Category Archives: Current Affairs

Winston-Salem Forsyth County School Bond Proposal

6 Replies

Tomorrow we citizens of Forsyth County will have the opportunity to vote for a $250 million school bond.  Of the $250 million about $125 million will be used to build seven new schools, $90 million will be used to renovate 14 schools and $4 million will be used for wireless internet connections in all 74 schools.  The school system is growing and there’s a rampant fear that our students will be increasingly educated in trailers.

The NAACP is against the proposal because they see it furthering the supposed segregation that the school system has developed since neighborhood schools were introduced back in the mid-90s. Their argument is that schools with a high percentage of minority, low income students are underperforming and that it is an inequitable situation. They feel that we need to return to forced integration of the schools so that there is an equal demographic balance in the schools.

Here’s my take on the situation:

First, I absolutely agree that school buildings need to be safe, clean and sanitary so any necessary renovations to old buildings should be made.  On the other hand there are many worse environments in which you can learn than an air-conditioned trailer, and I’ll bet that if you asked a student if he’d prefer a clean, warm (or cool), dry trailer or a leaky, drafty, dirty bricks and mortar building he’d take the trailer any day.  And you have to ask yourself is a state of the art, brick and mortar building the most critical component of providing a good education?

Second, most of the schools are segregated by demographics because the parents, rich and poor, minority and white, choose it to be that way.  Are you really going to tell them they’re wrong?  If they don’t want their child bused halfway across town in order to meet the system’s ideal demographic breakdown then you have to respect their position.  You also have to ask what you’re truly trying to accomplish by integrating the schools.  Is it to bring up the poorer students’ academic achievement by associating them with richer, better students?  If that’s the case aren’t you just as likely to bring down the richer, better students’ academic achievements?  Instead of looking at forced busing don’t you think you should address the core issue, which is sub-standard academic performance by the students?

To me, the solution to my first question, "Is a state of the art, bricks and mortar building the most critical component of providing a good education" and my last question, "Instead of looking at forced busing don’t you think you should address
the core issue, which is sub-standard academic performance by the
students" is more teachers.  We should spend every dime we can on recruiting and retaining more teachers and keeping the student-teacher ratio as low as possible.  I’d rather build a trailer village of education with a 10-1 student-teacher ratio than a castle of learning with a 30-1 student-teacher ratio.

The Journal had a feature story about the school bond that addressed the segregation issue and in it they mention that the new high school, Carver, in the poor part of town was set up as a magnet school with all the latest, greatest equipment but no parents from outside the district want to send their kids there.  My argument would be that instead of worrying about getting other kids there you worry about educating the kids that are already there.  You don’t throw money at the hardware, you throw money at the talent.  In other words, forget the fancy equipment and double your teaching force.  Make sure each kid gets tremendous individual attention and do it in the schools that need the help most.  Before long you’ll have kids achieving beyond imagination and you’ll probably have to set up a lottery system to deal with the parents clamoring to get their kids in the new school.  That’s when you start doing the same for all the schools.

Unfortunately this school bond is continuing the trend of spending money in the wrong place.  I’d like to see more money spent on talent and less on hardware.  Spend the $90 million on renovations, but take that $125 million and expand the existing schools and vastly expand the teaching ranks.  Also look at more creative thinking.  For instance:

  • Why not use some of the empty commercial space out there for classes?
  • Why not get more active with online learning initiatives?

You’d think that with three kids in the school system that I’d be a rubber stamp for the bond initiative.  I would be if I thought they were spending on the right things, but they’re not so I won’t vote for it.

 

I Can See This Going Over Well in the Miss America Bathing Suit Competition

2 Replies

MuslimbikiniDavid Boyd points to an interesting product from an Australian company that produces swimwear and activewear for traditional Muslim women.  I truly love watching entrepreneurialism at work and these guys have found what has to be a truly unique niche.  Of course I truly hope the fashion doesn’t catch on at the Outer Banks.

These things kind of remind me of the uniforms the sports teams at a fundamentalist Baptist high school that my school would play against once a season.  Neither the girls nor the boys were allowed to show their legs so the girls would wear these pants that looked like bloomers and the boys would wear sweat pants.  They looked very uncomfortable so I’m willing to bet they would have welcomed this kind of activewear sans the hoods.

We’re Screwed Part Deux…or Maybe Trois

1 Reply

There’s an article that you can read here (found via Lex)that explains how any one person can steal a statewide election if certain electronic voting machines are used.  Luckily here in Forsyth County our Board of Elections said "nyet" to these machines and the director, who wanted the machines, quit in protest.  The bad news is that she’s now working in the state (NC) elections office.

