This should a lot of fun. Senator Coburn of Oklahoma, birthstate of this humble blogger, is a delightful gadfly and that is why he was opposed by his own Republican party when he ran for the office. Now he has won and will be there for 6 years. Here is his latest ploy. The highway bill recently signed into law has thousands of pork projects includes a particularly egregious Alaska bridge which goes "nowhere". Coburn has proposed that we take that money and repair a bridge destroyed by hurricane Katrina down in Louisiana. As one might expect, the Senators do not want to vote on this because a NO vote would be very difficult to explain if you aren't from Alaska. Here is the Club for Growth's message to its members urging them to support Coburn and making the point that we could buy each person on one end of the bridge his or her own jet plane for the same money as the cost of the bridge.
October 19, 2005
The Club for Growth, with its 32,000 members, plans to score a “YES” vote as a pro-economic growth vote in its annual rating of Congress on Coburn Amendment #2085 to the Senate’s Treasury, Transportation, and Housing and Urban Development appropriations bill (HR 3058).
This amendment will transfer funding from the wasteful pork project, the “Bridge to Nowhere” in Alaska, to the repair and reconstruction of the “Twin Spans” bridge in Louisiana. According to published reports, the Alaskan pork project costs $220 million for a 5.9-mile bridge connecting Gravina Island (population 50) to the Alaskan mainland. The cost of the bridge alone would be enough to buy every island resident his own personal Lear jet.
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