Sacagawea dollar coin madness

I was reading an article in the September 24th issue of Coin World about legislation that has passed both the Senate and the House of Representatives that would authorize annually changing reverse designs for the Sacagawea dollars beginning in 2009. This is supposedly designed to help increase the circulation of the aforementioned dollar coins.

With this new legislation (as long as Bush doesn't veto it, which I doubt he would) we'll have four presidential dollar coins as well as annually changing reverse designs on the Sacagawea dollar. There are a few issues tied up in this that I must comment upon:

1) Does anyone find it odd that Congress acted to create this in the interest of "helping increase awareness and demand" for a dollar coin no one is interested in while ignoring legitimate coinage issues. This being the striking of 1 and 5 cent pieces at a significant loss (I believe that production costs including distribution are pushing close to twice face value for both of those coins). Why has Congress ignored this issue while finding the time to "fix" the Sacagawea dollar.

2) There is also legislation in Congress now that would force the Mint to remove edge lettering from the Presidential dollar coins. The sponsor of this bill (whose name I forget) was quoted as having responded to many upset constituents who were bothered by the moving of "In God We Trust" to the edge of the coin. At the same time, this new legislation has the new Sacagawea dollars looking like the current Presidential dollars with edge inscription. How ridiculous is this?

3) I could go on about this for a long time but the reason for the failure of the Sacagawea and Presidential dollars (yes, they've only been in circulation since mid February but I am already willing to label them as failures) is not a lack of awareness or lack of interesting designs but rather than people prefer the dollar bill. I am all for eliminating the dollar bill and going to a dollar coin: its cheaper and would eliminate some demand for quarters (more on that later), however, the real issue is that no one will use the dollar coins on a regular basis until they are forced to do so.

With all of this said I am really discouraged by Congress' lack of focus on solving issues that need to be solved rather than wasting time pandering to special interest groups. We don't need more coins but rather more coherent and logical coin policy.