Sarah Palin said in her acceptance speech at the RNC that "If our state wanted to build a bridge, we were going to build it ourselves." She said pretty much the same to Chris Matthews, Charles Gibson and at every campaign stop.

But it turns out she isn't doing it by herself after all. The federal government is footing a chunk of the bill for the replacement program that would link Ketchikan to its airport.

Gov. Palin’s administration acknowledges that it is still pursuing a project that would link Ketchikan to its airport -- with the help of as much as $73 million in federal funds earmarked by Congress for the original project. 

"What the media isn't reporting is that the project isn't dead," Roger Wetherell, spokesman for Alaska’s Department of Transportation, said. In a process begun this past winter, the state’s DOT is currently considering (PDF) a number of alternative solutions (five other possible bridges or three different ferry routes) to link Ketchikan and Gravina Island.

The DOT has not yet developed cost estimates for those proposals, Wetherell said, but $73 million of the approximately $223 million Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) and Rep. Don Young (R-AK) earmarked for the bridge in 2005 has been set aside for the Gravina Access Project.

The full details are at ProPublica.

So - how many different ways has she been untruthful about the Nowhere Project now? I confess I've lost count.

  Paul Begala goes to town on GOP media consultant Alex Castellanos for peddling blatant falsehoods about Sarah Palin's "reformer" record, specifically her phantom opposition to the "Bridge to Nowhere," which she not only supported, but for which hired a Abramoff crony to secure the earmark.

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ALEX CASTELLANOS: The amazing thing about Sarah Palin is when she became governor she actually stood up and said no.

BEGALA: That's not true.

CASTELLANOS: She took a strong stand. That is rare and that never happened.

BEGALA: That's just not true. You know, John, the facts matter. There's lots of things that are debatable who is more qualified or less experienced or more this or more passionate, whatever. It is a fact that she campaigned and supported that bridge to nowhere. It is a fact that she hired lobbyists to get earmarks. It is a fact that as governor she lobbies for earmarks. Her state is essentially a welfare state taking money from the federal government... This is the problem. We have this false debate when we ought to have at least agreed upon facts.

Begala couldn't be more spot on here: Facts are facts. Opinions can be debated, but facts are concrete and can't simply be spun away. It seems to me that this is the crux of the McCain strategy: take an unknown hockey mom from Alaska, tell everyone she's a reformer, lie about her record in order to convince people of it, then keep her sequestered from the press when they start asking questions. Are the American people really dumb enough to fall for it?

Full transcript below the fold:

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