As The Hound was standing in line at the Post Office for one-cent stamps to match up with the leftover 41-cent stamps which no longer are valid, steam was coming out of those big ears. It was just last year that the U.S. Postal Service raised stamp prices to 41 cents and now the cost of mailing a first-class letter is 42 cents.
Then, The Hound remembered that this is the same USPS whose employees rang up a $13,500 tab at a five-hour feast at a Ruth's Chris Steak House in Orlando, Fla. That's when the steam started pumping like an old Baltimore & Ohio coal train.
This postal order sort of made news last month after the Government Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, discovered the charges made to government credit cards. As far as The Hound is concerned, the national media dropped the ball on this story.
GAO investigators called the 2006 meal "abusive" in its extravagance, according to The Associated Press. That's too kind. How about piggish.
The order included more than $3,000 in drinks, including top-shelf beverages such as Courvoisier cognac, Belvedere vodka and Johnnie Walker Gold Label scotch. Then there was the $500 in shrimp cocktails and $900 in crab cakes --- that's a lot of appetizers. But then again, Ruth's Chris is no late-night diner. It's a classy joint.
According to the GAO breakdown, the diners also had 81 steakhouse salads at $588, and 130 jumbo scallops which totaled $422. Yum, jumbo scallops! Ninety-five people attended the feast and ordered 81 entrees, which the GAO figured averaged $160 per person. That's eating high off the hog!
The USPS defends the dinner, contending it was held to land corporate clients from privately run FedEx and UPS. Taxpayer money, they say, was not involved; the feast was funded by products and services of the USPS.
Uh, aren't stamps products? And they wonder why Americans go postal when the price of stamps rise.
