From Twitter tweets, to eyewitness blog posts, to Flickr photos and YouTube cell phone videos, to crowd sourcing collaborative reporting, citizen journalism played a significant and central role in the news coverage of the Highway 35W Minneapolis bridg…

From, among many other sites over the past week or two, the Freakonomics Blog, Stephen Bainbridge @ Andrew Sullivan’s, Michelle Malkin, Dr. Wes, and (examine the links closely) Declan McCullagh…….

On August 3rd, 2007 at 10:27 am, tgillian said:
In 2005, Congress passed and Bush signed the largest highway bill ever. (See http://www.stateline.org/live/details/story?contentId=35925) Wonder what Minnesota did with their share? They’ve hit the lottery now, though. The money will come flying in. Wonder what they’ll do with it now?

We also just “Voted Yes!” on a referendum that was put in on the 2006 ballot allocating a certain amount of our taxes to go JUST to MNDot, (the dept of transportation.) Where did that money go? Fiscal retard thy name is Minnesotan. You’re talking about a state where the regular Democratic party is too conservative so there’s the DFL, (dumb f-ing liberals as I call them.) And this is the first state to launch a class-action lawsuit against “big tobacco” and win. Where did the money for that go? Did it go toward some sort of medical program, (free patches, free nicorette gum, etc) something that may have helped people get off of tobacco like it was supposed to? No, of course not. It went to those goofy “Truth” ads which only make me want to smoke. I get a nic fit everytime I see one – I have to turn the channel. As I stated: fiscal retard, thy name is Minnesotan. Don’t expect the people of this state to do anything rational with the highway money.

Well, I hope when our shocked-shocked-shocked politicians droolingly jump to slash funding the “needless” war against terror in a frenzy of compassionate infrastructure reconstruction, that they figure in not the just the cost of fixing bridges and roads (which THEY long neglected), but the cost of rebuilding an entire city (or cities) out of nuclear rubble.

James Greenidge
Queens NY

Never having seen Jennifer Aniston or Friends I’m going to assume that you a point there.

But I don’t know what it is.

You can finger point all you want. It’s been two days… ONE when you decided to take me to task over it. They still don’t know what caused that bridge to fail. Only that it did.

Was it design? Was it maintenance or lack thereof? I heard one theory stating it was road salt usage.

But you, in your ultimate wisdom know EXACTLY what brought it down and are ready to point fingers and file lawsuits.

Go ahead… I don’t care.

Because one other thing I learned in Kindergarten was that some kids just don’t ‘get it’.

I was also surprised (NOT) to see the front page story on my local newspaper

State to look at Bridge Inspection Program

gee.. big surprise… oh by the way I was wrong yesterday we don’t have 5K bridges only 3k bridges in Maine. But the state acknowledges that at least 10% are are structurally deficient. Nice….

“We thought we had done all we could,” state bridge engineer Dan Dorgan told reporters not far from the mangled remains of the span. “Obviously something went terribly wrong.”

I found that link, finally, thanks to a friend. Not that it matters anymore, but at least I can make good on my promise.

[url]http://www.airamerica.com/node/4701?from=90&comments_per_page=90[/url]

Ah yes. Air America. Plenty of Bush hating to be found there. The specific comment I posted is a little bit about the half way point on the page.

We never know.

So now it it’s known the bridge “failed”.

Is it safe to discuss the possibilities or will that be misconstrued as “finger pointing”?