RALEIGH – Here’s how Triangle Business Journal described the aftermath of Sens. Elizabeth Dole and Richard Burr essentially announcing the end of serious efforts to secure large-scale federal funding for the Triangle Transit Authority’s choo-choo trains:

Despite the news, which took TTA by surprise, officials say the project is not dead. General Counsel Wib Gulley, in a phone interview, says that the FTA has requested more data from TTA, and once that information is submitted, the project can be re-rated.

Gulley remains hopeful that the problems alluded to in the letter are resolvable, and disagrees with the notion that Dole and Burr have withdrawn their support for the project.

“They’re offering us some advice on how things look right now and what they think,” Gulley says of the letter.

TTA will still receive $20 million that was recently appropriated to it by Congress, Gulley says. If the authority can’t win a long-term commitment for federal funding, it could try to build the project by getting appropriations from Congress each year, or by funding the project with just local and state funds.

In related developments:

• Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, speaking at a late-night press conference in Boston, challenged the widespread assumption that he had conceded the 2004 presidential election to George W. Bush. “There are still ballots to be counted in Ohio,” Kerry said, “and we’ll keep counting and recounting until the real results are more widely known.” Former Vice President Al Gore, sporting a long beard and a sepia-colored denim shirt, held a subsequent press conference from West Palm Beach, Florida, where he insisted that Kerry’s allegations were false and irresponsible. “There are no legal votes for Mr. Kerry, because he was never a legitimate candidate for president,” said Gore. “I was elected president in 2000, as will become obvious once we finish counting the dimpled ballots here in South Florida and collecting new votes from butterfly-ballot victims.”

• Alf Landing, a nationwide organization advocating the renewal of the television series “Alf,” held a protest today in front of the headquarters of General Electric, parent company of the NBC television network. “Some say that the greatest comedy in history was cancelled in 1990, but that is just a myth,” said one unidentified man, apparently, through a thick alien mask. “We believe that the final decision has not yet been made, and that a new season will begin production early next year. We further predict that it will attract 10 million – no, make that 10 billion viewers each week. Really. Our computer models say so.”

• The office of Richard Starkey, a.k.a. Ringo Starr, issued a statement today denying rumors on various online music sites that the original four members of the Beatles would finally be reforming for a tour of Europe and North America.

• Umfa-umfa, the taciturn Neanderthal man famous for his use of sleds to drag heavy objects and tribal members around, repeated his dismissal today of the value of a device invented by his cross-cave rival, Ugh-Ugh. Communicating through sign language, he indicated that the invention, called a “wheel,” posed a major hazard to public safety and the natural environment, while also allowing some people to move down into the valley, thus disturbing the equality and social cohesion of the tribe. “Cave good, slow good, wheel bad,” he philosophized.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.