It's no surprise that the Oklahoman spends time in the past few days pointing out that Oklahoma's bridges are rated the worst in the nation, given what happened on the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis, and that I-35 also passes through Oklahoma City. "Hey, we know that road! That could have been us!" Combine that with the Webbers Falls bridge collapse five years ago, and as Charles Hill put it, there are "no giggles" at fear of bridges.

Yet it's also entirely unsurprising to see the Oklahoman's talk about remedies focused on praise for the state's senior senator, the dangerous moron idiot Jim Inhofe, who has not crossed 50% popularity in two years, is a national joke, has zero credibility on any of his pet issues, and will now face a popular Democratic state legislator in the race for his seat next year.

Here's what the Oklahoman had to offer about fixing Oklahoma's bridges:

U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Tulsa, who helped write the six-year highway bill that was approved by Congress in 2005, said the condition of this nation's bridges is "something that needs to be talked about.”

"The conditions of our bridges is very serious,” he said.

Inhofe helped secure more than $3 billion in authorized spending for Oklahoma's roads and bridges in the six-year bill. He got $110 million for the Crosstown Expressway project in Oklahoma City; other members of the Oklahoma delegation got another $20 million. Not all of that money has been appropriated yet.

Inhofe, the top Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee, which wrote the highway bill, said he doesn't think the panel should necessarily hold hearings on the collapse. He said it was his understanding that the bridge already was being worked on.

"This happened because it was structurally deficient,” he said. "And now we've just lost lives. I just don't want that to happen in Oklahoma.”

Fair enough, for what it's worth—but isn't something missing here? Something about bridge repair, and paying for it, and…

Oh, yeah!

Just a day after voters soundly defeated a fuel tax proposal to fix the state's crumbling roads and bridges, Republican lawmakers announced a plan they say would provide much-needed money without raising taxes.

House Speaker Todd Hiett said the failure of State Question 723, a proposal to increase diesel and gasoline taxes to 22 cents per gallon, "sent a very clear message."

"They do not want a tax increase to fix the roads and bridges, said Hiett, R-Kellyville.

The plan, announced by House and Senate Republicans at the state Capitol, would increase annual appropriations hikes for the state Transportation Department from a maximum $35 million to $50 million.

…It would also create a $100 million emergency bridge repair fund —though it hasn't been decided whether money will come from the Rainy Day fund or another source, said Rep. Mark Liotta, R-Tulsa, chairman of the House Appropriations and Budget Subcommittee on General Government and Transportation.

The $100 million would be enough to fix about 55 of the state's "worst of the worst" bridges.

How did today's report start?

Oklahoma continues to lead the nation in the number of structurally deficient bridges, but none on the state highway system are unsafe or in danger of imminent collapse, including Oklahoma City's aging Crosstown Expressway bridge, state highway officials said Thursday.

Nearly 6,300 bridges are structurally deficient in Oklahoma, which means the bridges aren't meant to carry today's loads, federal data show. Of those, 989 bridges are on Oklahoma's state highway system. Such bridges are under greater scrutiny after Wednesday's bridge collapse in Minneapolis.

But the GOP went absolutely batshit crazy in 2005 opposing SQ 723, insisting not only that we didn't need to raise any taxes to pay for bridge repair, but that their plan to repair 55 out of 6300 "structurally deficient" bridges in Oklahoma (not even repairing all 909 "structurally deficient" bridges on state highways) was certainly all we needed to do.

This is even more puzzling given that, as Charles Hill's archives remind us, the so-far-right-that-they-think-Strom-Thurmond-was-Fidel-Castro's-gay-lover Oklahoman editorial page endorsed State Question 723 at the time. Charles himself opposed it, apparently due to the DFH argument (his only policy complaint was that the tax increase was permanent; most of his postings against it were really against the people who favored it).

Even more puzzling is that the Oklahoman's endorsement of SQ 723 has been disappeared from the paper's archives, nor is it in the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. It's hard to figure out why a newspaper that supported paying for bridge repair wouldn't say so in wake of I-35W.

Unless you remember that pretty much the entire state GOP opposed SQ 723 as virtual communism, taking money from soccer moms and handing it to (shudder) union-based highway contractors and construction crews, and that practically every officeholder or candidate the Oklahoman supports has embarassing on-the-record quotes somewhere opposing such evil "tax hikes" because they were "unnecessary." Bringing up that the editorial stance was right might point out that the GOP was wrong. The paper cannot allow that—so even its own foresighted-but-lukewarm recommendation for SQ 723 has been erased from the Internet.

And despite the obvious local importance of the story, the paper hasn't managed an editorial on how to fix Oklahoma's bridges yet, either.

Isn't it amazing how that could happen?