Palin Admin. Oversaw $26 Million ROAD to ‘Nowhere’

 

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A campaign led by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) to redirect the funds to a New Orleans bridge damaged by Hurricane Katrina failed. But Congress amended the legislation allowing most of the money to be used for any transportation project in Alaska.

For reasons that remain unclear, the bill left intact language requiring that $48 million be spent on "earthwork and roadway construction" for the Gravina Access Project.

According to Menzies, the Alaska DOT official, that meant the money could only be used to build projects directly associated with the $398 million bridge. The only alternative, Menzies said, was to return the money.

"I don't think there was any discussion about that," he said.

Such an attitude is typical of state DOTs, said Ashdown. They'll "move heaven and earth to make sure they can spend every dime given to them from the federal government through earmarks."

Menzies, however, argued that the road was not a waste. Even if it led to an empty beach, the road would help open the sparsely populated Gravina Island to development. And when it came to Alaska, "'nowhere' is a relative term," he said. "All of our roads to nowhere because they end in wilderness. That's just the way of Alaska."

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  • Posted By: Krohn @ 11/02/2008 11:15:21 PM

    The Wall Street crisis was planned the night of Obama's meeting at Bill Ayres home to put Obama in The White House. Together they put a beautiful plan into place.

    This Strategy was first elucidated in the 1966 issue of 'The Nation' Magazine by a pair of radical Socialist Columbia University professors, Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven.

    David Horowitz summarizes it as:

    "The strategy of forcing political change through an orchestrated crisis. The "Cloward-Piven Strategy" seeks to hasten the fall of Capitalism by overloading the Government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.
    unquote

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    So Fannie & Freddie was forced to purchase all these failed subprime mortgages.

    Then both Frank and Dodd denied that there were any problems, and refused the Bush Admin. requests to set up a regulatory agency to watch over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and they were still pushing for these agencies to go even further in promoting sub-prime mortgage loans almost up to the 'minute they failed'.

    Democrats then blamed Bush saying it happened on his watch knowing it would hurt the Republican Party in the election setting it up that Barack Obama could use this to his advantage.

    Karl Marx once compared a Revolutionary struggle with the work of the mole, who sometimes burrows so far beneath the ground that he leaves no trace of his movement on the surface.

    Barack Obama is that Marxist mole !

  • Posted By: akmother @ 10/28/2008 2:39:17 AM

    are you retarded???
    #1...The money did not go to oil companies..it went to other transportation projects AS IS THE LAW OF THE APPROPRIATION!!!
    Why would you give back that much money when as a state, you requested it, deserve, pay federal taxes IN like everyone else....and have a ton of transportation needs..just like the other states that received federal funds.

  • Posted By: akmother @ 10/28/2008 2:27:02 AM

    are you aware this is a rain forest in AK...with 180 inches of rain a year! Dark, blowing, rainy winters and you think its reasonable for people to boat back and forth to their homes? Here's a newsflash....down south, when people want to open areas for development, they get GOVERNMENT money, build roads (or bridges) and begin developing. If it makes sense for a 14,000 population town in the midwest....why is it porkbarrel spending when alaskans ask for it????

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