The recent relaunch of GOP.com featured a miniature animated Michael Steele begging for money and an appropriation of the ghost of Jackie Robinson and was the most comically awful thing in the history of the internet. The cost: $1.4 million.

The Sunlight Foundation's Real Time Investigations blog looked up the Republican National Committee's most recent FEC filing and found that they spent $1.4 million web sites and services over the past six months, the period during which Steele was blueskying names for his new "What Up" blog on the snazzy new site, which went live earlier this month.

How much does it cost to host a site for six months that is visited almost exclusively by stoned Wonkette readers who just want to see Steele walk onto their computer again? It costs $1,039,155. The Democratic National Committee, on the other hand, which gets roughly the same amount of traffic as GOP.com on its site, spent $203,000 on hosting during the same period.

That $1,039,155 went to Smartech Corp., a web company that services a lot of conservative clients. We're off to go find out which one of Michael Steele's brothers-in-law works there.

[Via Politico.]