Monday pay-hike chat

• An opinion piece in today's Inquirer, written by a Pennsylvania legislator, complains that the coverage has overblown this issue and portrayed it unfairly. He makes several good points, including that the raise was part of a complicated budget negotiation in which many other good things were achieved, that much legislation is finalized in the wee hours of the day (and thus that this was hardly an attempt to sneak a pay-raise through in dark of night), and that the pay raise received plenty of discussion beforehand. He ends the piece thusly:

  Despite all the hard political lessons I've learned in my life, I'm still naïve enough to hope that someday the news media will become as obsessed with, say, people living in poverty or the flaws in our criminal justice system as they are with legislative salaries.

  Fair enough point -- I can hardly disagree.
  
  
• Despite the above, the public continues to feel hard-done-by, as evidenced by the brief letter at the bottom here, which cites some old aphorisms in its condemnation of governmental greed.
  
  
• Finally, John Baer chips in some more, this time appealing to the political self-preservation instincts of the Republican leadership to repeal the current-year portion of the raises in response to the rising consciousness of the outraged public.