This has got to be one of the most absurd South Carolina stories I’ve read in a long time. And that’s saying a lot, because stories about this state are ALWAYS absurd.

According to the Charlotte Observer, “dozens of taxpayer-funded local governments, agencies and other public entities around the state have spent $3.5 million over the past 18 months on Washington lobbyists.” And what do they get in return? About the same amount of money as — or sometimes even less than– they spent on the lobbyists in the first place.

High five bureaucrats!

Nationwide, cities, states and other public agencies are on track to spend $68 million on D.C. lobbyists in 2007, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington think tank. That would double the total spent on lobbying in 2000.S.C. Gov. Mark Sanford, a fiscal hawk who tried in vain this year to block hundreds of spending projects in the state budget, recently terminated a long-standing contract the S.C. Department of Transportation had with prominent lobbyists Don Fowler and John Napier to help secure federal highway money.

“It’s ridiculous for the taxpayer to fund lobbyists to ask for yet more of their money,” Sanford said. “I’ll put (Sens.) Lindsey Graham and Jim DeMint up against any lobbyist in Washington. Nine times out of 10, a sitting senator is going to do better than lobbyists (at getting money) if he’s in touch with the needs of the DOT or other state agencies.”

Yet Sanford, like other governors, maintains an office in Washington, spending more than $74,000 a year on salary and expenses for staffer Blair Goodrich to attend committee hearings, monitor other developments and build ties with S.C. congressional offices.

So what is all this taxpayer cash being spent on?

• A Myrtle Beach lobbyist seeking federal money for beach renourishment and wastewater outfalls.

• A lobbyist for the Beaufort Sewer and Water Authority brokering a deal with the Pentagon to handle sewage at four Lowcountry military installations.

• Pentagon officials negotiating with a Florence-Darlington Community College lobbyist to send soldiers there for training in how to maintain robots that defuse roadside bombs in Iraq and photograph insurgent strongholds in Afghanistan.

The University of South Carolina is paying one of Washington’s most powerful lobbyists $180,000 to pursue federal money for fuel-cell research and ocean monitoring.

West Columbia, population 13,670, spent $42,000 from mid-2006 to mid-2007 with Ted Kinghorn, a prominent D.C. lobbyist who earlier worked for U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C., and was legislative counsel for the General Assembly in Columbia.

Jennifer Cunningham, city administrator for West Columbia, said Kinghorn and associate John Hilbert helped get two key projects into the federal government’s 2008 fiscal year appropriations bills now before Congress: $350,000 for laptops in West Columbia police cars and $150,000 for sewer line upgrades.

“It could mean as much as $500,000 to our city for projects that we would never have been able to get without the assistance of the Kinghorn group,” Cunningham said. “We just don’t have the expertise to navigate Washington, identify those funding sources and write those grant proposals.”

Wonderful. We’re wasting our money paying someone in Washington to bring back about the same amount in computers for West Columbia? That’s genius! Perhaps we’re crazy for suggesting this, but couldn’t we just skip the middle man and, umm, I don’t know, spend the money directly on computers for West Columbia?

No wonder the federal debt is closing in on $9 trillion. If every city in the United States with a population larger than 10,000 got $350,000 for computers, that would add an extra $944.3 million to the already over-inflated U.S. budget.

And why shouldn’t some poor guy in Billings, Mont., be forced to pay for our computers while Washington lobbyists pocket the cash? Sounds good to me… I don’t see anything wrong with that picture at all.