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.
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:
I’d say we need to look starting for a better return on our investment.
Esbee posits that if I link to her and Joe Jon to me and she to Ken then we’ll have a perfect blogsquare. As a lifelong square I find this a comfortable proposition. She also links to an interesting post by Ken Otterbourg, managing editor at the Journal, that discusses the evolving role of "citizen journalism" here in Camel City. Ken was prompted to write the post after Joe Jon turned the tables on one of Ken’s reporters during an interview.
My fellow local blogger Esbee sent me a link to the video below. It’s an Indian version of Michael Jackson’s Thriller and it has convinced me that if I ever want to look like a reasonably passable dancer then I need to change continents. This reminded me of Medina Kabob in Woodbridge, VA where I would often eat lunch with my buddy Ted. They had a TV in the corner that had Indian music videos playing all day and we’d end up choking down our food while trying not to laugh too loudly. BTW, if you like Pakistani food you’ll love Medina. Enjoy the video.
Joe Murphy is leaving the Winston-Salem Journal for a new job at the Denver Post. From what I could tell Joe, along with former Journal staffer Adam Howell, spearheaded the Journal’s (and Media General’s) foray into blogging and other online initiatives. This is a definite loss for the Journal and the Winston-Salem online community, as small as it is. I’ve heard that the Denver Post is a leader in the newspaper industry in terms of their online initiatives and I’m sure this is a great career move for Joe. Here’s to wishing him the best of luck and let’s hope he doesn’t forget us little people!
Found via Boing Boing is this interesting little epitaph (see left). It reads in full:
To Our Mother
Mona Herold Vanni
October 14, 1912 to April 11, 1996
You spent your life expressing animosity for nearly every person you
encountered, including your children. Within hours of his death, you
even managed to declare your husband of fifty-seven years unsuited to
being either a spouse or a father. Hopefully, you are now insulated
from all the dissatisfaction you found in human relationships.
Buddy, Jackie and Mike
I think I’m gonna write my own epitaph, thanks very much.
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.
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?
My daughter just got home from a short shopping excursion she talked Celeste (my lovely wife) into taking with her. She’s been hell-bent on getting a pair of Chuck Taylors and so she took her hard earned babysitting money and plopped over $40 on a pair of black Chucks. My reaction was, "Huh?"
When I was a kid we wore Chucks only because that was the only option we had. Buying shoes was kind of like buying a car back in the 1920s. You know, "Would you like your car in black or very black?" In our case it was "Would you prefer the black or white canvas Chucks?" That changed in the mid to late 70’s and I can distinctly remember wearing a pair of red suede Puma’s my Mom let me get and I also vividly remember all my socks turning pink when it rained. (This is the same woman, by the way, who dressed me in a peach denim leisure suit and my brother in a lime green leisure suit). Chucks became what you wore when your parents were intent on torturing you or simply refused to pony up the cash for some Nikes or Adidas.
I have to take my hat off to the marketing geniuses at Converse who somehow made the Chucks cool again. It probably began when they introduced various colors all those years ago. For me personally those colors will always seem un-cool because I had a kid in my class my senior year of high school who wore a different color of Chucks every day of the week. They matched the color of his corduroy pants and long sleeve button down shirt. If I remember correctly on Mondays he wore blue, on Tuesday green, on Wednesday red, on Thursday purple and Friday was black. I used to think of Thursday as "Grape Day" and Friday as "Johnny Cash Day." Miraculously he made it through the entire year without getting hassled once. Quite frankly we all thought he was nuttier than a fruit cake and we figured he was just the type who would hunt us down and kill us slowly with a pair of tweezers and Super Glue so we didn’t mess with him. That’s also why I’m not naming him. I really don’t feel like being hunted down and slaughtered by a middle-aged monochromatic-Chuck’s-wearing wacko.
All of this is just to explain why I’m absolutely befuddled that my daughter just dropped so much coin on a pair of shoes that in my mind are the ultimate in dork-fare. Of course this also explains why the large gap that used to separate me from cool has now grown into a bottomless chasm of un-cool. Hell I’m starting to ask the kids to interpret things I hear on TV! Next thing you know I’ll be saying "Boffo!"
Vernon Robinson is at it again. His latest ad for his campaign against Brad Miller for the House seat in North Carolina’s 13th District is just flat out over the top. It’s an attack ad…kind of. He doesn’t call Miller names, but he does say that Miller voted against a bill that would have paid for more body armor for the troops in Iraq and then lists a litany of sex-related bills that Miller voted for. Actually he cherry picks line items out of larger spending bills, but you can’t miss the point. Watch the video below and make sure you watch it all the way through; I swear you will actually hear the words "probes attached to their genitalia".
You may recall that Vernon was the only Winston-Salem leader to take me up on my offer to host their blogs for free (he was a member of the City Council at the time), but the blog never really took off. If he’d brought even 1/100th of the, uh, creativity of his ads to the blog it would be in the top 10 on Technorati.
Befuddled 