Mcnorman's Weblog

WARNING:  Move all liquids and sharp objects away from the computer.

Go on, give it a looksie. Silly us and our bills, we actually worry about whether there is enough in the bank and if the check is going to make it on time.

Grand Totals:

• $1,013,162,955
  the report’s tally of congressional spending between June 2009 and March 2010

• $674
  million
  What the House spent in the last six months of 2009
• $339
  million
  What the House spent in the first three months of 2010

• » Biggest expense: Benefits for retired federal employees took the largest slice of the pie, with the Federal Employees Retirement System showing some $80 million in expenditures.

• $114,925
  Amount the Democratic Caucus paid for its staff to have a getaway for the weekend to set the caucus’ 2009 legislative agenda at the Kingsmill Resort in Williamsburg, Va.
  $362,939
  Amount that former House Speaker Dennis Hastert received to run an office for outstanding affairs from his tenure. Hastert hasn’t been the speaker since early 2007 (or even been in Congress since late 2007)

Line items that left a dent

• $114,925
  Amount the Democratic Caucus paid for its staff to have a getaway for the weekend to set the caucus’ 2009 legislative agenda at the Kingsmill Resort in Williamsburg, Va.
  
• $362,939
  Amount that former House Speaker Dennis Hastert received to run an office for outstanding affairs from his tenure. Hastert hasn’t been the speaker since early 2007 (or even been in Congress since late 2007)

Who got paid how much

• $552 million in payments for all workers on the payroll

• $51.6
  million
  Paid to about 637 chiefs of staff or deputy chiefs of staff
• $4.4
  million
  Paid to about 1,045 interns and pages

Covering the benefits

• $34.9M
  Spent on health insurance
• $854K
  Spent on life insurance
• $12.6M
  Spent on student loan repayments

• IT’S GOOD TO BE IN THE BUSINESS OF SELLING PAPER CLIPS TO CONGRESS. Whether it’s computers, office supplies or carpet, lots of companies are ready to leap in with both feet to satisfy government contracts.

You need a computer to write all those bills on…

• $18
  million
  Spent on computer hardware
• $5.3
  million
  Spent on computer software (the equivalent of 26,600 Windows 7 upgrades)

• $6.5M
  Paid to CDW — an IT company that is one of the largest businesses the House deals with
• $6M
  Paid to Cisco — a networking and server hardware company
• $2.5M
  Paid to Dell — which means there are a lot of black boxes floating around

• » … And we’re a PC: A paltry $22,507 went directly to Apple. We’re guessing that’s probably enough to buy one of every item in its product line (but not enough for any apps).

…and lots (and lots) of ink to print them all out

• $7.5 million spent on office supplies (like toner cartridges and pencils)

• » Holding their own: Despite all the biggies in this category — CDW, Staples, Office Depot, Boise Cascade (better known as OfficeMax) — the No. 3 recipient of congressional cash might be the most interesting: Alliance Micro, a local firm that describes itself as “a service-disabled-veteran-owned small business” and caters to printer needs, which received $502,233.

The cost of a well-kept House

• $565,373
  Spent on carpet during the nine-month period
• $317,304
  Spent on new drapes during the same stretch

• » Finishing touches: The office decorating didn’t end there — another $2.5 million was spent on furniture.

• All those warm bodies need nourishment to get through their meetings. And between catered spreads, individual meals and thirst-quenchers, there’s a lot being spent to meet that need.

Keeping staffers fed

• $2.6 million spent on food and beverages for House reps and their staffers

• $604K
  Spent on bottled water — in 19,000 individual line items, many for Nestle’s Deer Park water-delivery subsidiary
• $169K
  Spent on CapitolHost — the biggest congressional caterer, it describes itself as “your co-host for events from casual to elegant on Capitol Hill”
• $3,061
  Spent on Chantilly Donuts — Minority Whip James Clyburn’s office bought $900 worth of doughnuts, and the Republican Conference ate the rest

Drinking it all in

• $84,794
  Spent on companies that specialize in coffee
• $9,450
  Spent on Coca-Cola products, the equivalent of 7,000 20-ounce bottles

• » Coke or Pepsi? It doesn’t matter which party is buying it — House Democrats and Republicans can agree on soft-drink brands, with Coke getting a line item while Pepsi does not. Democrats may drink it a little less, however: The Office of the Majority Whip spent around $4,543, while the Office of the Minority Leader spent $4,651. California Rep. Wally Herger, a Republican, also spent $256 on Coke for his own office.

For more on what Congress spent to keep itself well fed and hydrated, click here.

