Ranty McRanterson

I admit it. From time to time, I watch CSPAN. I mean, seriously, people should know how their government works and see their elected officials actually doing the jobs for which they were elected. More often then not, it's interesting and informative.

And then there are times like today when it's just frustrating and asinine.

We were flipping through the channels, and stopped on CSPAN to see what was up in Washington. The bottom of the screen said the current discussion was to address the naming of a post office in some town in Florida. "Okay," I think to myself, "this shouldn't take long." Right? Ummm...

Then they announced that Senator Whats-her-face and Senator Whats-his-nose would each have twenty minutes to speak on the issue. 40 minutes to debate naming a post office? I didn't take that long naming my daughter.

Okay, fine. Two-thirds of an hour to name a public building. Maybe one side wanted to name it something truly un-American - like Fidel Castro Post Office or Stalin Postal Annex - and the other was saying 'no way in hell'. Or maybe they were undecided over several good names. I dunno. Forty minutes would be okay in that case, I guess.

But no. The proposal was to name the post office after one of the flight attendants from Flight 93. She did something heroic. And she died while trying to save another building from being demolished by terrorists. It seems like a pretty obvious decision to me.

Name it after her. Took me ten seconds to decide.

I turned CSPAN off after a couple minutes of watching Whats-her-face posture. I don't know how long it actually took, or what the other guy had to say. It was too ridiculous.

I just looked it up. The average congressman makes about 170K a year. (Senators may make more or less - I couldn't tell.) That means we just spent over a hundred dollars so these two people could debate what to name a post office. And that's just the two of them. Other politicians were there. If there were ten of them sitting around watching, that's a thousand bucks the American Public might as well have just lit fire to. Fwoof.

Let's say they waste that kind of time every day. $5K a week. $260,000 a year. What if there were twenty politicians sitting around every day for things like this important debate on postal names??? HALF A MILLION DOLLARS.

I don't know about you, but I think we could all use some of that money back.

Hey, Washington??? Tell you what. Give me a portion of that, and I'll name every post office you want. Hell, I'll undercut the margin and give it to you for half of what you're paying now. Half-rate to take care of every lame ass time wasting gesture that comes out of my pocket. I think that's fair.

What do you think?