Obama Gets His First Bill-Signing Ceremony

The Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 has passed the House again. Now conformed with changes made in the Senate, it will move on to the President for signage. Symbolically, this is a good bill to be the initial one signed into law - one that values basic fairness and the principle of equal pay for equal work.

5 "Democrats" voted against this - Allen Boyd (FL), Bobby Bright (AL), Parker Griffith (AL), Travis Childers (MS), and Dan Boren (OK). I say "Democrats" because I can't see how the party affiliation applies to people who vote against legislation like this.

Fair Pay On The Way

The Senate today passed the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which would allow women an increased statute of limitations for fighting unequal pay in the courts. The current law was that a woman like Ledbetter would have 180 days from the infraction (which, like most pay discrimination, is carried out in secret) to file a claim.

Ledbetter roamed the Capitol's halls on Thursday, explaining to lawmakers and reporters that she was unaware of the pay disparity during most of the 19 years she worked at Goodyear.

"Pay levels were a big secret," she said, "but an anonymous person left a note in my mailbox at work one day, comparing my pay to that of three male managers — and that's when I knew I'd been the victim of pay discrimination."

She calmly recalled how "I started at a lower salary, and they gave me lower raises, over and over again." She sought help from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission just before she retired in 1998, and the case wound through the courts.

After the Supreme Court ruled against her, three months later the House voted to override the decision, but a Senate filibuster stopped the effort.

The roll call is here. All Democrats voted yes, and five Republicans (Specter, Snowe, Murkowski, Hutchinson and Collins) joined them. Because of some amendments it needs to go back to the House for a reconciliation vote, but once that happens, Ledbetter should be the first major piece of legislation signed by President Obama into law.

Ledbetter Passes

I was happy to see Lily Ledbetter become such a rallying cry in the Democratic Party during the campaign season. She got a prime speaking spot at the DNC Convention and was cited multiple times by Barack Obama on the trail. The issue of equal pay for equal work is so elemental to basic fairness and women's rights, and it's great to see the House end the first week of business by strongly passing the measure today. This isn't only a question of fairness, but one that will have an impact on the economy. Americans have seen their wages grow stagnant or shrink even when the economy has grown, and anything that puts pressure to push wages upward can help in a recovery.

Howie Klein has more, including a look at the five House "Democrats" who voted against this bill. I'm sure all the women who voted for them might be surprised to hear that. Howie says the odds look decent for passage in the Senate as well.

Social Security, Populism Front And Center - Choice Needs To Be Made

As the financial markets go to hell, connecting the mess to the McCain-Bush plan to privatize Social Security is a natural. And it's worked its way into Obama's standard stump speech.



He actually went further:

Speaking at Bethune-Cookman University at an event highlighting his campaign's efforts to appeal to women voters, Obama invoked the current financial crisis by taking aim at an article carrying McCain's name in the current issue of Contingencies magazine, published by the American Academy of Actuaries.

In it, McCain wrote, "Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation."

"So let me get this straight -- he wants to run health care like they've been running Wall Street," Obama told the audience. "Well, Senator, I know some folks on Main Street who aren't going to think that's such a good idea." [...]

"You know, you hear them talking about Wall Street and Main Street -- well, this is Wall Street plus Main Street, and I'm worried about Main Street. I'm worried about people being able to send their kids to college or to be able to afford their homes," Bush said. "...I said, what's it going to take to make sure Main Street doesn't get affected by the policies of Wall Street? And this is what they came up with, and this is big ticket, because it's a big problem."

McCain has attacked Obama this past week for ties to former executives of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, including in two television ads. But he said it's McCain whose campaign is replete with current or former lobbyists for the mortgage giants. He cited comments by the former head of Fannie Mae's government relations office, who was quoted in Politico as saying, "When I see photographs of Sen. McCain's staff, it looks to me like the team of lobbyists who used to report to me."

"Folks," Obama said, "you can't make this stuff up."

On Social Security, Obama said, McCain's support for privatization would leave senior citizens at risk at a time when the stock market has plummeted. "I know Senator McCain is talking about a 'casino culture' on Wall Street -- but the fact is, he's the one who wants to gamble with your life savings and that is not going to happen when I'm president of the United States."

He said that if McCain had his way, "the millions of Floridians who rely on it would've had their Social Security tied up in the stock market this week," although McCain has not called for full privatization of the system.

That letter from the Fannie Mae guy is hilarious.

This is good populist stuff, and considering that, after all this, McCain still favors privatizing Social Security, this message is what's going to work.

Obama's statement of principles on the proposed bailout is similarly good, although we're going to need to see what happens the moment after Bush and Paulson say "no" to see what happens on that one.

I also love this ad using Lily Ledbetter:



We have the lines clearly drawn. But the result of that bailout legislation will prove whether those lines result in talk or action.

