Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be increasingly sunny with a high of forty-one. Sunrise is 7:21 AM and sunset 4:22 PM, for 9h 01m 50s of daytime. The moon is new, with 0.1% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred fourth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Whitewater’s Library Board meets at 6:30 PM, and the Whitewater Unified School Board at 6:15 PM (closed session at 6:15 PM, open session beginning at 7 PM).
On this day in 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment goes into effect. On this day in 1863, the Milwaukee Sentinel calls for better pay for soldiers: “If any men deserve to be well paid it is the men who are enduring the hardships and running the risks of a war like this.”
Recommended for reading in full —
Jennifer Rubin considers The final straw: Rupert Murdoch needs to go:
Unless you’ve been living under a rock — or are the aging executive chairman of News Corp. — you know that Fox News has been ground zero in the epidemic of sexual assault scandals in which powerful men have abused younger, more vulnerable women. Fox, of course, has been slammed by a series of sexual harassment cases that cost the company tens of millions in settlement money and ended the careers of Bill O’Reilly, Roger Ailes, Eric Bolling and Fox News co-president Bill Shine (who was accused of covering up a culture of sexual predation).
So it was more than a bit stunning that News Corp.’s executive chairman Rupert Murdoch chose to brush off the epidemic of sexual harassment that has bludgeoned his company — especially during a cultural firestorm in which star news personalities, entertainment moguls and politicians have been forced out of their jobs (and in a few egregious cases now face criminal investigations) for accused sexual misconduct. Everywhere the code of silence that protected abusive men is crumbling — but the elderly news tycoon seems oblivious….
(He does need to go, but he won’t, and even if he does go, Lachlan Murdoch – likely to run the news side of things – will prove no better.)
Erik Wemple ridicules Murdoch’s judgment in Rupert Murdoch expertly returns the sexual harassment spotlight to Fox News:
There’s a certain corporate mind-set that allows a sexual harassment culture to germinate and thrive for decades. And it was on display Thursday, as 21st Century Fox mogul Rupert Murdoch was interviewed by Sky’s Ian King about the company’s deal to sell its entertainment assets to Walt Disney Co. for $52 billion. When King asked whether Fox News’s troubles with sexual harassment over the past two years had harmed the company, Murdoch riffed:
“All nonsense, there was a problem with our chief executive, sort of, over the years, isolated incidents,” replied Murdoch. “As soon as we investigated it he was out of the place in hours, well, three or four days. And there’s been nothing else since then. That was largely political because we’re conservative. Now of course the liberals are going down the drain — NBC is in deep trouble. CBS, their stars. I mean there are really bad cases and people should be moved aside. There are other things which probably amount to a bit of flirting.”
What a grasp of history: Under the always-vigilant supervision of Murdoch himself, that chief executive, the late Roger Ailes, spent two decades at Fox gathering accusers. The stories ranged from the merely gross — like the time he went after Megyn Kelly in the 2000s: “He tried to grab me three times. Make out with me, which he didn’t. But I had to shove him off of me. And he came back. And I shoved him again, and he came back a third time. And then when I shoved him off a third time he asked me when my contract was up,” said Kelly — to the barbaric, like the psychological torture he visited upon a Fox News booker….
Kathy Lally writes of The two expat bros who terrorized women correspondents in Moscow:
There’s more than one way to harass women. A raft of men in recent weeks have paid for accusations of sexual harassment with their companies, their jobs, their plum political posts. But one point has been overlooked in the scandals: Men can be belittling, cruel and deeply damaging without demanding sex. (Try sloughing off heaps of contempt with your self-esteem intact.) We have no consensus — and hardly any discussion — about how we should treat behaviors that are misogynist and bullying but fall short of breaking the law.
Twenty years ago, when I was a Moscow correspondent for the Baltimore Sun, two Americans named Matt Taibbi and Mark Ames ran an English-language tabloid in the Russian capital called the eXile. They portrayed themselves as swashbuckling parodists, unbound by the conventions of mainstream journalism, exposing Westerners who were cynically profiting from the chaos of post-Soviet Russia.
A better description is this: The eXile was juvenile, stunt-obsessed and pornographic, titillating for high school boys. It is back in the news because Taibbi just wrote a new book, and interviewers are asking him why he and Ames acted so boorishly back then. The eXile’s distinguishing feature, more than anything else, was its blinding sexism — which often targeted me….
(Taibbi and Ames: Americans in Moscow who behaved like the worst of Russia – and of America – to their fellow Americans living abroad.)
Dr. William Barber and Dr. Liz Theoharis write Poverty in America is a moral outrage. The soul of our nation is at stake:
In March of 1968, as part of a tour of US cities to shine a light on poverty and drum up support for the recently-launched Poor People’s Campaign, the Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr visited the northwest Mississippi town of Marks. He saw a teacher feeding schoolchildren a meager lunch of a slice of apple and crackers, and started crying.
Earlier this month, officials from the United Nations embarked on a similar trip across the US, and what they observed was a crisis of systemic poverty that Dr King would have recognized 50 years ago: diseases like hookworm, caused by open sewage, in Butler County, Alabama, and breathtaking levels of homelessness in Los Angeles’ Skid Row, home to 55,000 people….
The morally troubling conditions Dr King witnessed across the country cemented his call, along with leaders in the labor movement, tenant unions, farm workers, Native American elders and grassroots organizers, for a campaign to foster a revolution of values in America.
Half a century later, the conditions that motivated the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign have only worsened, making the need for a new moral movement more urgent than ever. Compared to 1968, 60% more Americans are living below the official poverty line today – a total of 41 million people. The gap between our government’s discretionary spending on the military versus anti-poverty programs has grown from two-to-one at the height of the Vietnam war to four-to-one today….
Recall That Time a 61 Year Old Farmer Won One of the World’s Most Grueling Athletic Competitions: