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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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Friday
Apr292011

The Commentariat -- April 30

I've posted an Open Thread for Saturday on Off Times Square.

The President's Weekly Address:

     ... AP Related: "President Barack Obama declared Saturday that oil companies are profiting from rising gasoline prices and urged Congress once again to end $4 billion a year in oil and gas company tax breaks." ...

... John Broder of the New York Times: "Both parties are planning legislative maneuvers this week to try to caricature their opponents as either in the pockets of the oil companies or hostile to domestic energy production."

Charles Blow: "... the right, with a new boost of energy from [Donald] Trump, is reaching for new frontiers. The language and methodology are different, but the goal is the same: to deny, invalidate and subjugate, to distract from real issues with false divisions. Trump is helping the right shape new weapons from old hatreds, forming shivs from shackles, all the while patting himself on the back and promoting his brand. But his point of pride is the right’s mark of shame." ...

     ... Update: the moderators nixed my comment on Blow -- which I thought was a pretty good one -- but you can read it on Off Times Square. Update of the Update: my comment on Blow is at #56.

Gail Collins remarks on state legislatures that can't take care of important matters -- like accepting federal grants for unemployment insurance aid -- but they're doing a great job at selecting state guns & vegetables.

Joe Nocera remarks that Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting will not be all fun and games this year in the wake of the scandal and resulting resignation of his one-time heir-apparent David Sokol. ...

... Here's a related Los Angeles Times story by Walter Hamilton.

The White House Correspondents' Dinner is tonight. Dana Milbank doesn't think much of it: "The correspondents’ association dinner was a minor annoyance for years, when it was a 'nerd prom' for journalists and a few minor celebrities. But, as with so much else in this town, the event has spun out of control. Now, awash in lobbyist and corporate money, it is another display of Washington’s excesses."

Brad Johnson of Think Progress: "Dr. Kevin Trenberth, one of the world’s top climate scientists, who has been exploring for years how greenhouse pollution influences extreme weather, said he believes that it is 'irresponsible not to mention climate change' in the context of these extreme tornadoes."

This story has been around for a couple of days, & I've been ignoring it, but now that it's made the front page of the New York Times, here it is: "A group including former White House officials, union leaders and one of Hollywood’s biggest producers have joined forces to start an outside effort to help President Obama and Congressional Democrats in 2012 by using the very sort of anonymous, unlimited donations from moneyed interests that the president has so deplored. Co-founded by the former White House deputy press secretary Bill Burton and with seed money from the Service Employees International Union and the film producer Jeffrey Katzenberg, the group’s entrée into the early 2012 contest all but ensures that the presidential race will be awash in cash from undisclosed corporate and labor sources with huge stakes in Washington policy making."

You know, it doesn’t really matter what they write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass. -- Donald Trump, to an Esquire writer in 1991

** Donald Trump Is a Wink-Wink Racist, but He's a Forthright Sexist. Anna Holmes in a Washington Post op-ed, cites numerous instances of Trump's crassly sexist remarks & actions. His sexist remarks "spotlight Trump’s particular brand of boorishness.... Women should be sexy, but not sexual..., a willingness to relinquish autonomy over one’s fertility is both an asset and a job requirement; and female worth is quantified not by character or accomplishment but by hip-to-waist ratio. These ideas about women have explicitly political implications as well, echoing the ideology at the core of the antiabortion movement’s recently heightened assault on women’s reproductive rights... The message is clear: Women can’t be trusted to define, or control, their own bodies, so it’s up to men to do it for them." Trump recent joined the anit-choice bandwagon, even as he demonstrated a complete lack of knowledge of Roe v. Wade.

Jon Cohn of The New Republic had a great series this week on what is wrong with the Republican House/Ryan bill. I linked the first one on food stamps earlier this week, but dropped the ball on the posts that followed:

     (2) "Raising the age at which Americans become eligible for Medicare, or whatever program Republicans put in its place, would make health insurance more expensive for businesses, workers, and their employees, all while leaving one-fifth of future 65- and 66-year-olds with too little insurance or none at all." ...

     (3) "Eliminating key provisions of Dodd-Frank.... Take it away, as the Republican budget would, and costly bailouts become more likely, not less. In that sense, I guess, this really is about government spending after all." ...

     (4) "According to Adam Hersh and Sarah Ayres of the Center for American Progress, the end result of the Republican budget would be a 53 percent reduction in per capita spending on education and training, a 28 percent reduction in scientifically oriented research and development, and a 37 percent reduction in transportation infrastructure." ...

