[VIDEO] White House’s Pay Gap for Women: Watch Valerie Jarrett’s Evasive Response When Confronted by Carly Fiorina
Posted: January 21, 2015 Filed under: Economics, Mediasphere, White House | Tags: Barack Obama, Car Allowance Rebate System, Carly Fiorina, Democratic Party (United States), Equal pay for equal work, Harry Reid, Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, State of the Union address, Valerie Jarrett, White House 2 CommentsNoah Rothman
writes: As part of President Barack Obama’s annual effort to provoke Republicans and cheer up disheartened Democrats, the president touched on a theme that he has deployed effectively in the past that is designed to inflame tensions between the genders: The idea that women are systematically discriminated against in the workplace….(read the full text here, at Hot Air)
“The average female employee at the White House earns about $78,400, while the average male employee earns about $88,600. That’s a gap of 13 percent – the same percentage as 2009, when the average woman made about $72,700 and the average man earned about $82,000…”
…By the administration’s own dubious calculations, the White House pays women less than their male counterparts in similar positions – a condition that persists long after it was first revealed by investigative reporters.
“…Women tend to hold more junior positions than men, and among White House leadership just 53 female officials make more than $100,000 compared to 87 males who do.”
— CBS News report from June 2014
White House advisor Valerie Jarrett was confronted over this disparity, and the hypocrisy associated with the president’s regular hectoring of others for a sin in which he also indulges, by potential Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina on Wednesday in an appearance on MSNBC.
“I’m also struck by the fact that the single greatest impediment to equal pay for equal work is the seniority system, which pays not on merit, not on performance, but on time and grade.”
— Carly Fiorina
Fiorina noted that, not only are there already anti-discrimination laws on the books and if women are truly being discriminated against, they have a legal recourse. Moreover, she added, the president is not leading on the issue because he cannot even address the pay disparity in his own White House based on the administration’s problematic calculations.
“And who is it that supports the seniority system? Unions. Government bureaucracies. The vast majority of constituencies that the Democratic Party represents and who supports the Democratic Party.”
— Carly Fiorina
“In the White House, women do earn equal pay for equal work,” Jarrett replied unconvincingly. Read the rest of this entry »
Vice President Biden Arrives Early To Set Up State Of The Union Fog Machine
Posted: January 20, 2015 Filed under: Humor, Mediasphere, Politics, White House | Tags: Barack Obama, Community college, Delaware, Democratic Party (United States), Greenville, Highway, Internet access, Jill Biden, Joe Biden, satire, State of the Union address 1 Comment
WASHINGTON—Speaking to reporters as he ran a tattered extension cord along the House of Representatives rostrum this afternoon, Vice President Joe Biden confirmed that he had arrived early in order to set up a fog machine for tonight’s State of the Union address.
“This baby kicks out the fog like you wouldn’t believe, but you gotta give her plenty of time to warm up if you want the whole room to fill up real thick.”
said Biden while carefully mixing water and glycerin according to his own homemade “fog juice” recipe, which he explained he’d been using since his brief stint as a roadie on White Lion’s Pride tour in 1987.
“I wanted to do this thing up right with a whole laser rig and shit, but that would’ve set me back mucho dinero. But don’t you worry; Uncle Joe knows a few tricks with strobes that’ll get the crowd going.”
At press time, Biden was reportedly double-checking the timers on a set of flash pots in order to avoid another congressional aide losing their fingers in a pyrotechnic mishap. Read the rest of this entry »
[VIDEO] The Phony Gender Wage Gap Myth
Posted: April 8, 2014 Filed under: Economics, Mediasphere, Politics, Think Tank, White House | Tags: American Enterprise Institute, Barack Obama, Christina Hoff Sommers, Equal Pay Day, Gender pay gap, Obama, State of the Union address, War on Women 1 Comment
“Yes, of course it’s not true. Yes…I know. It’s fiction. It’s complete bullshit, I know. It’s a wedge issue. It’s all we got. Give it time. If we keep repeating the lie, it will….yes, exactly…It’s perfect…”
The wage gap myth, most recently used by President Obama during the State of the Union Address, states that women make only 77 cents to every dollar that men earn. AEI resident scholar Christina Hoff Sommers debunks the bogus statistic…
The Hammer: The Myth of ‘Settled Science’
Posted: February 21, 2014 Filed under: Global, Science & Technology, Think Tank | Tags: Barack Obama, Charles Krauthammer, Climate, Freeman Dyson, Hurricane Sandy, John Christy, New York Times, State of the Union address 1 CommentComputer models of climate change have been dead wrong, yet alarmists aim to quell debate
Dr. Charles Krauthammer writes: I repeat: I’m not a global-warming believer. I’m not a global-warming denier. I’ve long believed that it cannot be good for humanity to be spewing tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. I also believe that those scientists who pretend to know exactly what this will cause in 20, 30, or 50 years are white-coated propagandists.
