April 24, 2009 10:26 PM UTC

Analysis of congressional bonuses skipped Musgrave, Tancredo

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• by: BobMoore

( – promoted by Colorado Pols)

Face the State posted an interesting article this week that looked bonuses paid in 2008 to staffers for the state’s House delegation.

FTS reported that Ed Perlmutter was the top bonus payer and quoted retired Rep. Tom Tancredo as saying, “There may be some offices that have to reward people to keep them. I don’t find it valuable to condemn this.”

That may be because it was Tancredo, not Perlmutter, who was the biggest bonus spender in the Colorado delegation, according to the data source for the FTS story. But Face the State didn’t include Tancredo or defeated Rep. Marilyn Musgrave in its analysis.

More details at my Coloradoan blog here: http://tr.im/jDuB

I asked FTS editor Brad Jones about why they didn’t include Tancredo and Musgrave in the story.

“For this story, we decided to look at members currently serving – you’re correct that there’s no real partisan variable in our selection, we just decided to look first at the delegation we have now,” he told me in an e-mail. “But your point is well taken: a follow-up on departed members would be good, too.”

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