The Hightower Report

The Presidential Library Scam

Acting like a 4-year-old, George W. has squeezed his eyes tight and put his fingers in his ears, claiming that he has no idea who is chipping in the big bucks for his half-billion-dollar presidential library to be erected in Dallas. He says he doesn't want his staff to tell him the names of these special-interest donors while he's still in office, as if his temporary ignorance can cleanse the stench of such secret fundraising by a sitting president.

But – whoops – one of the solicitors for Bush's ego temple inadvertently outed himself. Stephen Payne, a Houston businessman and sometime political arranger for Bush, got caught on video in July offering White House favors to foreign interests in exchange for a suggested donation of $200,000 to the library fund.

It is, of course, silly to think that George and his Oval Office handlers don't know who is funding his legacy library, but it is outrageous that they want to hide this knowledge from you and me. After all, we pay millions of tax dollars each year to maintain these things. Yet, last year, at the behest of the White House, Sen. Ted Stevens killed a bill to require disclosure of such donors.

Not that this is a partisan cover-up. Bill Clinton raised $165 million for his presidential palace, and he continues to keep his donor list tucked away in his vest pocket, safe from public scrutiny.

Let me ask a childlike question: What are they hiding? If no favors are being exchanged for these high-dollar donations, why not disclose them? Indeed, if the contributors are simply altruistic individuals with no self-agenda, wouldn't they want their names emblazoned on the walls of a presidential library?

By the way, there's no requirement that every ex-president has to have one of these monuments – and very few deserve them.

Structurally Deficient Bridges and Politicians

As we Texans have learned from experience, it doesn't take an IQ much higher than room temperature to be governor of the Lone Star State. But surely someone was fooling with the incumbent's thermostat when he responded to a recent report about the state of our state's bridges.

Last year, 20 heavily traveled spans in Texas were found to be "structurally deficient." Yet, a year later, only one has been fixed, and no work at all has been done on 17 of them. Hey, not to worry, declared Gov. Rick Perry, because "structurally deficient" is nothing but "a bureaucratic term."

Maybe he could try explaining this semantic insight to the families of the 13 people killed last year when the I-35 bridge in Minneapolis collapsed. It, too, was categorized as structurally deficient, a term used by highway engineers to designate bridges that are so deteriorated they must be closely monitored or repaired.

How's that monitoring going, you ask? After the Minneapolis crash, federal officials mandated an emergency inspection of all similar steel-deck truss bridges in America. The National Bridge Inventory, compiled from state records, listed 756 of these — but it turns out that 280 of them were not steel-deck trusses. Indeed, 16 of the listed bridges didn't exist, 13 were wooden, one was for pedestrians, and one Maryland bridge actually was in Pennsylvania.

"The data is not as good as we thought," explained a top federal highway official. Apparently not, which leads to the more urgent question of how many bridges are misclassified as another type when they're actually steel-deck trusses? The feds don't know.

A few things we do know are that our bridges are old and deteriorating, and politicians of both parties have cravenly refused to fund essential maintenance, leaving us $140 billion short of the money needed just to repair our nation's bridges.