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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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Wednesday
Apr132011

President Obama's Fiscal Plan

CW: Most of the underlying narrative in President Obama's speech was the same stuff you've been hearing from liberals all your life. If you thought it was refreshing and "new," it's because you haven't heard Barack Obama say it since, oh, say, 2008. BUT. For what it's worth, because I haven't seen anyone mention it, let me just add that the most effective theme in the speech was this one:

I believe it paints a vision of our future that is deeply pessimistic. It’s a vision that says if our roads crumble and our bridges collapse, we can’t afford to fix them. If there are bright young Americans who have the drive and the will but not the money to go to college, we can’t afford to send them. -- Barack Obama

     ... Casting the entire Republican philosophy of governance as pessimistic is brilliant. And it's true. This will hit a chord with voters (and, please, this was a one-hundred percent political speech) of all persuasions. Americans don't like pessimists. They like to win. They want the U.S. to "Win the Future" (a catchphrase, as Krugman says, that should earn its author an assignment "to count yurts in Outer Mongolia"). WTF.

New York Times Editors: "Negotiations with an implacable opposition are about to get much tougher, but it was a relief to see Mr. Obama standing up for the values that got him to the table." Comments are here.

Jonathan Cohn of The New Republic: "If there is an essence of the liberal vision for America..., it's the idea that a modern, enlightened society promises economic security to all, notwithstanding illness, accident of birth, or age.... In the era of Roosevelt and Truman, Kennedy and Johnson, Democrats talked openly and proudly of this mission. But in the last few years, at least, Democrats have seemed less comfortable with such rhetoric.... This contrast has been vivid in fights over the economy, climate change, and health care, with Democrats making sensible, nuanced arguments about growth rates and Republicans making hyperbolic, simplistic claims about 'socialism.' Not on Wednesday."

Rick Hertzberg: "Given the position his own reluctance, until now, to stake out a clear ideological divide had left him in, Obama succeeded in constructing a reasonably solid fortification for the fiscal battles to come."

Adam Serwer of American Prospect: "... despite the signs the president might tack right on this issue, he basically ended up giving the most full-throated rhetorical defense of American liberalism I think I've ever heard him give."

"The Umpire Strikes Back." Jon Chait of The New Republic: President Obama "beat Ryan and the Republicans to a bloody pulp.... He expressed moral outrage in a way I've never heard him do before, and in a way I didn't think he was capable of."

Massimo Calabresi of Time: "President Obama didn't offer a lot of specifics about how he intends to close the federal budget deficit in his speech at GW Wednesday, but he did make one thing clear: he intends to go head-to-head with Republicans over taxes."

Robert Greenstein of the Center for Budget & Policy Priorities looks at the numbers & doesn't like 'em: "Because the Obama plan relies on budget cuts for two-thirds of its deficit reduction measures, it goes dangerously far in ... cuts in mandatory programs other than Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security," i.e., "in core programs for low-income Americans, our most vulnerable people.... Another significant concern stems from the President’s proposal to limit the annual growth in Medicare costs per beneficiary to the per capita rate of growth in the ... GDP plus only 0.5 percentage points and to require automatic cuts in Medicare if this target would otherwise be exceeded. ... Finally, the President’s plan calls for a mechanism to trigger automatic reductions in programs and tax expenditures if the debt would exceed certain benchmarks.... But all triggers like this that have been designed in the past have ... required the deepest budget cuts when the economy was weakest and the smallest cuts when it was strongest — the opposite of what sound economic policy entails.... It should be recognized that this plan is a rather conservative one, significantly to the right of the Rivlin-Domenici plan." ...

     ... Update: commenting on Greenstein's analysis, which he endorses, Paul Krugman writes of Obama's budget proposal, "... it’s a center-right plan already; if it’s the starting point for negotiations that move the solution toward lower taxes for the rich and even harsher cuts for the poor, just say no."

President Obama, speaking at George Washington University, presents his plan to reduce the deficit. Video of full speech:

Here are the President's full remarks, as prepared for delivery. ...

... On the Ryan/Republican Budget Plan: Worst of all, this is a vision that says even though America can’t afford to invest in education or clean energy; even though we can’t afford to care for seniors and poor children, we can somehow afford more than $1 trillion in new tax breaks for the wealthy.... In the last decade, the average income of the bottom 90% of all working Americans actually declined. The top 1% saw their income rise by an average of more than a quarter of a million dollars each. And that’s who needs to pay less taxes? ... That’s not right, and it’s not going to happen as long as I’m President. The fact is, their vision is less about reducing the deficit than it is about changing the basic social compact in America.... There’s nothing serious about a plan that claims to reduce the deficit by spending a trillion dollars on tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. There’s nothing courageous about asking for sacrifice from those who can least afford it and don’t have any clout on Capitol Hill. -- Barack Obama

NEW. Here's the White House's fact sheet on the President's proposal for a long-term budget framework.

The New York Times comparison between major features of Ryan's & Obama's plans demonstrates how Obama is more in line with what pollsters say the majority of American people want.

Paul Krugman: "Much better than many of us feared. Hardly any Bowles-Simpson — yay!"

Steve Benen: "President Obama's speech ... was exactly the sort of spirited defense of government and progressive values the nation desperately needed to hear right now."

Kevin Drum of Mother Jones wonders how this will play out:

In December, I agreed to extend the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans because it was the only way I could prevent a tax hike on middle-class Americans. But we cannot afford $1 trillion worth of tax cuts for every millionaire and billionaire in our society. And I refuse to renew them again. -- Barack Obama

Meow! Suzy Khimm of Mother Jones: in anticipation of President Obama's surprise speech in which he reputedly was going to rely on Catfood Commission recommendations, mainstream Democrats shifted to the right to suddenly embrace the Catfood Commission, which they had previously condemned or criticized. CW: now that Obama has given his speech, in which he barely mentioned the Katzenjammer Kids, what will the disoriented Dems do next? They were against it before they were for it before they were against it again? Having no principles makes life confusing.

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