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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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Tuesday
Jan252011

State of the Union -- Analysis

Swimming Upstream in a Word Cloud.* What the American people got out of the SOTU:

Survey & art by NPR.* "NPR asked its listeners to describe Obama's address in three words. They then tallied up all 4,000 or so responses and made that into a word cloud — a snapshot of what people took away from the speech." -- Dana Amira of New York magazine. See Amira's post for what the word cloud of the President's actual address looks like.

Lie: Depending on bureaucracy to foster innovation, competitiveness and wise consumer choices has never worked — and it won't work now. -- Paul Ryan, SOTU rebuttal

Facts: Throughout our history, our government has provided cutting-edge scientists and inventors with the support that they need. That's what planted the seeds for the Internet. That's what helped make possible things like computer chips and GPS. Just think of all the good jobs -- from manufacturing to retail -- that have come from these breakthroughs. Half a century ago ... we unleashed a wave of innovation that created new industries and millions of new jobs.
-- Barack Obama, SOTU address

** Here is the prepared text for President Obama's second State of the Union address. Update: text has been revised to reflect the speech as delivered.

New York Times reporters fact-check the speech....

... Calvin Woodward of the AP fact-checks the President's speech: "The ledger did not appear to be adding up Tuesday night when President Barack Obama urged more spending on one hand and a spending freeze on the other."

Believe in Miracles. Matt Negrin of Politico: "[Tom Donohue,] president of the Chamber of Commerce, one of President Obama’s fiercest critics, and [Richard Trumka,] the president of the AFL-CIO, one of his key labor allies, have written a joint statement praising the State of the Union address."

"Hogwash!" Robert Sheer of TruthDig really hated the speech.

"Meh." Krugman didn't think much of it. My more positive comment is #18 on the same page.

Like Krugman, Kevin Drum of Mother Jones was underwhelmed: "... there was almost literally nothing in there that couldn't have been in a George W. Bush speech. It was intensely technocratic and bipartisan.... And even if you grant that 'invest' is just another word for 'spend,' he was mostly talking about the kind of spending the Republicans could, in theory, go along with.... And a note to John Boehner: dude, we know you're a Republican.... Your preposterously ostentatious boredom during the entire speech really needs to go. You should at least pretend you're not in junior high school anymore."

Michael Grunwald of Time has a useful analysis that looks at the history (brief as it is) of President Obama's policy objectives. Grunwald concludes: President Obama "keeps signaling to the public that he's reaching out to Republicans, even though he's still pushing policies they've been denouncing for two years. It wasn't his choice to swim upstream — the midterm voters made that call — but evidently he's got something in common with those salmon. He gets even more complicated when he's been smoked."

Ezra Klein: "... though there were a lot of policy proposals in the speech, there weren't enough specifics to really know where the president is going. For all the talk of investment, it was presented more as a philosophy than a proposal."

New York Times Editors: "Mr. Obama’s speech offered a welcome contrast to all of the posturing that passes for business in the new Republican-controlled House."

Gene Robinson: "The State of the Union speech ... seemed to chart ways to get over, under, around and through some of the roadblocks that stand in the way of Obama's policy proposals."

Dan Balz of the Washington Post: What was "... striking was [the President's] effort to frame the coming debates over spending and the role of government in ways that are designed to put Republicans on the defense as the fights begin. It was his latest effort to appeal to the center of the electorate. The speech was a defense of the active use of government to prepare the country for the long-term challenge of global competitiveness, through spending on education, infrastructure, alternative energy and other projects."

CBS Poll.Lucy Madison of CBS News: "An overwhelming majority of Americans approved of the overall message in President Obama's State of the Union speech..., according to a CBS News Poll of speech watchers.... Specifically, 82 percent ... said they approve of the president's plans for the economy, up from 53 percent who approved before the speech. Eighty percent said they approved of Mr. Obama's plans for the deficit -- in contrast to 45 percent before the speech -- and 83 percent approved of Obama's proposals regarding Afghanistan, which received only a 57 percent approval rating beforehand."

CNN Poll: "A majority of Americans who watched President Obama's State of the Union address said they had a very positive reaction to his speech, according to a poll of people who viewed Tuesday night's address."

Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times: "President Obama called Tuesday night for Americans to unleash their creative spirits, set aside their partisan differences and come together around a common goal of out-competing other nations in a rapidly shifting global economy."

