Update: A friend pointed out how misleading the Strib's headline is. Having refused and returned two years' worth of autmatic raises--about $9000 for this year--Walz gets paid less than $175,000. He's actually freezing his own pay at a lower salary.[end update]
More proof that we're having a cold, cold winter: the slow pace of news about rural representatives reaching the under-heated innertube connections at the cash-poor Star Tribune.
Right now, the lag time is two weeks.
As loyal readers of Bluestem Prairie know, we've posting since December 23 about how Walz has returned two years of automatic pay raises--each time when district papers editorialized against the automatic pay raises without mentioning than their own congressman had not taken the raise himself--and had continued to return an earlier hike,
On January 14, we noted how he had signed on to the bill to block an automatic raise for 2010. The Minnesota Independent picked up on the story that day, and other blogs noted the news as well.
Earlier tonight, the Star Tribune reported Two Minnesota Democrats sign up to freeze their $174,000 salaries. Excerpts:
In a call for members to share the burden in what may be the deepest economic recession since the Great Depression, Rep. Harry Mitchell, D-Ariz., introduced the Stop the Congressional Pay Raise Act earlier this month. The bill would halt the scheduled pay increase for 2010.. . .
. . .Walz, who has returned his salary increases to the U.S. Treasury each year since he was first elected in 2006, said he realized a few thousand dollars wouldn't fix the economy or pay down the country's $10 trillion debt. "But every little bit helps," he said.
"We're all in this together and now is not the time for a pay raise," Walz said. . . .
Nothing like breaking news, or molasses in January.
Photo: It's slow going to haul the news in with this rig during a winter like this one.
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