Last Call For Instant Lynch Mob

You need to stoke the fires of racism?  FOX News delivers.

Over the weekend, a gunman shot and killed a sheriff's deputy in Harris County, Texas, in an apparent ambush. It's still not clear what the shooter's motive was, but it was the work of a man with multiple marks on his criminal record for which he served several short stints in jail. 

Despite any solid leads and facts about the motives in the shooting of 10-year deputy veteran Darren Goforth, some conservative media outlets and local law enforcement officials have already settled on the real culprit: Black Lives Matter. 

"We've heard black lives matter, all lives matter," Harris County Sheriff Ron Hickman said at a press conference following the shooting. "Well, cops' lives matter, too. So how about we drop the qualifier and just say lives matter?" 

Fox News's Elisabeth Hasselbeck later wondered aloud on air why Black Lives Matter isn't considered a "hate group." Bill O'Reilly was more blunt, concluding the movement was indeed a "hate group."

Indeed, Bill-O vowed on his show to "take Black Lives Matter down."

Now white supremacist assholes in Texas are taking up FOX News on the offer.

“It’s going to end, and it’s going to end with that,” said Nathan Ener in a Facebook video. “That’s not going to happen anymore. That’s the end of it. Y’all have pushed us to the limit, and we ain’t going to take it anymore. There’s stuff that us citizens can do, and we’re fixing to do them — starting now.” 

He said alleged gunman Shannon Miles, who was found incompetent to stand trial in an unrelated 2012 assault case, was not to blame for the deputy’s slaying. 

“The one that killed him was these Black Panthers and all these black thugs that comes to your town and marches and hollers ‘oink-oink, bang-bang,’ and all that retarded sh*t, you know, they’re the ones that’s responsible for it,” Ener said. 

Fox News dubbed Black Lives Matter a “murder movement” in an on-screen graphic Monday during a segment with Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke, who accused President Barack Obama of launching a “war on police,” and other conservative media outlets have accused black activists of promoting violence against enforcement. 

“Starting now we holding these people responsible,” Ener warned. “Like I said, it stops now. Don’t ever let a Black Panther or any black group come to your town and march in that town and get done and be able to get in their vehicle and leave. That’s over with.”

So how long before yet more black lives are lost to the lynch mob?  Unfortunately, I'm thinking that the next tragedy will happen soon.

Ener held the slingshot draped over his hands like a noose and issued threats against “thugs” like the New Black Panthers and the Black Lives Matter “bullshit,” saying they “better run” because he and his associates were watching videos to identify, locate and target activists for violence. 

“There won’t be another killing in Texas,” he warned. “There might be a killing, but it won’t be what you think.” 

He picked up a shotgun and cocked it. 

“The last fricking thing some of you sons of b*tches will ever hear is that noise when we’re out there, when we come in your goddamn house,” Ener warned. “Don’t ever threaten another cop in Texas, don’t ever threaten another white person. You black bastards, you goddamn Panthers and sh*t, try to come to another town and try to march — see what happens to you.”

Big words from a small man, to be sure.  But following up on that threat, well...I'm very fearful that those words will become action.

Unless you think Nathan Ener is the only white guy in Texas who thinks like this.

Golden State Gets It Right On Equal Pay

California lawmakers have passed the nation's most ambitious legislation on equal pay for men and women in the workplace, and Gov. Jerry Brown says he'll sign the measure into law.

The bill has a number of provisions, but the piece that stands out the most is one that requires employers to pay men and women the same for “substantially similar work,” not just the exact same job, unless differences are based on productivity, merit, and/or seniority. 

This provision is what used to be called pay equity: not just requiring the same pay for the same job, but for different jobs that are similar in terms of effort, responsibility, and skill. While it isn’t mentioned much anymore, in the 1980s there was a strong movement toward laws that would require pay equality based on this concept. By 1989, 20 states had made adjustments among their own workforces based on “comparable worth,” or the idea of paying the same for substantially similar work in different jobs. More than 335,000 women got a raise and 20 percent of their gender wage gap was eliminated. That reduced the overall wage gap, and in five states it closed by 25 to 33 percent. 

Most of these projects have now been abandoned, however, although Minnesota has kept its own running. At the same time, progress on closing the country’s gender wage gap, which means that women make 78 percent of what men make, has stalled for about a decade. 

California’s new bill also bans employers from retaliating against employees who discuss pay. Even though all American workers have a legal right to discuss compensation with each other, about half say that doing so is either discouraged, prohibited, or could lead to disciplinary actions. That poses a significant hurdle for women trying to address unequal pay, given that it makes it very difficult to find out what everyone else at their job makes. Lilly Ledbetter, for whom the Lilly Ledbetter Equal Pay Act was named, didn’t know she was being paid less until 19 years later. On the other hand, in places like the federal government and unionized workforces, where pay is usually transparent, the gender wage gap is much smaller. 

Another provision of California’s law would allow employees to take action against wage gaps between different worksites, not just at their own location.

Now California's gender pay gap is still 16% between men and women, one of the smallest in the nation, but it still means that on average, men make six bucks for every five that women make for similar work in a similar position.  And a big chunk of that is Silicon Valley by itself, where the pay gap is twice that or more.  Luckily, this new legislation will go a long way towards fixing that problem.

Good job, Golden State.

Trolled By Turd Blossom

Even I have to admit that this is some pretty epic trolling by Karl Rove.

Rove, former deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush who is working on a book about President McKinley, told Time that he'd expect Obama to be "more gracious" to the man "who made it possible for him to be President." 

"In a serious vein, I would hope that he would find a gracious way to honor McKinley, who is an important figure in American history. And I’m not certain he has the authority to have done what he did; the designation was granted by law of Congress in 1917," Rove told the magazine. "In a more jocular way, the guy ought to be more gracious to the guy who made it possible for him to be President." 

Obama was born in 1961 in Hawaii, which was annexed in 1898 during McKinley's presidency.

A swipe at the President and the Birther idiots in his own party?  Yeah, you get a point for that, Karl.

And several million negative points for, you know, being Karl Rove.

StupidiNews!

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• Police in northern Illinois continue to search for three suspects who are believed to be involved in the shooting death of a police lieutenant in Lake County.
• The freefall in Chinese markets are bad news for the country's largest trading partner, Russia, as President Vladimir Putin arrives in Beijing this week.
• Consumer Reports magazine's rating of the $130,000 Tesla Model S electric car was so good it got more than the maximum possible score.