CONGRESSIONAL PAY RAISE: Howard Fienberg emails this bit from Leno last night:

Jay Leno: “Is this unbelievable? Congress just voted to give themselves a pay raise. Another pay raise. This is their fourth pay raise in four years. Anybody here had a pay raise every year? No. And yesterday, House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, he defended the congressional pay raise. He said Congress works hard. And all of that hard work has certainly paid off, huh? Yeah. Let’s recognize a job well done. We are at war. Terrorists all over the place. Wall Street’s collapsing. People are out of work. Retirement funds are gone. Imagine if they hadn’t goofed off. Oh, my God.

“On one hand, Congress does need this pay raise, you know, since those Enron checks dried up. You know, those are gone now, so they don’t have that coming in anymore.

“I got a better idea. Instead of a salary, let’s put Congress on commission. They don’t get paid unless they do something right.”

You tell ’em, Jay. Personally, I don’t think that members of Congress are overpaid. But I think that their sleaze in pursuing pay raises is a small, and clearly visible, example of their sleaze in pursuing lots of other ends. All too often, the goal is to make sure the public doesn’t know what’s going on until it’s too late.