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The New York Times lists Emmy winners. The AP has an overview story here.

New York Times: “Hvaldimir, a beluga whale who had captured the public’s imagination since 2019 after he was spotted wearing a harness seemingly designed for a camera, was found dead on Saturday in Norway, according to a nonprofit that worked to protect the whale.... [Hvaldimir] was wearing a harness that identified it as “equipment” from St. Petersburg. There also appeared to be a camera mount. Some wondered if the whale was on a Russian reconnaissance mission. Russia has never claimed ownership of the whale. If Hvaldimir was a spy, he was an exceptionally friendly one. The whale showed signs of domestication, and was comfortable around people. He remained in busier waters than are typical for belugas....” ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: Oh, Lord, do not let Bobby Kennedy, Jr., near that carcass. ~~~

     ~~~ AP Update: “There’s no evidence that a well-known beluga whale that lived off Norway’s coast and whose harness ignited speculation it was a Russian spy was shot to death last month as claimed by animal rights groups, Norwegian police said Monday.... Police said that the Norwegian Veterinary Institute conducted a preliminary autopsy on the animal, which was become known as 'Hvaldimir,' combining the Norwegian word for whale — hval — and the first name of Russian President Vladimir Putin. 'There are no findings from the autopsy that indicate that Hvaldimir has been shot,' police said in a statement.”

New York Times: Botswana's “President Mokgweetsi Masisi grinned as he lifted the diamond, a 2,492-carat stone that is the biggest diamond unearthed in more than a century and the second-largest ever found, according to the Vancouver-based mining operator Lucara, which owns the mine where it was found. This exceptional discovery could bring back the luster of the natural diamond mining industry, mining companies and experts say. The diamond was discovered in the same relatively small mine in northeastern Botswana that has produced several of the largest such stones in living memory. Such gemstones typically surface as a result of volcanic activity.... The diamond will likely sell in the range of tens of millions of dollars....”

