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A Tale of Two Representatives
Let’s look first to representative Carolyn Maloney, a New York democrat who has had it with Rumsfeld. Maloney is sick and tired of waiting for the Department of Defense to implement a system intended to track sexual-assault incidents that take place in the military. She says that the Pentagon has been slow to fully implement the system, at least in part, because it would push unflattering stories about military assaults into the public light. While the Pentagon says the system should be fully operation by next summer, Maloney and the bill’s co-sponsers want it up and running by January 1, 2007. And the bill includes an interesting form of motivation on this point - for every day after January 1 that the system is not running, the bill would have one grand removed from Rumsfeld’s personal paycheck.
However, Rummy won’t be able to use his pennies to make up for the lost salary, if Arizona representative Jim Kolbe has his way. Kolbe is sick and tired of that damn penny filling up people’s pockets and purses, and he’s introduced a bill that would require all cash transactions to be rounded up or down to a neat little 5 cent multiple, effectively eliminating the need, use or purpose of the wee lil’ penny. This is the second time Kolbe has tried to kill the penny, filing similar legislation five years ago which never made it to the floor for a vote. Even though zinc costs have increased almost two-fold since then, this legislation seems likely to suffer the same demise. And of course, the motivation behind Kolbe’s bill has everything to do with the rising cost of zinc (the penny’s main component) and nothing to do with the fact that his home state is the nation’s largest producer of copper (the nickel’s main component), right? Yeah, thought so.
Comments
Actually, the penny sucks. It's time for it to go.
Posted by AER | July 19, 2006 1:35 PM