Bobservations

When Tuxedo was spryer, he was quite the jumper. He’d jump to high shelves in the closet and then down to the floor, dropping over seven feet each time. He wasn’t allowed on counters—none of the pets at Casa Bob y Carlos are—but because he is The Great Tuxedo, he was allowed on the bathroom counter to drink from the faucet while we brushed our teeth.

Now that’s he’s older and less likely to make that leap, I pick him up and put him on the counter. I let him drink from the faucet while I brush my teeth, and when I am ready to rinse, I mumble, ‘My turn,’ and he wanders away from the sink to sit and wait until I set him back on the ground.

Last night, however, I walked into the bedroom and heard Carlos talking to Tuxedo, saying Tuxedo was ‘very thirsty.’ I went into the bathroom and found Tuxedo at the edge of the sink, with Carlos cupping his hands to make a little basin for Tuxedo to drink from.

I told Carlos then, and I will tell you all now: my husband is severely pussy[cat]whipped.

Try as he might, Tuxedo, and his two dads, cannot understand this country sometimes.

Last week, before Game 5 of the Eastern Conference Basketball Finals the Miami Heat began with a moment of silence in honor of the victims of the Robb Elementary School mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas that ended with this message:

"The Heat urges you to contact your state senator by calling 202-224-3121 to leave a message demanding their support for common sense gun laws. You can also make change at the ballot box. Visit Heat.com/vote to register and let your voice be heard this fall."

Gun control is once again a major issue after last week’s shooting, especially in Florida, where the state's GOP leadership is  pushing for a change in state law to allow residents to carry concealed guns without permits.

CAST A GODDAMNED VOTE!

Oh Marge Traitor Greene. You are really giving Lauren Boebert and Matt Gaetz a run for their money as the Dumbest Member of Congress.

Y’all might recall when Greene warned of Biden’s “gazpacho police”? Rumor has it she meant Gestapo, but maybe Marge was hungry. Well, she’s at it again, this time claiming that the government wants “surveillance on every part of your life,” including on what people are eating:

“Which is very bad because Bill Gates wants you to eat this fake meat that grows in a peach tree dish so you’ll probably get a little zap inside your body that’ll say ‘No, don’t eat a real cheeseburger, you need to eat the fake burger.’”

Peach tree dish?

Seriously, Georgia, between this moron and Herschel Walker, you state Republicans look like you only elect idiots.

The other day I ran a red light and crashed into a man's car; luckily, while both cars were heavily damaged neither one of us was hurt, and I said to the man:

“This must be a sign that we should meet and be friends for  the rest of our lives.”

And he agreed with; that’s when I looked in my car and saw that the bottle of 75-year-old scotch I’d just bought was still intact, surely another sign, and I said:

“Let’s toast to the fact that we survived this crash.”

I handed him the bottle and he took a long swig and handed it back to me. I put the cap on and gave it back to him, and he asked if I was having any, and I replied:

"Nah. I think I'll just wait for the police."

And what if it did happen?

Like McDonald’s did last week, Starbucks is leaving Russia and closing all 130 of its locations after 15 years in business saying:

“[Starbucks] has made the decision to exit and no longer have a brand presence in the [Russian] market."

Starbucks will continue paying its nearly 2,000 employees in Russia for six months and help them find new jobs, but no more Big Macs and no Half-caf, Half-decaf, extra foam lattes for you, comrade.

Now this did happen … a co-worker was telling the story of how he’d been at Food Lion and when the cashier gave him his change, one of the dollars bills had this written on it:

“I suck dick for a dollar.”

Everyone chuckled, but I said:

“I always knew you were a cheap cocksucker.”

Again, why I still have a job, I don’t know.

Over there in the UK a Rainbow 50p coin will be minted to mark the 50th anniversary of the Pride movement in the country.

The coin features Pride in London’s values of Protest, Visibility, Unity, and Equality in rainbows with the Pride progression flag. This will be the first time the LGBTQ+ community has been celebrated on official UK coin, and it begs the question: where’s our coin America?

