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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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Page Links
Friday
Apr152011

The Commentariat -- April 16

President Obama's weekly address:

     ... Related AP story here. ...

... Richard Stevenson of the New York Times: "... the budget debate that became fully engaged last week is about far more than accounting and arcane policy disputes. What is under way now is the most fundamental reassessment of the size and role of government — of the balance between personal responsibility and private markets on the one hand and public responsibility and social welfare on the other — at least since Ronald Reagan and perhaps since F.D.R."

The first advice I'm going to give my successor is to watch the generals and to avoid feeling that, just because they are military men, their opinions on military matters are worth a damn.
-- President John F. Kennedy

** Filmmaker Oliver Stone & historian Peter Kuznick in the British New Statesman "on how the US president can learn from precedents for peacemaking set by Mikhail Gorbachev and John F Kennedy." Here, from the essay, is a pretty fine summary of the Obama presidency:

Surrounding himself with Wall Street-friendly advisers and military hawks, he has sent more than 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan; bailed out Wall Street banks while paying scant attention to the plight of the poor and working class; and enacted a tepid version of health reform that, while expanding coverage, represented a boondoggle for the insurance industry. And he has continued many of Bush's civil rights abuses, secrecy obsessions and neoliberal policies that allow the continued looting of the real economy by those who are obscenely wealthy.

Steve Kornacki of Salon: in voting to "end Medicare as we know it," as House Repubicans did Friday afternoon, they gave an election-year gift to Democrats. What's weirdest about it is that the bill has no chance of becoming law. "... this was a vote that Republicans insisted on -- but that will only help Democrats." ...

... Thursday, the House voted to permanently defund Planned Parenthood. Family planning expert & former Planned Parenthood executive Clare Coleman, in a Washington Post op-ed, debunks five myths about the organization. Happily, Coleman was able to include another reminder that Sen. Jon Kyl doesn't mind dissembling on the Senate floor; i.e., he says things that "are not intended to be factual."

** "A crime was definitely committed in this case, but not by me." CW: I've linked to several articles about the Supreme Court's egregious 5-4 decision in Connick v. Thompson, but I missed the most important one of all -- this April 9 New York Times op-ed by John Thompson himself. If you've read any of the articles I've linked, reading Mr. Thompson's story in his own words will make you angry all over again. 

Leslie Kauman of the New York Times: "In the past month, the nation’s focus has been on the budget battle in Washington, where Republicans in Congress aligned with the Tea Party have fought hard for rollbacks to the Environmental Protection Agency, clean air and water regulations, renewable energy and other conservation programs. But similar efforts to make historically large cuts to environmental programs are also in play at the state level as legislatures and governors take aim at conservation and regulations they see as too burdensome to business interests."

Scot Kersgaard of the Colorado Independent: "Today the Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength slammed Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) for comments he made Thursday ridiculing ‘rich liberals’ calls to raise taxes on millionaires like themselves." Includes the full statement from the Patriot Millionaires & related content. CW Note: I don't know & haven't been able to find out exactly what Hatch said. I'm still looking. Update: okay, I found Hatch's comments on "rich Democrats," which begin about 17:30 min. into this video. I had to listen to a lot of Orrin Hatch's bloviating to find this.

Joe Nocera is a friend of oil & gas billionaire T. Boone Pickens. If you read Nocera's second column touting the safety & wisdom of natural gas drilling, published in today's New York Times, please read some of the comments, too. Comment #1, by Steven from Texas, is particularly good.

Right Wing World *

Why punish the most productive people? The people who have resources create jobs, not poor people. -- Rick Santorum, on President Obama's budget plan and those nonproductive poor people ...

