GovernmentExecutive.com

The folks over at the Merit Systems Protection Board might want to take a little closer look at who's in charge up on Capitol Hill these days. The agency routinely sends its research reports to Congress and the White House, and the recent ones (here's one example) have come with cover letters addressed to the following people: the President, the President of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives.

That's all well and good, but then the letters begin:

"Dear Sirs:"

I'm not sure how much House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., likes being addressed as "sir."

Want to know what Barack Obama likes in the way of earmarks? He's released a full list of his requests for fiscal 2006 and 2007.

(Hat tip: Politico's Ben Smith, via Andrew Sullivan.)

I realize that congressional hearings are rarely nonpartisan, or even fully bipartisan, affairs. But when you title your hearing on pay-for-performance in government "Robbing Mary to Pay Peter & Paul," aren't you kind of tipping your hand that this isn't exactly going to be a dispassionate analysis of the concept?

This just in from my colleagues over at CongressDaily:

House Republican sources said this afternoon that Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., has decided to retire, creating yet another open seat for Republicans to defend and setting off a shuffle on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, where Davis is ranking member. Davis' announcement, coupled with the retirement of Rep. Ron Lewis, R-Ky., and Missouri GOP Rep. Kenny Hulshof's decision Tuesday to run for governor, means there are 24 Republicans and 29 House members overall who are either retiring or running for higher office.

I was listening to ESPN Radio's "Mike and Mike in the Morning" show this morning on my way to work. Discussing impending congressional hearings on steroids in baseball, they began mocking legislators for their tendency to profess their love for the national pasttime without knowing all that much about the teams that play it. But then one of the show's co-hosts, Mike Greenberg, referred to Roger Clemens' potential deposition by staff members of the "Government Committee."

It cuts both ways, guys.

Memo to State Department Inspector General Howard Krongard: When a report by congressional Republicans who are trying to defend you against charges of political bias concludes that you have "an extraordinarily abusive management style," a "a poor regard for government workers," and that you'll "give anybody, any time, anywhere, a hard time," it might be time to rethink whether leading a very important federal operation is the right job for you.

Just in case you missed it, I wanted to draw your attention to this tidbit, courtesy of our friends at CongressDaily, about Congress' contingency planning for its ongoing failure to pass any appropriations bills -- more than a month into the fiscal year:

If Congress cannot get its work done in time for Christmas, as a fallback, federal agencies have already been instructed to plan as if Congress will eventually pass a CR running through Feb. 15, sources said.

Looks like we can count on budget uncertainty running well into the new year. Again.

Here's today's trivia question: How many times since 1977 has Congress managed to pass all of the annual appropriations bills on time? Three. That's according to Philip Joyce of The George Washington University, cited in this piece by the Washington Post's David Ignatius.

Ignatius details in all-too-familiar fashion the managerial inefficiencies that result from ongoing budget uncertainty. " How do you innovate if you don't know how much money you've got?" he asks. "A continuing-resolution world means business as usual."

Those concerned -- or heartened -- that Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., might leave his longtime perch at the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to run for the Senate in Virginia next year may need to do some rethinking. The Hill reports that Davis is now hinting he might not enter the race for the seat being vacated by retiring Republican John Warner. Instead, Davis said he theoretically could wait and take on Democratic Sen. James Webb in 2012.

“There are other races; this isn’t the only shot,” Davis said at a breakfast at the National Press Club on Tuesday. “You’ve got a very vulnerable guy sitting there in the other Senate seat right now who may or may not run in four years. And you know what? If you don’t go to the Senate, so what? I’ve been a committee chairman in the House. I’ve got my portrait hanging on a wall. I’ve been pretty productive legislatively.”

One assumes that Davis' thinking on this subject has been influenced by a recent Washington Post poll showing him trailing Mark Warner, the likely Democratic candidate for John Warner's seat, by 30 points.

No, this isn't another bird decapitation item. It's about our country's elected legislators, actually.

If the goal of members of Congress is to try to drive their approval ratings ever lower, I have to say they are doing a remarkable job. The latest case in point is the push by a group of House Democrats to engineer a resolution condemning Rush Limbaugh for allegedly insinuating military service members who speak out against the war in Iraq are "phony soldiers." This, of course, is payback for Republicans maneuvering Democrats into voting for a measure that criticized the group MoveOn.org for running a newspaper ad referring to Gen. David H. Petraeus as “General Betray Us.”

I'm not even going to bother trying to sort out who might be in the right or in the wrong here. The broader point is this: Nobody cares. Whatever your position on the war, or Gen. Petraeus, or Rush Limbaugh, one thing is certain: It's a trivial waste of time for Congress to take ceremonial votes of outrage purely for the purposes of scoring political points.

“What’s good for the goose is good for the gander,” says House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer, D-Md. No it isn't. It's bad for the goose, the gander and the country.

We're not really going to have a government shutdown, are we? Everybody remembers 1995, right? How nobody came out looking good? Still, the fiscal year's ending in a week, almost all of the appropriations bills haven't been passed, and it seems like there's a whole lot of brinksmanship going on.

The New York Times presents a cautionary tale, involving a South Dakota Indian cultural and judicial center that lost its funding when its patron, former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, lost his seat.