The US Soccer Federation reached an agreement to pay its men’s and women’s teams equally, making the American national governing body the first in the sport to promise both sexes matching money.

About effing time.

Ah, Iggy Goncalves, a native of Brazil, who worked for Elite Models before he started his own agency, Iggy Models, Inc, and founded Miami Beach Fitness. All well and good, but all that matters is: Would You Hit It?

Paging Ivanka _____! Paging Ivanka _____! This Is Why You're Complicit ...

Perhaps she was getting her hair done; or maybe her nails were chipped. Maybe she was designing a new handbag to be made in China and sold in “America First,” or maybe she was busy having her street blocked off so her children could go to the park with their Secret Service escorts.

One thing is for sure, when Daddy recently signed an executive order that advocates say rolls back hard-fought victories for women in the workplace, Ivanka _____, Daddy’s Special ASS-istant, was nowhere to be found.

Complicit. On March 27, President _____ revoked the 2014 Fair Play and Safe Workplaces order that former Real President Obama put in place to ensure that companies with federal contracts comply with labor and civil rights laws. See, in an attempt to keep the worst violators from receiving taxpayer dollars, the Fair Pay order included two rules that impacted women workers: paycheck transparency and a ban on forced arbitration clauses for sexual harassment, sexual assault or discrimination claims.

But why ban forced arbitration in cases of sexual harassment? Well, forced arbitration clauses—sometimes called "cover-up clauses” critics—are commonly used to keep sex discrimination claims out of the courts and off the public record.

No one knows about the company’s sexual harassment history, or arbitration, because it’s kept private. And many of us learned about this last year when Gretchen Carlson, formerly of Fox News, choice to avoid the arbitration avenue and directly sue former Fox CEO Roger Ailes, rather than sue the company. Ailes' lawyers accused Carlson of breaching her contract, and tried to force her into private arbitration to keep the story out of courts and out of the public’s eye.

And now there’s a new lawsuit filed against Fox News by commentator Julie Roginsky, who says she faced retaliation "because of [her] refusal to malign Gretchen Carlson and join 'Team Roger' when Carlson sued Ailes."

So, by overturning the Fair Pay order, _____ has made it possible for businesses with federal contracts to continue forcing sexual harassment cases like Carlson's into secret proceedings; and it doesn’t matter how many sexual harassment claims are made against the company, all of them would stay private.

After the Fox News sexual harassment story broke, Carlson testified before Congress about forced arbitration; Senators Richard Blumenthal, Dick Durbin and Al Franken wrote to major arbitration companies to ask for information on the amount of secret arbitration proceedings involving sexual harassment and discrimination:

"If Ms. Carlson had followed Mr. Ailes's reading of her contract, her colleagues might never have learned that she was fighting back, they might never have followed her example; Roger Ailes might never have been exposed; and Fox News might never have been forced to change its behavior. Decades of alleged abuse—harassment that should disgust and astound any reasonable person—could have been allowed to continue."

But hey, it’s just women being sexually harassed, so who needs to know about it, right? I mean, c’mon gals, buck up, you know you asked for it when you wore that tight skirt or when you “accidentally” brushed up against Rioter Ailes in a crowded hallway.

Blumenthal has said that _____'s overturning the Fair Pay order sends women's rights in the workplace back "to a time best left to 'Mad Men'":

"These cover-up clauses render people voiceless—forcing them to suffer in silence, suppressing justice, and allowing others to fall victim in the future. At a time when the fight for equal pay continues, _____ also moved to eliminate paycheck transparency and leave workers to negotiate in the dark."

And that’s the other result of _____'s executive order: it lifted a mandate on paycheck transparency, or requiring employers to detail earnings, pay scales, salaries, and other details ... one of the few ways to ensure companies were paying female workers equally to their male colleagues.

