If lemmings could understand human language, as you watched them run
towards the cliff you could run with them, trying to reason with them, telling
them if they would just stop and look at the evidence and think about it, they’d
hightail it in the opposite direction. But because they are lemmings, because they
feel they should be making that dash regardless of the truth that awaits, they
wouldn’t stop. Which is why if she could choose to be an animal, state Sen. Karen Peterson would feel right at
home as a lemming.
Peterson, a staunch ally of Pres. Barack Obama,
recently
took command of Louisiana’s Democrats in a state where the embattled Obama
remains extraordinarily unpopular and the party unusually inert. She pledged to
take the party even further to the political left, its steady drift in that direction
already having weakened it, mimicking the actions of Obama at the national
level.
As a legislator, this session she signed on to the usual moonbattery as
is her wont, but one of her sanitized obnoxious ideas actually made it all the
way to the governor’s desk. Her HB 577
came in as a related measure to her HB 568,
which was based upon the sham that structural imperfections in society and
economics discriminate institutionally against women by forcing them to be paid
less than men for comparable work, limited in this bill to government positions.
Through careful,
valid research this myth long ago and repeatedly has been disproven.
HB 568 predictably went nowhere as a result, but HB 577 was an attempt
to try to score propaganda points derived from this falsehood nonetheless. It
was to set up a study commission concerning some vaguely-defined “wage disparities
between men and women in certain public sectors” that would find “factors”
alleged to cause this, address “consequences” of the presumed problem, and then
invite “action, including … legislation” intended to fix the assumed problems.
HB 577, then, served as a sanitized version of HB 568 which itself in concept
allied with Obama’s latest
tactic designed to distract from his record, the “Paycheck Fairness Act,”
which would make it much easier for suits against employers to sue for
discrimination in pay on the invalid bases already identified as such through
research. The tactic in all cases is to try to promote as an election-year ploy
a (to date unconvincing) narrative that somehow Republican candidates (despite
a number of them being women) for federal office are against women.
The indirectness of HB 577 in connecting it to this more radical idea allowed
it to pass out of both chambers, but with the commission proposed to begin work
in August, it could have provided some ammunition for Democrats in federal
elections (although given their extraordinarily weak position in Louisiana it
seemed highly unlikely anywhere enough to make any difference) but also in
regards to state politics potentially for years ahead through any recommendations
that could find their way into legislation. In the process, it managed to
obtain a judgment of no fiscal impact from the Legislative Fiscal Office, because
it would rely on existing staff at the Louisiana Workforce Commission and the
cooperation of other agencies, key to flipping enough of the more easily-cowed Republicans
in the House to approve, after one failure, the conference report.
But then Gov. Bobby
Jindal called that fiction to prevent political points from being scored at taxpayer expense. He received from the LWC its judgment that the
extra work entailed would cost $300,000 extra over the 18-month predicted
lifespan of the bill, and vetoed it on that
basis. Of course, this sent Peterson into dyspepsia (the written statement
version here),
but the ranting obviously serves its political purpose.
1 comment:
More garbage from Jeff, this time with the bonus idiocy that there is no sexism reflected in paychecks. Any moron with at least two neurons in his head to bang together knows that sexism is real, and the gender pay gap too. Hell, there's even a Wiki page pulling together studies. There's a great Jeff-esque line where he points to Thomas Sowell of all people as performing "careful, valid research," which is Jeff's way of saying that if some hateful conservative says something then it therefore is empirically sound and unquestionable. You'd think a college professor of all people would have a shred of dignity to put a little more window dressing on his bigotry.
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