That must be some damn good flour.

Perhaps those who prepared the food, since it is for the bureaucrats, require security clearances.

...$32 per person on a meal of Cracker Jacks and candy bars at a conference of the Office on Violence Against Women!

Let me guess, Paydays and $100 Grand bars.

Those bribes, I mean campaign contributions, don't pay for themselves.
I give you a $5000 contribution to get elected and I get the candy deal, at taxpayer expense.

A duck goes to see his psychiatrist and says, "Doc, I don't know what's wrong with me. I'm always losing my temper, getting into arguments, and it's driving my friends away."

The psychiatrist replies, "It's quite obvious. You're mallard-justed."

Oh, the caterers gave them the "wedding upcharge."

Crackerjacks and candy bars?

Well that explains a lot. These dolts are jacked up on sugar all the time....

I guess we have to change the lyrics to "Buy me WITH peanuts and Crackerjack."

When you factor in labor costs for the DOJ attendees, it gets even worse. We'll give them all fat pensions and benefits in return for deciding to pay contractors $16 a muffin.

If I were king, the government would have as much prestige, power and money as it did in say, 1820 or so. Slashing 90% of it would be a good start.

"The psychiatrist replies, 'It's quite obvious. You're mallard-justed.'"

Guy walks into a psychiatrist's office. "You gotta help me," he says. "One night I dream I'm a tepee, and the next I dream I'm a yurt!"

"Well, there's your problem," says the doctor. "You're two tents!"

Aw, heck, you beat me to it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/21/us/justice-dept-draws-criticism-for-pricey-food.html?ref=us

But I wonder -- is this like the $600 toilet seat the DOD claimed to purchase? Those insane overcharges went into the black ops slush funds.

I wonder what we're up to this week.

Most times, that $500 toilet seat had to be custom-built.

I used to work with a woman who worked for the Dept. of Defense. She told the following story.

A request went out for a new patrol aircraft and someone thought it would be a good idea for it to have a coffee maker (long patrols means a need for caffeine). Being in a plane, it had to be built in and able to survive evasive maneuvers without spilling coffee on the crew or the floor.

The coffee maker would therefore be custom-built into the plane.

A missed decimal place typo in the requirements called for a coffee-maker capable of enduring ten times the g-forces the plane was capable of enduring.

No one corrected the error - too afraid of losing the contract. Instead, they built the coffee maker ... and charged for it.

I guess the upside is NTSB could have hot coffee while investigating the wreck.

=========================

When you're spending the magical neverending taxpayer dime, no one bothers to check the bottom line.

Just raise taxes. Tax the rich. Fair share. We can't run out of money, we're the government!

That may be true Conan, but as the $16 muffins indicate, more often than not, government waste just is. Look at all of the monstrous waste in Iraq and Afghanistan... we're feeding an insatiable monster.

There may be calls to tax the rich, and while it's true that they already pay most of the actual income tax collected in this country, FICA and other taxes tend to equalize things. We're all in this together, being royally fleeced without prejudice.

Things won't change unless we shrink government dramatically.

From the story about this that I saw on the news tonight, it's entirely possible that the prices quoted were normal for the convention halls they were held in.

On the other hand, there's no reason that the government needs to hold conferences in top-drawer hotels, either. It is OUR money they are spending, after all. It's one thing to entertain visiting dignitaries in high style, it's another thing altogether to have a glorified business meeting that way.

Gog_Magog_Carpet_Reclaimers wrote: "But I wonder -- is this like the $600 toilet seat the DOD claimed to purchase?"

I remember the news reports from decades ago about very pricey toilet seats and what not, as provided by firms contracting with the federal gov't. What people generally didn't know then is that the contracting firm's overhead for a given contract was included in the cost of these items, as well as the cost of compliance with the federal government's very demanding specifications. So news reports of that sort give (gave) a very misleading picture; and getting a different contractor to do the work wouldn't have lowered the cost of toilet seats, or lowered them much.

That likely has little relevance to this story, though. A more upfront way to compare costs between different bidders is to have bids include separate pricing for materials, and for services rendered.

People who think the gov't might be more cost effective by making government specifications less demanding might also want bridges to be made of cardboard instead of steel and concrete.

Usually, the cost is, and isn't, that bad. It depends on the context, and usually whichever side is demonizing, tends to ignore that.

Army once let out a contract for $75 hammers. Press had a field day with that one. Except they didn't mention that this was to be used for putting a track back on a armored vehicle. If you're fixing a tread while under fire, often you forget to pick up the hammer, and it might get run over. So the hammer had to be capable of being run over by an M1 Abrams. Storage space is very slim in a tank, you could buy 10 for the price of one good one, but you've got space for 1.

But with a lot of this, it's the government slush/preferred people slush to blame.

It's dealing with the minority/diversity issues that really start jacking it up, as long as it's out of the spotlight, nobody cares.

I once was having lunch with some vendors, and they waved at a guy across the resturant casually when we sat down. They explained he owned their company, and a few others. "Really? He's got time to run all of them?" They laughed. "Run? No, he gets a check every year for owning them, and he's happy with the setup."

He was black, and since he "owned" the companies, they qualified for "minority-owned" set-asides and contracts. He got a $40k or so check each year from each company and was on-call if needed to sign papers or show up.

Great work if you've got the skin for it.

Does the cost include things like plate rentals and paying for the space?

See Kevin Drum for a likely explanation of this:

http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/09/great-16-muffin-myth

The muffins are obviously magic muffins, containing substances that have a "street value."