Roy Blunt: WATB

Hard Times in the Congressional Dining Room

Representative Roy Blunt (R-MO) has fallen on hard times. How else to explain why the man is insisting on a raise of his already significant Federal salary $165,000 per year?

Mr. Blunt...said the raises were crucial for members of Congress who are not independently wealthy and must operate two households on the current $165,200 salary. The annual raise for this year was set at 1.7 percent, about $2,760.

Shorter Blunt: $165,200 per year, bad; 167,960, good. In all fairness, Blunt is one of the, ahem, poorer members of Congress, with a reported net worth of between $118,000 - $345,000, making him the 315th most affluent member of Congress. Lest we forget, however, Mr. Blunt is married to a high-powered lobbyist for Altria (formerly Phillip Morris Management Group), who still lobbies members of Congress. Why is it I doubt his pleas of poverty?

Abigail Pearlman Blunt and Rep. Roy Blunt smiling in the face of adversity

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Huckabee is In

I'm your Huckleberry

Former GOP governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee announced on last Sunday's Meet the Press that he's entering the race for president, via the ever popular exploratory committee formation. Huckabee will likely try to make a play for the evangelical Christian GOP voter, which will put him in direct play against Mitt Romney & Sam "SexyBack" Brownback. But he also seems to be trying to strike a populist pose:

One of the reasons that I'm running for president is because I think that America needs folks who understand what it is to start at the bottom of the ladder and climb their way to the top.

America loves an underdog. America loves people who had to struggle and for whom every rung of the ladder has been sometimes three rungs up and two back down.

"Huckleberry" has some advantages that the other GOP nominee hopefuls do not: he has chief executive experience, having served as governor, he has no Senate record of rubberstamping Bush's agenda that so many of the other candidates have and he has a personal story of perserverance that many Americans can identify with, that being his dramatic change from fat to fit.

Trim the fat, he may have, but the skinny is that he has ethics problems. So in addition to already being an underdog against candidates with much greater name recognition, the press may be in a mood to ask probing questions. Even Timmeh was asking a few good ones on MTP, though some followup would have been nice.

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Greetings from Florida

Well, it's been quite a day here in Central Florida. As you know, we were hit by a series of tornados that cut a path across our state. The devastation is pretty complete in some areas. I was about 1 mile north of the path and have been up since about 3:00 this morning following the news and then the clean up.

This afternoon I donated blood and blogged about it for our local paper. It is really sad that, in the face of such devastation, people will do nothing.

Our governor, Republican Charlie Crist, held his on-the-ground news conference in Volusia county. He was joined by Democratic US Senator Bill Nelson and Democratic Florida CFO Alex Sink plus Republican State Attorney General Bill McCollum and Rep. John Mica (FL-07) who is also a Republican.

In a decidely Democratic county, Charlie and crew delivered the most non-partisan press conference I have ever seen. He could have been in either Lake or Sumter, which are really red, but I think he wanted to send a specific message - "We are in this together."

You would think that's the way it should always be in a disaster such as this. Unfortunately, we know all too well that in the age of Bush (both of them), that has not been the case. At least today, that changed.

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On the Federal Minimum Wage

Yesterday, the Senate voted on a House bill to increase the Federal Minimum Wage to $7.25 an hour from $5.15 over two years. The amended bill passed 94-3, with 3 Senators [Johnson (D-SD), Schumer (D-NY), Inhofe (R-OK)] not voting. Coburn (R-OK), DeMint (R-SC), and Kyl (R-AZ) voted against the bill.

Last week, Senator Wayne Allard (R-CO) introduced a bill that would have eliminated the Federal Minimum Wage entirely and left the wage rate for the lowest-paid workers to each state. In Kansas, this would mean that workers would revert to the state-mandated minimum wage of $2.65 per hour, which is currently superseded by the federal minimum of $5.15.

As of January 2007, twenty-states had a higher minimum wage than the federal wage. Five states had no minimum wage.

