House of Eratosthenes

So just in case I missed it, the Barack Obama campaign sent me an e-mail letting me know of the instantly notorious “Life of Julia” slideshow/presentation. One thing immediately jumped out at me: Twenty-four hours previous, when I viewed the images myself, I noticed all these Obama policies affecting the life of the fictional/composite/faceless/cartoon-figure Julia, had something to do with eliminating options for somebody else. Julia benefits from a service, because money was taken forcibly from taxpayers — or borrowed from her son Zachary in the form of a swelling public debt — to provide it. Julia is given coverage or contraceptives, because her health insurance provider has no choice but to offer it, thanks to Obama.

Who is President, it seems, throughout all of the 64 years of the show. But let’s ignore that for now.

So after the slide show presentation about force force force force force, I couldn’t help noticing this e-mail blurb telling me all about it, was full of allow allow allow allow allow. Either someone’s lost track of what they’re doing here, or the packaging is strikingly different from the contents. I think it’s the latter. To be clear, no, I’m not thinking Obama’s team rolls out of bed in the morning and asks “How can we force people to do things, today, that they don’t want to do?” Rather, I think that is a natural consequence of looking for new ways for people to sue people.

This Lilly Ledbetter act is a perfect example. What a public relations win that is. People get all squeamish with feminism when it starts insisting on free contraceptives, abortion-on-demand, airlines should be forced to hire fat flight attendants…but…first and foremost, Americans are fair. We don’t think it’s right that someone should be paid for the same job at a lower scale, just because she’s a woman, or has a different skin color or sexual preference. The very thought of such a thing offends us deeply. Nationally. And so this part of feminism has never become unpopular. It won’t, and it shouldn’t.

But one has to wonder — how come in 2012 it’s still part of the fight? And the truth is, it’s not. The Lilly Ledbetter law doesn’t equalize pay. It changes the parameters under which lawsuits may be filed. I said democrats are constantly looking for new ways for people to sue people, and that’s what Ledbetter is all about. It changes the rules under which such a lawsuit may be filed; not altogether doing away with the statute of limitations, but certainly weakening it. Essentially, making it legally very dangerous to hire women.

For all the noise made about it, I’m not sure why it was needed. I asked Wikipedia about it, and the article on Ms. Ledbetter pointed to this guy over here who said…

Ledbetter admitted in her sworn deposition that “different people that I worked for along the way had always told me that my pay was extremely low” compared to her peers. She testified specifically that a superior had told her in 1992 that her pay was lower than that of other area managers, and that she had learned the amount of the difference by 1994 or 1995. She added that she had told her supervisor in 1995 that “I needed to earn an increase in pay” because “I wanted to get in line with where my peers were, because… at that time I knew definitely that they were all making a thousand [dollars] at least more per month than I was.”

Yet…she waited to sue until 1998, when her retirement was imminent. This was well over five years after she had learned of the pay disparities. It was also after a supervisor whom she blamed for much of the alleged discrimination had died, making it impossible for the employer to refute those allegations.

Indeed, Ledbetter’s lawyer didn’t even argue that the Supreme Court should extend to her claim, under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, its rule in some other contexts that time limits should not begin to run until the employee discovers the alleged discrimination. “Because Ledbetter does not argue that such a rule would change the outcome in her case,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority, “we have no occasion to address this issue.”

As Alito explained, the logic underlying the relatively strict congressional time limit was that lawsuits filed years after the alleged discrimination — and after key witnesses have moved on or died, memories have faded, and records such as performance evaluations have been discarded — make it difficult or impossible for defendants to disprove false or misleading discrimination claims.

It’s less than clear, by the way, that Ledbetter was a victim of discrimination at all. Her years of poor performance evaluations, plus repeated layoffs affecting her eligibility for raises, convinced a federal magistrate judge that her relatively low pay did not prove sex discrimination. The jury disagreed and awarded Ledbetter back pay and punitive damages. Maybe the jury was right; maybe the magistrate judge was.

So in truth, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 does not allow women to stand up for their right to equal pay. The first thing to be realized when you read a sentence like that is, in progressive language, “stand up for” always means destroying something. It’s either protesters interfering with the lives of perfect strangers by smashing storefront windows, or stalling a commute on a bridge somewhere, or else it’s litigation.

Next to the bin Laden kill, the Ledbetter Act may be Obama’s most promising path to a second term. It’s got everything. It works from the fair-pay attribute of feminism, which is by far its most appealing one; and it does what left-wingers like most, which is to make it easier for lawsuits to happen. Also, it confers special super-rights on females without singling the females out by name. Wage discrimination lawsuit — that’s a chick, right? Everybody knows that’s a chick. Okay, you don’t need to worry about statutory time limitations when you file these lawsuits. Takes chicks extra time to make up their minds, ya know.

Upton Sinclair, looking back on his experiences in political life as a socialist, said,

The American People will take Socialism, but they won’t take the label.

I think he was right. But it needs an update: The American people will always love freedom, but they have a blind spot recognizing attacks upon it. It speaks volumes, to me, that the focus group that Obama’s people used to test the Life of Julia fanfare, seems to think so highly of this concept of allowing things. I’m doubting like the dickens that the Tea Party or the right-wing radio talk show hosts were aptly represented in such a group; I think it was a moderate to left-leaning focus group. Even there, Americans are nuts for possibilities and opportunities.

There is hope there. Obama had to lie about what He did.

Hey Republicans, this is how you win. You following along, here? The election is about allow-allow-allow versus force-force-force…if you do a good job making sure your policies are different from the incumbent President’s, then you’re on the right side of this thing. Americans want to be able to do things, but they’re not wild about a feeding-frenzy of lawsuits to make that happen. Just tell the truth about who’s doing what.

I’m upping my previous fee for this valuable political consultancy, from $0.00 for the last time I helped you out, by thirty percent…times are tough, and hey, I’m a dude, I figure I’m worth it.

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“…Allows Women to Stand Up For Their Right to Equal Pay for Equal Work…”Saturday, May 5th, 2012

“…Allows Women to Stand Up For Their Right to Equal Pay for Equal Work…”
Saturday, May 5th, 2012