61-meter (200-foot) high bridge over the west channel to Gravina Island
"Alaska's Gravina Island is home to 50 people and more than 350 Sitka black-tailed deer. Under the U.S. highway bill passed last month, this group will get a $223 million bridge taller than the Brooklyn Bridge in New York.
The funding is among $1.04 billion that Alaska lawmakers secured for transportation projects, making the state the envy of its neighbors in the U.S. Pacific Northwest. The states of Washington and Oregon, with a combined population 15 times that of Alaska's 650,000, each received about $500 million sought by lawmakers for transportation projects in their home states under the bill signed by President George W. Bush on Aug. 10.
Alaska owes its bounty to Congressman Donald Young, a Republican who heads the U.S. House of Representatives Transportation Committee and has told voters he used his position to enhance Alaska's share. A second bridge, spanning 2 miles in Anchorage, to be called ``Don Young's Way,'' got $229 million".
Republicans are excellent at spending and wasting your tax money and telling you it's the Democrats who did it. The only wasteful spending to a Republican is what’s not being spent in his district or state.
Hell, instead of paying $223 million for the bridge that leads, not to 'nowhere', but to 50 poor Eskimos stuck on some God forbidden island, couldn't we give each of them $1 million, have them move off the island and use the remaining $173 million for hurricane Katrina recovery?
Of course, $173 million is chickenfeed. What we should go after is the $300 billion that Bush and the Republicans kicked-back to the pharmaceutical companies when they rammed through their prescription drug program or we could also go after the $15 billion those same criminals kicked-back to the oil industry with their new energy policy. But, best of all, we should tell Iraq to stand on their own two feet and save the $5 billion we're wasting there each month.
There's a lot of room to cut spending and it's on welfare all right-corporate welfare that is. Corporate welfare, the raiding our our treasury to pay off corporate donors to republican criminals. Now, there's where we need to look when Congress talks about cutting spending. That's where the pigs feed.