** Tobin Harshaw of the New York Times is running a livethread of invited commentators' opinions on the SOTU address. Keep the auto-refresh on.

** Michael Shear, et al., of the New York Times are liveblogging the State of Union Address. The Times has just obtained (at 7:58 pm ET) a copy of the prepared SOTU address.

Shira Toeplitz of Politico: "Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid blasted President Barack Obama on earmarks in advance of his State of the Union address Tuesday, when he’s expected to call for a ban. 'I think this is an issue that any president would like to have, that takes power away from the legislative branch of government,' said Reid. '... It only gives the president more power. He’s got enough power already.'”

Republican Responses

Here is the prepared text for Rep. Paul Ryan's Republican response. You can watch Ryan's rebuttal here.

Jason Linkins gathers rebuttals to the "facts" Ryan presented. Uh, they're not factual.

Political Correction does an in-depth analysis of a few of Ryan's "facts." He should invest in/spend on a fire extinguisher.

Joan Walsh of Salon: "Rep. Paul Ryan railed against the deficit without proposing even one specific cut. He didn't talk about his own infamous 'Roadmap,' maybe because most analysts have called it a budget buster, even though it essentially replaces Social Security and Medicare with vouchers.... Citizens for Tax Justice said Ryan's Roadmap raises taxes on 9 out of 10 taxpayers ... while slashing them for the wealthiest.... Ryan ... promised to ... replace ['Obamacare'] with 'fiscally responsible ... reform,' but didn't say word one about what it would entail. Most dishonestly, Ryan said Democrats had overspent 'to the point where the president is now urging Congress to increase the debt limit,' ignoring the fact that Congress raised it seven times under President Bush." Then Walsh hits Bachmann.

Paul Krugman said "the Ryan response … was as bad as you might expect." ...

     ... NEW. AND furthermore. Ryan really doesn't know WTF he's talking about.

Here's the prepared text of Rep. Michele Bachmann's rebuttal rebuttal. Bachmann's rebuttal rebuttal is here.

Dana Milbank on Michele Bachmann's alternate -- and vituperative -- universe.

CNN Political Unit: "Minnesota Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann, chair of the Tea Party Caucus in Congress, delivered a Tea Party-style, red-meat conservative rebuttal sharply criticizing President Barack Obama's State of the Union Tuesday."

Jeff Zeleny of the New York Times: "The crosscurrents inside the Republican Party were on fresh display Tuesday evening with the unusual sight of two lawmakers delivering responses to the State of the Union address.

Jay Newton-Small of Time on the GOP's two-headed monster rebuttal.

Steve Benen on the Bachmann pitfall: "I can only hope that Paul Ryan isn't positioned as the 'middle' -- literally and figuratively -- between the president and Bachman. The Ayn Rand acolyte [i.e., Ryan] is, after all, a hard-core radical, intent on destroying Medicare and Social Security. Bachmann's wild-eyed craziness shouldn't make Ryan appear reasonable by comparison, but it might." Benen also notes that CNN will be carrying Bachmann's rebuttal rebuttal. ...

... Adam Serwer in the Washington Post: "I'm not sure how much real ideological daylight there is between Bachmann and Ryan, and the two appearances are as likely to muddle the conservative message as reinforce it."

Dave Weigel of Slate on why CNN aired the Bachmann rebuttal rebuttal: "CNN has a longstanding romance with the Tea Party Express.... Later this year, the network and the [TPE] PAC (and potentially other Tea Party groups) are co-sponsoring a presidential debate between Republican candidates. So, not shocking at all for the network to promote this and then claim a higher purpose."

The Seating Chart

CLICK ON PHOTO TO GO TO THE NEW YORK TIMES' INTERACTIVE SEATING CHART.

If you had actually followed the rules and not claimed a seat and got there at eight or quarter to eight there were no seats. House members almost wrestled the staff of the Senate sergeant at arms to the ground to claim some of the seats that were claimed for the Senate.
-- Brad Miller (D-NC)

Jennifer Steinhauer & Carl Hulse of the New York Times: "The idea of having Democrats and Republicans sit together ... gathered frantic steam in the hours leading up to the speech. As evening approached..., members madly tweeted about who they would sit with, looked for a last minute date, and, in at least one case, blew off a suitor." Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va) invited Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Cal.). She tweeted back, “I thank @GOPLeader for his #SOTU offer, but I invited my friend Rep. Bartlett from MD yesterday & am pleased he accepted.”

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