• Communicating is a huge part of Congress’ job. Be it through e-mail, Web, phone, mail or simply shuffling papers, it may be the most important thing our representatives do. And they do a lot of it — aided in part by a perk most Americans don’t get. (Hint: It’s “franked mail,” which doesn’t require members of Congress to pay postage, at a cost to taxpayers of $22.6 million during the nine-month period.)

Dialing up the dollars

• $11.3M
  Spent on telecom service from Verizon — mostly its wireless service but also including subsidiaries like MCI and long-defunct WorldCom.
• $4.4M
  Spent on telecom service from AT&T, which doesn’t separate its iPhone-centric wireless service from its legacy landline service in the data
• $454K
  Spent on other notable phone companies — Qwest, CenturyLink, Sprint, Nextel, Cincinnati Bell, nTelos, T-Mobile, Alltel and U.S. Cellular

• » Congress loves Verizon: Verizon Wireless, which is known for servicing BlackBerrys popular with Congress, has the largest expense in the broad-ranging telecom listing, which also covers cable service, Internet service and numerous other loosely related things. Congress spent $7,693,508 on Verizon Wireless alone.

Staying abreast of the news

• $11 million spent on newspapers and other resources

• 431
  Number of line items for The Washington Post (wonder why)
• 287
  Number of line items for The New York Times
• 147
  Number of line items for Wall Street Journal owner Dow Jones

• » Premium payments for specialized info: Congressional Quarterly, which publishes dozens of very specific publications just for Congress, earned $3.3 million from the House during the nine-month period. LexisNexis, which specializes in archival articles, netted around $735,000.

Logging on, racking up

• $5.8 million spent on Web design, e-mail and hosting services

Shredding for confidentiality

• $9,809
  Spent on shredding services during the study period
• 7.4M
  Estimated number of sheets of paper shredded (based on the going rates of Shred-it*)

• * The company, which is the leading shredder for congressional offices, charges $150 for every half-hour of on-site service, or $5 per box if you drop the paper off.

For more on what the House shells out to get its news fix, click here.

• Those flights back home mean the plane tickets really pile up. Especially if you’re the delegate from Guam or Alaska’s only congressman — but they’re hardly the only well-traveled lawmakers. Note: We’ve focused here on expenditures labeled travel reimbursements and commercial transportation, and have not included mileage, which is recorded separately.

• $12.5M
  Spent on travel for representatives and staff
• 21,760
  Number of separate travel charges on the taxpayers’ dime
• 45
  Average number of trip expenditures for each representative

• » Frequent fliers: The top two travelers in the House? Democrats Chellie Pingree of Maine, who has 197 travel expenditures, and Ike Skelton of Missouri, who had 163 expenditures. Neither was close to being the top spender, however. One high-spending traveler was Republican Jerry Moran of Kansas, who had 145 expenditures and an $82,000 taxpayer bill.
• » Traveling cheap: Around 158 representatives spent less than $20,000, but only 37 spent more than $50,000. And distance plays a a factor with travel, too: House Minority Whip Eric Cantor, R-Va., for example, spent a grand total of $297. D.C. delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton doesn’t have much of a need for travel, either; she spent just $57.
• » Costliest route: Madeleine Bordallo, the delegate from Guam, put in for $127,368 on 33 separate travel reimbursements or charges. (She didn’t take all the trips herself, as some were listed under staffers’ names.) Her average reimbursement was $3,859; one reimbursement, possibly for multiple flights, cost $22,000. The flight to Guam we found on Expedia would take 27 hours and have two stops.
• » Flying to Alaska: Also not inexpensive, or fun: Alaska Rep. Don Young rang up $125,510 in travel charges in 113 separate travel expenditures during the period. The average reimbursement for his trips was $1,110.

Note: We’ve focused here on expenditures labeled travel reimbursements and commercial transportation, and have not included mileage, which is recorded separately.

To view and share this info as a standalone file, click here.

via The Other Congressional Spending: How the House Spent $1 Billion on Itself.

A spouse that is honest about the other half?  After 40 years of being married, it’s time to speak honestly.

In a new book, the wife of Japan’s Prime Minister Naoto Kan questions whether he is fit for the nation’s top job and suggests his tenure might be short-lived.

In “You are Prime Minister, So What Will Change in Japan?” which was released this week, first lady Nobuko Kan lists a host of her husband’s shortcomings, from his failure to do any housework to his hot temper.

But it also depicts the premier, who took the job in June, as a caring father of two sons. And when he speaks spontaneously, he can be inspiring, she says. But not when he reads his speeches.

Kan, 63, has often called his wife “the opposition at home.” Asked by reporters about the book, Kan said he was too scared to read it.

via Japan PM’s wife criticizes him in new book – Yahoo! News.

