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Joanne Bamberger in USA Today on Silicon Valley's working moms If Silicon Valley is creating the workplace of the future, they're pushing working women back into an inflexible past, argues Joanne Bamberger. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer stirred controversy this week by ordering remote employees to move back to the office. And Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg may have written a book that tries to empower women to seize executive positions within their company, but Bamberger sees the message as hostile to working mothers who need more flexible schedules than what Sandberg describes. "The message coming from these C-suite moms is less about empowerment and accountability than it is about guilt," Bamberger writes. "Guilt for women wanting to work remotely in order to manage their lives and provide for their families. Guilt for not acting with more ambition. Guilt for daring to put their children and spouses on equal footing with their careers."
Jonathan Cohn in The New Republic on the inevitable sequester What was once a looming crisis is now an inevitable certainty, argues Jonathan Cohn. In the absence of a bipartisan deal, a sequester will take effect on Thursday night, triggering indiscriminate across-the-board federal spending cuts at a time when discretionary spending is already at a historic low. Neither party likes the prospect of sequestration, but they like each other's proposed solutions even less, to the point where they're willing to put the nascent economic recovery on the line. "Within a week or two, political rhetoric may matter a lot less than longer lines at airport security, smaller unemployment checks, and other reminders that less government spending also means fewer government services," Cohn writes.