Posted: April 17, 2012 at 6:09 pm

Rehberg Dinged on Oil Subsidies, Equal Pay for Women

Today was not a good day for Congressman Rehberg.

First, he can’t be too pleased about the Montana Fat Cat campaign, which is calling attention to his support for massive oil and gas subsidies while Montanans pay at the pump.  Meanwhile, the fat cat profits continue to rise.  Rehberg’s hoping you don’t checkout the Montana Fat Cat Facebook page and Twitter feed either which appear to be dedicated to ridiculing his idiocy.

Today is also Equal Pay Day, when America recognizes that women are still not paid equally for equal work. Which reminds us of still more ways Dennis Rehberg votes against women.  He voted against a level playing field in the workplace for women and against equal pay for equal work.

Rehberg voted twice against the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act in 2009, a bipartisan measure that protects women’s rights to seek restitution if they’re victims of pay discrimination in the work place. [Vote 768, 7/31/07; Vote 37, 1/27/09; CQ Votes]

Rehberg also opposed the Paycheck Fairness Act twice, which would strengthen protections for women to fight pay discrimination.  [Vote 556,7/31/08; CQ Votes] [Vote 8, 1/9/09; CQ Votes]

That’s bad, even by Rehberg standards.  Even Mitt Romney supports the Lilly Ledbetter Act, further demonstrating how terrible Rehberg really is.

According to the latest data from the American Association of University Women, American women still earn on average 23% less than their male counterparts in the workplace. Equal Pay Day takes place today to symbolize how far in to 2012 women would have to work in order to earn what their male counterparts did in 2011. Over the course of a lifetime, women earn approximately $431,000 less than men.

48 comments

  1. Larry Kralj, Environmental Rangers

    There are only TWO kinds of Pubbies. Rich dudes and SUCKERS!

    • Rob Kailey

      Mark Tokarski
      April 17, 2012 at 6:24 pm · Reply

      Oops, watching a ball game while using IPad so excuse tops, which are mostly autocorrects
      Mark Tokarski
      April 17, 2012 at 6:24 pm · Reply

      Typos!

      Obviously a man totally in control of his thoughts.

      • Mark Tokarski

        Don’t start with me, you lying SOS. Otherwise this will become a circus. You and I both low that Cowgirl and at at are the Montana Democratic apparatchiks. Just leave it alone.

        • Mark Tokarski

          Still with the baseball game. Cowgirl and Fat Cat are one and the same, Democrat apparatchiks.

  3. Jennifer Davies

    Rehberg is such a slimeball. Here’s a millionnaire voting against equal pay for women for doing the same jobs? No. No. and no.

    • Norma Duffy AKA ILIKEWOODS

      And the question keeps coming up to the GOP? What has Rehberg done besides save a cement Idol of Jesus for the state of Montana???

      The answer is: nothing, zip, zero, Zilch, Nada, Nowt, Nil, Luv, Nul, Null, Nichts, Niente, Sifir, 0, NO

      The mans has been wasting Montana’s time for the last 8 years! I tell you its been long enough!!!!!!

      • Jennifer Davies

        Exactly! He just sits around drinking and acting important. Did you guys see that ridiculous article where Rehberg is still claiming he lives in his office. Puh-lease. He stays in hotels. He’s a millionnaire. He flies a private plane for God’s sake.

  4. Max Bucks

    Equal pay: Another fallacious concept derived the categorically false idea called “equality.”

  5. Moorcat

    First, Mark is still and always will be an idiot. Montana Cowgirl (whoever he/she/they are), posts from Helena. Anyone with even a smidgen of internet knowledge can figure that out. The group behind the “Fat Cat ads” is from Billings. If you call the number listed on the webpage, you can actually find out exactly who the group is etc. It isn’t rocket science.

    As far as the actual article, Rehberg isn’t happy about the ad and has said so on the national news. He feels it “misrepresents” the energy companies. What he isn’t saying is that he thinks it misrepresents him. He has been trying to shed his “rich” label for years now. Unless you have been living under a rock, I am sure you have heard of his famous “Land rich and cash poor” statement that landed him on the national laughing news.