     (5) It doesn't reduce the deficit. Krugman references this "feature" in his Flim-Flam Man post, linked below under Right Wing World, & I've linked Cohn's post there, too.

Right Wing World *

Paul Ryan, Flim-Flam Man. Paul Krugman: "Jon Cohn points out that the real question about the Ryan plan isn’t whether it reduces the deficit in the right way; it’s whether it reduces the deficit at all.... The truth is that this is almost surely a deficit-increasing plan, not a deficit-reducing plan. Meanwhile, Jon Chait looks at Ryan being interviewed about his plan and sees “a stream of misleading and outright false claims”.... I don’t know when if ever the Beltway crowd will admit it, but they were, indeed, flim flammed; the man they decided was an upright, honest deficit hawk is in fact an evasive, dissembling guy who wants to use the deficit, not end it." ...

... Here are the articles by Cohn and Chait:

     ... Jonathan Cohn: "... the tax cuts in the House Republican budget would very nearly offset the spending cuts, leaving a modest $155 billion in additional savings over ten years." ...

     ... Jonathan Chait: "Paul Ryan, in an interview with CBS News, offers up the latest incarnation of his budget spin. Ryan is a very smooth front man, and has skillfully employed carefully crafted language worked out by a team of pollsters, but -- being in the position of defending wildly unpopular priorities -- he is offering up a stream of misleading and outright false claims." Chait has the video, which I can't embed because it gets screwed up every time I make a change to the page. Chait goes on to debunk all of Ryan's central claims. ...

... Don't Believe Your Lying Eyes. Jordan Fabian of The Hill: "Contrary to some of the angry scenes at certain of his town-hall meetings, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said Friday that the crowds are 'overwhelmingly supportive' of his budget plan. Ryan claims that his constituents know him well and appreciate that he is trying to reduce the nation's debt and deficits with his 2012 budget plan, which is strongly opposed by Democrats."

You have to ask, 'Why are you taking care of Alabama and other states?' I know our [aid request] letter didn't get lost in the mail. -- Gov. Rick Perry (R-Texas)

Jed Lewison of the Daily Kos: "So hundreds die in storms throughout the South and Rick Perry's response is to question why those states are getting federal aid instead of Texas? Funny how he doesn't mention that Texas has already gotten at least $39 million in firefighting aid from FEMA over the past two fire seasons and has already received 22 grants in this fire season alone." Odd talk, coming from "Mr. Secession himself."

* Where facts never intrude.

News Ledes

President Obama spoke at the White House Correspondents' Dinner this evening. New York Times: "Many of President Obama’s friends and foes alike got shellacked — as expected — on Saturday night when Mr. Obama took to the stage at the gussied-up White House Correspondents’ Dinner at the Washington Hilton. But none so much as Mr. Trump, reality television star, birther and Republican presidential aspirant. As a hair-gelled, grimly unsmiling Mr. Trump sat at a nearby table — a guest of the Washington Post — Mr. Obama ripped one punch after another at the real estate tycoon." Video under May 1 Commentariat.

Al Jazeera: "Saif al-Arab Gaddafi, the youngest son of the Libyan leader, and three of his grandchildren have been killed in a NATO air strike, a Libyan government spokesman said. Gaddafi and his wife were in the Tripoli house of his 29-year-old son, Saif al-Arab Gaddafi, when it was hit by at least one missile fired by a NATO warplane late on Saturday, according to Libyan government spokesman Moussa Ibrahim." New York Times story here.

Washington Post: "Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels (R) announced Friday that he plans to sign legislation that would prevent Planned Parenthood in the state from receiving Medicaid funds. When he does, Indiana will be the first state to take that step." CW: this is an excellent way to raise the number of unwanted pregnancies in that population of parents who are least able economically & socially to rear a child. Fucking brilliant, Mitch! You just added unfortunate, unwanted children to your welfare rolls. (I try not to comment on news stories, but sometimes I just can't help it.)

New York Times: "Soldiers fired on protesters carrying olive branches and seeking to break the military’s siege of a rebellious town in Syria on Friday, killing at least 16 people, as thousands took to the streets in what organizers proclaimed a “Friday of Rage” against the government’s crackdown on a six-week uprising, witnesses and activists said." ...

... Reuters: "The United States slapped sanctions on Syria's intelligence agency and two relatives of President Bashar al-Assad on Friday in Washington's first concrete steps in response to a bloody crackdown on protests. Assad, Syria's long-serving ruler, was not among those targeted under an order signed by President Barack Obama but could be named soon if violence by government forces against democracy protesters continued, a senior U.S. official said."

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