About a ten months or so ago, give or take a few weeks, I wrote a brief to-do list to remind me of what needed to be done in re the sorting out of the 35W Bridge collapse.

Among the reminders:

Item #3: Await apology from Nick Coleman: After all, before they’d even found all the submerged cars, the Non-Monkey had blamed Pawlenty, the GOP and the Taxpayers’ League, and the “failure” to raise the Gas Tax, for the disaster, all but accusing them of complicity in murder.

Item #4: Await same from Alice Hausman: The famous truck was still engulfed in flames when Alice “The Phantom” Hausman, Tic from Saint Paul, Chairbeing of the House Transportation Appropriations Subcommittee, and subject of an unseemly Lori Sturdevant girl crush, went on WCCO Radio and blamed the disaster on taxes.

Item #5: Await More Of Same From Elwyn Tinklenberg: Elwin “E-Tink” Tinklenburg, Transportation Commissioner for DFL-Lite “Independence” Party governor Jesse “The Stealth Tic” Ventura, and perennial Tic candidate for higher office (he’s been pondering running against Michele Bachmann since before Rep. Bachmann was actually elected) did pretty much the same.

The NTSB has released their draft report on the causes of the 35W Bridge Collapse. The forty-year-old freeway bridge – which collapsed on August 1 of last year, killing 13 – collapsed because:

Original designers of the Interstate 35W bridge in Minneapolis likely neglected to calculate the size of key gusset plates that eventually failed, a human mistake that culminated 40 years later when 13 people died after the span collapsed, federal safety investigators have found.

They also have determined that corrosion of certain gusset plates, extreme heat and shifting piers did not contribute to the bridge’s collapse on Aug. 1, 2007, according to sources with direct knowledge of the probe. In three weeks, investigators will present their findings to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which will publicly review the draft report in a hearing Nov. 13 at the board’s Washington headquarters. After that, the board will use the draft as the basis for its final report on the probable cause of the collapse and recommendations for preventing future disasters.

In other words, the mistake was made on the drawing board, during the Johnson Administration.

So let’s revisit this:

How about you, Elwin “E-Tink” Tinklenburg? Before the last bubble leaked to the surface of the Mississippi River that tragic evening, you were on WCCO blaming Tim Pawlenty for the collapse – albeit silent as a ghost about your own record as Minnesota’s Transportation Commissioner under Jesse “The Punchline” Ventura, where you found the money to build an absurd trolley but precious little for actually maintaining things.

Explanation, E-Tink?

How about you, DFLers; Margaret Kelliher certainly had you all chanting in unison about this time a year ago. Any second thoughts about not only politicizing a lethal tragedy, but being wrong about it?

Eight District Representative Jim Oberstar, who – when the first intimations came out that this was likely an engineering disaster rather than a political one – turned his boundless pettifogging clout to trying to intimidate the NTSB into finding at least some partisan political points for him? Any response?

Alice Hausman – DFL Transportation Committee chairwoman who was on the air with T-Tink before the sun set that night, and who spent the coming weeks figuratively carrying tar and feathers for Tim Pawlenty, Marty Seifert and David Strom? Any second thoughts?

And above all, Nick Coleman. Nick, who went on the air live from the banks of the Mississippi three days after the disaster to blame tax cuts for the tragedy;

Nick, who tittered like a schoolgirl when the first, preliminary word came out that it was a gusset problem.

E-Tink, Alice and Nick; science has crushed your febrile attempts to politicize this tragedy. And before the memory hole claims your loathsome little outburst, I thought I’d take a shot at asking.