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Where did Michelle Bernard come from, and why on earth would anyone ask her opinion on the Lilly Ledbetter Act, which President Obama signed into law last week?

The first question is easier to answer. Bernard is President of the deceptively-named Independent Women's Forum, a thinktank that is neither "Independent" (Prominent members include Kate O'Beirne, Nancy Pfotenhauer, Lynne Cheney and the Podhoretz boys' wife and mother, Midge Decter. Funding comes from organizations like the Castle Rock Foundation and the Scaife Foundation. Sound independent to you?) nor particularly interested in furthering the welfare of women. In fact, some of their declared stances are against gender equality, like Title IX and the Violence Against Women Act. A curious case of self-loathing that must be given an inordinate amount of airtime, don't you think?

And who better to ask to speak on monopolize a segment on a bill that simply gives women the right to sue if they discover--years after they've been hired--that they have been working for less money for the same job than their male counterparts, as Lilly Ledbetter discovered. Naturally, Bernard and the IWF do not support the Ledbetter Act. How dare women think they should be entitled to equality, those silly little things?

What happened is…the case was overturned at the Supreme Court on a technicality. Instead of being forced to bring a lawsuit that alleges discrimination within a 100 days…180 days, women now have a longer period of time to do that. The problem with the legislation that was signed yesterday is we don’t know what the unintended consequences are going to be. Number one, it tells women that you’re a victim. Number two, we don’t know what the burdens are going to be that are going to be put on employers. Will employers all of the sudden say if I…maybe I should hire less women…fewer women in the workplace because they might sue me 20, 30, 40 years from now. Insurance is going to go up. What is the negative impact that this could possibly have on women, and for that reason, the Independent Women’s Forum and the Independent Women’s Voice does not think that this is a great day in America for women.

Holy cow, my blood pressure is rising just re-typing that drivel. First, it teaches women to be victims? Once again the wrong-headedness of conservative logic rears its ugly head. This law now acknowledges women who have already been victimized by sexist employers and cheated out of fair wages. Those unexpected consequences, Michelle, will be employers--those ones afraid of lawsuits 20, 30, 40 years from now (which you realize means they have been cheating their female employees out of fair wages for that time)--actually abiding by the Equal Pay Act of 1963.

Chris Matthews, bless his clueless little heart, confuses issues by getting into an area that Bernard feels more comfortable--the issue of fair pay. As far as Bernard is concerned, anyone who goes into female-dominated professions like teaching or nursing should just suck it up, because that revered "free market" has spoken and their jobs just don't merit higher wages. I'm completely serious and she's seriously deranged.

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Sen. Jon Kyl told Chris Wallace that the economic stimulus bill is losing support among Senate Republicans. Kyl believes the bill needs a major rewrite to get Republican votes.

Almost as soon as it went up The Shoe has been brought down. The monument commemorating the journalist who hurled his shoes at President George W. Bush was taken down only one day after it was erected. Seems the Central Government just didn't approve.

Children unwrap the sculpture of a shoe created as a monument to the shoes thrown by an Iraqi journalist at former U.S. President George W. Bush, in Tikrit, 130 kilometers (80 miles) north of Baghdad, Iraq, Friday, Jan. 30, 2009. The director of an orphanage in Tikrit said Iraqi police told her the shoe sculpture had to be removed because government property should not be used for something with a political bias. (AP)

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From the same administration that claimed they kept us safe, more good news:

WASHINGTON -- The government said schools and agencies in at least three states were shipped possibly tainted peanut products that have been recalled in a nationwide salmonella outbreak. The products were shipped as part of the federal school meal program.

A spokesman for the Agriculture Department's Food and Nutrition Service said schools, daycare centers and group homes in California, Idaho and Minnesota received roasted peanuts and peanut butter from Georgia-based Peanut Corp. of America. The USDA had said previously that school meal programs were not affected by the large-scale recall.

Stores have already pulled more than 430 kinds of cakes, cookies and other peanut-containing foods from shelves in what the Food and Drug Administration is calling one of the largest product recalls in memory. The outbreak has sickened more than 500 people in the United States. As many as eight deaths may be linked to the outbreak.

The government has opened a criminal investigation into the outbreak.

Stephen Sundlof, head of the FDA's food safety center, said Friday the Justice Department will investigate possible criminal violations by the Blakely, Ga., peanut processing plant that shipped tainted products to dozens of other food companies.

