Glenn Reynolds has an update on the Ultimate Ham Sandwich oopsie. For those unfamiliar with it, it was an item on the Recovery.gov site that suggested that the government was buying ham at $595,600 a pound. As it turns out, there was a typo (which pretty much everyone figured, anyway): the actual price was $1.50/lb. Drudge’s retort to that reply – a link to a Food Lion online circular listing ham going for 72 cents – has since blown up; but (picking a store at random) ham is going for $1.09/lb over at the Appomattox Food Lion, which does suggest that the government should have shopped around a bit. Or maybe issued vouchers. Or made some faint nod towards a market solution.
I will politely avoid any suggestion that the reason that they didn’t is because Food Lion is not particularly known as being a heavy Democratic Party supporter.
Crossposted to RedState.
Aside from the actual price paid, how about the fact that a website devoted to transparency apparently cannot give enough information to be useful in examining these contracts (namely unit price and/or quantity of units)?