Word: alaska
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...could say it was about two years late. Designed to keep an eye out for rogue missiles flying toward the United States, the SBX had been scheduled to report for duty in Alaska in early 2006, but a series of structural repairs and upgrades have kept it in warmer waters. For over a year, the nine-story radar that sits atop a self-propelled Norwegian oil platform has been coming and going from Pearl Harbor for fixes and tests - a delay critics see as symptomatic of an agency under pressure to deliver a national missile defense system that is still...
...nation's first functional national missile defense system. Since President Ronald Reagan initiated his Star Wars program, about $100 billion has been spent on U.S. missile defense. We don't have an invisible shield protecting us, but we do have two ground-based interceptor batteries in California and Alaska aimed roughly in the direction of North Korea, and plans to build more in central Europe aimed at Iran...
...tons hoisted onto a ship, and sailed 15,000 miles around the tip of South America (it was too big to use the Panama Canal), arriving in Pearl Harbor in January 2006. Its ultimate destination is the more challenging waters of Adak, a farflung outpost in Alaska's Aleutian island chain, famous for terrible weather and 100-foot waves. The MDA claims the SBX is powerful enough to spot a flying baseball in San Francisco from New York, and more importantly, to tell the difference between a real missile heading for America and a decoy...
...water projects, which I wrote about last week. There's no starker example than Young's $375 billion bonanza, which he bragged he had stuffed "like a turkey." The bill included more than 6,300 earmarks inserted by individual congressmen, including not one but two bridges to nowhere in Alaska - the notorious $223 million crossing to the island of Gravina, population 50, and a $229 million boondoggle near Anchorage known as Don Young's Way. The entire bill was known as "TEA-LU," an acronym for the awkwardly named Transportation Equity Act - a Legacy for Users, which only makes sense...
...than 10% of the bill's cost; Congress sent most of the cash directly to state departments of transportation with virtually no strings attached. The earmarks for the bridges to nowhere were removed after a national outcry; instead, Congress sent the money for the bridges to the state of Alaska, which plans to build them without a specific directive. So the problem isn't earmarks. The problem is that the interstate highway system is complete, and we haven't come up with a new vision for distributing America's gas-tax dollars. "We've lost our way," says Emil Frankel...