Here’s a fascinating look at a dimension of Wal-Mart you may not have thought about. Generally, we hear a lot about Wal-Mart driving down wages or running local retailers out of business. From the right, we hear paeans to Wal-Marts as engines of capitalism driving down prices for ordinary everyday products for tens of millions of Americans. Each is true in its way, two sides of the same economic coin. But there’s another reality. In many small towns throughout America today, Wal-Mart has become the de facto meeting place – open 24 hours a day – where all sorts of things happen beside just buying a TV or stocking up on dry goods. It’s replaced the mall, the town center, the drive-in, all the places where life happens, teenagers hang out or tailgate and drink, or people just meet up. This piece looks at the local Wal-Mart as the center of life in one Texas town.
Far-right Christianist rappers pen song dedicated to Ted Cruz and his battle for freedom.
Former GOP Rep. Tom Davis: GOP could have “a lot of pissed off people” if Supreme Court goes along with GOP’s latest Obamacare challenge.
I noted earlier that Joseph Hutchens, the former Arkansas State Trooper now serving a lengthy child porn sentence, says that Jim Bob Duggar dramatically underplayed the scope and scale of son Josh Duggar’s instances of molestation when he brought Josh to talk to Hutchens in 2003. Now, though, In Touch Weekly is reporting that in 2007, when Josh Dugger was 19 he sued the Arkansas Department of Human Services to prevent them from making a finding against him or possibly to prevent on-going monitoring of his interactions with his sisters.
We’ve got your FIFA corruption scandal covered: 5 Points on the investigation that is rocking international soccer, This Chart on how the allegedly corrupt enterprise worked, and the full indictment to peruse at the bottom here. In depth enough for soccer fans, accessible enough for muckraking fans!
So Joseph Hutchens, the pedophile former Arkansas State Trooper, now doing 56 years on a child porn conviction, says Jim Bob Duggar lied when he told police he’d taken son Josh Duggar to see Hutchens for a talking to about fondling young girls. Hutchens says Duggar dramatically downplayed what was known – claiming it was a single incident with a single girl and only through her clothes rather than multiple times with multiple girls, etc. Here’s the latest.
Carly Fiorina decided to show up and upstage Hillary at a campaign event to burnish her pitch as the 2016 campaign Hillary-slayer. But she ended up getting huffy and defensive. So the whole thing was sort of a trainwreck. Basically, she HP’d it.
I’m actually surprised advertisers are abandoning the Duggars quite this fast.
The day the Duggar scandal broke out I did a write up based on the initial reports of what had happened. So over the weekend I read the actual police report that pushed the whole story into the media and apparently ended the Duggar’s show at least temporarily. So what’s in there?