These 28 Senators voted to eliminate the Federal Minimum Wage on January 24, 2007:
Alexander (R-TN)
Allard (R-CO)
Bennett (R-UT)
Bond (R-MO)
Brownback (R-KS)
Bunning (R-KY)
Burr (R-NC)
Chambliss (R-GA)
Coburn (R-OK)
Cochran (R-MS)
Cornyn (R-TX)
Craig (R-ID)
Crapo (R-ID)
DeMint (R-SC)
Ensign (R-NV)
Enzi (R-WY)
Graham (R-SC)
Gregg (R-NH)
Hagel (R-NE)
Hatch (R-UT)
Inhofe (R-OK)
Isakson (R-GA)
Kyl (R-AZ)
Lott (R-MS)
McCain (R-AZ)
McConnell (R-KY)
Sununu (R-NH)
Thomas (R-WY)

Why did 24 of these Senators change their mind? Because Senate leaders added small-business tax breaks to the bill. House leaders say those tax breaks, worth $8.3 billion over 10 years, are unacceptable. They say businesses need no additional help after six years of breaks from the Bush administration.

Democrats were less effusive. After the vote, presidential candidates Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Barack Obama (D-Ill.) lined up at a news conference with the bill's sponsor, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), and bemoaned the complications. Earlier, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said he would prefer to pass a minimum-wage increase without "all these business pieces of sugar."

Reid predicts the differences would be worked out by a conference committee. House leaders have demanded that the tax measures be stripped from the bill. Negotiations could be lengthy.

As ThinkProgress noted, Republican objections to a clean minimum wage increase are based on myths:

MYTH #1 — Raising the minimum wage will hurt businesses. A study by the Center for American Progress found that employment in small businesses, the number of small businesses, and inflation-adjusted small business payroll growth grew more in states with higher minimum wages than federal minimum wage states. Almost 300 large and small business owners across the country have signed on to Business for a Fair Minimum Wage, which is pushing Congress to raise the federal minimum wage. A recent Gallup poll found that “three out of four small businesses said that an increase in the minimum wage would have no effect on their company.”

MYTH #2 — Businesses can’t afford to give workers a wage increase. In the past 10 years, Congress has “showered corporations with $276 billion in tax breaks, plus another $36 billion aimed exclusively at small businesses.” Steven Pearlstein of the Washington Post adds that even though the Bush administration has gifted declining tax rates to small businesses over the past several years, “according to the Internal Revenue Service, small-business owners, sole proprietors and the self-employed are, as a group, the biggest tax cheats in America, responsible for $153 billion of the estimated $345 billion tax gap in 2001.”

It's worth noting that Congressional salaries have increased from $133,600 to $165,200 per year since the last Federal Minimum Wage increase. And a cost-of-living-adjustment (COLA) increase takes effect annually unless Congress votes to not accept it.

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House Judiciary Committee to Probe Bush on Torture and Patriot Act Statements

RAWSTORY's Brian Beutler is reporting that:

House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) will be investigating all of President Bush’s so-called signing statements to determine how drastically the president has misinterpreted laws passed by Congress

In particular Conyer's is interested in two widely reported signing statements The first is a December 30, 2005, signing statement in which Bush asserts "The president, as commander in chief, can waive the torture ban if he decides that harsh interrogation techniques will assist in preventing terrorist attacks." and the second signed by the President on March 9, 2006, claims "The president can order Justice Department officials to withhold any information from Congress if he decides it could impair national security or executive branch operations." Boston Globe, April 30, 2006.

Before the last election Republicans complained that if he ever became Chairman Conyer's wouldn't roll over and play dead. I guess they were right.

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Frickin' Ridiculous

So, those guys from Cartoon Network who were promoting the new Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie are being prosecuted in Boston for "[creating] panic by placing 'bomblike' electronic light boards displaying a cartoon character with an upraised middle finger throughout Boston." This is stupid. The problem here is not that these two men created a panic, but rather, that the Boston Police Department created a panic by overreacting and failing to recognize a piece of electronics that was obviously not a bomb. Seriously. It's a pixelized alien sporting a middle-finger. This promotion was conducted in seven other major cities without incident.

The city of Boston needs to just accept that they made a mistake; a mistake that was exacerbated, perhaps, by a generational gap. If DAs prosecuted every instance of guerrilla marketing, there'd be no one left on the streets.

While I like Aqua Teen Hunger Force, I'm not really an avid fan. I wasn't aware of the "moon men" characters, but when I saw the alleged "hoax bombs" it was obvious what they were. While it wasn't obvious that it was part of a marketing ploy, it was obvious that it was some kind of grass-roots art; potential vandalism at worst. If these men are prosecuted, the freedom of speech consequences could be pretty dire.

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