The "liberal media" in conspiracy with the Census Bureau reported this week that women earn 80% of what men earn, on average.
Research explains roughly 60% of the problem: Women pull out of the fast lane to care for children or enter professions that pay less, for example. Forty percent of the gender wage gap "puzzle" however is a gaping black hole not explained by scientific study.
The issue of persistent inequality of income between men and women in the United States is open to sheer speculation, but one thing we know for sure is that gasbags abhor a vacuum.
Look no further than the "Sage of Farmington" to offer his keen insight as to why women don't earn equal pay for equal work in the land of equal opportunity. His self-absorbed, back-slapping column doesn't tackle the issue directly, but its mere presence in Maine newspapers offers some not-so-nuanced clues.
The Sage writes of his love to read and reread what a fellow curmudgeon columnist writes adoringly about him, but makes it clear he won't stoop to read anything written by conservative-turned-liberal women, like Arianna Huffington. While he delights in rattling off a laundry list of obscure male writers he and like-minded "genetic conservatives" inhale, Huffington isn't "intellectual" enough for his club. She is merely "good looking."
With all his time spent bloviating about rare works of underground "pure" conservatives, it's no wonder the Sage has never encountered a single person who has drifted from the right to the left of the political spectrum. His worldview springs forth from an echo chamber like a breath of stale air. How privileged we are in Maine to read his bombastic opinions and ideas in the newspapers and on the Internet.
So what do the women columnists have to say about the subject of disparate pay in Maine, and the nation?
Well, that's left to speculation as well! You see there are plenty of conservative men who are paid to lament publicly about being treated unfairly by the "liberal media," but no women paid less to weigh in on the gender gap, or anything else political for that matter.
A cruel irony, perhaps, is that women's voices are welcome, for free, right here on the Huffington Post.
Why don't things change and get better for working women, with regularly published lectures from men like the Sage who writes with pride that he "never experienced a transition?" What a surprise the gender wage gap continues, with daily doses of what old farts like him have to say.
The Sage is given a public voice by the biggest news outlet in Maine to write about his resentment of being constantly exposed to liberal points of view, while according to him "liberals" live their entire lives "without any direct exposure at all" to conservative brilliance.
I dare you to speculate what will happen when the people of Maine are finally given "direct exposure" to women's voices in the media about political issues like the chronic wage gap between men and women. I'll go out on a limb and suggest us girls will be paid more fairly. Good looking, or not.