Lost amid the news accounts and watchdog reports: some of the lesser line items that suggest their own story lines. Here are a few, after the jump.

Among the host committee’s expenses:

$112.36 to TLF Country Florist, South Bend, Ind. The date on this item: on Feb. 14, 2008. While the RNC played Valentine’s Day mischief with Barack and Hillary, was someone’s honey made happy at RNC expense?

$20,000 to the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board for a “permit for media party.” Looks like there was a Republican big-tent windfall after all.

$50,000 to John Zweifel of Orlando, Fla., for “attraction exhibit expense.” Zweifel brought a 60-foot-by-20-foot scale model of the White House to the CivicFestevent in Minneapolis. Also listed: dozens of $2,500 fee refunds to exhibitors at the CivicFest flop.

Among the host committee’s smallest receipts:

$100 from well-heeled Republican donor (and two-time candidate in statewide elections in Minnesota himself) Wheelock Whitney of Maple Grove, Minn., George H. W. Bush’s chum from their prep days at Andover Academy. It’s an oddly meager donation to a $58 million convention fund for a man who’s given $50,000 to Republicans since 2002. Would he care that he covered the better part of someone’s Valentine’s flowers in South Bend, Ill.?

President Woodrow Wilson's china was among the attractions at CivicFest.

Among the widely trumpeted 8 billion RNC-related media impressions of the Twin Cities were a few distinctly negative impressions created by a Minneapolis Convention Center event called CivicFest. It was meant to draw 150,000 media representatives, schoolchildren, RNC delegates and other visitors to see exhibits such as a replica of the White House and to shop for Minnesota gift items.

But even after they dropped the $15 fee that might have sent budget-minded civics-seekers scurrying for low-cost alternatives, officials say attendance only reached 50,000. Event vendors want their $2,500 booth fees back, one telling the Star Tribune hours went by when no one came.

Cheryl Luger, a local government watchdog who can make any day a festival in civics, tracked the project from its inception 10 months ago as a “Delegate Experience/Community Festival,” when Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak proposed and the city council approved spending $200,000 on the event. “During a tight budget year, this matter came forward late in the game,” Luger recalls. Now she wants taxpayers reimbursed.

The plan was to convert RNC hoopla into convention center promotion, since many attending the RNC would be people “with strong influence over or responsibility for where their organizations hold future meetings and conventions.” The $200,000 outlay during a tight budget year was justified because “individuals who visit Minneapolis as a convention attendee or visitor are much more likely to have a favorable impression of our community, and more likely to want to return.”

CivicFest appears to have accomplished the exact opposite. One vendor told KSTP: ”I will never come back to a convention in this town because of being misled. They lost my business for life.”