Gallup’s polling on Congressional Approval Rating shows it is stuck in the teens. This sort of makes a contempt of Congress finding worthless, when over 80% of the people have contempt for Congress. People are not going to get too upset about anyone accused of lying to Congress until they see some Congresscritters punished for lying to the people.

The members of both Houses of Congress make a minimum of $174,000 per annum. That’s better than three times the median income of US households. They get health insurance and other benefits on top of that. For that kind of pay I don’t think it is unreasonable to expect them to spend 40 hours per week at their job. I’ll give them Federal holidays and two weeks vacation, but every time you turn around they are ‘in recess’. They spend more time in recess than a kindergarten.

Nothing is getting done, and they aren’t even trying. I would grant them a round trip ticket home every two years, but they seem to be traveling home at taxpayer expense nearly every week. The job is in Washington. If you don’t want to stay in Washington, don’t run for national office.

Contempt for Congress certificates might make some money for someone with some skill with graphics. The market is over 240 million Americans.

Digby’s place, Hullabaloo, is currently unreachable. There is a legacy referral to “haloscan.com” somewhere in her template, and Haloscan is pining for the fjords. I assume that that the last remnants expired overnight.

The BBC had a nice piece on Steve Wilhite’s campaign to get people to pronounce his creation, the Graphics Interchange Format [GIF], the way he intended “JIF”, a soft “G” or “J” sound, not the hard “G”. As is often the case with acronyms, the meaning was created after the abbreviation. Wilhite was paying homage to his favorite peanut butter, Jif, but was forced to use a “G” for it to be plausible.

The articles says that Pepsi, Jif, and Doritos were the principle foods of the coders. It must be a graphics thing, because I always went with Coke, Snickers, and Fritos. Of course, I changed to coffee and doughnuts as I got older.