Nobody but an art historian is going to look at a narrative painting like that, and when asked what it means to them, reply "Well, I can't really be sure. It's full of ambiguity." If that had been Bush's description of it, the Guradian's article would have been about how stupid he is for not being able to understand a painting of a guy riding a horse up a hill.

Besides, politicians are constantly looking for meaning where there isn't any, and there job consists primarily of selling us stories. Stories about how the big bad terrorists are out to get us, stories about how the little man can't get by any more, stories about how selling things on eBay is going to ruin the Pennsylvanian economy. Stories without evidence are exactly what politicians do best, and I guess art interpretation is no different.

If there's one thing all BB readers might agree on, it's that this kind of information is far too late in coming. USAspending.gov just launched earlier this week, I believe. Sae, I think most of the older information you would want is out there somewhere, but the OMB and GPO websites are uniformly awful, like almost all government sites. As far as I know, you'd have to wade through hundreds of pages of PDFs to see if there's anything there about shredding. And most of that will be missing, or incomplete, or summarized. And virtually nothing will be easily machine readable, so it would be tough to compile the kind of interface they use at USAspending.

"What, people might actually want data in XML? In 2007? Fascinating!" I've spent too much time trying to scrape HTML from "public" information sources to buy into the idea that the government is very good at investing for the future.

Cory, I would explain the rise in shredding spending the same way I would explain the rise in spending on "instruments and lab equipment", or "medical, dental and veterinary supplies" or any of a number of other things that appear to have doubled or tripled in the last 6 years.

The first thing to remember is that this is only contract spending. Anything done in-house doesn't show up. Let's not ignore the "Clinton Contractor Shuffle," where you contract out some service, at greater cost, but get to pat yourself on the back for decreasing federal payroll. Then you bring the task back in house, and congratulate yourself for increasing efficiency. This is a very popular move for administrators. The trend in the mid 90's was to contract most of this stuff, then to do it yourself, and recently contracting has been back in vogue.

Secondly, either there was a lot more in-house shredding going on in 2000, or this data set is incomplete. The only agencies listed in 2000 with shredding contracts were the IRS and the Department of the Army. In fact, there aren't even five agencies listed under the top 5 until 2003. I find it hard to believe that those are the only two agencies who had documents to dispose of. So we're really comparing the outside shredding budgets of the IRS + Army in 2000 to most or all of the Federal government in 2007.

Actually, I see now that the data is estimated to be 65.22% complete. It's much more likely that newer data has been more fully migrated in than older data. Keep in mind then that 35% of contracts are not being counted, and those are much more likely to be older contracts.

Nelson, I know there have been bins designed to be bombproof and channel the blast upwards, but I'm not sure how many have actually been deployed around the world. One of the other dangers of non-bomb-proof bins is that they're a ready source of shrapnel. You don't need to pack the explosives in a bag of nails or a pipe because the bin fragments will take care of that for you. That's just one more reason that a bomb left in a trash container is more dangerous than hidden under a bench etc.

Changing tacts,

Sorry, Cory - I didn't know you're Canadian. I'll keep that in mind when I read future posts of yours, especially whenever you post commentaries concerning US policies of various kinds.

Assuming arguendo Cory was a US citizen, how exactly would that matter? If he was making fallacious commentary then why is the issuer of his passport important? If his commentary was valid, would you ignore it because of citizenship alone?

Either an argument (regarding US policy or otherwise) is sound or it isn't. Someone's citizenship status may give us a very marginal insight into their potential motivation or bias, but it doesn't tell us whether their words are valuable or not. Discounting someone's argument because of where they were born or choose to live is textbook ad hominem.

Sorry to get riled about this (and I don't mean to get after you personally, Father Brown), I just see this kind of thinking a lot and it's starting to bother me.