For several years, Sen. Tom Coburn, R-OK, has compiled an annual report on government excess and waste, aptly titled The Wastebook. Just in time for the 2012 elections, Coburn’s latest version has been released. We thought it might be interesting to just take a look at some of the report’s more outlandish examples:

At the top of the Wastebook list for 2012 is everyone’s favorite, Congress, wasting about $132 million, according to the report. Low legislative activity, empty committee rooms and lots of time spent doing very little led to a lot of expense with sparse results. The Senate Budget Committee, despite our massive debt and fiscal insolvency, apparently met only 12 times in 2012.

The report concludes: “Whether it was failing to hold oversight hearings, pass laws, cut unnecessary spending, or simply cast votes on amendments, the U.S. Congress let taxpayers down in 2012. In fact, many high school student councils have been more deliberative than the U.S. Senate.”

It’s football season, and many of us are sports fanatics. If you thought ticket prices were high and players’ salaries were astronomical, you might be interested to learn that taxpayers subsidize pro sports more than we know. Via a loophole the NFL, NHL, PGA and some smaller leagues are exempt from federal taxes on earnings, costing us around $91 million in 2012.

Recently, the food stamp program was renamed the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), but with true governmental logic at play, there’s no requirement that purchases made with the benefits have to be nutritional.

The US Department of Agriculture oversees the program and classifies soda, fast food and candy as food. The Wastebook estimates a loss of $4.5 billion in improper food stamp payments for junk food and other items. The use of electronic benefit cards has made it easier to pay for alcohol, cigarettes, cosmetics, you name it. With the Obama Administration’s emphasis on cutting childhood obesity and appearing to want to control all of our diets, this is really hard to swallow. (Pun intended)

If you think the above example is far out of the realm of possibilities, take a look at the spending NASA has done on developing recipes for food that could be served on Mars. Close to a million dollars ($947,000) was awarded to researchers at Cornell University for the study, despite the fact that NASA has scrapped its manned flights and it could be decades before anything but the mechanical space probe Curiosity spends any time on the red planet.

(Vote in poll, at right)

Pets are important and vital parts of many Americans’ lives. We love them, we pamper them, after all, they are our pets. But to find out that Nebraska steered some $505,000 of a federal grant toward production of specialty shampoos, toothpaste and other beauty products for cats and dogs is astonishing. Obviously, the money could have been better spent, perhaps on products for people?

Probably the cutest and strangest of the ‘wastes’ is the robotic squirrel that a $325,000 National Science Foundation grant funded. RoboSquirrel was built to look, act and smell like a bona fide squirrel and then placed with a live rattlesnake to observe their interaction. There’s no mention of why in the report, and the news that researchers are working on more robotic mammals is not very encouraging.

There’s a lot more in Wastebook 2012: The major expense to produce the American penny, a $500,000-plus video game to simulate high school prom week — with graphics so amateurish its hard to imagine anyone would play the game — and $15 million spent recruiting scientists for Russian weapons institutes, are just some of the ‘highlights.’

It’s not light reading, and it will probably raise your blood pressure — along with a lot of questions — but you can view the report on Senator Coburn’s website: www.coburn .senate.gov

public. — For the editorial board, Pula Davis, The Gazette