Another “Adjustment”

An automatic raise:

The House on Tuesday agreed to a $3,100 pay raise for Congress next year _ to $165,200 _ after defeating an effort to roll it back.
In a 263-152 vote, the House blocked a bid by Rep. Jim Matheson, D-Utah, to force an up-or-down vote on the pay raise. Instead, lawmakers will automatically receive the raise _ officially a cost of living adjustment _ as provided for in a 1989 law that barred them from pocketing big speaking fees in exchange for an annual COLA.
. . .
“It’s not a pay raise,” said House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas. “It’s an adjustment so that they’re not losing their purchasing power.”

Don’t you think that after years of receiving nothing, America’s lowest wage earners deserve an “adjustment” of their own?

Winning Hearts And Minds

President Bush, his tank overflowing with political capital from re-election, has been touring the nation for several months with staged events promoting Social Security change.
How’s it been going? Well, to use the administration’s Iraqi gage, he’s making great progress:

The senator in charge of trying to put President Bush’s Social Security ideas into law says his colleagues “all want it to go away.”
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley said that despite their reluctance, he’s not giving up on Bush’s top domestic priority.
“Nobody really talks too much about Social Security,” Grassley, R-Iowa, said Tuesday. “They all want it to go away. I’m not going to let it go away.”
A fellow Republican on Grassley’s committee, which is charged with producing a bill, gave a bleak assessment of the issue’s prospects.
“Little more than just talk,” said Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore., when asked about the status of Social Security legislation. “I think that people are talking, but nothing’s moving.”

It’s kind of funny that some are trying to blame the slide in American public support for Iraq because Mr. Bush has been focusing on Social Security instead. Guess he’s 0 for 2.
Keep hammering away at Social Security, Mr. President. You’re making great progress.

Jaws

Apparently September 11 didn’t change everything after all. Looks like we still need a bigger boat.
Even the local news had a shark story in the first five minutes of the broadcast last night, and these and these are the only threatening sharks within a couple hundred miles. But stay tuned to learn how you can avoid becoming the victim of a shark attack.
According to Paul Harvey news yesterday, on average the following number of Americans are killed each year:
–1 person by sharks
–24 from being gored by cattle
–88 from being thrown off horses
–168 when their vehicle collides with a deer
I wonder how often TV news or national news magazines run features on how dangerous it is to ride a horse.

Intelligence At Work

How the terror alert level was raised in late 2003:

CIA analysts mistakenly thought they’d discovered a mother lode of secret al-Qaida messages. They thought they had found secret messages on Al-Jazeera, the Arabic-language television news channel, hidden in the moving text at the bottom of the screen, known as the “crawl,” where news headlines are summarized.
U.S. officials tell NBC News that CIA experts � technicians working for the Directorate of Science and Technology � thought they had found numbers embedded in the crawl signaling upcoming attacks; dates and flight numbers, and geographic coordinates for targets, including the White House, Seattle’s Space Needle, even the tiny town of Tappahanock, Va. What the analysts thought they had found was something called “steganography” � messages hidden inside a video image.

It’s reassuring to know that the CIA TIVOs are up and running. As long as they maintain ther live feed to the Iranian and North Korean nuclear facility surveillance cameras, we’ll be just fine.

Rover

Nice.
Isn’t this the guy who likely contrived that “uniter not a divider” malarkey?