As the author of the article says the average person will probably see warnings about possible election tampering to be alarmist or far-fetched, but I personally have a few reasons to believe it.  Among them:

  • We’re talking politicians here.  I’d rather be surrounded by convicted felons than these folks since I’d at least know that the convicted felons were dumb enough to get caught.  These politicians are some of the smarter crooks out there.
  • I spent a year or two managing the website for a non-profit with zero visibility.  For absolutely no reason other than having a little fun someone hacked the site and posted porn…twice.  If someone’s willing to hack merely for grins and giggles don’t you think there’s more than a few hackers who would consider hacking an election to be the ultimate in cool?
  • These are computers.  Anyone who’s gotten the blue screen of death needs no further proof that things can go radically wrong.  Put another way, "Microsoft."

So yeah I’d say we’re screwed.

These Guys Don’t Know Shiite

Leave a reply

Just read this OpEd piece in the New York Times (via Lex) about how some Congresscritters who sit on committees that oversee critical aspects of the war on terrorism don’t know their Shiite…or Sunnis.  From the piece:

FOR the past several months, I’ve been wrapping up lengthy
interviews with Washington counterterrorism officials with a
fundamental question: “Do you know the difference between a Sunni and a
Shiite?”

A “gotcha” question? Perhaps. But if knowing your
enemy is the most basic rule of war, I don’t think it’s out of bounds.
And as I quickly explain to my subjects, I’m not looking for
theological explanations, just the basics: Who’s on what side today,
and what does each want?

After all, wouldn’t British
counterterrorism officials responsible for Northern Ireland know the
difference between Catholics and Protestants? In a remotely similar but
far more lethal vein, the 1,400-year Sunni-Shiite rivalry is playing
out in the streets of Baghdad, raising the specter of a breakup of Iraq
into antagonistic states, one backed by Shiite Iran and the other by
Saudi Arabia and other Sunni states…

Take Representative Terry Everett, a seven-term Alabama Republican
who is vice chairman of the House intelligence subcommittee on
technical and tactical intelligence.

“Do you know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite?” I asked him a few weeks ago.

Mr. Everett responded with a low chuckle. He thought for a moment:
“One’s in one location, another’s in another location. No, to be honest
with you, I don’t know. I thought it was differences in their religion,
different families or something.”

 

To his credit, he
asked me to explain the differences. I told him briefly about the
schism that developed after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, and how
Iraq and Iran are majority Shiite nations while the rest of the Muslim
world is mostly Sunni. “Now that you’ve explained it to me,” he
replied, “what occurs to me is that it makes what we’re doing over
there extremely difficult, not only in Iraq but that whole area.”

As Lex says, "Ya think?" 

Man, we’re in trouble.

Is Foxx Obtuse, a Partisan Lap Dog, or Both?

6 Replies

I’ve spent a little time lately looking at our Congressional leaders and the amount of money they spend doing their jobs, but I haven’t felt any burning desire to dive into the political maelstroms that are kicking up since there’s so much of that going on everywhere else.  But after reading Lex Alexander’s post in which he shares comments made by Virginia Foxx to him re. the Foley Scandal I just have to say my piece about my own US Representative.

It’s really quite simple.  I don’t know Rep. Foxx personally but based on her comments on this and at least one other issue I have to ask whether she’s a Republican lap dog or just plain dense.  And it’s not just that I disagree with her take on things it’s that I think what she’s doing is stupid from a pragmatic, political angle.  Let’s start with the Foley issue.  Here’s an excerpt from Lex’s blog:

During my telephone conversation with him Thursday, Rep. Howard
Coble, the 6th District Republican, called on the National Republican
Congressional Committee to return $100,000 it received earlier this
summer from former Rep. Foley’s political-action committee. The NRCC
works to elect Republican candidates to the U.S. House of
Representatives. Because Republican control of the House is in jeopardy
for the first time since that party took control of the chamber after
the 1994 elections, the NRCC understandably wants to raise as much
money as possible to help Republican candidates in close races. Foley,
prior to news of his scandalous Internet communications, was considered
a safe bet for re-election and still has roughly $2.8 million in his
PAC.

The NRCC’s problem, however, is that news reports indicate that the
NRCC’s chairman, Rep. Tom Reynolds of New York, had been told months
ago about Foley’s potentially problematic behavior. He accepted the
money anyway — and also is reported to have been instrumental in
talking Foley, who had been thinking about retiring, into running for
re-election this year.