“The debate is settled,” asserted propagandist-in-chief Barack Obama in his latest State of the Union address. “Climate change is a fact.” Really? There is nothing more anti-scientific than the very idea that science is settled, static, impervious to challenge. Take a non-climate example. It was long assumed that mammograms help reduce breast cancer deaths. This fact was so settled that Obamacare requires every insurance plan to offer mammograms (for free, no less).
[Order Charles’ book: “Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics” from Amazon]
Now we learn from a massive randomized study — 90,000 women followed for 25 years — that mammograms may have no effect on breast-cancer deaths. Indeed, one out of five of those diagnosed by mammogram receives unnecessary radiation, chemo, or surgery.
No, Women Don’t Make Less Money Than Men
Posted: February 1, 2014 Filed under: Economics, Politics, U.S. News | Tags: Barack Obama, Christina Hoff Sommers, Gender pay gap, Naval Architecture, President of the United States, State of the Union address, United States, Washington Post, White House 1 Comment
Photo by CBS Photo Archive/Getty
It’s the bogus statistic that won’t die—and president deployed it during the State of the Union—but women do not make 77 cents to every dollar a man earns.
Christina Hoff Sommers writes: President Obama repeated the spurious gender wage gap statistic in his State of the Union address. “Today,” he said, “women make up about half our workforce. But they still make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns. That is wrong, and in 2014, it’s an embarrassment.”
What is wrong and embarrassing is the President of the United States reciting a massively discredited factoid. The 23-cent gender pay gap is simply the difference between the average earnings of all men and women working full-time. It does not account for differences in occupations, positions, education, job tenure, or hours worked per week. When all these relevant factors are taken into consideration, the wage gap narrows to about five cents. And no one knows if the five cents is a result of discrimination or some other subtle, hard-to-measure difference between male and female workers. In its fact-checking column on the State of the Union, the Washington Post included the president’s mention of the wage gap in its list of dubious claims. “There is clearly a wage gap, but differences in the life choices of men and women… make it difficult to make simple comparisons.”
‘The president likes to think of himself as an empiricist, a nonideological believer in what works…’
Posted: January 30, 2014 Filed under: Economics, U.S. News, White House | Tags: Austin, Austin Texas, Barack Obama, Economic inequality, Sixth Street, State of the Union address, Texas, United States 3 CommentsObamanomics: Missing the Obvious
AVIK ROY: On Inequality, Obama Fails His Own Test.
During President Barack Obama’s 2014 State of the Union address on Tuesday night, one section stood out. “After four years of economic growth,” said the president, “corporate profits and stock prices have rarely been higher, and those at the top have never done better. But average wages have barely budged. Inequality has deepened. Upward mobility has stalled.” But Obama left unstated the most important point of all: Under his watch and thanks to his policies, those at the bottom of the ladder face fewer and fewer opportunities to get ahead. Worse still, most of the policies he proposed during his address would make social and economic mobility even harder.
“Texas ranked 10th nationwide in a measure of states with the lowest costs of living. That is because the state has a predictable and relatively light regulatory regime that drives down the cost of doing business, and thereby the cost of consumer goods and services.”
I just returned from a three-day trip to Austin, Texas. Spend a few days in Austin and you feel as though you are in a different America from the one described by the president.
Sixth Street is Austin’s entertainment showpiece.
In the next two years, downtown Austin’s hotel capacity will increase by 57 percent. In the last 20 years, Austin’s population has increased by an astounding 71 percent. The state of Texas hosts four of the 11 largest cities in the country: Houston (4), Dallas-Fort Worth (5), San Antonio (8) and Austin (11). The biggest problem in Austin is not the economy or unemployment — it is the traffic.
Paradox: Conservatives Insisting SOTU Speeches are Boring, Nobody’s Watching, Obama is Irrelevant…Yet… We…Can’t…Stop…Talking About It…
Posted: January 29, 2014 Filed under: Breaking News, Mediasphere, Politics, White House | Tags: Al Jazeera America, BarackObama, Bill Clinton, CNBC, Fox News Channel, Hollywood Reporter, MSNBC, State of the Union address, Union 1 Comment
I was going to write about the contradiction between words and deeds, between message, and reality.
The message: “The State of the Union speech is a non-event, featuring an irrelevant president, on subjects that nobody cares about. America is tuning out.”
The reality: “We can’t stop talking about Obama’s State of the Union speech.”
The message, endlessly repeated by conservative talking heads, writers, and bloggers (count me among them) for the last three days, emphasizing boredom, fatigue, irrelevance, tuning out.