Click on photo to enlarge.

~~~ Guardian: "On a distant reef 16,000km from Paris, surfer Gabriel Medina has given Olympic viewers one of the most memorable images of the Games yet, with an airborne celebration so well poised it looked too good to be true. The Brazilian took off a thundering wave at Teahupo’o in Tahiti on Monday, emerging from a barrelling section before soaring into the air and appearing to settle on a Pacific cloud, pointing to the sky with biblical serenity, his movements mirrored precisely by his surfboard. The shot was taken by Agence France-Presse photographer Jérôme Brouillet, who said “the conditions were perfect, the waves were taller than we expected”. He took the photo while aboard a boat nearby, capturing the surreal image with such accuracy that at first some suspected Photoshop or AI." 

Washington Post: “'Mary Cassatt at Work' is a large and mostly satisfying exhibition devoted to the career of the great American artist beloved for her sensitive and often sentimental views of family life. The 'at work' in the title of the Philadelphia Museum of Art show references the curators’ interest in Cassatt’s pioneering effort to establish herself as a professional artist within a male-dominated field. Throughout the show, which includes some 130 paintings, pastels, prints and drawings, the wall text and the art on view stresses Cassatt’s fixation on art as a career rather than a pastime.... Mary Cassatt at Work is on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through Sept. 8. philamuseum.org”

New York Times: “Bob Newhart, who died on Thursday at the age of 94, has been such a beloved giant of popular culture for so long that it’s easy to forget how unlikely it was that he became one of the founding fathers of stand-up comedy. Before basically inventing the hit stand-up special, with the 1960 Grammy-winning album 'The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart' — that doesn’t even count his pay-per-view event broadcast on Canadian television that some cite as the first filmed special — he was a soft-spoken accountant who had never done a set in a nightclub. That he made a classic with so little preparation is one of the great miracles in the history of comedy.... Bob Newhart holds up. In fact, it’s hard to think of a stand-up from that era who is a better argument against the commonplace idea that comedy does not age well.”

Washington Post: “An early Titian masterpiece — once looted by Napolean’s troops and a part of royal collections for centuries — caused a stir when it was stolen from the home of a British marquess in 1995. Seven years later, it was found inside an unassuming white and blue plastic bag at a bus stop in southwest London by an art detective, and returned. This week, the oil painting 'The Rest on the Flight into Egypt' sold for more than $22 million at Christie’s. It was a record for the Renaissance artist, whom museums describe as the greatest painter of 16th-century Venice. Ahead of the sale in April, the auction house billed it as 'the most important work by Titian to come to the auction market in more than a generation.'”

Washington Post: The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., which houses the world's largest collection of Shakespeare material, has undergone a major renovation. "The change to the building is pervasive, both subtle and transformational."

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Sunday
Feb272011

Full House Fold

Art by Barry Blitt for the New York Times.Frank Rich: "Still heady with hubris from the midterms — and having persuaded themselves that Gingrich’s 1995 history can’t possibly repeat itself — radical Republicans are convinced that deficit-addled voters are on their side no matter what.... Let’s hope [the President] knows that he, not the speaker, is the player holding a full house, and that he will tell the country in no uncertain terms that much more than money is on the table."

CW: I'm not sure when or if the Times is going to get around to posting my comment on Rich's column, so here it is:


President Obama will not tell the American people what's at stake in the budget. None of us knows what his true ideology is. None of us knows how he would govern if we had a parliamentary system in which the leader of the government can pretty much govern as he wishes.

But we do know this: Prime Minister Obama would not govern as a progressive. All that progressive talk during the campaign was a vote-currying deception. Mr. Obama campaigned the way Republicans always campaign: by pretending his goals were markedly different from what they really were.

Obama perfectly followed the Republican playbook in 2008: he pretended to be a progressive who would right the wrongs of eight years of Republican rule. But when he got into the White House, he suddenly turned into a conservative who engineered a "stimulus" package that was largely Republican-style tax cuts, a healthcare law that was nearly identical to one Republicans proposed in the 20th century (& which also included the individual mandate, BTW), & a financial reform package that lets the banksters do what they want.

If you think I'm exaggerating, let's look at something that's more simple and straightforward than a complex budget or those huge bills that Obama signed into law during his first two years in office. Let's look at something over which Mr. Obama has complete control and for which he cannot claim the Congress forced him to "compromise": Here's what President Obama said in a campaign stump speech he made in the fall of 2007 in South Carolina:

 If American workers are being denied their right to organize & collectively bargain, when I'm in the White House, I'll put on a pair of comfortable shoes myself, I'll walk on that picket line with you....

Here's the video, which I first posted a couple of days ago:

Today, Republican governors in several states are attacking collective bargaining rights. Obama made one statement -- and then only in response to a reporter's question -- in which he said of the Wisconsin bill, "it appears to be an assault on unions." President Obama's comfortable shoes are nowhere to be seen. Reporters have repeatedly questioned Obama's press secretary Jay Carney about Obama's campaign promise, and Carney has dutifully obfuscated with responses like (this is not an exact quote) "People know where the President stands." Yeah, we know this: he's not standing in Wisconsin or Ohio or Indiana in those comfortable shoes.

Similarly, ever since budget season has come upon us, President Obama has been playing the part of a reliably Republican president. He has repeatedly told the American people that the government must live within its means. That's a line straight out of the Contract on America. Never mind that politicians since Alexander Hamilton -- you know, one of the fathers of the Constitution -- have said that federal deficits are a good thing. And where has President Obama been campaigning? At corporation after corporation where he has said we can "win the future" (or as Sarah Palin calls it, "WTF") by giving tax breaks to small businesses so they can innovate.

Not Word One about funding prenatal care or healthcare legislation or the EPA. Not Word One. Instead, Obama has given government workers an effective five-year pay cut by freezing their wages even as the prices of essential commodities (like grain & cotton) have soared, guaranteeing that prices of food and clothing will rise. He has also presented a budget that will cut home-heating assistance to poor families & Pell grants to college students. Hope you're not too cold while you're staying home from college.

Scott Walker made a "fireside" address the other day in which he expressed his respect for unions. ("I really do" respect unions, he emphasized.) Relying on President Obama to tell the American people the truth about what's in that noxious House budget is like relying on Scott Walker to tell the truth about how he feels about unions:

Not. Going. to. Happen.

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