The Battle For Women

I just got an email from Page Gardner of Women's Voices Women Vote with some polling results:

Gallup recognizes the importance of the marriage gap, and has been polling on the preferences for the General Election and reporting the results by marital status and gender since early June. Be sure to check the WVWV website each week to see the latest results. This week, 57% of unmarried women favor Barack Obama, and 33% support John McCain. Of married women, 54% favor John McCain, and 39% support Barack Obama -- giving Barack Obama an overall 39 point marriage gap.

And yet unmarried women lag behind their married counterparts in registering and voting. Organizations like WVWV are trying to balance that (they have registered over 700,000 voters so far this year) but it's going to take a message as well as registration efforts.

That's why the Obama campaign is amping up their women's outreach.

While Palin makes a historic appeal to women to break the glass ceiling, the Obama campaign will have an equal pay ad airing this week reminding voters of policy differences with the McCain-Palin ticket that vastly impact females.

"More and more families depend on the income earned by working women, so you'd think we'd be united in our determination to help eliminate the unfair pay gap and pay women what they deserve for the work they do. But even now in 2008 Senator McCain has stood in the way of legislation to help close the pay gap... only from the man who repeatedly says the fundamentals of our economy are strong," said Moira Mack, spokeswoman for the Obama campaign.

On Monday, the Obama campaign released a list of major female backers--some there from the start of his campaign, but more important, names of women prominent in the Clinton presidential campaign and some visible females who are just now making a public endorsement. Obama spoke to the group Monday in a conference call, first reported in the Huffington Post.

On Tuesday, Ellie Smeal of the Feminist Majority and Kim Gandy of NOW--the National Organization for Women-- hold a press conference at the National Press Club to make their endorsement of Obama public. These Democratic-allied groups had been in the Clinton camp.

On Wednesday, Michelle Obama and Lilly Ledbetter, a leader in the battle of equal pay for equal work, take part in a roundtable in Richmond, Va. and headline a Virginia Women for Obama voter registration rally.

It continued today with Michelle Obama in North Carolina. You can read about this women's week of action here. The NOW endorsement is unusual, they haven't endorsed in a Presidential race since 1984.

And most crucial, Obama is not hiding his stance on a hot-button culture war issue, but making sure the differences between him and his opponent are clear.

WASHINGTON - Republican John McCain, an abortion rights opponent with a conservative Senate record on the issue, seems content with the public's perception that he's more moderate on the subject.

Democrat Barack Obama, who supports abortion rights, is only too happy to remind voters where McCain stands, but he tries to make his case without attracting too much attention [...]

Obama's radio ad, running in Indiana, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and elsewhere, features nurse practitioner Valerie Baron telling voters: "John McCain's out of touch with women today. McCain wants to take away our right to choose."

Glossy fliers with the same messages fill the mailboxes of women in Florida, Virginia and other states.

Countering that effort, McCain rolled out his own radio ad suggesting he's not as far right on abortion as Obama makes him seem — though he never mentions that procedure.

Instead, McCain's commercial focused on stem cell research and said he will invest more money in research to prevent disease and find medical breakthroughs to "help free families from the fear and devastation of illness."

Not only is that not likely to work, given that McCain has publicly expressed his "25 year consistent pro-life record," it may end up hurting him with his far-right base. Obama has been consistent as well - he wants to help reduce unwanted pregnancies, but he will not deprive women of their medical options and make them unsafe.

One candidate picked a female running mate to appeal to women. The other picked the right issues. I think the latter is the correct move.

Truth Squadding The Conservative Media

It's not only John McCain's campaign you have to watch for lying, it's conservative media, which is much more insidious because they are a trusted source for many.

For instance, Rupert Murdoch's NY Post just ran a bamboozling op-ed from Amer Taheri, a discredited wingnut who previously claimed that Iranians were forcing Jews to wear yellow stars on their clothing (completely untrue), and the claim he makes here is similarly unfounded.

Since yesterday, the right-wing blogosphere has been all aflutter over a report in the New York Post, written by the Iranian-born journalist Amir Taheri, that Barack Obama has privately tried to delay an agreement between the Iraqi government and the Bush administration on a draw-down of American forces from Iraq [...]

But there are a couple reasons why the bloviation looks to be uncalled for. The Obama camp yesterday put out a statement of its own asserting that the story "bears as much resemblance to the truth as a McCain campaign commercial," and charging that Taheri has confused a long-term Status of Forces agreement with negotations over a shorter-term drawdown.

It's worth looking at that distinction more closely to get a sense of what the Obama camp means here and where Taheri may have erred. In terms of a Status of Forces agreement, Obama has consistently made clear that he believes any such agreement should be delayed until after the election -- so that a President Obama or McCain would not be bound by an agreement negotiated by a weakened Bush administration. The McCain camp did not object when, in June, Obama told reporters at a press conference that he had made exactly this argument to Zebari in a phone call.

So here we have an explicit statement of policy turned into a distorted smear. Par for the course for Taheri.

And for James Taranto of Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (sensing a pattern), who claims that the Gramm-Leach Billey Act, which went a long way toward deregulating the financial industry and putting us in jeopardy in the current financial crisis, was passed with bipartisan support by 90-8 in the Senate. Not so:

Two items of note.