No quid pro quo has been proved, Coble said, but "appearance-wise, it does not look good."

Rep. Virginia Foxx, the area’s other Republican House member, has no
problem with Reynolds’ behavior. And she thinks that if at least two
newspapers — the Miami Herald and the St. Petersburg Times — were
onto the story but had chosen not to publish anything at the time the
NRCC got Foley’s money, she doesn’t see why Reynolds should have done
anything differently: "There were at least two newspaper outlets and
they didn’t think it was worth reporting. Then why fault Reynolds for
doing what he did? If the news media had thought at the time that it
was so inappropriate that something should have been done, then maybe
they should have done something."

Can she possibly be serious?  Why fault Rep. Reynolds if we don’t fault the papers?  Well let’s start with the fact that he’s a member of Congress and it’s his job to do something about it, as it would have been hers if she were privy to what was going on.  Is she saying that she’s not obligated to report misgivings about a fellow Representative unless the Winston-Salem Journal also reports on the situation?  Furthermore, here’s what the St. Petersburg Times’ editor said about deciding not to run the story:

I led deliberations with our top editors, and we concluded that we did
not have enough substantiated information to reach beyond innuendo.

We were unsuccessful in getting members of Congress who were
involved in the matter or those who administer the House page corps to
acknowledge any problem with Foley’s ambiguous e-mail or to suggest
that they thought it was worth pursuing.

And we couldn’t come up with a strong enough case to explain to a
teenager’s parents why, over their vehement pleas to drop the matter,
we needed to make their son the subject of a story – and the incredible
scrutiny that would surely follow.

It added up to this conclusion: To print what we had seemed to be a
shortcut to taint a member of Congress without actually having the
goods.

I guarantee you that if they’d run the story as it was Rep. Foxx would have jumped all over them for reporting rumors and trying to sabotage a sitting member of Congress.  Also, she should take note that had Rep. Reynolds and the other party leaders who’d been warned about Foley done their jobs the story would have run with corroboration.

As I said I’m not just stunned because I disagree with her stand on this issue, I’m equally or more stunned at her political ineptitude here.  Instead of just saying "I think we should investigate this matter and take whatever actions are appropriate" she tries to shift the blame and in the process looks less adept at that than my 5th grade son.

The Foley incident where Rep. Foxx has looked like she’s living in a different, partisan universe.  Earlier this summer she went to Baghdad and here’s some excerpts from a Winston-Salem Journal article about her trip:

The war in Iraq is
going well, Iraqi government officials are determined to have a united
government, and American soldiers are satisfied with their equipment
and their mission, said Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-5th, who visited Iraq
yesterday and Sunday…

Foxx and other members
of the congressional delegation stayed with troops overnight in a
military compound in Baghdad that is one of Saddam Hussein’s former
palaces and had lunch together yesterday. (Ed. Comment: Sure she got a real good idea of what the situation on the ground looked like from there)…

Yesterday, after
Foxx’s visit, there were several kidnappings in Baghdad, the latest in
a string of sectarian violence that has escalated in recent months.

Foxx said she did
not see any evidence of this (Ed. See comment above). but said that the government officials,
particularly al-Bolani, are committed to making sure "the terrorists
don’t create a civil war."…

Ideally, she said,
military leaders and government officials told her they hope to have
Baghdad "secure" and a "place where people can feel safe" by the end of
the year. (Ed. She really bought this?)

There have been
reports that American military personnel do not have adequate supplies
or that their morale is low. Foxx said that her meetings with soldiers
did not support this. She said that at one point she asked the
soldiers, while their supervising officers were not within earshot, in
hopes to get the most honest answer, and they told her they were fine.

"There was no sense of any problems," she said, "There was no indication of unhappiness." (Ed. Oh come on, in the private sector that would be like a VP going around her CEO to bitch to the Board of Directors.  It ain’t gonna happen).

So again I ask, is she really this obtuse or is she a party hack?  Personally I think she’s a party hack and my evidence to support this is her early and consistent push for immigration reform.  That’s a hot-button issue in this neck of the woods (see this W-S Journal article) and I will definitely give her props for being a consistent advocate for immigration reform, even if I don’t agree with some of the solutions she proposes.

Still her recent comments and stances on issues like the war and the Foley matter really have me thinking she’s more commited to her party than the good of her constituents.  I’m sure she’s worried about her party losing the majority in November, but her comments and behavior, and that of her party’s leadership are only serving to highlight why it’s time they get a little butt spanking.  Maybe it will help them remember where they’re from and what they’re supposed to be about. Sadly the Democrats aren’t any better, but I guess it’s their turn to figure out how to further screw this country up.

