OBAMA ABOUT TO BE BLAMED FOR BUSH-ERA REGULATION

Here's a story tailor-made for election season, in the New York Post:

$27 million to change NYC signs from all-caps

The Capital of the World is going lower-case.

Federal copy editors are demanding the city change its 250,900 street signs ... from the all-caps style used for more than a century to ones that capitalize only the first letters....

At $110 per sign, it will also cost the state $27.6 million, city officials said....

Outrageous! What will those bureaucratic Obama fascists demand that we pay for next? And in the midst of a recession, no less!

Oh, except, um, it wasn't their idea, and it doesn't need to be done in the depths of the economic downturn, though we don't learn that until the 11th paragraph of the story:

...in 2003, the administration allowed for a 15-year phase-in period ending in 2018.

The damn Post can't even bring itself to print the key word here: if this was in 2003, "the administration" was the Bush administration. The regulation was based on a determination that signs printed this way are easier to read and thus safer for drivers. Maybe that's crazily bureaucratic, and maybe it's irrelevant to New York City (where there are few streets where you can drive much faster than 30 miles an hour most of the time), but if it was bureaucracy gone wild, it was Bush's bureaucracy that did so, or at least that signed off on the regulation.

And fifteen years were allowed for the transition -- which, as the Daily News explains, means that there really isn't any extra sign replacement being mandated:

The life of a typical sign is about a decade, so most of the city's signs would be replaced in the next few years anyway, [NYC Department of Transportation spokesman Seth] Solomonow said.

But it's still all going to be blamed on Obama, right?