The Bridge to Nowhere Lives!

Begin forwarded message:

From: Dewayne Hendricks <[email protected]>
Date: October 11, 2006 4:43:54 AM EDT
To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <[email protected]>
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] The Bridge to Nowhere Lives!
Reply-To: [email protected]

[Note:  This item comes from friend John McMullen.  DLH]

From: "John F. McMullen" <[email protected]>
Date: October 10, 2006 4:58:28 PM PDT
To: "johnmac's living room" <[email protected]>
Cc: USA Talk List <[email protected]>, Dewayne Hendricks  
<[email protected]>
Subject: The Bridge to Nowhere Lives!

Thanks to Jim Connors -- I thought that this ****en boondoggle had died

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Bridge to Nowhere

If it's fair to say, I think you were a bit appalled when I mentioned  
that the multi-million dollar, infamously irresponsible Alaskan  
"Bridge to Nowhere" did not in fact go away.

As confirmation, William Safire's column in the NY Times Magazine  
today reminds us that it was to have connected the megapolis of  
Ketchikan (population less than 8,000) with Gravina Island  
(population less than 50) for no seeming reason other than political  
pork.  Although the measure ostensibly was squelched by front-page  
publicity, Safire confirms my recollection that the appropriation was  
reinserted, without directing where it must be spent. The bridge was,  
or is being, built.

Alaska is a state that has no income tax and annually distributes a  
multi-thousand dollar check to each of its residents as oil income  
largess.

This is a bi-partisan thing. If you travel through West Virginia, You  
can't possibly avoid seeing a Robert Byrd Throughway, Bridge,  
Municipal Building, One-Way Street or Barbeque Pit.

-------------------------------

Safire's Column -- <http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/08/magazine/ 
08wwln_safire.html? 
ex=1317960000&en=15991fbe1c880ada&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss>

On Language
Bridge to Nowhere
By WILLIAM SAFIRE

Keith Ashdown was a few beers into a night at the Hawk n Dove, wrote  
Tory Newmyer in the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call, when he came up  
with the phrase that sparked a national debate over Congressional  
spending. Reaching for some way to get people worked up about  
earmarks directing taxes collected by the federal government into  
obscure local construction projects, the lobbyist for the  
unassailably named Taxpayers for Common Sense was struck by what he  
recalled was a moment of sheer focus.

He came up with a moniker for a proposed costly bridge to a sparsely  
populated island in Alaska. At first, no reaction; but three years  
later, the atmosphere became charged with scandals of political  
influence-peddling, and The Washington Post reported that the Bridge  
to Nowhere became a national symbol of porkmania.

Ashdowns Bridge to Nowhere was the phrase that launched a thousand  
editorials. On the left, Salon noted with scorn that Alaskas Gravina  
Island (population less than 50) will soon be connected to the  
megalopolis of Ketchikan (pop. 8,000) by a bridge nearly as long as  
the Golden Gate. On the right, the Heritage Foundation denounced the  
planned span to the Ketchikan International Airport as an object of  
national ridicule and a symbol of fiscal irresponsibility.

Did Ashdowns sheer focus lead to a shiny coinage? No; a bridge to  
nowhere was not only the title of a 1986 movie about kids finding a  
mysterious hermit but was also in minor headlines in The New York  
Times in 1981 and 2000. It is the unofficial name of the concrete-and- 
steel span connecting Middle and Lower Hooper Island in Chesapeake  
Bay, Md. In a 1960 feature in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Mel  
Seidenberg wrote of the Fort Duquesne Bridge that calling it a bridge  
to nowhere may be cutting the truth a bit short, since drivers were  
likely to wind up on some obscure back street of the lower North  
Side. Chris Potter of the Pittsburgh City Paper reports today that  
the bridge certainly gets used a lot. Steelers fans use it on game  
days; Heinz Field is nearby.

Opponents of vital infrastructure projects have used this term to  
describe other bridges, the press aide to Senator Ted Stevens of  
Alaska informs me. These include Louisianas sunshine bridge across  
the Mississippi, originally hooted at as the bridge to nowhere, as  
well as the Astoria-Megler Bridge over the Columbia River in Oregon,  
which  like the proposed Gravina Island span  replaced a ferryboat  
and is now known as the Bridge to the World.

The feisty Stevens, a longtime Republican leader and stalwart on  
mental-health appropriations, threatened to quit the Senate if his  
state was stripped of aid to this and another bridge to spur  
development. A compromise was reached to send the money to Alaska for  
local decision making, but  as testimony to an apt tropes power to  
marshal bipartisan media ridicule  without earmarks directing where  
it must be spent.

I can empathize with the lobbyist Ashdown in the face of all the  
antedatings of his coinage. Only last month, in a fit of lexical  
triumphalism, I gleefully claimed to have minted e-maelstrom to mean  
a storm of e-mails  only to be brought low by the Gotcha! Gangs  
pajama-top patrol citing five previous usages and going nyah-nyah.

[snip]

Weblog at: <http://weblog.warpspeed.com>