Lame-duck Pennsylvania lawmakers shouldn't be permitted special perks beyond those they already receive by virtue of holding office.

But that is about to happen as five lame ducks prepare to attend a four-day legislative conference later this month in Nashville, Tenn.

Since the lawmakers in question will be leaving office on Nov. 30, they have no long-term use for the conference. Thus, state taxpayers should not have to foot the bill for their attendance.

If they want to attend, they should pay their own way.

The five lawmakers in question who will be attending the annual meeting of the National Conference of State Legislatures Aug. 15-18 at the Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center are Reps. Ken Ruffing, D-West Mifflin; James Shaner, D-Fayette; Lynn Herman, R-Centre; Tom Corrigan, D-Bucks; and Mark McNaughton, R-Dauphin.

Actually, any legislator can choose to attend the conference and bill the state. Not surprisingly, Pennsylvania will be well-represented, with a 32-member delegation scheduled to attend. That delegation will include 17 legislators and 15 staff members.

Eric Epstein of Rock the Capitol, one of the citizens groups that was formed in July 2005 to protest a 16 percent to 34 percent legislative pay raise that the General Assembly approved at 2 a.m. July 7, 2005, without prior notice or public debate, put the conference attendance by the lame ducks into proper perspective.

"It's an incredibly insensitive parting shot to voters," he said. "For them, this trip is just one more bite out of a rotten apple."

The cost of the four-day trip will be between $1,200 and $1,500, depending on a person's mode of transportation and costs for lodging and food. The conference registration fees are $425 for legislators and $495 for staffers.

After the taxpayers' outrage over the pay-raise vote, most people might have thought that legislators — lame duck and otherwise — would try to project a better image to their constituents. Not so.

Lawmakers' priority of serving themselves first still is alive and well in the legislature.

Lawrence County Judge Thomas Piccione deserves the gratitude of people in Butler County, as well as those in his home county, for the sentence he meted out to child molester Jerry Valecko, a former youth baseball team volunteer in Center Township.Piccione sentenced Valecko to serve five to 10 years in prison plus five years of probation for assaulting an 11-year-old boy inside a construction trailer.What earns Piccione this cheer is that he ordered that the Lawrence County sentence be served consecutively, not concurrently, with prison sentences Valecko is serving for child-molestation crimes in Butler County. That means the sentence handed down by Piccione won't begin until Valecko completes the four- to eight-year Butler County sentence.Some judges might have opted for the concurrent option, meaning that Valecko would have gotten out of prison sooner.Valecko doesn't deserve such consideration; he is believed to have victimized 12 children.Regarding the Lawrence County case, Valecko pleaded guilty in June to involuntary deviate sexual intercourse with a minor and corruption of minors. The longer he is in prison, away from children, the better.

Pennsylvania Partnerships for Children (PPC), which dedicates itself to improving the health, education and well-being of Pennsylvania's children, is to be commended for calling attention to the fact that there still are more than 133,000 in the commonwealth without health coverage — a finding disclosed by a Pennsylvania Department of Insurance survey.But not deserving of praise are the holes in the system that allow that troubling situation to exist. If state politicians had focused on this problem rather than on ways to milk the system by trying to boost their pay and improve their perks, that 133,000 figure might be smaller.State lawmakers should be spending more time devising ways to get the word out about the availability of Medical Assistance (MA) or the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) to the parents or guardians of the children in question. There are no excuses for this situation having been allowed to continue to such an extent.The commonwealth finances MA and CHIP with both federal and state funds. Meanwhile, 68 percent of uninsured children are reported to be between the ages of 11 and 18.As PPC points out, children who have health insurance are more likely to be immunized, receive regular checkups and get prompt treatment for common childhood ailments. Children who have health insurance are less likely to use costly emergency room services for common childhood ailments that should be treated by primary care physicians. Also, children who have health coverage have better school attendance.It's great that there is a group like PPC looking out on behalf of the state's children. It's an embarrassment that there has been such little success on the state's part in terms of getting the word out.