Read This Now - Chris Christie Can't Handle The Truth

In rather unsurprising news a(nother) Republican politician is having trouble with the veracity of his statements.  NJ Gov. Chris Christie was apparently less than truthful in his explanation for pulling the funding for that tunnel to NYC last year.  It seems the cost hadn't actually risen like he claimed, but that he wanted to siphon off the money to prop up the state transportation fund so he could avoid raising gas taxes.  The GAO did the investigating and the NYT drops the dime...

...found that while Mr. Christie said that state transportation officials had revised cost estimates for the tunnel to at least $11 billion and potentially more than $14 billion, the range of estimates had in fact remained unchanged in the two years before he announced in 2010 that he was shutting down the project. And state transportation officials, the report says, had said the cost would be no more than $10 billion.

Mr. Christie also misstated New Jersey’s share of the costs: he said the state would pay 70 percent of the 

project; the report found that New Jersey was paying 14.4 percent. And while the governor said that an agreement with the federal government would require the state to pay all cost overruns, the report found that there was no final agreement, and that the federal government had made several offers to share those costs. 

Nice to see an article that does less hemming and hawing around the fact that a politician was lying to the public than normal, it could probably stand to be even more declarative though. Check out the whole thing for some of the other details and the potential impacts of the report.

(via CP)