From last night’s Special Report with Brit Hume:

—On the Highway Bill—

FRED BARNES: [O]nly 60 percent of the money that goes into the Highway Trust Fund goes to highways and bridges. It also goes to light rail and recreational trails, and covered bridges, and all kinds of other stuff. And $24 billion of it goes to earmarks.
Oberstar, the guy we just saw saying god help you if you’re not for this tax hike. It has 61 earmarks in the Highway Bill, millions and millions of dollars. That is the first thing you have to do is use that money.
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Fred is right: it’s not that the money is not there. A quarter of a trillion is spent in this ‘05 bill for transportation. About 10 percent is spent on pet projects, not a penny on this bridge.
In Minnesota itself, there was a $2 billion surplus in the budget. Not a penny was spent on the bridge. . . . [E]verybody wants his name on a new bridge and not on the new rivets on an old bridge.
The way to fix this is what Utah has. Utah has a law that says that you cannot spend money on a new project until you have appropriated all the money required for the maintenance of old projects.

—On Putin—

KRAUTHAMMER: Well, this is Putin flexing muscles. He has made deals with Iran and Syria. He has threatened the Ukrainians and the Czechs. He has had military exercises with China just last week.
Look, he is not a Communist, he is a believer in power. He is old secret service–KGB–and they were too sophisticated and too worldly to actually believe in ideology. But he believed in power. He has accumulated it for himself by dismantling democracy in Russia. And he wants it for his country. . . .
They’re selling arms to Syria and Iran, a lot of bad guys. The exercises with the Chinese—it’s beyond symbolism. And they are putting pressure on the eastern Europeans.
What Putin wants is to reconstitute the old Soviet Empire in a non-Communist Russia. And that is dangerous.