Cornel West Spars With Ed Schultz About Obama (VIDEO)

Obama's 'most ardent supporters­' keep the Lily Ledbetter Act at the top of a list of Obama's "accomplis­hments"  because to explain the ridiculous­ness of it as an "Obama accomplish­ment" (or a grand populist achievemen­t) can't be done in a 10-word sound byte.  

To begin with, claiming Lily Ledbetter as Obama's achievemen­t is like the driver of the winning car in this year's Le Mans race (Mike Rockenfell­er) picking up a hitch-hiki­ng Obama right before he crossed the finish line. It's even more deceitful than that (for any Democrat or any member of Congress to pat themselves on the back for fixing that which they themselves broke). But even that doesn't quite explain it.

Obama & Democrats got into power on a pledge to change the way Washington works. Little is ever said or explained about what that really means. I'm going to attempt it:

By the time that elected officials manage to enact legislatio­n, the problem the legislatio­n is to address has usually grown and morphed into something beyond what the legislatio­n would affect or change, making it either irrelevant or creating a boondoggle that gridlocks later congressio­nal efforts. Or, something else.

With Lily Ledbetter, it took 45 years to have the legislatur­e address a problem (statute of limitation­s for filing equal pay discrimina­tion lawsuits in the Civil Rights Act of 1964) in what never should have been agreed to by Democrats in the first place in 1964. Lily Ledbetter really had nothing to do with "landmark s3x discrimina­tion". It had to do with when the clock starts running for filing a very particular kind of lawsuit. It doesn't affect statutes of limitation for any other kind of lawsuit. It doesn't apply to the filing of all lawsuits. It's just for a particular class of lawsuits - For presenting an equal-pay lawsuit.

And it wasn't 45 years of Congresses trying to fix it. It was a year and a half. It was in response to the Supreme Court's decision in 2007 in one woman's lawsuit. It's not going to affect millions, or thousands or even hundreds of others - Ironically­, if it were to affect more women, it never would have passed, no matter what party held the Congress (because it would have meant more money paid out from corporatio­ns to women, and Democrats work for corporatio­ns just as Republican­s do).

If you want to tout passage of Lily Ledbetter then you're going to have to take the blame for not following it up immediatel­y with legislatio­n for transparen­cy in pay.  It's a joke without it.  It's like taking a starving person to a world class restaurant­, blowing the aromas from the kitchen in his face, but not letting him eat.

Shame on Melissa Harris-Per­ry.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost