This has been circulating around the Hill today; some kind, cruel soul from there took the trouble to forward it to me.  Twenty-four hours and they still haven’t fixed recovery.gov: remember how we got told that the new administration was going to bring us into this new, wonderful Web 2.0 reality? These guys can’t even get a database up and running properly. Heck, they can’t even be bothered to check typical search results for garbage before they take said database live.

Moe Lane

PS: At them. We are all laughing at them. Not with.

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SEN. LEGHORN ANNOUNCES $14.7 MILLION FOR TEXAS; ‘YEE, HAW!’ HE ADDS

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE*

WASHINGTON – U.S. Sen. Foghorn J. Leghorn, D-State, announced Tuesday that he had won an extra $14.7 million in stimulating funds from the solicitous Obama Administration for the people of seven congressional districts in Texas.

“This funding will go for good,” the Senator said.  “Why, son, 98 hardworking, taxpaying, aging, poor, honest, hungry, working-class, middle-class, undereducated, disadvantaged, undercounted, overlooked, underprivileged, overtaxed and uninsured constituents of my good friends and esteemed colleagues in the 52^nd, 58^th, 86^th, 00^th, 68^th, 91^st, and 85^th Congressional Districts of Texas deserve every penny,” he added.  “Yep, they can shore count on me.  Vote Leghorn!  Yee, haw!”

Following is an official, premeditated account* of the stimulating funds provided by the Obama Administration through Sen. Leghorn’s good offices:

Texas Congressional District    Jobs      Amount

52nd congressional district     0       $8,937,289
58th congressional district     45      $3,659,694
86th congressional district     6       $943,326
00 congressional district       11      $752,292
68th congressional district     1       $310,963
91st congressional district     30      $57,367
85th congressional district     5       $56,661

Stimulus Total: $14,717,592

Jobs Total: 98

*Please don’t call Sen. Leghorn’s office about this.  He’s busy working on health care today.  For further information on this gracious investment of job-creating government money, please “track the money” through the President’s Recovery website, http://www.recovery.gov/Pages/TextView.aspx?data=stateSummaryAllCD&statecode=TX

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

There are not 75. Hey, everyone else is looking up their state, so I might as well do so, too.

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The Sunlight Foundation’s Luke Rosiak reported on Friday the Republican National Committee spent $1.4 million on the redesign of GOP.com, a figure which totals more than five times what the RNC’s Democratic counterpart spent to host and maintain Democrats.org. Sources familiar with the RNC’s digital makeover, however, contest Sunlight’s report, calling it “ridiculous.”

Rosiak writes:

The biggest disparity seems to be bandwidth costs–the RNC paid Smartech Corp., a Republican-focused hosting firm, more than a million dollars, plus $22,000 to Eloqua, compared to the DNC’s $203,000 to Sprint, Switch and Data and Servint Corp.–despite the fact that the two sites’ traffic, which determines bandwidth usage and, largely, hosting costs, was the same.

But the design of the site itself was costly, too. In the months prior to the October 13 launch of GOP.com, the committee paid $328,000 to 11 firms for Web development.

For an organization that prides itself on investigative research, the Sunlight Foundation is comically inept at reading campaign finance data. “They should learn to read an FEC report,” remarked my source.

The most outrageous of the RNC’s web-related expenditures, Sunlight’s exposé goes, is the $1 million-plus disbursement to Tennessee-based Smartech Corp. for hosting services. Smartech, considered by many a heavyweight in Republican web hosting, began consulting for the RNC in 2000.

“I can tell you from my tenure there that the Smartech bill includes a lot of things that aren’t GOP.com,” said former RNC eCampaign Director Michael Turk. “If you go back and look at that bill over time, I suspect it has always been high, regardless of who was Chair and regardless of whether they were rolling out a new GOP.com.”

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Reminiscent of the no-bid, cost-plus contracts awarded in the Bush administration to defense contractors, ABC News reported last night the Obama Administration awarded a five-year $18 million contract to Smartronix, a Maryland-based IT firm with connections to House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, for the redesign of Recovery.gov.

Launched in February to track the expenditures of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, Recovery.gov was to be the pinnacle of web-enabled transparency, according to President Barack Obama.

“The site is the tip of the iceberg for the effort that will go into taking spending tracking and accountability to the next level,” one administration official said of their intended level of transparency.

But now, it seems, the administration has failed to deliver on two pledges central to the Obama campaign’s rhetoric: fiscal responsibility and unrivaled transparency.

An acerbic Ed Morrissey asks, “Since when does it cost $18 million for a website, even one with a database requiring updates on a quarterly basis?”

Not often.

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