Ole Miss Shows Its Southern Backwardness Courtesy Of Sexist Governor

The Article: Mississippi governor: Educational troubles began when ‘mom is in the workplace’ by Valerie Strauss in The Washington Post.

The Text: Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant (R) said Tuesday that America’s educational troubles began when women began working outside the home in large numbers.
Bryant was participating in a Washington Post Live event focused on the importance of ensuring that children read well by the end of third grade. In response to a question about how America became “so mediocre” in regard to educational outcomes, he said:

I think both parents started working. And the mom is in the work place.

Bryant immediately recognized how controversial his remark would be and said he knew he would start to get e-mails. He then expanded on his answer, saying that “both parents are so pressured” in families today. He also noted that America seemed to be losing ground internationally in regards to educational outcomes because other nations began to invest more in their own school systems and make progress.

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A Liberal Mole At FOX News Speaks Out

The Article: I was a liberal mole at Fox News: From Bill O’Reilly to Roger Ailes, here’s all the inside dope by Joe Muto in Salon.

The Text: People would often ask me about how Fox pushes a message.

And I would always tell them the message isn’t so much pushed as it is pulled, gravitationally, with Roger Ailes as the sun at the center of the solar system; his vice presidents were the forces of gravity that kept the planet-size anchors and executive producers in a tight orbit; then all the lesser producers and PAs were moons and satellites and debris of varying sizes.

An organizational flow chart at Fox would be tough to draw up, as title alone was not the ultimate signifier of status. Sometimes the anchors outranked their executive producers, as was the case with “The O’Reilly Factor.” (In fact, Bill had procured an EP title for himself, but he outranked the two other EPs on the show, both Stan, who oversaw TV, radio, and the website, and Gayle, who focused on television and also served as a fact-checker.) Sometimes the anchors were relatively weak — as was the case with a lot of weekend shows, and maybe some of the newswheel hours — and a strong senior producer or producer outranked, or at least pretended to outrank, the host. (For example, Lizzie from “The Lineup,” who was only a producer but was tough enough that she probably could have bossed around Ailes himself had she been left alone in a room with him for more than five minutes.)

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Charitable Donations? Not For The Poor

The Article: Only a third of charitable contributions go the poor by Dylan Matthews in The Washington Post.

The Text: Sussing out who gets what from various tax breaks is tricky enough, but it’s nearly impossible for the charitable tax deduction. On the most basic analysis, it seems to help the rich. After all, they are more likely to itemize their tax returns, and the deduction is worth more for people in higher tax brackets. That’s why the CBO found that $33 billion of the $39 billion deduction went to the top quintile, and that the top one percent gets more out of it than any other group, as a share of income.

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Meet The Billionaires Who Run Wal-Mart

The Article: Always Low Wages: Meet the Billionaires Who Run Wal-Mart by in Josh Eidelson in The Nation.

The Text: This week Walmart shareholders will gather in the retail giant’s Arkansas backyard and re-elect a board of directors charged with guiding the company over the coming years. Walmart’s board—rife with billionaires and industry titans—has recently become a lightning rod for company critics. During their lengthy and high-profile business careers, several board members have faced allegations—from worker exploitation to financial malfeasance—that parallel those facing Walmart itself.

Over the past year, labor activists have targeted board members with dossiers on the Internet and protests around the country, from a hunger strike and vigil by guest workers outside Michele Burns’s New York mansion, to demonstrators placed along the route of a Bay Area marathon to shout messages at Greg Penner as he ran towards the finish line. Over the past week, striking retail workers from the union-backed group OUR Walmart have staged a series of board-focused protests, including one at Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer’s Palo Alto mansion, and another outside her penthouse atop the San Francisco Four Seasons hotel.

While Walmart’s shareholder meeting won’t kick off until Friday, strikers are already in town. This week they’ll try to win over some of the workers flown to Arkansas by management, and to draw shareholders’ and reporters’ attention to OUR Walmart’s allegations of illegal retaliation and their demands regarding Walmart’s working conditions. They’ll also work to shine light on recent company controversies regarding reported bribery in Mexico and factory deaths in Bangladesh.

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Another Example Of Domestic Surveillance Courtesy Of Obama

The Article: U.S. Is Secretly Collecting Records of Verizon Calls by Charlie Savage in The New York Times.

The Text: The Obama administration is secretly carrying out a domestic surveillance program under which it is collecting business communications records involving Americans under a hotly debated section of the Patriot Act, according to a highly classified court order disclosed on Wednesday night.

The order, signed by Judge Roger Vinson of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in April, directs a Verizon Communications subsidiary, Verizon Business Network Services, to turn over “on an ongoing daily basis” to the National Security Agency all call logs “between the United States and abroad” or “wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.”

The order does not apply to the content of the communications.

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