... Irony Alert! Speaking at a town-hall-style meeting in New Hampshire, anti-gay, anti-sex, anti-everything Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum "was tripped up a bit when a student * asked him if he knew that the choice of his slogan, 'Fighting to make America America again,' was borrowed from the 'pro-union poem by the gay poet Langston Hughes.' 'No I had nothing to do with that,' Santorum said. "I didn't know that. And the folks who worked on that slogan for me didn't inform me that it came from that, if it in fact came from that.' The student ... was referring to the poem 'Let America Be America Again.' When asked a short time later what the campaign slogan meant to him, Santorum said, 'well, I'm not too sure that's my campaign slogan, I think it's on a web site.' It was also printed on the campaign literature handed out before the speech." From Melanie Plenda of the Manchester, New Hampshire, Union Leader. Thanks to reader Haley S. for the link. Hughes' powerful poem stands as a perfect rejection of Santorum's Right Wing America:

     ... * Update: turns out that "student" was Lee Fang of Think Progress. CW: I love the kids at Think Progress.

Gail Collins continues her book reviews of the writings of presidential candidates. Today she concentrates on Romney rewrites. Here's a sample:

'Despite my affiliation with the Republican Party, I don’t think of myself as highly partisan,' Moderate Mitt wrote toward the end. This comes after 300 pages of unrelenting attacks on Barack Obama and every member of his party since Andrew Jackson. He blames Bill Clinton for everything from cutting military spending to presiding over an administration during which 'birth to teenage mothers rose to their highest level in decades.' I’m sure this week’s Romney does not regard that as a partisan statement even though teenage birth rates actually fell spectacularly during that exact period.

Conservative Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker (late of "Parker-Spitzer") on Donald Trump:

In saner times, we’d recognize and dismiss the ravings of madmen, self-promoters and false prophets. Today, thanks to the democratization of the megaphone and the political bulimia we euphemistically call 'dialogue,” any old [birther] canard can enjoy 15 minutes of credibility. Sure enough, Trump’s challenge to Obama’s natural-born citizenship has gained traction among a disturbing number of believe-anythingers, outscoring others in GOP presidential preference polls.

* Where facts never intrude.

News Ledes

Washington Post: "The Federal Aviation Administration has suspended another air traffic controller allegedly caught sleeping on the job and is ending the scheduling system responsible for often putting sleepy controllers behind the microphone after just eight hours off duty. The FAA said a Miami-based controller who directs planes after they reach cruising altitude fell asleep on the job early Saturday. It was the seventh instance this year when FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt has suspended a controller for allegedly sleeping on the job." CW: does anybody think controllers suddenly started falling asleep on the job this year?

New York Times: Cuban President Raúl Castro," in a speech on Saturday heralding a battery of changes intended to lift the island out of economic despair and stagnant thinking, proposed that politicians be limited to two five-year terms in an effort to rejuvenate a political system dominated by aging loyalists of the revolution. At the top are himself and Fidel Castro, 84, who permanently gave up presidential power in 2008 and last month announced that he was no longer head of the Communist Party, either." AP story here.

AP: "An officer with Libya's rebels says after four days of holding back, his forces have advanced to a strategic oil town. Col. Hamid Hassy said Saturday that following scattered clashes with government forces, the rebels were now near the massive oil facilities of Brega. He said the rebels have brought with them engineers to repair any damage to the refineries and terminal which have already changed hands half a dozen times since fighting erupted a month and a half ago."

AP: "A suicide bomber disguised in an Afghan army uniform on Saturday detonated a vest packed with explosives at the entrance to a base in eastern Afghanistan, killing five coalition and four Afghan soldiers, officials said."

The Hill: "President Obama signed into law on Friday the hard-fought legislation to fund government and keep it running through the end of September.... But Obama took the key step of issuing a signing statement, a declaration of constitutional interpretation by a president of legislation he or she might sign into law. It essentially notified lawmakers that he would not abide by the section of the law defunding the establishment of so-called 'czars.'"

Eeeww. AP: "Los Angeles County health officials say the bacteria that causes Legionnaires' disease was found in a hot tub at the Playboy Mansion where scores of people became ill after attending a fundraiser in February. The Los Angeles Times says health officials presented their findings Friday at an annual conference at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta."

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