Business

Paul Ryan , recently announced as Mitt Romney ‘s running mate, has spent about 13 years in Congress. During that time, only two of his bills have become law. One of those bills came in July 2000 and renamed a post office in Ryan’s district. As the Huffington Post notes, the “post office on 1818 Milton Ave. in Janesville, Wis., is now known as Les Aspin Post Office Building.” The other came in December 2008, when Ryan tackled the excise tax on arrows (bows and arrows). His bill “amended the Internal Revenue Code to impose a 39-cent tax per arrow shaft, instead of a 12.4 percent tax on the sales price.” (Ryan himself is a bowhunter and took a personal interest in passing that bill.) Over at the Washington Post, Dylan Matthews notes that Ryan has proposed “many, many bills.” Specifically: Looking through the Library of Congress’s records, I counted 71 bills or amendments that Ryan has sponsored 71 bills or amendments and 971 bills that he has co-sponsored. That’s a lot of legislation, an...

Colleen Taylor is based in San Francisco where she is a reporter for TechCrunch TV. Previously she worked for GigaOM, where she reported on startups and Silicon Valley. Earlier, Colleen reported for Mergermarket, an online newswire and subsidiary of the Financial Times focused on M&A. Before that, she was a contributing editor for Electronic News, the semiconductor industry trade newsletter. Colleen... ? Learn More Facebook has become known for making a good number of talent-focused startup acquisitions, aka acqui-hires — but the cost of each deal is normally kept under wraps. In a regulatory quarterly filing the company made today with the Securities and Exchange Commission, though, it put an aggregate pricetag on all those “non-material” sized deals it made in the first half of this year: $24 million. Here’s the wording from the document: “During the six months ended June 30, 2012, we completed business acquisitions for total consideration of $24 million. These acquisitions wer...