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Watch C-SPAN long enough, and you'll see members of Congress using visual aids: big, brightly colored poster boards, known on Capitol Hill as floor charts.

They've become an essential part of congressional messaging.

Almost every day the House of Representatives is in session, lawmakers line up to give what are known as one-minute speeches. Florida Democrat Frederica Wilson is always there.

And she always has her floor chart with her. It displays the number of days since Wilson came to Congress and the number of Americans unemployed.

"When you are in the minority, you have to find ways to get your message across because there's no other way. You don't have a bill that they're going to hear. There's no committee that will receive your suggestions," Wilson says.

She's been reusing the same chart since February, just swapping out the number of days in red type. Some members have dozens of them, ready to go at a moment's notice. Indiana Republican Rep. Todd Rokita has a whole stack of charts in his office, leftover from a lengthy presentation he gave back in April on the national debt. Back then, he offered a bar chart showing budget deficits through the years, with pictures of presidents on top of each bar. If you had seen it on C-SPAN, occasionally you'd see a hand come into the shot, switching to the next chart. That is Zach Zagar, Rokita's communications director.

"I was Vanna White on the House floor, one beautiful night this spring," Zagar says.

So how exactly do these things get made?

First the content: These are actually just PowerPoint slides from a presentation Rokita often gives when he's back home in his district — printed real big for use on the House floor.

"The House doesn't quite have a PowerPoint projector on the floor," says Zagar. "So this is what we get."

There are a couple of nice ones, made expertly and mounted by the House graphics office. But most in this stack are just printed on giant sheets of paper, then wrapped around and taped onto previously used poster boards. Zagar says the House Republican Conference has a big printer, which makes these charts cheap to make, if not aesthetically perfect up close.

"Sometimes you get the backend of a weird leftover presentation. Sometimes you get a poster board with a giant wedge taken out of it, so yeah, it varies," he says. "The presentation via television is barely noticeable."

A little secret about Congress that may not be obvious watching on TV: Often when members give these speeches, the room is virtually empty. But that doesn't really matter, because C-SPAN's cameras are always rolling.

Bill Gray is a producer at C-SPAN, and a man so obsessed with floor charts he's created a blog to catalog their use.

"Budget and deficit and deficit reduction and anything that has to do with hard numbers, those are the most popular because if you show a giant red line going from low to high, then it's going to draw the number, and it's just very simple — this number is higher than it used to be, here we go," Gray says.

But perhaps the most popular floor chart of all time (though, admittedly, this is hard to gauge) was used by Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa back in 2009.

Here's how he described that chart at the time: "the rising cost of health care as a massive fire-breathing debt and deficit dragon."

That's right. The debt and deficit dragon — a gray fire-breathing dragon, labeled with yellow Olde English-style print on a blue background. It got a lot of attention, which is exactly what Grassley says he's going for.

"I think they're very beneficial, probably more to the public at large than they are to our colleagues," Grassley says.

At this point, a taxpayer might wonder how much these charts cost. In reality it varies, from an estimated $10 for the giant-printer-used-poster-board method to, well, no one would say how much it costs to get one of the fancy charts made by the House and Senate graphics offices. Something comparable made by a national printing chain would cost $129 per chart. But everyone insists they aren't spending that much.

If you think it's tough being a Cabinet secretary in the U.S., having to deal with the demands of a fiercely partisan Congress and testify a few times a year, try being the Afghan interior minister.

"I have been summoned by the lower house 93 times, and 79 times by the upper house," says Ghulam Mujtaba Patang, who for the past 10 months has been in charge of the ministry that oversees the Afghan National Police.

"Based on this calculation, I have had one day in a week to work for the people," he says.

In addition to answering calls to appear before Parliament, he's had to answer 15,000 request letters from parliamentarians. "Some of them legal and some of them are illegal," he continues. "Most of the requests are personal demands."

A List Of Headaches

Not unlike officials in Western governments, Patang says he gets patronage requests to hire relatives of parliamentarians, to fire people they don't like, or in seven specific cases, to promote uneducated and/or illiterate officers to the rank of general. But, he says, his headaches don't end there.

Patang says lawmakers are illegally cruising around in 46 Ford Ranger police trucks belonging to his ministry. In addition, 254 of the ministry's rifles and 51 pistols are also illegally in their hands. He has received demands for 84 permits for armored vehicles, despite the fact that, he says, Parliament has more than enough. And, he has received 232 requests for taxi permits, which he says lawmakers turn around and sell.

Now, the reason he happened to be rattling all this off is because he was in the process of being impeached by Parliament. Lawmakers say the vote to dismiss him was because of his failure to fight corruption in the ministry, and because he wasn't doing enough to combat deteriorating security in parts of the country.

'Immature Act'

But one of those who supported him says that's a cover story.

"Unfortunately, today's voting was not about security in Afghanistan," says Shukria Barakzai, a member of Parliament. She argues that MPs didn't like the fact Patang would not cave to all their demands. The straw that broke the camel's back, she says, was the fact that he declined to appear before Parliament over the weekend.

Barakzai says Patang was legitimately too busy doing his job tending to the ongoing security transition in Afghanistan, and the vote to impeach him was an "immature act" that will undermine security in the country.

Patang argues that part of the reason he's been sacked is because he's independent – he's not a member of any political party or beholden to any tribe, warlord, or mafia. As a result, he doesn't have strong patrons in Parliament to prevent this.

"This is plot against educated and elite people," he says.

But he's not going down without a fight. He threatened that in his next news conference he will disclose the names of 72 land-grabbers in Parliament, MPs who are spies for Pakistan's intelligence service and those affiliated with drug mafias.