But if it’s so irrelevant, and everyone’s tuning out, why invest billions of pixels writing about it, and waste valuable broadcast time, evaluating it, discussing it, talking about it? It means that people are paying attention. Doesn’t it?
Then I saw this.
Falling just shy of the 2013 outing, Nielsen returns put President Obama’s Tuesday address as the least watched since 2000.
Apparently, they were right. America is tuning out.
It could be the only people paying attention were insiders, media people, speechwriters, White House staff members, friends and family of members of Congress, political operatives, cameramen, broadcasters, and editors who had no choice, but primarily, disgruntled conservatives; the people warning us that no one is paying attention.
From the Hollywood Reporter:
TV Ratings: State of the Union, With 33.3 Million Viewers, Hits 14-Year Low
With final ratings in for the State of the Union address, Nielsen Media puts the grand total just shy of last year’s for a 14-year low.
The gross average audience of 13 networks airing President Barack Obama’s speech puts viewership at 33,299,172. That’s down from the 33.5 million that tuned in for the 2013 speech for its lowest showing since 2000. (President Bill Clinton’s final address in office averaged 31,478,000.)
Award: The Kevin D. Williamson 100+ Word Single-Sentence SOTU Adjective-Bomb
Posted: January 28, 2014 Filed under: Mediasphere | Tags: Democratic, Kevin D. Williamson, Kevin Williamson, National Review Online, Roman temple, SOTU, State of the Union address, United States, Washington 1 Comment
In case you missed it at NRO, or in our earlier post, it’s too good not to feature as a highlighed quote. Keep in mind, it’s a long time before the keyboard hits the period key. A bottle of Champagne goes to anyone who can memorize this and perform it, in one breath, at a cocktail party, in front of a roomful of humorless Democrats.
Without further ado, here’s Kevin D. Williamson‘s Award-winning, adjective-loaded (adjectives and qualifiers?) uninhibited description of a America’s most outdated tradition: The State of the Union Address.
“The annual State of the Union pageant is a hideous, dispiriting, ugly, monotonous, un-American, un-republican, anti-democratic, dreary, backward, monarchical, retch-inducing, depressing, shameful, crypto-imperial display of official self-aggrandizement and piteous toadying, a black Mass during which every unholy order of teacup totalitarian and cringing courtier gathers under the towering dome of a faux-Roman temple to listen to a speech with no content given by a man with no content, to rise and to be seated as is called for by the order of worship — it is a wonder they have not started genuflecting — with one wretched representative of their number squirreled away in some well-upholstered Washington hidey-hole in order to preserve the illusion that those gathered constitute a special class of humanity without whom we could not live.”
Thanks again to Mr. Williamson (and his editors) for providing today’s Award-winning quote.
[Feast on Kevin D. Williamson’s fine book The End Is Near and It’s Going to Be Awesome]
SOTU Survey
Posted: January 28, 2014 Filed under: Politics, White House | Tags: Benghazi, GOP, Medicare, Obama, Obamacare, President Obama, SCOMAF, SOTU, State of the Union address, survey, White House 5 Comments
After five State of the Union addresses, all Obama’s delivered is a series of broken promises on jobs, debt, health care, government and accountability.
What is the biggest disappointment in the current state of our union under Obama?
- Jobs: Under Obama, over 20 million Americans are still struggling to find work, despite billions of dollars in binge government spending and empty promises.
- Debt: Obama promised to tackle our debt and entitlement problems. But on his watch, the national debt has gone up $6.6 trillion, and Medicare and Social Security are still on a path to bankruptcy.
- Health Care: ObamaCare was the liberals’ dream solution to our health care problems. But since Obama took office, insurance costs for families have gone up by $3,671 and 5 million Americans have received cancellation notices for their health plans.
- Benghazi: Obama promised swift justice for the Benghazi attackers, but what we got was a political scandal. None of the Benghazi suspects have been brought to trial for their connection with the attack on our consulate and the murder of one of our Ambassadors.
- Government: Obama has let the federal government run wild: the IRS targeted conservative organizations, Obama’s agencies threw lavish taxpayer-funded parties, and lobbyists continue to pass through the revolving door at the Obama White House.
Department of Wishful Thinking: Competence Questions Threaten Obama’s Ambitions
Posted: January 28, 2014 Filed under: Politics, U.S. News, White House | Tags: Barack Obama, Capitol Hill, Obama, State of the Union address, United States, United States Congress, White House 1 Comment
Media Euphemism of the Day: “Achievable”, to describe a disgraced president’s diminished agenda
Brian Hughes reports: President Obama will unveil a slate of executive actions in his State of the Union address Tuesday just as questions about competency plague his White House.
It’s a challenge — asking Americans to let his administration take the lead after a series of self-inflicted setbacks — that could imperil confidence in Obama’s 2014 agenda before it even gets out of the gate.
