Okay, I yell a lot. I know that. I don’t really yell a lot in person but on the page. To paraphrase RFK, there is much to yell about.
News item out of Wisconsin: according to what seems a legitimate news story, Wisconsin’s asshole governor, Scott Walker, has “repealed the state’s Equal Pay law.” It’s not clear how it’s possible for a governor to repeal a law, but evidently it is in Wisconsin.
Michelle Goldberg, writing on the Daily Beast, quotes Republican Glenn Grothman who claims that there is no differential between the sexes when it comes to pay. Grothman’s source for this is Ann Coulter.
Yes, Ann Coulter with ‘facts’ is as reliable as Dick Cheney with a shotgun, but even if that’s not so, Grothman believes that money is more important to men than to women.
“You could argue that money is more important for men,” he said. “I think a guy in their (sic) first job, maybe because they (sic) expect to be a breadwinner someday, may be a little more money-conscious. To attribute everything to a so-called bias in the workplace is just not true.”
Coulter, the useless twit who several years back made the cover of Time Magazine, probably sending Claire Booth Luce spinning in her grave, once wrote that liberals ought to be shot in order to send a message to the people on the left. She said later that she was only joking.
You may have noticed that there’s a pattern among these people. They call for the murder of their political opponents and then say they were just kidding. Limbaugh does it all the time. Mobsters used to claim that, as well.
I’d say that it might be a fine idea to shoot Coulter, Grothman, and Walker, except that if we’ve figured out anything over the past dozen or so years it’s that stupid people are incapable of learning, so no message is likely to resonate and they’d simply replace these idiots from the idiot factory now running full-time in South Carolina.
As John Hiatt might say, in one ear and out the other, nothing there to stop it, brother.
I used to say that the idiot factory was in Indiana but I got a nice letter from a reader who objected. He was from Indiana and wanted to know why I was always picking on his old home state. Besides, it took a lot of stupid people to elected Grothman, and they weren’t from Indiana.
The data on income disparity is actually quite compelling. Women earn 76 cents on the dollar for what a man earns for the same job. This, after all those years of fighting for women’s rights. As Jesse Jackson famously reminded us, women cannot buy bread cheaper, women cannot buy milk cheaper, women cannot buy meat cheaper...
Of course, Jackson is a figure of fun to the right wing, which hates and fears blacks and pretends its doesn’t. And women don’t need to be able to buy bread cheaper because if they were staying home with their heads in the oven their big, strong men would be buying it for them.
So I yell about things. As it happens, I’m a male caucasian, and I’ve had plenty of breaks. I can’t even imagine how angry I’d be if I were a woman and had to listen to this shit every day. I suspect I’d want to throw Walker and Coulter and their ilk out the window just to hear them scream on the way down.
I know that’s not healthy. But, Lord, it feels good to write it.

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