Stick Another Ribbon on Your SUV

2 Replies

Political commentary, satire and protest in the Web age.  Here’s a video called "Stick Magnetic Ribbons on Your SUV" over at Glumbert.  Really it’s just a video of a stage performance, but the interesting thing to me is that I probably never would have foud this even five years ago so the audience would have been the dozens or hundreds who were actually in the theater.  It doesn’t hurt that the satire is spot on.

So How Much Did Our Do Less Than Nothing Congress Cost Us?

2 Replies

There’s been some chatter about how little actual work the US Congress did this year.  In 1948 Harry Truman called the Congress that year the "Do-Nothing Congress" because they only met for 101 days.  Well after adjourning on October 2 this year the House of Representatives had booked only 93 legislative sessions.  The Senate calendar indicates they were in session for 125 days.

I thought it would be interesting to look at Congress’ payroll and see how this worked out in the number of dollars spent for days in legislative session.  Since their fiscal year starts Oct 1 we’ll have to include to the end of the 109th Congress’ first session (2005). Also, to be fair, let’s keep in mind that even though the Congress isn’t in session it doesn’t mean they aren’t working, but all those days not in session means that they’re free to do things like campaign, go on press-the-flesh tours, attend fundraisers and engage in activities not directly related to governance.  In essence what I’m saying is that looking at the number of legislative sessions is a good measurement for how much actual legislative work our Congress members are doing. For a year-by-year comparison since 1993 check out this article.

For those who would like to check the numbers you can find the appropriation for Congress’ 2006 budget, Public Law 109-55, 109th Congress, here (PDF).

Let’s start with the Senate. Their Official Personnel and Often Expense Account budget for FY06 was $350,000,000 or $3,500,000 per Senator.  The Senators were in session for 38 days between October 1 and December 31, 2005, and if you add that to the 125 days in 2006 you get a total of 163 days in session.  Divide $350,000,000 by 163 and you get $2,147,239 per day in session.  And that doesn’t include the salaries of the committee staff, the offices of the VP and the President Pro Tem, the offices of the majority and minority leaders, etc.  This is just for the personal staff.  Heck, the salaries for the  Appropriations Committee itself comes to $13,758,000 or $84,405 per legislative session!

On the House side the appropriation for salaries and expenses was $1,100,907,000.  From my reading this number includes all the salaries and expenses for various committees’ staffs and operational staff like the Capitol Police and the Library of Congress, so this isn’t a direct comparison to the Senate. So the overall salary and expenses on the House side divided by 435 members gives you $2,530,820 per member.  The House was in session for 32 days between October 1 and December 31, 2005.  Add that to the 93 days they were in session in 06 and you get a total of 125 days in session.  Divide the total salary and expense number and you get $8,807,256 per legislative session.

In an effort to make a more direct comparison between the personal staff of the House and Senate I searched around to find out what each House member was allocated to pay personal staff and expenses.  I found this little item that said that the "Member Representational Allowance" varied from member to member based on seniority but that it was around $1,000,000 per member.  So if you use a rough estimate of $435,000,000 for the House and divide it by 125 legislative sessions you get  $3,480,000 per session, compared to the Senate’s $2,147,239 per session.

For some real fun let’s look at the Senate and House members’ own salaries.  Rank and file members of the House and Senate get paid $165,200.  For Senators that means they made $1,013.50 per legislative session and for House members they were paid $1,321.60 per legislative session.  The House and Senate majority and minority leaders each gets paid $183,500 so the House leaders are getting paid $1,468 per legislative session and the Senat leaders are getting paid $1,125.77.  Finally, the Speaker of the House gets paid $212,100 which equates to $1,696.80 per legislative session.

So what did my Congressperson Virginia Foxx cost me and my fellow citizens here in NC’s 5th district?  I wrote about her office’s payroll a couple of weeks back so let’s use those numbers and divide by 125 sessions.  I calculated her staff’s pay for the year at about $670,000 and if you add her salary the total comes to $835,200 or $6,681.60 per legislative session.  Her office’s salary total is actually one of the lowest in the NC delegation so I guess I should consider myself lucky.

How about our NC Senate members?  In this post I calculated that the Senators’ average payroll was $2,023,399 which divided by 163 sessions works out to $12,413.49 per legislative session.  Ouch.

