When campaigns heat up, so do the pro-bridge/light rail/tolling lies.

"Figures don't lie, but liars figure."

Look, we get that John Laird is an ignorant, self-serving, surgically implanted blinders for the democratian kind of guy, and that "journalism" is some arcane concept that he seems to have, maybe, heard about some time in his distant past.

We get that lies from the Columbian on the bridge/loot rail/toll scam are almost as repulsive as their taxpayer-paid ballpark flip.

But to, once again, use your column to lie, exaggerate and pontificate while leaving out the biggest fact of all, namely, that this entire project is a con to get morons like Laird to buy-in?

This "column," where no lie is safe, serves as a great example of the Chief Justice of the Oregon Supreme Court's ruling, where-in the country knuckle draggers across the river had to be fooled into screwing us with this project... and that they arrived at the goal (which is to ram loot rail down our throats) and everything else, including Laird's Lies, are mere backfill to try and get support for it:

Now, it seems, no less then the Supreme Court of Oregon agrees.... with me.

The Oregon Supreme Court has succeeded in doing what scores of public meetings, thousands of pages of reports, and endless public relations spin could not: Give us the original rationale behind the proposed $3.5 billion Columbia River Crossing.
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The answer, according to the court: The massive Interstate 5 bridge and freeway project is a “political necessity” to persuade Clark County residents to accept something they previously didn’t want—a MAX light-rail line from Portland to Vancouver. (To read the Feb. 16, 2012 Oregon Supreme Court decision regarding the Columbia River Crossing Project, click here (PDF, 18 pages))
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Project opponents filed a legal challenge to the way Metro, the regional planning agency, granted sweeping land-use approval to the project. The Oregon Supreme Court sided mostly with Metro.
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But Chief Justice Paul De Muniz, writing for the majority, highlighted an inconvenient set of facts for CRC backers.

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He wrote in the Feb. 16 opinion that most of the project—namely the 10-lane freeway bridge and new interchanges—was put forward to get Clark County to agree to the light-rail line.

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De Muniz cited statements that Metro made in the land-use process and Metro’s lawyer repeated before his court.

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“It was politically impossible for the light rail project to proceed without also building new interstate bridges across the Columbia River,” De Muniz wrote.

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“Or as Metro later summarized it: ‘There is no light rail without the freeway bridge[s] being replaced.’”

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Backers have cited traffic and safety issues as the top reasons to build the CRC. But the court ruling means those and other justifications were created after officials decided to give a sop to Clark County, now worth $2.5 billion.

Everything that lying little slimeball wrote today can be covered under the last sentence in the excerpt I quoted above.  NONE of the garbage cited by Laird is a reason, or the cause of this massive screw-up

THIS is why this is happening to us, yet the dillwads like Laird and Brancaccio refuse to mention it.

And we all know why that is.  But that they refuse to mention it... that they keep engaging in the Goebbelian science of telling a lie long enough and loud enough that it becomes the truth... these are what make Laird and Brancaccio a disgrace to the newspaper industry.

As for the rest of Laird's lies, Laird's got the same problem as his fringe-left heroes:  He's lied for so long that we can't tell when he's trying to write the truth.

When he lies by telling us that an additional bridge to the west won't relieve pressure on the I-5 (And, for that matter, a great deal of the I-405 and much of Hiway 26) I can only hope that he steps away from the bong before he publishes next time.

All of this is a real shame.  This "I know better then you" arrogance, this "everyone who disagrees with me is stupid," shtick, this ongoing effort to support those with no vision, those who lie, those who have no clue as to the meaning of innovation and reality... the deliberate suppression of facts "inconvenient" to those drinking the loot rail kool aid.... these are just a part of the things that make the local democrat newsletter a disgrace to the media world.

And it didn't have to be this way... which is the biggest shame of all.