There's an item in today's Albany Times-Union that deserves to be read for its sheer entertainment value alone. It appears that a state highway fund, dedicated to infrastructure maintenance, has been tapped into for other purposes. The amount of said tapping is a cool $750 million over three years.

But behold, relief is at hand, in the person of state Senator Tom Libous, republican.

"We're raiding the fund and that's wrong," the Broome County Republican said in announcing a bill with bipartisan support to end the practice. "I've been saying that for three years ... but now it's a matter of public safety."

A spokesman for Gov. Eliot Spitzer said change is on the way.

With the disaster in Minneapolis and the appalling state of our own bridges - see Paul's invaluable article on the subject here - posturing of some kind is inevitable, certainly by a Senator who seems to have been targeted for extinction in the 2008 elections. But for a republican, presumably a supporter of the late Pataki administration and of Joe Bruno, that is, the very people responsible for the practice, to present himself as an agent of reform, is much like someone holding a canister of gas and a blowtorch standing outside a burning building and deploring the fire.

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