On Monday’s Morning Joe, an all-liberal panel discussed, with co-host Joe Scarborough, the recent feud between the D.C. Council and Walmart, highlighting the standoff between the discount retail giant and city councilors over wages at three future Walmart locations in the nation’s capital.

Co-host Mika Brzezinski bashed Walmart throughout the segment, responding with a long pause and a befuddled look when Scarborough and liberal panelist Brian Shactman defended the world’s largest retailer. Brzezinski petulantly asked Shactman how Walmart’s “doing,” as though the answer alone would morally justify a policy that specifically targeted Walmart because it is a profitable, and politically incorrect, corporation:

Walmart, the nation’s largest retail employer is in the process of building the very first of its planned six brand-new stores in Washington, D.C., but the liberal city council plans to welcome them into the city with new legislation mandating that the company "pay their employees a 50 percent premium over the city’s minimum wage." Yet in his 27- paragraph story in the July 11 Washington Post, staff writer Mike DeBonis ignored how the legislation exempts large retailers with unionized workers from paying the premium minimum wage.

The Arkansas-based retailer has threatened to halt construction on its planned six stores, citing the fact that the added labor costs inject uncertainty about the profitability of the operations given the new law's mandates. DeBonis noted that the law requires "[r]etailers with corporate sales of $1 billion or more and operating in spaces 75,000 square feet or larger would be required to pay employees no less than $12.50 an hour." Curiously, however, DeBonis failed to mention an exemption in the law that shields unionized companies like grocery chain Safeway from the bill.  DeBonis choose to cite union supporters who support the de facto tax on Wal-Mart, without explaining why unions would love a proposed law that would exclude them from its penalty.

MSNBC’s Ed Schultz will take any and every opportunity to bash Tea Party conservatives, even if it means exploiting a terrible tragedy to do so. The bombastic host did just that on Sunday, using the recent factory collapse in Bangladesh to blast Republicans for supporting the removal of burdensome regulations on American businesses.

Schultz introduced his segment with scenes from the horrible incident, huffing:

Jeffrey Lord at the American Spectator has reviewed the White House logs looking for a relationship between meetings listed there and the timeline found in the Inspector General's report on the targeting of Tea Party and conservative groups issued last Tuesday. Lord's work represents yet another example of alternative media scooping a lazy or negligent establishment press.

What Lord has found (single-page print version) is that President Barack Obama met with the President of the National Treasury Employees Union Colleen Kelley, on March 31, 2010. The NTEU is "the 150,000 member union that represents IRS employees along with 30 other separate government agencies." The Inspector General's report, blandly titled "Inappropriate Criteria Were Used to Identify Tax-Exempt Applications for Review," indicates that the IRS, in Lord's words, "set to work in earnest targeting the Tea Party and conservative groups around America" the very next day. Lord's work is a mandatory read-the-whole-thing item. Excerpts follow the jump (bolds are mine throughout this post):

In a roundup of editorial commentary published on Wednesday, the Associated Press excerpted an editorial at the Los Angeles Times condemning the Atlanta Public Schools cheating scandal, which has thus far led to 35 arrests, including that the of the district's former superintendent. "Somehow," the excerpt omitted the specifics of the excuse-making on the part of the American Federation of Teachers and it President Randi Weingarten in the organization's press release.

What AP excerpted, followed by the key passage it chose not to, follow the jump.