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Via The Corner, here is Austin Hill working up some righteous populist outrage at Townhall.com:

Last week the Social Security Administration flew approximately 700 of its managers from across the U.S. and Guam to Phoenix, Arizona’s posh Arizona Biltmore Hotel and Resort, for “organizational training.” The event, which included musical entertainment and dancing, skits, catered food, cocktails, and a “casino night” featuring “door prizes,” cost us lowly taxpayers approximately $750,000.

Seriously?  SSA managed to put together a three-day corporate training session for $1,071 per person?  That’s…..unbelievable.

Seriously.  That’s unbelievable.  SSA must have some world class penny-pinching accountants and event planners on their staff.  I doubt there’s a corporation in America that would even try to budget less than two grand a head for something like this.

And why did SSA hold their training session at the “posh” Arizona Biltmore?  Let me take a guess: because it’s 120 degrees in the shade in Phoenix during July.  The heat hits you like an anvil and the Biltmore practically gives rooms away for free in order to keep the place from turning into a ghost town.  SSA probably paid less than they would have at a Holiday Inn in Schaumburg.

(Yep.  $85 per night it says here. That’s really cheap for a hotel with convention facilities for 700 people.)

Apparently this has been the outrage du jour among conservatives for the past few days.  Sad.  If they knew anything about how the real world works they’d be applauding, not catcalling.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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