I’m not sure I’ve blogged about Lilly Ledbetter’s case before, and if I have I haven’t done so very much, but watching her convention talk was a stark reminder of exactly how absurd the Supreme Court ruling that made her famous was. If you didn’t hear her talk, the point is that she worked for many years at Goodyear Tire. One day, she found persuasive evidence that she’d been the victim of illegal wage discrimination on account of being a woman. She sued. She won before a jury. But after a series of appeals a 5-4 Supreme Court decision let Goodyear off the hook on the theory that her suit had been filed too late — she needed, they said, to have filed her claim within 180 days of the first instance of illegal discrimination even though she wasn’t aware that it was occurring at the time. As The Los Angeles Times editorialized back in April:

As a narrow reading of the law, that’s all well and good. But as a prescription for redressing harm — the intent, after all, of anti-discrimination law — the court’s approach is impossibly binding. Most cases of discrimination, including the one before the court in Ledbetter, are difficult to discern at once, for the simple reason that most discrimination is covert. In the case of Lilly Ledbetter, a jury found that her employers had unfairly paid her less than male colleagues over a period of years. When Ledbetter discovered the disparity, she sued, but it was years after the initial discrimination, so five justices of the Supreme Court stood on a sterile legal principle in order to deny justice.

At any rate, even if you accept the conservative justices’ theory that their perverse reading of the existing law is correct, that points to the need to change the law. Which is exactly what their was a move to do in congress, but it’s been filibustered by the Senate Republicans and so, basically, if you want to get away with illegal discrimination you just need to make sure you can cover it up for at least 180 days.

Ledbetter’s not a political professional, but her story’s pretty compelling and important and one kind of wonders why so many Senate Republicans think it’s so important to help companies get away with illegal discrimination. Or as Jonah Goldberg put it:

Wow, she was even worse than Sebelius. Tootsie with a southern accent. I burst into laughter when they started playing “I’m so excited” after she finished.

I like that stuff so much better than Bill Kristol’s fake feminism.

Looks like when you include all the networks, the 2008 convention is drawing more viewers than the 2004 edition did.

Here’s a snippet from a BloggingHeads episode I recorded with Jon Chait late last week, but that only just recently went up on their site. We’re talking about the Russia-Georgia situation:

I sort of prefer to express myself in writing, so to reiterate my idea here the point is that I think a lot of people have a tendency to wave the flag of “morality” or “idealism” in foreign policy as a way of evading responsibility for the consequences of their ideas. At the extreme, I think everyone agrees with this. There would have been nothing “moral” about it if Dwight Eisenhower had taken an “idealistic” stand over Hungary in 1956 and wound up causing a nuclear war. Nor would the fact that the resulting war would, in an important sense, have been the result of immoral Soviet actions really done a great deal to exculpate Eisenhower. There’s nothing new about this idea, it’s all in Max Weber’s “Politics as a Vocation” where he says that in the political domain we need an ethic of responsibility, where you put forth initiatives that actually lead to good consequences.

In foreign policy, this is the animating ideal behind Lieven & Hulsman’s concept of Ethical Realism which despite some disagreements on policy specifics, I think is generally the right way to think about this stuff. When I say that maintaining a good relationship with Russia and China so as to allow for progress on nuclear proliferation, climate change, and international terrorism rather than a new era of cold wars and proxy conflict is so important that we need to let some other stuff slide, I’m not saying we need to set morality aside in order to pursue our interests. I’m saying that, morally speaking, the one course is better than the other. Trying to promote a world in which peaceful cooperation and commerce predominate over coercion and violent conflict is a profoundly moral approach, even if it at times requires people to temper the natural human instinct toward moralistic posturing.

TV Week article says viewership of Monday’s conventioneering was “tepid”:

Preliminary national television ratings data from Nielsen Media Research indicate that interest in the first night of the Democratic convention as covered by the three major broadcast networks was tepid, to say the least.

The 10-11 p.m. hour of convention coverage of Michelle Obama’s big night on ABC, CBS and NBC added up to slightly less than 12.5 million viewers combined. NBC scored the largest audience.

But then they don’t compare to the ratings for 2004 or 2000. And this doesn’t include the cable viewership. So what does this really tell us? As best I can tell, nothing. It would be interesting to know if interest in the convention is up or down from four years ago, though.