Quoted from bumblethru

Is she an idiot?

Quoted from Shadow

Only in San Francisco would a person that stupid get elected term after term.

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Rank-and-File Members:
The current salary (2011) for rank-and-file members of the House and Senate is $174,000 per year.
•Members are free to turn down pay increase and some choose to do so.

•In a complex system of calculations, administered by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, congressional pay rates also affect the salaries for federal judges and other senior government executives.

•During the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin considered proposing that elected government officials not be paid for their service. Other Founding Fathers, however, decided otherwise.

•From 1789 to 1855, members of Congress received only a per diem (daily payment) of $6.00 while in session, except for a period from December 1815 to March 1817, when they received $1,500 a year. Members began receiving an annual salary in 1855, when they were paid $3,000 per year.

Congress: Leadership Members' Salary (2011)
Leaders of the House and Senate are paid a higher salary than rank-and-file members.

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If you stayed up nights wondering whether members of Congress would be able to weather the Great Recession of the late 2000s, this bit of news should finally put your mind at ease.

Overall, members of Congress saw their personal wealth grow by more than 16 percent during the worst economic downturn in the United States since the Great Depression, according to financial disclosures submitted by lawmakers.

See more: Even in Recession, Congress Pay Grew

The median personal wealth for members of Congress grew to $911,510 in 2009, up from $785,515 in 2008, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Nearly half of the members of Congress are millionaires.


Who are the wealthiest members of Congress? Here's a look.

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A Thanksgiving Promise

by Karen Kwiatkowski

Recently by Karen Kwiatkowski: What Does the GOP Really Want in 2012?



  
    
Exciting times are just beyond the bend for this country. As we gaze into the future, the lapping of the water at our feet is more agitated than usual, the waves subtly more insistent. Occasionally we hear an unfamiliar sound, a microcrash of waves or a strange cry from an unknown bird. We see unseasonable migrations and we sense that the ground beneath our feet is moving, catlike.

Most have not yet noticed the profound urgency of what is upon us, but there exists a sharpness in the air, beyond the new normal of a November morning.

It is difficult to comprehend the massive pent-up force potential of a hundred years of war and state-ordered theft, a hundred years of global nationalism, a hundred years of the voracious passion of the state for the bones and marrow of free-thinking people. Barriers to the state’s inevitable metastasis have begun to fall away, and what was once hidden from view is now partially revealed. The zombification of the United States is upon us. Our generations will witness and experience the transmogrification of something we thought we knew and trusted into a walking-dead centralized horror intent on our personal destruction.


But it’s not all bad.

Humble gratitude and community appreciation prevail in many parts of the country. The nationalization of a "day" for gratitude and community solidarity must of course be suspect. We are told that Thanksgiving traces back to the Pilgrims, but its dedication by the state in midst of a bloody confederation crisis in 1863 was neither humble nor community oriented. It was the "great Union Festival of America."

In that spirit, all week we will hear posers in houses of worship share their gratefulness for soldiers that the American president and his unelected advisors have, for decades, sent around the world to kill, defraud, and steal. Politicians, state historians, and even otherwise honest people will tell us that we are the freest nation on the planet and that we should thank our past and present political classes for this freedom. Some will vaguely recall the official spirit of the first Europeans to North America, and many more will eat, drink and watch football. In carb and tryptophan-induced comas, we will fall asleep and dream.

Here are a few things I will do this week.

I will remember that my liberty exists not because I deserve it, nor because someone else fought for it. My liberty – and that of my children, my grandchildren, and my neighbors – is a birthright from the Creator.


I will recall that my Christian faith consistently teaches that Jesus, even at an early age, stood wholly without fear in front of kings, princes, high priests, wealthy men, and powerful bureaucrats.

I will marvel that despite every state centralized effort to dumb us down, to make us feel less and fear more, to destroy our intellectual, moral, and economic independence – for all of that, the fundamental sense of justice in this country has not yet been murdered by the state. No American truly believes that the government has the right to hunt down and destroy their child or brother on an executive command and a rumor. No person in this country celebrates a social welfare state that consciously and enthusiastically increases poverty and dependence. No person in this country believes that the freest nation in the world would also be the one that incarcerates 1 of every 100 of its citizens.

I will be happy that through family conversations about the so-called "1%," the D.C banksters, the ratchet effect of our warfare/welfare state, the legal evil of congressional insider trading, federal school loan serfdom and a hundred other things – Americans of all ages are beginning to understand that libertarian class analysis is the only way to truly understand American history. Sheldon Richman explains:


The government’s coercive taxing power necessarily creates two classes: those who create and those who consume the wealth expropriated and transferred by that power. Those who create the wealth naturally want to keep it and devote it to their own purposes. Those who wish to expropriate it look for ever more-clever ways to acquire it without inciting resistance. One of those ways is the spreading of an elaborate ideology of statism, which teaches that the people are the state and that therefore they are only paying themselves when they pay taxes.

I will be grateful that statism is becoming a dirty word.

I will be humbled and inspired by the wisdom, ingenuity and common sense of my neighbors, both those over the fence, and over the internet. I’ve learned more philosophy, more history, mastered more skills and spoken substantively with more people in the past decade than in all four of my previous ones. This exponential change in the ownership and access to knowledge and truth is the fundamental strength of our coming revolution. We are winning already, and we haven’t even begun to fight.

In terms of politics, I will continue to be profoundly amazed and grateful for the living example of Ron Paul – an honest and humble man of faith and courage who inspires a hundred million Americans. I will be grateful that his words are being borrowed and repeated by every pretender to the Washington Throne.

Thanksgiving – simple, heartfelt gratitude – creates its own bounty, liberates and nourishes individuals, families, and communities, and blesses everyone. As we work towards real liberty in America, and as we wage our long battle to restore the republic, the mindset of thanksgiving powerfully demarcates us from our enemy. That enemy, the ravenous and soulless state, thankful for nothing and coveting everything, is less powerful than we suspect. The real nature of power is an open secret. And if you learned any of this, in part, or in full, because of Lew Rockwell and the Mises Institute, like me, you’ve got one more item to add to your Thanksgiving list.





November 22, 2011

LRC columnist Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D. [send her mail], a retired USAF lieutenant colonel, blogs occasionally at Liberty and Power and The Beacon. To receive automatic announcements of new articles, click here or join her Facebook page. She is currently running for Congress in Virginia's 6th district.

Copyright © 2011 Karen Kwiatkowski

Quoted from senders

http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/uscongress/ss/Wealthiest-Members-of-Congress.htm