CONGRESS HITS 9% APPROVAL RATING

Ouch!

The percentage of voters who give Congress good or excellent ratings has fallen to single digits for the first time in Rasmussen Reports tracking history. This month, just 9% say Congress is doing a good or excellent job. Most voters (52%) say Congress is doing a poor job, which ties the record high in that dubious category.

Last month, 11% of voters gave the legislature good or excellent ratings. Congress has not received higher than a 15% approval rating since the beginning of 2008

Soon their approval rating will be lower than the unemployment rate. And on a related note, Congress is declaring war on bed bugs.

The United States House of Representatives is currently considering the bill H.R. 6068 titled The Don't Let the Bed Bugs Bite Act of 2008. Thats right, no issue is too small for the United States government! The act aims to appropriate grant money to state governments in order to "conduct inspections of lodging facilities" among other things.

The bill cites seven findings that are used as justification for the money and time spent on this project:

(1) on February 12, 2008, a thorough inspection of a hotel in Nashua, New Hampshire, found that 16 of 117 rooms were infested with bedbugs;

(2) cimex lectularius, commonly known as bed bugs, travel through the ventilation systems in multi-unit establishments causing exponential infestations;

(3) female bedbugs can lay up to 5 eggs in a day and 500 during a lifetime;

(4) bedbug populations in the United States have increased by 500 percent in the past few years;

(5) in 2004, New York City had 377 bedbug violations and from July to November of 2005, a 5-month span, there were 449 violations reported in the city, an alarming increase in infestations over a short period of time;

(6) in a study of 700 hotel rooms between 2002 and 2006, 25 percent of hotels were found to be in need of bedbug treatment; and

(7) bed bugs possess all of the necessary prerequisites for being capable of passing diseases from one host to another.

A Congress that's more willing to declare war on bed bugs than on murderers. Any wonder why that approval rating keeps dropping?