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Reports say that President Obama might nominate Republican Sen. Gregg as Secretary of Commerce. Many have speculated that the Democratic Governor of New Hampshire would replace Gregg with a Democratic Senator giving Democrats a possibility of 60 seats in the Senate.

This morning on Fox, Sen. Kyl hinted that the New Hampshire Governor would not appoint a Democratic Senator to replace Gregg. A panel on Fox News interpreted Kyl's comments to mean that the New Hampshire governor may replace Gregg with a Republican Senator.

Crackpot Press: Great and Not So Great Moments In Super Bowl History

The Mahablog: About those bonuses

Petrelis Files: Skepticism about the next AIDS czar 

David E’s Fablog: The Miracle of Birth

LA Weekly: Box of Broken Dreams: In Search of a Soul Lost and Found in LA

The Opinion Mill's Weekend Bookchat returns with books for the new Depression, and a way to make Ann Coulter cry.

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From The Rachel Maddow Show:

Former Guantanamo prosecutor, Army Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, describes the sorry state of the government's case against many of the inmates at the prison on Guantanamo Bay.

Andy Worthington -- Former Guantánamo Prosecutor Condemns “Chaotic” Trials in Case of Teenage Torture Victim:

On January 13, in a declaration submitted to a Washington D.C. District Court in the case of Guantánamo prisoner Mohamed Jawad, Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, a former prosecutor in the Military Commission trial system, delivered perhaps the most blistering attack on the US military’s detention program by a former member of the Pentagon’s team to date.

Speaking of the man he was once tasked to prosecute, Vandeveld said prisoner Mohamed Jawad’s continued detention is “something beyond a travesty,” and urged that Jawad be released given a “lack of any credible evidence.”

Some of this information was revealed in September 2008, after Vandeveld (who has served in Bosnia, Africa, Iraq and Afghanistan in the years since the 9/11 attacks, and has received several military awards) resigned as a prosecutor, complaining that “potentially exculpatory evidence” had “not been provided” to Jawad’s defense team, and that his accidental discovery of information relating to Jawad’s abuse helped convert him from a “true believer to someone who felt truly deceived.”

Continue reading the rest of the article here.

According to Fox News, Obama is proposing a measly 10% cut in the Pentagon's declared budget. Predictably, wingnut heads are exploding.

But Justin Gardiner of Donklephant has some real facts at his fingertips in an astute comment over at center-right blog Poligazette. I'm going to lift his comment in its entirety:

A few things…

1) The Pentagon’s budget (not including expenditures for Iraq and Afghanistan) has grown from $316B in 2001 to $536B in 2009. This represents a 70% increase. So a 10% decrease is funding will take us from $536B to $483B, which is still more than the $463B the Pentagon had for 2007. All Obama is doing is preventing the budget from growing an average of 10% year after year when there’s no discernible advantage to doing so.

2) Obama has said consistently that ALL government agencies will see cuts, but the military budget is the biggest so that has to be one of the first to be addressed.

3) The United States spends more than the next 40+ countries combined in defense spending. How that’s tolerated by our taxpayers is beyond me, but I’d imagine they’d like a little of that money back at a time like this, wouldn’t you?

But to the broader point of this post, I think it would be refreshing to see these cuts being characterized as something other than an ideological win for the Dems. Cutting back right now makes sense because our current budgets aren’t sustainable.

In other words, if McCain had won the election and was proposing these cuts, what would this post say? Would you call Republican voters gullible? Would you tell people to contact their congressional reps or senators?

Well yes, exactly. Plus, remember that the declared budget doesn't include supplementary amounts for Iraq and Afghanistan or the defense spending spread around other departments like Energy (nukes), veteran care and Homeland Security. Add it all up and its closer to $1 trillion, or well over half of all government spending.

And no, defense spending is not good stimulus spending unless you work for a neocon think-tank. If it were, increased spending since 9/11 - almost a trillion a year - would have had a far more noticeable effect on GDP. Lets face it, we've had tax cuts for the rich and defense spending out the wazoo. If they were effective as stimuli to rescue the nation from depression, the economy wouldn't be in this state to begin with.

Crossposted from Newshoggers

From Go Left TV and Ring of Fire Radio:

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Mike Papantonio run down this week's stories that the mainstream media did a poor job of reporting - Everything from the ongoing Karl Rove subpoena saga, to the irreversible effects of climate change.

Ring of Fire's Buried Stories Jan. 30th Pt. 1

Part 2

Part 3