The Ledes

Friday, September 6, 2024

CNBC: “The U.S. economy created slightly fewer jobs than expected in August, reflecting a slowing labor market while also clearing the way for the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates later this month. Nonfarm payrolls expanded by 142,000 during the month, down from 89,000 in July and below the 161,000 consensus forecast from Dow Jones, according to a report Friday from the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics.”

New York Times: “Colin Gray, the father of the 14-year-old accused of killing two teachers and two students at his Georgia high school, was arrested and charged on Thursday with second-degree murder in connection with the state’s deadliest school shooting, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said. In addition to two counts of second-degree murder, Mr. Gray, 54, was also charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter and eight counts of cruelty to children, according to a statement. At a news conference on Thursday night, Chris Hosey, the G.B.I. director, said the charges were 'directly connected with the actions of his son and allowing him to possess a weapon.'” At 5:30 am ET, this is the pinned item in a liveblog. ~~~

     ~~~ CNN's report is here.

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The Ledes

Thursday, September 5, 2024

CNBC: “Private sector payrolls grew at the weakest pace in more than 3½ years in August, providing yet another sign of a deteriorating labor market, according to ADP. Companies hired just 99,000 workers for the month, less than the downwardly revised 111,000 in July and below the Dow Jones consensus forecast for 140,000. August was the weakest month for job growth since January 2021, according to data from the payrolls processing firm. 'The job market’s downward drift brought us to slower-than-normal hiring after two years of outsized growth,' ADP’s chief economist, Nela Richardson, said. The report corroborates multiple data points recently that show hiring has slowed considerably from its blistering pace following the Covid outbreak in early 2020.”

