It might not be enough to vault members of Congress to the top of the lists of most-admired Americans, but it couldn’t hurt: Some are calling on lawmakers to roll back the 2.8 percent pay raises that go into effect today. With the hikes, a lawmaker’s base salary will rise to $174,000 – a small fortune to many Americans right now, though hardly extravagant by the standards of the cost of living in the Washington, D.C., area. “The general public can’t help but think that lawmakers are patting themselves on the back, and padding their wallets, for presiding over the worst fiscal-policy blunders in recent history,” said Pete Sepp of the National Taxpayers Union. Lawmakers like to act as if the salary hikes are out of their hands, but in 2007 the newly Democratic-led Congress opted not to raise its pay until it raised the minimum wage. And a handful of lawmakers plan to refuse the latest raise or donate it to charity.
This startling statement from Mark Gietzen, the Wichita-based leader of the Kansas Coalition for Life, made Kansas City Star columnist Steve Kraske’s roundup of memorable 2008 quotes:
“From a moral perspective, for someone to vote for Obama, it is much the same as someone aiding a person who is planning to do a school shooting – only much worse! A person doing a school shooting will likely only kill less than 1,000 persons, whereas a vote for Obama will enable him to enact policies that will kill millions every year, and for years to come!”
With so much punditry in the media these days, there is no shortage of off-base opinions. Here are two of the Top 10 worst predictions of 2008, as compiled by Foreign Policy magazine:
– Bill Kristol (in photo), of “Fox News Sunday,” the Weekly Standard and the New York Times News Service, predicting that Barack Obama wouldn’t win a single Democratic primary.
– Jim Cramer of CNBC telling investors that Bear Stearns was not in trouble and that they shouldn’t take their money out. A week later, Bear’s shares lost 90 percent of their value.
“O.J. actually got convicted of something. Gasoline hit $4 a gallon – and those were the good times. On several occasions, ‘Saturday Night Live’ was funny. There were a few days there in October when you could not completely rule out the possibility that the next Treasury secretary would be Joe the Plumber. Finally, and most weirdly, for the first time in history, the voters elected a president who – despite the skeptics who said such a thing would never happen in the United States – was neither a Bush NOR a Clinton.” That’s where the Miami Herald’s Dave Barry begins in his lengthy review of 2008.
This gem comes from July: “John McCain, at a strategy session at a golf resort, tells his top aides to prepare a list of potential running mates, stressing that he wants somebody ‘who is completely, brutally honest.’ Unfortunately, because of noise from a lawn mower, the aides think McCain said he wants somebody ‘who has competed in a beauty contest.’ This will lead to trouble down the road.”
November is remembered thusly: “Barack Obama, in a historic triumph, becomes the nation’s first black president since the second season of ‘24,’ setting off an ecstatically joyful and boisterous all-night celebration that at times threatens to spill out of the New York Times newsroom. Obama, following through on his promise to bring change to Washington, quickly begins assembling an administration consisting of a diverse group of renegade outsiders, ranging all the way from lawyers who attended Ivy League schools and then worked in the Clinton administration to lawyers who attended entirely different Ivy league schools and then worked in the Clinton administration.”
It might not be enough to vault members of Congress to the top of the lists of most-admired Americans, but it couldn’t hurt: Some are calling on lawmakers to roll back the 2.8 percent pay raises that go into effect today. With the hikes, a lawmaker’s base salary will rise to $174,000 – a small fortune to many Americans right now, though hardly extravagant by the standards of the cost of living in the Washington, D.C., area. “The general public can’t help but think that lawmakers are patting themselves on the back, and padding their wallets, for presiding over the worst fiscal-policy blunders in recent history,” said Pete Sepp of the National Taxpayers Union. Lawmakers like to act as if the salary hikes are out of their hands, but in 2007 the newly Democratic-led Congress opted not to raise its pay until it raised the minimum wage. And a handful of lawmakers plan to refuse the latest raise or donate it to charity.
