By L.P. LUPO

WASHINGTON, D.C. — If you love the Adopt-a-Highway program, you’ll love the Adopt-a-Border and Adopt-a-Bridge offshoot.

Oops, we already have Adopt-a-Border program, featuring the now squabbling Minutemen.

The little Adopt-a-Highway signs serve as billboards that indicate “big government does not work.”

The next mile, brought to you by “Joe’s Diner,” is a subtle reminder that governments at all levels have abdicated the most basic of governmental functions, which is maintaining the public highways and byways.

The collapse of the Minneapolis bridge screams the same message. It takes the organizational skills of Joe, his diner’s employees and their families to keep the roadways tidy.

This is not surprising, for governments have a lot more important things to do than maintain public roads, bridges and borders. They have our lives to run and more private-sector functions to usurp.

The work of local governments, whose ninnies desperately want to run with the big boys and girls of Congress, is to ban smoking everywhere, trans fats in restaurants and infant formula. They also endeavor to establish nuclear-free zones, provide sex-ed for tots, prosecute 13 year olds for sexual harassment and require the recycling of unused food or throwing out food that is more than two weeks old

This is the fun stuff, the ideological stuff, the how-to-run-our-lives stuff.

Let the private sector run the janitorial part of government on its nickel, while government dictates the important stuff that people used to be able to decide for themselves.

This intrusive attack on the individual is not limited to local politicians. Congress does the same thing but with greater corruption.

Under the cover of darkness, members of Congress earmark the heck out of useless stuff, such as the Bridge to Nowhere, in order to provide a return on their reelection investment, a.k.a. campaign contributions.

We don’t need earmarks at all, but if they have to exist at all, why can’t they go for constructive governmental things like keeping an eye on 16^th-century bridges?

In case you missed it, members of Congress, in their ethics “reform legislation” last week, said they do need earmarks and need only disclose them 48 hours in advance, if feasible.

So while the political class uses your money to stay in power, you can go out and pick the litter off the highways.

You also can go out and inspect the quality of our bridges in your spare time, if you are not already busy guarding our border.

Our lawmakers are too busy with the big picture to concern themselves with defending our border and maintaining the integrity of our bridges.