From J.D. Tuccille at Reason Hit’n’Run:
But I still think I’m correct in looking at the presidential race and seeing anything but an easy call. Strictly speaking, I see two midgets locked in a slap fight, and the loser is us as we confront the fact that one of them will be left standing.
Well said.
If you live in a swing state like I do, you have probably seen the ad from the Obama campaign entitled “First Law.” The claim in this ad is that women are “paid 77 cents on the dollar for doing the same work as men.” This claim (a real pet peeve of mine) is nothing new; the Obama campaign is repeating the same myth that Leftists and so-called feminists have been making for years.
Here is the ad:
The researchers at FactCheck.org concluded that the claim that women are being paid 77 cents on the dollar for doing the “same” work isn’t true and to the extent there is a gap has little to do with discrimination on the part of employers.
Breaking last year’s figures down by occupation, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research showed women doing the “same work” (that is, within the same occupational groupings) often make much more than 77 percent of their male counterparts’ median weekly earnings. The IWPR is affiliated with the graduate program in Public Policy and Women’s Studies at the George Washington University and says it seeks “to address the needs of women.”
The IWPR study found that “median earnings are lower than men’s in nearly all occupations.” But for the most part, the gap for “the same work” is not as wide as Obama’s figure suggests. Of the 36 different occupational categories in the study, in only seven were women paid 77 percent of the pay of men or less.”
[…]
Economists have identified a host of factors — other than discrimination by employers — that lead to lower earnings for women. These include such things as women choosing to work fewer overtime hours, choosing jobs that offer more “family friendly” fringe benefits in lieu of higher pay, and choosing to leave the workforce for years to rear children. Whether these choices are voluntary, or unfairly forced on women by society, is a good question. But they are not discrimination by employers.
All the researchers at FactCheck.org did was determine an apples to apples comparison rather than lump all occupations men and women have and calculate an average. This may be a difficult concept for the Occupy crowd and Leftists in general but I do not want to live in a society where doctors and lawyers make the exact same money as janitors and store clerks. As pointed out in the article, the reason that women on average make less than men is because they choose not to work in the higher paying career fields, don’t work as much overtime, and generally have larger and more frequent gaps in their employment histories than men.
Let me break this down even more. Person A who has been an engineer for 10 years with few or no gaps in his or her employment history is probably going to make more than Person B who has been out of work for years at a time over the same period. Could we really say that Person B is doing the “same work” as Person A since both are engineers? I would have to say no. Person A has more job experience as an engineer than Person B. Person A should be paid more because of the additional job experience (provided that Person A is a more competent engineer than Person B).
Consider the above next time you hear someone complaining that women should be paid equal for equal work. More often than not, the “work” isn’t actually equal to begin with.
“If a mandate was the solution, we could try that to solve homelessness by mandating everybody buy a house. The reason they don’t have a house is they don’t have the money.” – Sen. Barack Obama during the 2008 Democrat Primary.
A long, long, time ago, way back during the 2008 primaries, then Sen. Barack Obama attacked then Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. John Edwards for the mandate provisions of their respective healthcare plans. Sen. Obama went on to explain how the RomneyCare mandates were not helping indigents in Massachusetts acquire the healthcare they needed leaving some without health insurance and paying the fine.
Fast forward to the present: President Barack Obama’s signature legislation, the so-called Affordable Care Act (A.K.A. ObamaCare, modeled after RomneyCare) is upheld by the Supreme Court, the main question being whether or not the federal government can force mandate individuals to purchase a product. Meanwhile on the Republican side, with about a dozen or so candidates to choose from in the course of the 2012 campaign, Gov. Mitt Romney will be the G.O.P. nominee who pledges to repeal ObamaCare if he is elected the next President of the United States. Mitt Romney, the man behind the very policy that Obama criticized and now embraces at the federal level.
Now isn’t politics fun!
Over at Red State, Erick Ericson theorizes that Chief Justice John Roberts joined the majority opinion as a way to put ObamaCare back into the hands of the political branches to decide the law’s fate:
The Democrats have been saying for a while that individual pieces of Obamacare are quite popular. With John Roberts’ opinion, the repeal fight takes place on GOP turf, not Democrat turf. The all or nothing repeal has always been better ground for the GOP and now John Roberts has forced everyone onto that ground. Oh, and as I mentioned earlier, because John Roberts concluded it [the individual mandate] was a tax, the Democrats cannot filibuster its repeal because of the same reconciliation procedure the Democrats used to pass it.
It seems very, very clear to me in reviewing John Roberts’ decision that he is playing a much longer game than us and can afford to with a life tenure. And he probably just handed Mitt Romney the White House.
Our own Doug Mataconis said he “would not be surprised to see it be a 6-3 decision” way back in April for the following reason:
Ordinarily, the most senior Justice in the majority gets to decide who writes the majority opinion. However, if the Chief Justice is in the majority he gets to make that decision. If Kennedy ends up voting to uphold the mandate then I could see Chief Justice Roberts joining him so that he can write the opinion himself and make the precedential value of the decision as limited as possible.
Erick Erickson also mentioned on his radio program that many conservatives and libertarians who aren’t thrilled with Romney as the nominee will put aside their objections and vote for him if it means repealing ObamaCare.
I hate to say it but I think Erickson has a point. ObamaCare being upheld is a game changer. Prior to this decision that was supposed to strike down all or part of ObamaCare, I was absolutely certain that I would enthusiastically vote for the Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson rather than settle for the lesser of the two evils. With ObamaCare being upheld, now I have to say I’m not so sure. I’m not normally a single issue voter but if ObamaCare isn’t stopped and soon, we will be stuck with it for at least a generation.
The problem is though, it might already be too late. Several things have to happen just right. First Romney must be elected and the GOP must take control of the Senate and hold the House. Second, we have to trust that Romney and the Republicans in congress will actually follow through. We’ve been disappointed before.
I’ve officially lost count of the number of times I’ve heard or read a media source assert that Operation Fast and Furious was botched. It wasn’t. It did exactly what it was designed to do: put American guns in the hands of criminals so they could terrorize and kill innocent Mexicans with them and get caught doing so. When they were caught, the guns would be traced back to American gun shops “proving” that smuggling was a huge problem that had to be solved by any means necessary.
Were it not for the whistleblowers, the Obama administration would have built a gun control propaganda campaign upon a pile of dead bodies–exactly has they had planned to. Every single dead body was the result of things going right in the operation, not wrong.
So, why is the media continuing to insist that it was botched? Simple. It allows them to keep the truth of the Republican investigation out of the narrative. They can frame the investigation as looking into a mistake, like so many others. In reality, it’s an investigation looking at the administration’s clear intent to sacrifice innocent and unwilling lives for its own political agenda.
When you hear the word botched, know that it’s an attempt to weave a tale of incompetence when the real story is one of evil.
