Below The Beltway

Prior to the writer’s strike, the cast of 24 was in Washington filming scenes for the opening episodes of Season 7, and Jack Bauer met up with the guys fighting waste in government:

Maybe we can send Jack to Congress to fight the earmarks.
H/T: Swineline — the blog of Citizens Against Government Waste

I missed this story last week, but the Congressional Quarterly reports that Congressional staffers have been spending time editing Wikipedia:
Political spats, petty vandalism, cleft chins and Rep. Rahm Emanuel’s (fictional) death by shark attack — Wikipedia users on House computers clearly have a lot of time on their hands.
A new online tool has made it [...]

No, really, the government apparently continued to send farm aid to farmers after they died:
The U.S. Department of Agriculture distributed $1.1 billion over seven years to the estates or companies of deceased farmers and routinely failed to conduct reviews required to ensure that the payments were properly made, according to a government report.
In a selection [...]

The D.C. Examiner takes a look at the Metrorail to Dulles project, which is being touted as one of the greatest transportation achievements in Northern Virginia in decades, and finds that there’s quite less than meets the eye:
WASHINGTON (Map, News) - How’s this for a deal? Riding the $5.14 billion Dulles Rail extension [...]

West Virginia’s own Robert Byrd steals the show at a committee hearing on contaminated pet food:
[B]est-in-show honors went to Byrd, who, in a statement notable for its breadth, explained why his eyes had been closed (”I have what is called dry eyes”) and why he has tremors in his hand (”I’m not scared or anything”), [...]

One of the silliest uses of taxpayer money in awhile comes to us from Great Britain:
Psychics were recruited by the Ministry of Defence to locate Osama Bin Laden’s secret lair, it was claimed yesterday.
Newly declassified documents revealed that the MoD conducted an experiment to see if volunteers could ’see’ objects hidden inside an envelope.
t [...]

A Washington Post editorial follows up on the series the paper has been running on the fam welfare system and asks a very simple question:
A QUESTION raised by The Post’s recent reports on farm subsidies is this: Why does the nation tolerate this waste? As reporters Gilbert M. Gaul, Dan Morgan and Sarah Cohen explain, [...]

Today’s Washington Post has another excellent article this morning exposing the ways in which the farm welfare system has been utilized in ways that have nothing to do with providing relief to distressed farmers.
When a drought left pastures in a handful of Plains states parched in 2003, ranchers turned to the federal government for help. [...]

The Washington Post has been giving alot coverage to the farm welfare fiasco over the past weeks. We’ve seen storties of people getting farm subsidies who don’t even own farms, other farmers gaming the farm relief system to make huge profits, ranchers who get disaster subsidies even though they’ve never subsidized a disaster, and farm [...]

The Washington Post has a companion piece to today’s story about the Livestock Compensation Program, that tells a very interesting political story.
If not for a tight Senate race in South Dakota in 2002, there might have been no Livestock Compensation Program.
In August 2002, 12 weeks before the election, aides to the Republican candidate, then-Rep. John [...]