The New York Times' live updates of developments in the Georgia school massacre are here, a horrifying ritual which we experience here in the U.S. to kick off each new School Shooting Year. “A 14-year-old student opened fire at his Georgia high school on Wednesday, killing two students and two teachers before surrendering to school resource officers, according to the authorities, who said the suspect would be charged with murder.” ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: I heard Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) speak during a press conference. Kemp is often glorified as one of the most moderate, reasonable GOP elected public officials. When asked a question I did not hear, Kemp responded, "Now is not the time to talk about politics." As you know, this is a statement that is part of the mass shooting ritual. It translates, "Our guns-for-all policy is so untenable that I dare not express it lest I be tarred and feathered -- or worse -- by grieving families." ~~~

~~~ Washington Post: “Police identified the suspect as Colt Gray, a student who attracted the attention of federal investigators more than a year ago, when they began receiving anonymous tips about someone threatening a school shooting. The FBI referred the reports to local authorities, whose investigations led them to interview Gray and his father. The father told police that he had hunting guns in the house, but that his son did not have unsupervised access to them. Gray denied making the online threats, the FBI said, but officials still alerted area schools about him.” ~~~ 

     ~~~ Marie: I heard on CNN that the reason authorities lost track of Colt was that his family moved counties, and the local authorities who first learned of the threats apparently did not share the information with law enforcement officials in Barrow County, where Wednesday's mass school shooting occurred. If you were a parent of a child who has so alarmed law enforcement that they came around to your house to question you and the child about his plans to massacre people, wouldn't you do something?: talk to him, get the kid professional counseling, remove guns and other lethal weapons from the house, etc.

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Thank you to everyone who has been contributing links to articles & other content in the Comments section of each day's "Conversation." If you're missing the comments, you're missing some vital links.

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.

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
Dec162011

The Commentariat -- December 17

We have an Open Thread on today's Off Times Square.

My column in today's New York Times eXaminer is on Charles Blow's really stupid piece in today's Times: "The Times employs a brilliant statistician – Nate Silver – but Silver does not have a regular column that appears in the print edition of the paper. Blow does. This week, he didn’t have time to write it. Maybe he was busy buying holiday gifts for the kids. What we readers got was a pre-winter snow job that misinterprets poll results in a way that helps Republican politicians and attempts to make Americans look stupider than we are." If you were taken in by Blow's column, as almost all of the early commenters were, read my column. The NYTX front page is here.

President Obama's weekly address. The transcript is here:

Chris Spannos of the New York Times eXaminer has a fascinating article on the New York Times' scant coverage of Bradley Manning's court proceedings. As Spannos points out, "If found guilty Manning could prove to be one of the Times’ most important sources since Daniel Ellsberg." So why is the Times' giving so little coverage to Manning? -- apparently none in the dead-tree edition; a short post in the online edition. Here Spannos talks with WikiLeaks' Julian Assange about Manning and the Times:

     ... Links to more segments of the interview here. ...

... Ed Pilkington of the Guardian: "Adrian Lamo, the hacker who betrayed the alleged WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning to the US authorities, has said it would be to his 'lasting regret' were the soldier to be given a lengthy custodial sentence." And, boo-hoo, his fellow-hackers don't like him anymore. See also Spannos above on Lamo.

 ... Also of interest to people who live in the New York City area is a public discussion about mainstream media’s representation of OWS and lessons for the new year, to be held Tuesday, December 20, from 7:30 pm ET to 9:30 pm at the Brecht Forum at 451 West Street in Lower Manhattan. Spannos will be one of the panelists. More information and map here.

Matt Flegenheimer of the New York Times: "... in the weeks since Occupy Wall Street was evicted from Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, relations between the demonstrators and Trinity Wall Street, a church barely one block from the New York Stock Exchange, have reached a crossroads. The displaced occupiers had asked the church, one of the city’s largest landholders, to hand over a gravel lot, near Canal Street and Avenue of the Americas, for use as an alternate campsite and organizing hub. The church declined, calling the proposed encampment 'wrong, unsafe, unhealthy and potentially injurious.'” ...

... Karen McVeigh of the Guardian: "Archbishop Desmond Tutu has waded into an ecclesiastical row over a New York church's refusal to allow protesters from Occupy Wall Street to camp on a vacant lot it owns. The South African activist and retired church leader urged Trinity Church to heed the pleas of demonstrators to allow the camp and, failing that, at least to stop any violence or arrests at the site during a day of action this Saturday to mark its three month anniversary."

** Adam Serwer of Mother Jones has a reality check on the National Defense Authorization Act about which I've been pretty upset, based on reports from the usually fairly reliable sources: the Guardian, the New York Times editors, Glenn Greenwald (on the facts, anyway). Serwer writes, "It does not, contrary to what many media outlets have reported, authorize the president to indefinitely detain without trial an American citizen suspected of terrorism who is captured in the US. A last minute compromise amendment adopted in the Senate, whose language was retained in the final bill, leaves it up to the courts to decide if the president has that power.... Still..., it is the first concrete gesture Congress has made towards turning the homeland into the battlefield, even if the impact in the near term is more symbolic and political than concrete." Read his whole post. ...

... Steve Benen: "President Obama has been facing quite a bit of criticism from the left over the NDAA’s provisions, and that’s understandable.... That said, if I’m making a list of those responsible for the NDAA’s most odious measures, the White House wouldn’t be on top. I’d start, obviously, with congressional Republicans whose misguided worldview intended to make the NDAA even more offensive, but it was a whole lot of congressional Democrats who went along with them." ...

... Sen. Al Franken, on why he voted against the bill. ...

