Road to Nowhere

My friends, that is a taxpayer boondoggle you can believe in:

During Palin’s recent convention speech she sharply criticized Senator Barack Obama for wanting to end Bush's tax cuts. She pointed to her sister and husband who are new small business owners in Alaska, “How are they going to be any better off if taxes go up?”

But in fact, the way the hockey rink was built was by raising taxes. Palin funded the project by pushing a special referendum that raised the sales tax by 25 percent. City hall records show the referendum was passed by twenty votes.

One Wasilla resident who voted for the complex is Mike Edwards. He says he spends about an hour a day at the facility watching his son play. He says he’s glad government stepped in to build the new ice because privately run rinks are much more expensive, costing teams as much as $300 an hour to practice compared to $185 at the public rink.

CBS News obtained 86 pages of city council documents that show Palin sought to justify the tax increase to fund the sports complex in part because the private sector had not stepped in to fill the gap. She noted the strong support in the community as a reason to move ahead.

But her most striking argument for raising taxes is one you might not expect from a fiscal conservative. She writes that the rink offers an opportunity for government to stop a social ill like drug abuse or juvenile delinquency before it starts.

So it's like midnight basketball, then. I suppose "community organizers" were involved at some level, not that these bozos would ever admit it.

Even better, media folk are already starting to debunk Klondike Barbie's autopilot "thanks, but no thanks" schtick.

Since McCain tapped her as his running mate on Aug. 29 (hard to believe that was less than two weeks ago) Palin at every opportunity -- using virtually the same phrasing -- has told crowds that as governor of Alaska, "I told Congress, 'Thank but no thanks for that bridge to nowhere.' "

She re-ran the line again today at a rally in Lebanon, Ohio. But she did so in the face of a release from the Obama forces noting that a plethora of reporting shows her stance on the project -- which would have connected the small city of Ketchikan to the even smaller island of Gravina -- isn't so black-and-white.

And now it's a $24 mil road leading to the bridge that was never built, because Palin didn't want to have to give back the money. That's reform we can all believe in, my friends.

Extra points for the scathing ridicule emanating from the Obama camp on this bullshit ("next thing you know, she'll claim she sold [the bridge] on E-Bay"). Seems like after a rather wild week or so, with some oddball weekend polling, the honeymoon is already winding down, pending Granny Glasses Gibson's suckupfest later in the week. She wound up the rubes, but even they have people who might need health care or benefit from stem-cell research, etc. When it sinks into their thick skulls that this crew's answer to all that is "fuck you", it might mean something. Might.

Also, for the Clump for Growth idiots and the retards in the LA Times comments in the linked article, with their "what about Obaaaaama and Biiiiden voting for the briiiidge toooooo!!1!1!" whine, get this, you mouthbreathing fuckheads -- neither Obama nor Biden has staked a mythical maverick claim using this contrived episode as evidence of their ideological independence. Palin, on the other hand, has touted it as a prime character reference at every stop, even though it is not at all true.

Not that any of these, you know, facts stop this broad from repeating it, since she's not allowed to say anything extemporaneous, and her audience doesn't care about facts anyway. They just want a chance to publicly beat off to an image of what they think they are, when not a one of them -- including Palin and McCain -- are remotely the rugged self-made individualists they posture as.

And if they are, then by all means put your money where your pieholes are and quit sucking our tax dollars already.