Some other things to keep in mind:

  • Attendance at legislative sessions aren’t mandatory.  For your individual Congress member you should look at their attendance record.  They could actually have been even more do-nothing than these numbers show.
  • The numbers above don’t include a lot of overhead.  The appropriation for the legislative branch is at least $3 billion so this is costing us a lot more than the numbers above indicate.

I’d say we need to look starting for a better return on our investment.

Buddy Jesus in Baghdad

Leave a reply

Buddyjesus
I think I’ve found at least one thing that Muslims and Christians can agree on: they don’t like it when you mess with Jesus.  In the case of the Muslims some residents of Sadr City weren’t too amused when they "found a picture of "Buddy Jesus" from the 1999 film "Dogma"
posted in the streets, accompanied by a badly photocopied pamphlet
bearing a crude approximation of a US military crest and outlining a US
"plan" to subjugate the neighborhood."  (See picture to left). Of course they didn’t know that it was a spoof picture of Jesus from Kevin Smith’s 1999 film "Dogma":

"That picture abuses our Imam Mahdi and his holy character, and mocks
our sacred figures," said resident Abu Riyam Sunday, apparently
mistaking the satirical movie still of Jesus for one of Shiite Islam’s
historical imams, whose images adopt a Jesus-like iconography.

Well, they have plenty of company in not liking the iconography of Smith’s film.  A lot of Christians weren’t too happy about it either.

If It’s a War on Terror Why Aren’t Captured Terrorists POWs?

Leave a reply

What with all the to-do over the law recently passed by Congress to deal with the treatment of captured enemy combatants and that pesky little thing called the Geneva Conventions there’s been a lot of discourse between the "f— ’em they’re terrorists, they don’t have or deserve rights like us" crowd and those who are a little frightened by the idea of giving the President the power to define what is cruel punishment and pretty much freaked out by the denial of habeas corpus the new law provides.  Based on how I wrote that last sentence you can probably guess that I’m part of the latter crowd, but before you think of me as some "lilly-livered I love the world and the world loves me" type let me explain my thinking.

First, I don’t understand how we can have a "War on Terror" and not consider terrorists prisoners of war.  People say that we can’t treat the terrorists as POWs because they aren’t traditional soldiers for a state funded armed force, rather they represent a nebulous, sectarian foe.  If you look at it that way then we can’t say we’re at war because you can’t declare war on a nebulous, sectarian foe.  Our leaders are being disingenuous, to put it kindly, and we need to hold their feet to the fire by asking two very simple questions: Are we at war or not?  If we’re at war then why can’t we treat everyone we capture as a POW?

Second, if we accept the designation of the terrorists as "enemy combatants" why do we need to create a new system to deal with them?  I remember clearly when the first President Bush initiated the "invasion" of Panama and we captured Manuel Noriega and then shipped him to the States and in the great American tradition we charged him with federal crimes, provided him with a lawyer and then put him away.  (BTW, he’s still in jail in Florida).  Noriega had been financed by the CIA (in fact Bush 1 had authorized some of the payments when he was head of the CIA) and it was only when he started misbehaving (harassing US troops in the Panama Canal zone and eventually killing a US Marine) and engaging in various activities like drug smuggling that the US took him down.  If we can do this with the head of a sovereign nation’s military why can’t we do it with a bunch of religious fanatics who killed or are trying to kill American citizens?  Charge them with federal crimes, try them, convict them and put them away.  Hell, we could even get the death penalty for them and legally kill them.

Perhaps we the people are willing to accept the government’s new system because we’re so consumed with fear and a desire for vengeance that we’ve forgotten our long tradition of justice.  Perhaps our political leaders are using our fear and lust for vengeance to serve their own purposes (stay in power, expand powers of the President).  Perhaps our leaders want the new system because they view the traditional system as more difficult to use to get the results they desire than their new system and they’re probably right, but we didn’t elect these guys to take the easy road, we elected them to take the right road.  Perhaps many of the members of Congress aren’t really serious about
this law and are counting on the Supreme Court to find it
unconstitutional, thus allowing them to make political hay but not
really give the President what he wants.

But I digress so let’s leave this with my original question: How can we have a war on terror and not consider captured terrorists prisoners of war?

What Do Foxxy and Her Cohorts Pay?

