biden and Sen. Obama voted for funding the Bridge, even when given a second chance by Sen. Tom Coburn, who proposed shifting earmark funds to Katrina relief."

Truth can be an itch-bay can't it?

Comments

[s7eph2n]

now that, that ...........lol,lol,lol,rofl,tih,dah!

Skepticism surrounding Palin's opposition to the infamous pork-funded "Bridge to Nowhere" has been repeated continuously on Leftist blogs, and Obama himself has criticized a McCain ad which highlights Palin's opposition to the Bridge. Biden took it a step further and called the ad an outright "lie." Now if this is true it greatly concerns me, but who is to be believed?

Apparently, no one ever questioned that Palin stopped the infamous Bridge until she was selected/considered as a running mate. On February 8th of this year the Anchorage Daily News reported the following: hah! that is..........? what? Can't have trouble
finding an opinion?!

[tim aka The Godless Heathen]

Not sure what to make of the last incoherent rambling, but if anyone else believes the falsehoods like "Apparently, no one ever questioned that Palin stopped the infamous Bridge until she was selected/considered as a running mate" please go read this NRO article and get the truth, not the BS being thrown about.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=Yzk1MWE2ZDg5OGE3ZGYyMTY3ZGEyZTIzMTk0MjVhZWQ=

[Joe]

While we're on the quotation thang, let's look at what the issue really is: Palin has been touting herself as an anti-earmarks, bridge-killing loose cannon lately. The truth will out, however:

(http://tinyurl.com/53jxt9)

As the new mayor of tiny Wasilla, Alaska, in 2000, Ms. Palin initiated a tradition of making annual trips to Washington to ask for more earmarks from the state’s Congressional delegation, mainly Representative Don Young and Senator Ted Stevens, both Republicans.

“It was about being face-to-face with those who were actually writing the budget,” she told The Anchorage Daily News in 2006, boasting that she brought home more money for priorities like upgrades to the local sewer system.

She directed Wasilla to employ Washington lobbyists to press for federal money for the town, helping obtain more than $8 million in earmarks for projects ranging from waterworks to a shelter.

And she expressed support for the Bridge to Nowhere earmark as well. “I do support the infrastructure projects that are on tap here in the State of Alaska that our Congressional delegations worked hard for,” Ms. Palin said when asked about that bridge and another in an October 2006 television debate while campaigning for governor.

Later that month, when asked if she would continue state financing for the Gravina bridge and another proposed bridge project, she said yes. “I would like to see Alaska’s infrastructure projects built sooner rather than later,” she responded in a questionnaire from The Anchorage Daily News. “The window is now — while our Congressional delegation is in a strong position to assist.”

Earmarks are close to sacrosanct in Alaska, which routinely reaps more money per resident for such projects than any other state because of the seniority and aggressiveness of Mr. Stevens and Mr. Young (both now mired in unrelated corruption inquiries.)

[tim aka The Godless Heathen]

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=Yzk1MWE2ZDg5OGE3ZGYyMTY3ZGEyZTIzMTk0MjVhZWQ=

“The only people ‘lying’ about spending are the Obama campaign,” McCain-Palin spokesman Brian Rogers shot back. “The only explanation for their hysterical attacks is that they’re afraid that when John McCain and Sarah Palin are in the White House, Barack Obama’s nearly $1 billion in earmark spending will stop dead in its tracks,” he added, referring to the 330 federally funded projects worth $931.3 million that Obama has requested since joining the Senate in January 2005.

While noting her early support for the Bridge while a gubernatorial candidate, the Republican vice-presidential nominee’s critics seem to forget statements she made against it while governor long before “Palin officially killed the project” as PolitiFact.com puts it. (The photo below shows how the bridge would have connected the town of Ketchikan on Revillagigedo Island with the airport and village on Gravina Island, population: 50. A ferry links the two places.)

While running for chief executive, Palin backed the bridge, although with little evident enthusiasm. “The money that’s been appropriated for the project,” she told Ketchikan voters in September 2006, “it should remain available for a link, an access process as we continue to evaluate the scope and just how best to just get this done.”

Palin could have fought for the bridge as governor, as did her spendthrift GOP predecessor, Frank Murkowski (whom she jettisoned in a primary). Murkowski recommended dedicating $195 million in the state budget for the bridge. Instead, Palin gave it $0.

“Palin’s budget doesn’t include money for mega projects that she supported as a candidate, such as the controversial Gravina Island bridge in Ketchikan,” Kyle Hopkins wrote in the December 16, 2006 Anchorage Daily News. “Palin said she will hash out where the bridge fits on the state’s list of priorities with the help of the Legislature and public. ‘We have a limited pot of money, of course, and we need to make wise, sensible choices,’ she said.”

In a February 2007 report on infrastructure priorities, Palin’s transition team opposed the Bridge, plus a road in Juneau. “Statewide, these two projects are seen as a severe drain on resources that would otherwise be assigned to heavily used commercial and passenger routes,” the study concluded.

Alaska’s Senate approved $1.6 billion in capital items on May 11, 2007. True to Palin’s wishes, the spending plan provided no money for the Bridge to Nowhere.

On September 21, 2007, Palin finally stated, “‘Ketchikan desires a better way to reach the airport, but the $398 million bridge is not the answer.”

Palin’s early, tepid support for the bridge, followed by her open hostility to it as governor did not please the state’s GOP political establishment.

As Amy Goldstein and Michael D. Shear observed in the August 30 Washington Post, Palin “has angered two of Alaska’s leading Republicans — Sen. Ted Stevens and Rep. Don Young — by refusing to support their decades-long practice of securing federal money for the state, including Young’s effort to obtain $233 million for a structure dubbed the ‘Bridge to Nowhere’ by critics because it would have connected a small town with an island populated with 50 people. In her short time in state office, she has repeatedly thwarted Stevens’s and Young’s interests and, at times, challenged their candidates — including their children.”

While it may be unfair to say that Sarah Palin always treated the Bridge as Milton Friedman might have, she quickly grasped the project’s folly and ultimately put it out of the nation’s misery. In a country where politicians endlessly make demands until weary taxpayers capitulate, Palin scrapped the bridge soon after she was empowered to do so.

Read it all if you like:

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=Yzk1MWE2ZDg5OGE3ZGYyMTY3ZGEyZTIzMTk0MjVhZWQ=