Rep. Mark Kirk also joined WLS's Don Wade & Roma this morning, and was quick to praise Sarah Palin for her work fighting against the infamous "Bridge to Nowhere" earmark, which Kirk defeated via a 2006 amendment.  Listen here:

Internal mp3

KIRK: I didn’t know much about her until I was about eight months into my fight to kill funding for the Bridge to Nowhere.

DON WADE: Oh yeah!

KIRK: We got the House of Representatives to back the Kirk Amendment to zero-out that bridge and then we were getting ready for the big battle in the Senate against Ted Stevens of Alaska, who had really championed this project. And suddenly, the new governor of Alaska stepped in and de-funded her own project, and so finished the battle for us.

Maybe Kirk just reads the news a few days after everyone else.  Several major media outlets (including the New York Times, Washington Post, and Boston Herald among many others) have already reported that Palin was not on the right side of this fight from the beginning and only switched her position when political support for the bridge had all but evaporated.

Here's Reuters' account:

When she was running for governor in 2006, Palin said she was insulted by the term "bridge to nowhere," according to Ketchikan Mayor Bob Weinstein, a Democrat, and Mike Elerding, a Republican who was Palin's campaign coordinator in the southeast Alaska city.

"People are learning that she pandered to us by saying, I'm for this' ... and then when she found it was politically advantageous for her nationally, abruptly she starts using the very term that she said was insulting," Weinstein said.

More from the Post:

Keith Ashdown, a spokesman for Taxpayers for Common Sense, the government watchdog that first drew attention to the project, believes Palin has "hyper-inflated her role" in killing the project.

"She put the final stake in the project," Ashdown said. "But there was already tremendous momentum for the project to be scrapped. She gets credit for saying that they were not to go forward with the bridge, but it was at death's door."

When Palin says "I told Congress, 'Thanks, but no thanks,' on that bridge to nowhere," it implies Congress said, "Here's a check for that bridge" and she responded, "No thanks, that's wasteful spending; here's your money back."

That's not what happened. Fact is, Alaska took the bridge money, and then just spent it on other projects. Palin did make the final call to kill plans for the bridge, but by the time she did it was no longer a politically viable project.

Pick up a newspaper before you go on the radio, Mark!