So last night I was watching TDS. The guest was Bill O'Reilly, who was hawking some book about the Lincoln assassination that a ghostwriter whipped up for him. Stewart called him out on his ridiculous "Obama's making it too expensive to be rich" argument and O'Reilly went straight to government spending. What about the $16 dollar muffin?Stewart admitted that he hadn't heard about this $16 muffin thing, which isn't extremely surprising; it was one of those rightwing blogosphere "scandals" with the shelf-life of an unrefrigerated popsicle. Stewart probably missed it because he blinked.
Basically, the story worked like this; an audit from the Inspector General for the Department of Justice found that the Capitol Hilton in Washington overcharged a 2099 Justice Department Legal Training Conference -- which O'Reilly described as "a bunch of conferences for pinheads" -- for refreshments. The hotel was apparently given a budget and it exceeded it by the slimmest of amounts.
The "$16 muffin" came from a poorly itemized invoice and some quick, back-of-the-envelope accounting -- i.e., a bunch of other stuff was listed in a column marked "muffins." "So did DOJ really pay $16 for muffins?" Kevin Drum wrote at the time. "Of course not. In fact, it's obvious that someone quite carefully calculated the amount they were allowed to spend and then gave the hotel a budget. The hotel agreed, but for some reason decided to divide up the charges into just a few categories instead of writing a detailed invoice for every single piece of food they provided."...[CLICK TO READ FULL POST]