This is the page that Taranto linked to in that first bold quote (90-8) as evidence of who did and did not vote for passage of the bill.

Using the roll call from that linked page, he says "John McCain was absent"

Problem is, that page is not a transcript of the roll call vote for the bill. This is. It took place on May 6, 1999. The page that Taranto linked to was a vote on the conference report, which took place 6 months after the bill had already passed in the senate, and just over a week before it was signed into law. The bill was not passed 90-8; it was passed 54-44, almost strictly down party lines (The lone Democrat to vote for the bill was Ernest Hollings of South Carolina).

You can add to this Deroy Murdock's smear trying to blunt Obama's advantage on the subject of pay equity by claiming that he pays his female staff less than his male staff. Of course, the group that tracks Congressional staff pay says this is shoddy work that aggregates salaries without basing them on the job done (it's called "equal pay for equal work" for a reason).

It's important to truth squad these media lies quickly, because these are the ones that turn into zombie lies endlessly repeated by the right.

Equal Pay

I'm pleasantly surprised to see equal pay make a prominent appearance in the Presidential election. Surprised and saddened - I can't believe this is still an issue in 21st-century America. But here we are, and the Obama campaign is certainly using this as a wedge issue. He's released an ad in Virginia and perhaps elsewhere on the issue, without posting it in his YouTube channel so that the McCain campaign would know what's coming:



I think it's especially effective to use the line about how McCain thinks women need only "education and training," as if they're a bunch of dopes who need to learn how to do their jobs if they want to get paid like the big boys.

In addition, Michelle Obama has posted at BlogHer about equal pay, revealing that she'll be campaigning with Lilly Ledbetter.

Lilly is from Alabama. For nearly 20 years, she worked for a Goodyear tire plant. She was the only female supervisor—so you know this is a tough, hard-working woman. One day, someone sent her an anonymous letter with a list of salaries of her co-workers. That’s how she found out that she was making less than the men she worked with—even men who were less senior than she was. And we’re not talking about a few dollars. Some of her male counterparts were making 40 percent more than she was—for doing the same work.

Over 20 years, that adds up to a lot of money—money that could have helped Lilly send her kids to college, provide some comfort in her everyday life, or prepare for her retirement.

So Lilly did the brave and difficult thing. She confronted this injustice. Her case went all the way to the Supreme Court. And in a 5-to-4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that, according to the law, Lilly only had 180 days to complain about the pay discrimination. So because it had taken her 20 years to find out the truth, she had missed her chance at justice.

Well, some people in Congress decided to change that law, so it would no longer reward employers for hiding discrimination until they ran out the clock. Last July, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act passed the House. But this April, Republicans in the Senate blocked it. Now, Democrats in the Senate are working to bring Lilly’s bill back for another vote this fall.

My husband is a proud supporter of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

Senator McCain does not support it. In fact, Senator McCain said that what women really need is more education and training.

It's a discrimination issue as well as an economic issue. The unemployment rate for women has seen the highest one-month spike in 33 years, and as state and local governments cut back in an economic downturn, women, who currently receive proportionately more government services, will continue to suffer. And getting 77 cents on the dollar compared to men doesn't help.

McCain may have hired a girl Friday to run with him (the narrowness of her issue silos as Vice President is embarrassing), but on women's issues, it's clear who is on the side of the people in this election.

California Report

• Turning locally, while Arnold missed the festivities in St. Paul to look very serious about the budget, Pete Wilson made it out there in his stead - and he slammed Schwarzenegger's call for a tax increase, clearly temporarily forgetting the increase of his own. And when he was reminded, he said, "The situation was very different."

• Among the bills about to land on the Governor's desk is an equal pay bill. This has become a big issue in the Presidential race, and I'm glad to see the legislature on the right side of it.

• This is a good Chris Hayes piece from The Nation about union members at the RNC, but the California-specific part about the SEIU-UHW fight I found just right:

The more I talked to the UHW members and heard their grievances, the more I thought about the fact that organized labor has two goals that can often come into tension: power and dignity. We tend to focus on the power aspect in politics: the power to collectively bargain, to make sure labor captures a fair share of profits, to demand higher wages--all of which have been in sharp decline. That's the objective nature of unionization. The subjective nature of unionization, though, is dignity. It is the process by which working people come to believe that their views and their ideas and their demands are important. That they should be listened to. These two values can be in tension, as I suspect might be the case in California. Sometimes maximizing power might (I stress might, because the UHW-SEIU situation is very, very complicated) require people to fall in line, but the prerogative of dignity is to speak out and stand up.

• I'm interested in hearing more about Prop. 5. Anything that rolls back our stupid and shortsighted drug war is positive, in addition to addressing the prison crisis. Martin Sheen, of all people, has joined up with the No on 5 crowd, being run by the people who brought you the pro-Denham team during the aborted recall.

• Just noting the prison guard payoff to Don Perata because nobody else has.