1 Reply

There’s a new website called LegiStorm that allows you to look up what the members of Congress pay their staffs.  My US Representative is Virginia Foxx and she paid her staff $167,538.89 from 1/1/06-3/31/06, or in other words the first quarter of the year.  If the payroll stays consistent then her payroll for Foxx’s staff for the year will be about $670,000. If you include the Congresswoman’s salary of $165,200 for the year then the overall payroll for her office is $835,200. Here’s the breakdown by staffers with quarterly income and then the estimated yearly amount:

  • Rep. Foxx, Member, $41,300.00 ($165,200.00)
  • Richard Hudson, Chief of Staff, $27,941.67 ($111,766.68)
  • Deana Young Funderburk, Legislative Dir., $18,750 ($75,000.00)
  • W Todd Poole, District Director, $15,000.00 ($60,000.00)
  • Robert Honold, Legislative Asst., $11,000.01 ($44,000.04)
  • Amy Auth, Press Secretary, $9,624.99 ($38,499.96)
  • Christopher Wall, Legislative Asst., $9,000.00 ($36,000.00)
  • Michael Church, District Caseworker, $8,750.01 ($35,000.04)
  • Aaron Whitener, Field Rep, $8,375.01 ($33,500.04)
  • Mary Carpenter, Executive Asst., $8,000.01 ($32,000.04)
  • Joshua Wall, Constituent Liaison, $7,749.99 ($30,999.96)
  • Erica Shrader, Legislative Corresp., $7,500.00 ($30,000.00)
  • Rebecca Potts, Constituent Liaison, $6,750.00 ($27,000.00)
  • Emily Beth Richardson, Constituent Liaison, $6,624.99 ($26,499.96)
  • David Ward, Jr., Staff Asst., $6,458.33 ($25,833.32)
  • Teddie Hathaway,Shared Employee, $5,499.99 ($21,999.96)
  • Carrie Church, Part-time Employee, $3,750.00 ($15,000.00)
  • Lindsay Moore, Part-time Employee, $3,000.00 ($12,000.00)
  • Nicole Gustafson, Shared Employee, $3,000.00 ($12,000.00)
  • Jeff Stockdale, Staff Asst., $763.89 ($3,055.56)

So if you include Rep. Foxx herself you could look at her office as a small business "owned" and financed by we members of NC’s 5th Congressional District with 20 employees, 14 of whom are full time, and a total payroll of about $835,000.  This is another reason why we truly need to work hard to hold our representatives accountable; not only are they setting the direction for our country they are also a considerable investment of our money and resources.  And remember this is payroll; it doesn’t include other expenditures of the Member’s office or even the employees’ benefits.

Now I’m not being critical of Rep. Foxx or her employees here. (If you look at the comparison of all NC Representatives she has the second lowest payroll).  No one is getting rich off of these salaries, especially those who are working in her DC office.  Even Mr. Hudson’s six-figure salary doesn’t go that far when you take into account the DC housing market.  And those lower level staffers who work in DC aren’t in it for the money.  They’re either doing it out of idealism, or they’re putting their time in before they leave the Hill to make their financial futures on K Street, or maybe both.  Still, this is a significant investment of our taxpayer finances and we need to keep an eye on it.

So how does Rep. Foxx compare to her NC counterparts in the house?  Here’s the payroll for each Rep.’s office, including the member’s pay, for the first quarter of 06 with projected annual numbers in parentheses:

  • Rep. Butterfield, D-1st, $266,157.44 ($1,064,629.70)
  • Rep. Etheridge, D-2nd, $258,866.49 ($1,035,465.90)
  • Rep. Jones, R-3rd, $257,483.31 ($1,029,933.20)
  • Rep. Price, D-4th, $268,588.22 ($1,074,352.80)
  • Rep. Foxx, R-5th, $208,838.89 ($835,355.56)
  • Rep. Coble, R-6th, $277,340.42 ($1,109,361.60)
  • Rep. McIntyre, D-7th, $283,688.05 ($1,134,752.20)
  • Rep. Hayes, R-8th, $227,819.41 ($911,277.64)
  • Rep. Myrick, R-9th, $272,511.11 ($1,090,044.40)
  • Rep. McHenry, R-10th, $202,645.39 ($810,581.56)
  • Rep. Taylor, R-11th, $246,365.99 ($985,463.96)
  • Rep. Watt, D-12th, $267,562.67 ($1,070,250.60)
  • Rep. Miller, D-13th, $262,803.37 ($1,051,213.40)

So if you total it up North Carolina’s payroll just for our members of the House of Representatives is $3,300,670.76 for the first quarter of ’06 which projects to $13,202,682.52.  In my next post I’m going to look at North Carolina’s Congressional delegation in a little more detail.