Non-Compliance Topples Arizona Traffic-Cam Program.

In January of this year Arizona began considering the shut-down a state-wide traffic cam program. This is because there was wide-spread non-compliance. Many, many citizens of Arizona simply refused to pay their tickets.

Beautiful!

And now the verdict is in. They shut it down. The citizens won ‘” not by fighting the state, but by ignoring the state.

The State, as an institution, thrives on confrontation. The best antidote is peaceful non-compliance. Simply ignore the State, disengage, and the State is rendered impotent.

Through the highway camera system, it was hoped that an additional burst of revenue would roll in. Instead, it became a massive drain on the state’s budget. Not only did it not bring in the hoped-for revenue, it didn’t even make enough money to pay for expense of installing and maintaining the cameras.

The citizens simply ignored the tickets that arrived in the mail. The state of Arizona doesn’t have the money nor the resources to follow up on the unpaid tickets. To top that all off, a group of activists went around vandalizing the traffic cams ‘” icing on the cake.

Kudos to you Arizona.  Enough is enough!

Picking the poison du jour at the White House…Analysis: Race issues beset Obama’s post-racial presidency. Post racial my arse…POTUS’s administration is all about smoke and mirrors.   Sherrodgate was the best that this administration could do.  Liberal journalists had hatched an idea to shut down Fox News which apparently causes POTUS great angst.

The very existence of Fox News, meanwhile, sends Journolisters into paroxysms of rage. When Howell Raines charged that the network had a conservative bias, the members of Journolist discussed whether the federal government should shut the channel down.

“I am genuinely scared” of Fox, wrote Guardian columnist Daniel Davies, because it “shows you that a genuinely shameless and unethical media organisation *cannot* be controlled by any form of peer pressure or self-regulation, and nor can it be successfully cold-shouldered or ostracised. In order to have even a semblance of control, you need a tough legal framework.” Davies, a Brit, frequently argued the United States needed stricter libel laws.

“I agree,” said Michael Scherer of Time Magazine. Roger “Ailes understands that his job is to build a tribal identity, not a news organization. You can’t hurt Fox by saying it gets it wrong, if Ailes just uses the criticism to deepen the tribal identity.”

Jonathan Zasloff, a law professor at UCLA, suggested that the federal government simply yank Fox off the air. “Do you really want the political parties/white house picking which media operations are news operations and which are a less respectable hybrid of news and political advocacy?”

But Zasloff stuck to his position. “I think that they are doing that anyway; they leak to whom they want to for political purposes,” he wrote. “If this means that some White House reporters don’t get a press pass for the press secretary’s daily briefing and that this means that they actually have to, you know, do some reporting and analysis instead of repeating press releases, then I’ll take that risk.”

Scherer seemed alarmed. “So we would have press briefings in which only media organizations that are deemed by the briefer to be acceptable are invited to attend?”

JD commented that this was the story of the day, yet Sherrodgate was the distraction that needed to happen in order to distract the American public from noticing the this story.

What better use of the race card can there be?   Let’s face it, today it will be another sordid Al Gore tale of another masseuse investigation.  Erstwhile Bobby Jindal and the state of Louisiana have been screaming and no one is listening.  Afghanistan is a double edged sword.

Pressure?  Which way does the wind blow today?

The Obama administration’s move to reconsider her employment was an absolute reversal from hours earlier, when a White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said President Barack Obama had been briefed on Sherrod’s resignation after the fact and stood by the Agriculture Department’s handling of it.

But growing calls for the administration to reconsider the decision put pressure on Vilsack, who stressed that the decision to ask for her resignation was his alone.

via USDA reconsiders employee ouster over race remarks.  The entire content of Sherrod’s speech.

I think the White House is getting itchy over the lawsuit.  The difficult question which has not been asked is, did Shirley Sherrod resign so quickly because the circumstances of her hiring and the lawsuit settlement with her organization that preceded it might expose some unpleasant truths about her possible and possibly sanctioned conflicts of interest?

Toxic.

Former Houston Mayor Bill White told The Associated Press that he couldn’t block Obama from supporting his campaign to become the first Democrat to win statewide office in Texas since 1994. But he also suggested that Obama’s visit opens the door for Republican Gov. Rick Perry to continue running against Washington insiders — an unwelcomed distraction in the Democrats’ best chance to win the governorship in years.

“I believe Rick Perry will try to run against President Obama because he knows that he can’t beat me,” White told the AP during an interview in San Antonio. “He will try to say — unfairly — that somehow voting for him will somehow change the administration in Washington.”

via Obama to campaign in Texas – Yahoo! News.