    Rehberg is in trouble and he knows it. All he had to do to keep his House seat was not engage his opponent. He can’t do that this time. He HAS to engage Tester to win and Tester is holding most of the cards. Rehberg has been actively campaigning for months and all he has been able to accomplish is pull even with Tester in the polls. Tester has been campaigning for two weeks and he is already gaining. The only hope Rehberg has is for large, out of state money to come in and pull a Romney (sinking his opponents by outspending them on negative ads). It must scare the crap out of him to see the first couple of salvos come from the other side.

    One last note. The second part of the article is missing something important and it is what the Republicans are using to attack the current administration. After having to spend hours explaining this to a guy that bought into Romney’s arguments, it isn’t something that Cowgirl should have missed.

    Wage equality (a woman and male getting paid the same wage for doing the same job with the same experience), is really not that big of an issue anymore. Laws like the Ledbetter act have tightened up wage equality a great deal. I am not saying that it doesn’t exist, it is just not as common or as widespread as the article made it out to be.

    What is still a problem is the so called “Glass Ceiling”. That is still a serious problem that recieves very little attention in the news. It is also the core of the argument that ABC tried to use against President Obama in 2008. While they wrote about “wage inequality” the data did not support that claim. What the data did support is that there were fewer women in higher positions in the Obama Campaign than there were in the McCain campaign. Proving anything from that data is problematic, though. It is difficult (if not impossible) to prove that a woman is being held back in the workplace as advancement in a company is a matter of a number of factors. Moreover, there is not clear law to deal with the situation.

    Anyway, it is a subject that is often “glossed over” when people start to talk about wage equality because it is so hard to quantify.

    • Max Bucks

      Equality does not exist except in mathematics. Equality is merely the marching banner of the underachiever, the loser, the inveterate incompetent. It has been the slogan of the helpless and dispossessed from the time of the primitive Christians down to the French Revolution and beyond.

      No law can create equality. “Equal pay for equal work” is an absurdity on its face, because no two jobs are truly equal, and no two work products are exactly the same. Only a free and unencumbered labor market can determine what an employee should be paid.

      • Norma Duffy AKA ILIKEWOODS

        Wage earning isn’t a race Max. It should be equal pay for equal work. I have worked jobs that a man can’t do in a mans field for years…. I did not get the same respect as a man does or the same pay. The problem is men have used religion, and the weaker sex argument for years and it doesn’t work anymore. women have leveraged the playing field…. and it bothers you old farts… cause you have used the stereotype Hype for so long you actually believe your very own Male lies.

        Get over it, or get passed up anyway while in your denial.

        “Women have risen Past Male Hype. Everywhere they have taken the places made vacant by men and in so doing, they have grown in self-respect and in the esteem of their respective nations. In every land, the people have reverted to the primitive division of labor and while the men have gone to war, women have cultivated the fields in order that the army and nation may be fed. No army can succeed and no nation can endure without food, or equipment; those who supply it are a war power and a peace power. That is the reason women should be treated with the respect earned today”

        Carrie Chapman Catt 1916

        • Max Bucks

          Your sexist attitude is precisely why companies avoid hiring women whenever possible, and when they must hire them for appearance’s sake, companies make sure women are placed in positions where they can do only limited damage, i.e., the low responsibility, low-paying jobs.

          Affirmative action and equal opportunity laws have only served to spread the losses incurred by hiring minorities evenly among companies competing in the same space. Naturally, those losses are passed on to the consumer in the form of higher prices, poor service, and shoddy products. Everyone pays when “equal pay for equal work” distorts the labor market.

          We gave up on hiring minorities, especially women, years ago. At first we were fooled into hiring them by all the credentials and letters of recommendation they presented, but it soon became apparent, when they simply could not perform their job duties in a consistent and competent manner, that they were the recipients of affirmation action college degrees and recommendations by other minorities. We did not need The Bell Curve to tell us that by hiring a minority, we were hiring someone guaranteed to be in the lowest 20 percent of her graduating class.