In 2016, the median wage for U.S. women was about 16.8 percent less than the median wage for men; women make about 83 cents to a man's dollar. And, according to economist Elise Gould, that gap that increases as women climb the corporate ladder:

"At the bottom, there's just so far down women's wages can go. They are protected by some degree by the minimum wage, but as you move up, women are not occupying places at the top the way men are. The wage gap at the top is much larger."

Gould listed Wal-Mart as an example of how the wage gap works: in lower-paying hourly jobs at the company made $1,100 less per year than men in the same jobs, while women with salaried positions were paid $14,500 less per year than their male coworkers.

And so Obama’s Fair Pay order made employers submit salary details to the government that would show massive wage gaps like Wal-Mart's. That way you know who is cheating women about of equal pay and by how much, and maybe then companies like Wal-Mart and, well, almost every other company in the country might have to pay women the same wage as their male counterparts.

And so where was Ivanka _____ the day her Daddy once again sexually harassed women by taking away some of their workplace rights? All I know is that her hair looked good and her nails were done ... 

Complicit.

Resist. Do it for women’s rights. And you’ll end up doing it for the rights of all other “less thans” in the country.

NBC News

The Funny Papers

ISBL Asshat of the Week: Phyllis Schlafly

It’s rare that we have a female Asshat of the Week here at ISBL — though we’ve made exceptions for the delightfully delusional Michele Bachmann — because it’s generally the male gender who acts in the most asshatted manner. But today we induct a new female into those hallowed halls: one Phyllis Schlafly, who is visiting our world from the 1920s.

While we have all heard the GOP whispers about rebranding their party, to make them more LGBT-friendly, more Latino-friendly, more female-friendly, we haven’t really seen much action on that, at least at the national level. In fact, just this week, the Republicans — even female Republicans — voted down the Paycheck Fairness Act — meaning women might earn the same as men and not the 23% less than men they earn now.

Sidenote: a junior Asshat of the Week is the Republican Congresswoman  from Tennessee, Marsha Blackburn [right], who actually suggested that Republicans have long “led the fight for women’s equality.”

Now, to be fair, a hard thing to do with Republicans, they say they have a good reason for voting against equal pay .... Obamacare. Yes, it’s the Blame Obamacare excuse from the GOP once again, because they are suggesting that Democrats were using the issue to distract from the alleged problems with Obamacare.

But I digress …

Let’s talk asshat; let’s talk Phyllis Schlafly, a prominent, vocal, and oh-so-out-of-touch member of the Republican movement who suggests that the current pay gap between genders is not wide enough. In an op-ed piece for the Christian Post, Schlafly — the founder of the Eagle Forum PAC — says that woman should never be paid the same as men, and wants the pay gap widened so that woman will be able to find themselves a suitable husband. She says:

“ … women typically choose a mate (husband or boyfriend) who earns more than she does. Men don’t have the same preference for a higher-earning mate.

While women prefer to HAVE a higher-earning partner, men generally prefer to BE the higher-earning partner in a relationship. This simple but profound difference between the sexes has powerful consequences for the so-called pay gap.

Suppose the pay gap between men and women were magically eliminated. If that happened, simple arithmetic suggests that half of women would be unable to find what they regard as a suitable mate.”

See, in Phyllis Schlafly’s world — not in present-day America, I’m guessing — all women really want is a man to take care of them and if you start treating women equally, meaning equal pay, they will simply lose interest in finding a mate.

It’s no great surprise that Schlafly thinks this way; she has long been the voice of the most conservative parts of the GOP and has used her  Eagle Forum PAC to give money to the likes of fellow ISBL Asshat of the Week winners like Eric Cantor, Michele Bachmann, Steve King, and Ted Cruz.

But her stance, especially given that the GOP is trying to make itself more appealing after losing the White House [again] in 2012, will only undermine the efforts of the party to rebrand itself. This, though, is actually a good thing, so maybe Schlafly should get a different award from ISBL?

No, asshat will do nicely.

source

The Funny Papers Pt 1