**Please read the update to this thread**  

I recently stumbled upon a site by the name of Legistorm. If you go to the site, you will discover that does strive to be “transparency’s sidekick” as an informative resources about congressional staff salaries and many other things.

As a sister site to our recently reviewed Richmond Sunlight, you can find all sorts of crazy things on Legistorm. You can learn about salaries of congressmen and their assistants, you can learn about trips they took and you learn that most expenses are not itemized and, I quote, “good faith estimates.”

While the good faith estimates opens a whole can of worms, I was searching around and apparently, you can see all tax payer money that has sent politicians on trips to Charlottesville.

You can also see who invited the politicians and the reason for the event. Take for instance a trip on May 22nd, 2005 in which Senator Evan Bayh spoke at the UVa Law Graduation Ceremony. He charged taxpayers $821.41 for this trip.

Shouldn’t UVa have paid for his trip, not the federal government? It seems like a waste of money to me and somehow doesn’t seem right.

Check out the list for yourself. You can see taxpayers have given politicians almost $100,000 to come to Charlottesville since 2000. What do you think? Did you find anything else interesting on the site?

Important Update: LegiStorm chimes in and lets us know that this trip and many others were paid for by the sponsor… although it isn’t very clear on the site.  Sorry for the mixup!
[pic]

Popularity: 29% [?]

I ordered a replacement keyboard for work, because I put coffee in my old one and it stopped doing its job. Made it hard for me to do mine. So I ordered from Apple (“Apple recognizes its responsibility as a global citizen”) a brand new keyboard. So today when I got back from lunch, I received this box:

»Read More

Popularity: 40% [?]