          Incompetence, low productivity, and emotional problems aside, we also discovered that we could not get rid of a worthless minority employee without her suing us for some made-up injury. It was then decided that we would be better off getting sued for not hiring any minorities, rather than allowing them into our company, only to cost us money and customer goodwill until we had to let them go, and then have them sue us on the way out.

          Here is a real-world example: We usually have eight to ten analysts on the payroll. They are technically Financial Planning and Business Analysts and are divided up into Analyst I, Analyst II, and Senior Analyst positions. There is about a $12,000 difference in starting pay for each position. An Analyst I is usually advanced to Analyst II after two to three years of satisfactory work performance. An Analyst II can expect to make Senior Analyst after five to six years of good service.

          Back when we had our sorry share of minorities, we never had a minority hire make it to Senior Analyst and only one made it to Analyst II. All the others quit because they could not take the workload and the pressure or were fired because they were incompetent. The few who remained were justifiably frozen in place, usually at the lowest step in their salary range.

          You cannot find two clerks in Wal-Mutt that scan groceries at the same speed. “Equal pay for equal work” is a farce.

            • Larry Kralj, Environmental Rangers

              Analyst I, analyst II, and senior analyst! Damn that’s funny stuff! This dufus sounds like Jumbo Jimmy Knoxious! What a dufus! He’s just SO important! What a business tycoon! He’s a regular Putz in a Hat! What to do? What to do? Call in thing one and call in thing two! I’m thinkin’ that he’s actually retired military or sumthin’. He’s got hated gubmint sucker written all OVER him! A man THIS important (as he is in his own mind) would not be CONCERNED with trolling!!

              Jus sayin’.

          • Norma Duffy AKA ILIKEWOODS

            And that is why chauvinistic business heads will always be suseptable to lawsuits and federal fines for not allowing women to move forward. Uh Max it is the Law!!!!!

            • Max Bucks

              I realize reality hurts, especially for those who see government and law as the be-all and end-all of their existence, the omnipotent and omnipresent defender of the downtrodden and defenseless. But all of that is fantasy and merely entertainment for the immature of mind and experience. Adults know how the world works. Capitalism controls everything.

              So, shout your high-sounding Jeffersonian slogans about “equality” all you like, as if you were in some eighth-grade social studies class. Pass laws to enforce equality all you like. But you will never defeat the Invisible Hand, which apportions success and wealth according to a man’s ability and not for the sake of his minority status.

              • Larry Kralj, Environmental Rangers

                IS IT STILL SWOLLEN, CUPCAKE? bhwhahahaha! Try blowing on your thumb, Putz! Hey, Putz, why don’t you show us how smare you ARE, little fella! Define “capitalism”, cupcake? In some detail.

                You see, Putz, not only are you a troll, but you’re an idiot too! It’s painfully obvious that you are a pretender. You have YET to say anything that indicates otherwise.

    • Moorcat

      Larry,

      First, those are numbers without context. Those are the same numbers, BTW, that Romney is using to push his meme that the Obama Administration’s Recovery is a “War on Women”.

      The problem with the research behind the report you list is that the recession started in 2008. Moreover, there are many factors involved in behind the numbers. For example, in the FactCheck article about this study, they ask the question of women – “Did you choose to stay home rather than look for another job?”. Many women answered “yes” and listed the reason as being it was easier on the family for them to do so.

      Broad assersions like the ones made by the PEW research should always be qusetioned becuase there are usually factors that are not taken into account when a study like that is made.

      It should also be noted that even today, women have a smaller unemployment percent than men. While the percentage of unemployment for women did not “improve” as much for women as it did for men, the overall unemployment for women is more than a percent lower than for men.

      • larry kurtz

        Keep following Pew’s links, Mr. Kailey, there are many pages to the findings.