... CW: other than Serwer, I can't find anyone who will write dispassionately about this bill, so I can't offer anything I think is definitive. That's partly on purpose, & it brings up a point that has broad application, an application that makes Constitutional "originalists" look as silly as they are: you can't decide the "intent" of the framers of the Constitution -- 200 years ago -- or a single bill -- yesterday -- because the "framers" do not agree. They have different intents and different aims -- they hope a bill will be interpreted in a certain way, but even they often know they've written something ambiguous to get it past the opposition.

Gail Collins: No matter what the occasion, it's always a great opportunity to restrict women's reproductive rights. And everybody does it! ...

... Amanda Marcotte in Slate: "Seems the Obama administration will be disappointed, if they were hoping for an end to the backlash against HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius making the unprecedented move of overruling the FDA's decision to make Plan B emergency contraception available over the counter without age restrictions. For one thing, the legal manuevering is far from over, with a federal judge specifically recommending to the Center for Reproductive Rights that they reopen a 2005 lawsuit against the FDA, and add Kathleen Sebelius as a defendant."

Prof. William Gould, in a New York Times op-ed: "UNLESS something changes in Washington, American workers will, on New Year’s Day, effectively lose their right to be represented by a union. Two of the five seats on the National Labor Relations Board, which protects collective bargaining, are vacant, and on Dec. 31, the term of Craig Becker, a labor lawyer whom President Obama named to the board last year through a recess appointment, will expire. Without a quorum, the Supreme Court ruled last year, the board cannot decide cases."

Victor Gilinsky, a former NRC member, writing in a New York Times op-ed on the application for renewal of the Westchester County, New York, Indian Point nuclear reactor license: "... we now know that radioactive material in the melted fuel can escape to contaminate a very large area for decades or more. It doesn’t make sense to allow such a threat to persist a half-hour’s drive from our nation’s largest city."

David Dayen of Firedoglake writes a provocative post titled "Republicans demand to kill the Keystone XL pipeline." CW: He has a point. And with a different president he'd be right. But giving a choice to President Pretzel A. Rollover, along with his Interior Secretary Ken Dig-In Salazar, practically guarantees the pipeline deal will go through if Democrats cave to this particular Republican demand.

Mitt Romney likes the Ryan-Wyden Kill Medicare Plan (which quickly became "Ryden") because he says he invented it. But Jed Lewison of Daily Kos, with backing from Center for Budget & Policy Priorities analysis, reminds us that "Because Medicare would [no] longer be a single payer system, it would become less efficient and would be in a worse position to keep costs down. Meanwhile, the fact that beneficiaries would be getting a subsidy rather than insurance means that either (a) their share of medical costs would grow or (b) public health care spending would grow even faster than before. Either way, the idea is a stinker."

A lovely tribute to Christopher Hitchens, and to any well-lived life, from Christopher's brother Peter Hitchens. Thanks to a reader for the link. ...

... ** NEW. AND for a well-wrought view from the loyal opposition, I highly recommend Glenn Greenwald's column on the hagiographic nature of the coverage of Hitchens' death & of Ronald Reagan's.

Right Wing World

Mitt Romney's New Look, via Media Matters:

     ... Romney sure looks presidential, doesn't he? Fox "News" later corrected the graphic.

News Ledes

... A transcript of the President's remarks is here.

New York Times: Hundreds of protesters and an untold number of NYPD officers converged on Trinity Church in downtown Manhattan after the church declined to allow Occupy Wall Street to set up an encampment in its vacant lot.

New York Times: "Flash floods in the southern Philippines on Saturday sent water gushing into homes, killing more than 400 people and surprising families who fled to rooftops clutching children, officials said."

Reuters: "Deeply divided U.S. lawmakers on Friday eked out an agreement to extend payroll tax cuts for just two months, and only after Democrats bowed to Republican demands on a controversial oil pipeline. The deal, which still needs approval of the full Senate and House of Representatives, fell far short of President Barack Obama's push for a one-year extension of the tax relief and long-term unemployed benefits to boost the country's fragile economic recovery." ...

     ... Washington Post Update: "The Senate agreed Saturday to extend the payroll tax cut for two months, in a deal that would avert a New Year’s tax increase for millions of workers. The agreement, approved in an 89-to-10 vote, also would require the administration to decide quickly whether to allow construction of a controversial transcontinental oil pipeline. President Obama had demanded that Congress extend the tax holiday, but Republicans had refused to go along unless the White House agreed to an accelerated decision on the pipeline."

New York Times: "In a major surprise on the politically charged new health care law, the Obama administration said Friday that it would not define a single uniform set of 'essential health benefits' that must be provided by insurers for tens of millions of Americans. Instead, it will allow each state to specify the benefits within broad categories."

Reuters: Bradley Manning, "an American Army intelligence analyst suspected of being behind the largest leak of classified documents in U.S. history, made his first court appearance on Friday, sitting stone-faced as military prosecutors launched their case against him." The New York Times story is here. ...

     ... AP Update (via the NYT): "An Army appeals court has rejected the defense’s effort to remove the presiding officer in the military hearing for [Bradley Manning] the soldier accused of the largest leak of classified material in American history."

Al Jazeera: "Egyptian soldiers with batons have charged into Tahrir Square, the focal point of anti-military demonstrations in the capital, on the second day of violent clashes with protesters. The renewed fighting on Saturday came as Egypt's health ministry reported nine people were killed and more than 350 others injured since Friday when soldiers stormed an anti-military protest camp outside the parliament building, a short distance from Tahrir." With video. Al Jazeera's liveblog on Egypt is here.

Reuters: "Syrian forces killed 13 people on Friday during widespread protests against President Bashar al-Assad, activists said, a day after Syria's big power ally Russia sharpened its criticism of Damascus in a draft United Nations resolution." Al Jazeera's liveblog on Syria is here.

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