Turning The Tables

Parliament has impeached several ministers over the years, and in most cases, President Hamid Karzai kept them on as "acting" ministers.

A few months ago, Parliament initiated impeachment proceedings against Finance Minister Omar Zakhilwal. But he fended off the vote by going on the offensive. He accused one lawmaker of illegally importing nearly 2,000 cars and of smuggling alcohol into the country. Zakhilwal accused another parliamentarian of smuggling fuel and yet another of smuggling millions of dollars worth of flour. Parliament was too busy howling at that point to continue his impeachment.

The Presidential Palace issued a statement saying that the Supreme Court must evaluate the legality of Patang's sacking, and until then he will remain the acting minister of interior.

And one footnote: During the proceedings, Patang revealed another profound statistic: In the past four months, 2,748 police officers, roughly 2 percent of the police force, were killed fighting militants. That's more than the number of U.S. troops who have been killed during the entire war.

Long-time White House correspondent Helen Thomas, who covered every president from Eisenhower to Obama, has died at age 92, according to The Gridiron Club & Foundation.

Thomas, who spent much of her career at United Press International before switching in her last decade in journalism to Hearst Newspapers as a columnist, died Saturday morning at her Washington apartment after a long illness, according to the Gridiron Club, where Thomas was the first female member and a former president.

Her longevity at the White House gave Thomas a coveted front row seat at briefings and allowed her, as the senior wire-service reporter, the first question at presidential news conferences. That ended when she left UPI in 2000.

NPR's David Folkenflik reports that the sometimes controversial journalist "broke barriers that prevented women from rising in the Washington press corps."

Thomas was born to Lebanese immigrants of little means and grew up in Michigan. She attended Wayne State University before heading to the nation's capital as a copygirl for the now-defunct Washington Daily News.

She covered women's issues, but held onto the White House beat for UPI, staying for decades.

The New York Times writes:

"Presidents grew to respect, even to like, Ms. Thomas for her forthrightness and stamina, which sustained her well after the age at which most people had settled into retirement. President Bill Clinton gave her a cake on Aug. 4, 1997, her 77th birthday. Twelve years later, President Obama gave her cupcakes for her 89th. At his first news conference in February 2009, Mr. Obama called on her, saying: "Helen, I'm excited. This is my inaugural moment."

It appears that it's just a matter of days before it becomes official that Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate's top Republican, will be primaried by a Louisville businessman with Tea Party backing.

The news that Matthew Bevin, owner of a bell-manufacturing company and an investment company executive, intends to soon announce his effort to oust McConnell, is interesting because it appears to place McConnell in something of a bind.

As Senate minority leader, McConnell has seen his role as at times negotiating compromises with Democrats in order to break impasses, something he has done repeatedly in the past two years. Most recently, there was the fiscal-cliff deal at the start of the year that McConnell negotiated with Vice President Biden that allowed tax rates to rise on individuals with more than $400,000 in annual taxable income. It was a compromise because President Obama had sought a much lower threshold.

It's that role as a compromiser, however, long part of the unwritten job description of Senate leaders in the majority and minority, that has gotten McConnell in trouble with those conservatives who find any compromise with Democrats anathema. They couldn't care less that McConnell is a fan of fellow Kentuckian Henry Clay, who as an antebellum senator became earned the sobriquet The Great Compromiser.

Despite the negative feelings many conservatives have about compromise, there will still be situations that require it. For instance, Congressional Republicans will need to negotiate with President Obama and Democratic lawmakers later this year on the debt ceiling and federal budget.

And therein lies the problem for McConnell. How will he be able to compromise without inflaming the already inflamed Tea Party Republicans who support Bevin's expected challenge?

One possibility is that McConnell repeats as many times as possible the scenario that just occurred, with the just concluded negotiations to end the GOP filibuster of seven of Obama's executive branch appointments.

McConnell let Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican, to lead those negotiations while the Kentuckian tried to keep his distance, a move that theoretically would allow him to maintain some plausible deniability as he wades into his primary fight. It was a kind of "leading from behind."

Of course, plausible deniability only works when those in the know allow you to keep up the pretense. That didn't work out so well for McConnell in the filibuster fight, since McCain and fellow Republican Sen. Bob Corker of Kentucky testily outed McConnell.

Despite that, McCain is apparently still willing to play a similar role in future inter-party negotiations. And McConnell, presumably, would still try to stay in the background.

"What other choice is there [for McConnell]?" said Richard A. Baker, who served as the Senate's first official historian between 1975 and 2009 and is co-author of "The American Senate. An Insider's History."

"You can sign your death warrant now or sign it later. It's a real tough situation," Baker says.

"In earlier days (the early 1950s) [party] leaders got knocked off because they were viewed as not coming back to the state often enough. They had gone Washington, so to speak. That was the reason that they were vulnerable.

"Now, of course, in the era of instant communications, that's not a problem anymore. [The problem is] being caught between political factions. It's two separate tracks, being the party leader and being the representative of your state in the Senate. And here's the classic example of where those tracks are running at cross purposes. It's a rock and a hard place for sure."

The McConnell described in Baker's book, however, comes across as a shrewd political strategist and tactician. Robert Bennett, a former Republican Senate colleague of McConnell's who was himself primaried out of the Senate by a Tea Party challenger, is quoted in Baker's book as calling the Kentuckian "the best political mind" in the chamber.

Which leads Baker to say that if anyone can navigate the treacherous waters facing the Senate minority leader, it's McConnell. "I would put my money on him to do that," he says. "Whether it's possible to do in the scope of larger things we'll know later. But he would be the guy for the challenge."