        What they show is that the extractive industries are spiking while the services sector is lagging: bad news. There are more women in academia: good news.

        • Moorcat

          I did, actually, Larry, because I had this same discussion with a high school friend of mine a few days ago. There are a number of factors to look at here. I have only pointed out a few.

          First, the numbers are not based on Labor statistics, they are based on survey data taken about Hispanic labor. This, in and of itself makes the data questionable. Moreover, given the slant toward the focus of the survey, I would question the results being used to determine women’s employment in the recovery.

          It should also be pointed out that public sector jobs have not enjoyed a recovery. In fact, public sector jobs have remained flat or declined and in the last report issued by the labor dept, public sector jobs declined in the last quarter. Since those jobs are usually a majority women, this could also explain the slow recovery for women.

          • larry kurtz

            Looks like we’re on the same page, Mr. Kailey. More:

            “The official added: “If you compare employment changes from December 2007 to January 2009 versus January 2009 to March 2012, government represents the only sector that has performed much worse.

            Every other industry has either had relatively similar job changes on net across the two time periods (e.g. construction) or is doing much better (e.g. manufacturing, professional and business services, retail trade, leisure and hospitality, transportation and warehousing, mining and logging, etc.).”” WaPo.

            • Moorcat

              I think it will be interesting to see where we go from here. I am not all that unhappy about a small to medium cutback in government employment, though I am distressed that the cutback came from the “workers” rather than management. Our government is too big and too cumbersome in many ways and a cutback was enevitable. For decades, the government has been a job’s problem for more government workers.

              What I would like to see, though, is some sanity to how it is being done. A leaner, more effecient government serves everyone better and when you have more effective distribution of resources, management and workers, not only is the public better served, but the government has more money to do the things that need to be done.

                • Moorcat

                  I would also take some exception to the characterization that “men are just now hearing about it”. I heard about violence against women all my life – especially when I was a police officer. It is not a new thing but it is now being addressed as a society. That is what societies do – they address problems over time. Sometimes it takes decades or even centuries, but any progressive (by that I mean growing) society will eventually address issues. Violence against women is heinous and it is good that it is being addressed now.

          • Moorcat

            Another datum point to consider is that, more and more, women are finding it financially expedient to stay home rather than work. This is based on a reasonable analysis of the costs of daycare, child transportion, taxes etc.

            http://money.cnn.com/2012/04/18/pf/moms-work/index.htm?hpt=hp_c3

            “For most working parents, child care is by far the greatest expense. In 2010, the cost of putting two children in child care exceeded median annual rent payments in every state, according to a report by Child Care Aware of America.”

            With that in mind, this could very well be one more reason that women have lagged behind men in recovering jobs during this recession. Prior to the recession, two working parent families were the norm. That may well change as disposable income remains scarce or non-existant.

        • Moorcat

          Using the US Dept of Labor statistics and the various polls being made, I would suggest a different picture –

          1) Due to the non-existant growth rate in the public sector, and the ratio of men/women in the public sector, this has impacted the rate at which women have “recovered” from the recession.

          2) The same issue is partially at work in why women did not experience the sudden increase in unemployment in 2008 – Public sector jobs were being lost a much slower rate than private sector jobs.

          3) Many women (especially in two parent households) are choosing to take on the “traditional” role of caring for the family while the males are attempting to get back in the work force. This is somewhat expected given our social mores. It should also be noted that women are choosing to go back to school at a higher rate than men.

          4) As I pointed out above, women experience less unemployment overall than men did, and that unemployment came later in the recession. Available jobs are hard to find for both but men have been out of work longer. It is likely (if the recession continues to improve and doesn’t stall out) that women will begin to catch up with men in the rate of recovery. This will definitely occur if the public sector recovers – a situation that might or might not happen depending on what happens in Congress.

          I don’t think we have seen the end of the recession, nor do I believe the “recovery” is strong enough to endure any major issues. I think that what happens over the next 18 months will determine whether we plunge back into a major recession or the recovery picks up steam.