Sure, the lovely headline in today's NYT is "Democrats Divided Over Gas Tax Break."  And the politics are confusing: on one side we have Clinton, McCain and plenty of Republican state lawmakers.  On the other side, Obama, Republican Senator Cornyn from Texas, and even (it would seem) Bush.

But let's set aside the confusing political landscape of this, and examine the idea on its merits.  For those too lazy to make the jump, I'll summarize: cutting the gas tax is a very bad idea.

I must admit, I was irrationally hopeful when I saw the title on the NYT website: "Bridge Collapse Revives Issue of Road Spending.  The article purports to cover how "the collapse is changing a lot of minds about spending priorities."  I thought, what an excellent opportunity to revisit how our governments fund one mode of transportation above all others.  Only, the views that are presented sound like pretty much the same things people said before the bridge collapse.

Most importantly (to me), there's this statement:

Further, transportation and engineering experts said, lawmakers have financed a boom in rail construction that, while politically popular, has resulted in expensive transit systems that are not used by a vast majority of American commuters.

Oh, I see.  Apparently lots of experts think that we've diverted huge sums to build incredibly expensive transit systems...but which experts are these?  We'll find out on the flip side...

As I mentioned previously, President Bush and his allies have spent quite a bit of time talking up the Social Security "crisis," characterizing the US Treasury Notes its trust fund holds as, for example, "Worthless IOUs." As Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo points out, however, President Bush's most recent federal financial disclosure form, from May 2004, makes it clear that a large chunk of the President's assets are, or at least were as of not long ago, tied up in these worthless scraps of paper. The actual magnitude of this is hidden, however, by the disclosure form's mere ranges of value for each asset, but I took the time to add up the numbers.

It turns out, as you could in fact see for yourself (feel free to compare the disclosure form with my own rough Excel file), that these "worthless IOUs" make up at least 33%, and as much as 75%, of the president's total assets. Again, Josh's question: is Bush broke?

Economics is being talked about quite a bit these days, what with the Social Security "crisis" that Paul Krugman and John DeLong are spending way, way too much time debunking. But there's plenty more beyond that that many people perhaps, well, just don't get.

And so, below the cut, there's more economics in the news, from the tsunami to North Carolina's sweet deal for Dell. You won't find too much insight into these economic issues in the papers...

Now, quite a bit of work is being done around these parts regarding Ohio numbers, and I'm thankful for that.  But, hey, let's take a look at Florida numbers, just for fun.

The Florida Department of State has posted its first set of unofficial returns from every county.  Every one has included counts of absentee ballots, and every one is marked as a final report, according to the data on the site.  Now, I'm not sure about that, but let's accept it for now.

Turnout is reported for every county except Hernando (which inexplicably reports 0 turnout).  Now, let's assume that every registered voter in Hernando county (all 109,656 of them) voted.  That gives us total voter turnout of 7,460,556.  Let's compare that with the reported total numbers of votes for Senate, President, and Amendment 5, the amendment receiving the most total votes of the 8 offered (number of votes in excess of maximum turnout in parentheses):

for Senate: 7,409,542 (-51,014)
for Amendment 5: 7,277,832 (-182,724)
for President: 7,586,995 (126,439)

Something is wrong here.  A bit more below the fold...

According to E&P, newspapers endorsing Bush currently represent circulation of 8.6 million [days-old figures, I know, but bear with me...]. Given that these aren't all exactly the most enthusiastic statements, I offer one cobbled together from excerpts from Bush endorsements, all from newspapers listed in compilations by either Editor & Publisher or dKosopedia.   I have made efforts not to take any of these excerpts grossly out of context, though I obviously didn't provide proper citations.  But still, I offer this ringing endorsement of President George W. Bush. The rest is below the fold...