“It’s not the perfect environment to be rolling out executive orders…”
Much of the blowback leading up to Obama’s prime-time speech has centered around the idea of executive overreach, that the president is simply sidestepping another branch of government to get what he wants.
Yet, Obama has a more burning question that he must answer Tuesday: Is his administration capable of delivering on his progressive blueprint for a self-professed “year of action?”
State of the Union Address: A Monarchial Anachronism
Posted: January 28, 2014 Filed under: Politics, White House | Tags: Barack Obama, Jason Collins, Kevin D. Williamson, Kevin Williamson, State of the Union address, United States 4 Comments
GREAT CEASAR’S GHOST
If the first 100+ words don’t get you, go get coffee, come back, and read ’em again. It’s all one sentence. I want to see Kevin go on Red Eye and do this first sentence as an opening monologue.
On the nauseating spectacle that is the State of the Union address
Kevin D. Williamson begins:
The annual State of the Union pageant is a hideous, dispiriting, ugly, monotonous, un-American, un-republican, anti-democratic, dreary, backward, monarchical, retch-inducing, depressing, shameful, crypto-imperial display of official self-aggrandizement and piteous toadying, a black Mass during which every unholy order of teacup totalitarian and cringing courtier gathers under the towering dome of a faux-Roman temple to listen to a speech with no content given by a man with no content, to rise and to be seated as is called for by the order of worship — it is a wonder they have not started genuflecting — with one wretched representative of their number squirreled away in some well-upholstered Washington hidey-hole in order to preserve the illusion that those gathered constitute a special class of humanity without whom we could not live.
It’s the most nauseating display in American public life — and I write that as someone who has just returned from a pornographers’ convention.
It’s worse than the Oscars.
The national self-debasement begins well before the speech is under way…
[check out Kevin Williamson’s book The End Is Near and It’s Going to Be Awesome]
Empty Suit: Obama’s State of the Union Address as America Really Sees It
Posted: January 27, 2014 Filed under: Humor, Politics, White House | Tags: American Action Network, Barack Obama, Obama, Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, President, State of the Union address, United States 1 CommentNot feeling up to subjecting yourself to President Obama’s State of the Union spiel tomorrow night? No problem. American Action Network has already put together a preview of what we should expect.
Will tomorrow’s #SOTU be the same empty promises from an #EmptySuit? http://t.co/tjX6zP44ef
— AmericanActionNetwrk (@AAN) January 27, 2014
Twitchy, where else?
Legitimacy Problems, Continued: 63% Don’t Have Confidence in Obama to Make Right Decisions, 51% say ‘Not a Strong Leader’
Posted: January 27, 2014 Filed under: Politics, White House | Tags: ABC News, Americans, Barack Obama, Obama, President, State of the Union address 2 Comments
(AP/Jacquelyn Martin)
On the eve of President Obama’s State of the Union Address, a new poll from Washington Post-ABC News shows that fully 63 percent of Americans have either little no confidence Obama will make the right decisions.
The public is evenly split on whether Obama is honest and trustworthy, with 49 percent of Americans answering in the affirmative, and 48 percent answering negatively.
[VIDEO] Small Ball: ‘Shrinkage’ of Presidency Will Be on Display in State of the Union Adress
Posted: January 26, 2014 Filed under: Entertainment, Mediasphere, Politics | Tags: Barack Obama, George Costanza, George Will, Minimum wage, Small ball, State of the Union address, Stolen base Leave a comment“In baseball you play what’s called small ball — stealing bases, bunting — when you can’t do anything else,” Will said. “This is the miniaturization of the president’s agenda…”
George Costanza Will previewed Tuesday’s State of the Union address on Sunday, arguing that the president will focus on initiatives like universal pre-K and increasing the minimum wage because his major policy initiatives have been hamstrung.
“I was in the pool! I WAS IN THE POOL!”
— George Costanza
“In baseball you play what’s called small ball — stealing bases, bunting — when you can’t do anything else,” Will said. “This is the miniaturization of the president’s agenda.
A President Speaks, America Tunes Out
Posted: January 24, 2014 Filed under: Politics, U.S. News, White House | Tags: Barack Obama, Joe Biden, John Boehner, Lenny Skutnik, PEGGY NOONAN, State of the Union address, Washington 2 Comments
STATE OF THE UNION
A Grand Tradition… But only if people are listening
“Because when I imagine Barack Obama’s State of the Union, I see a handsome, dignified man standing at the podium and behind him Joe Biden, sleeping. And next to him John Boehner, snoring. And arrayed before the president the members, napping…”
In a State of the Union a president tries to put his stamp on things. Here we are, here’s where we’re going, all roads lead forward. We can face whatever test, meet whatever challenge, united in the desire that we be the greatest nation in the history of man . . .
pundit from another planet 