The Ledes

Sunday, September 29, 2024

Washington Post: “Towns throughout western North Carolina ... were transformed overnight by ... [Hurricane Helene]. Muddy floodwaters lifted homes from their foundations. Landslides and overflowing rivers severed the only way in and out of small mountain communities. Rescuers said they were struggling to respond to the high number of emergency calls.... The death toll grew throughout the Southeast as the scope of Helene’s devastation came into clearer view. At least 49 people had been killed in five states — Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia. By early counts, South Carolina suffered the greatest loss of life, registering at least 19 deaths.”

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The Ledes

Saturday, September 28, 2024

Washington Post: “Rescue teams raced to submerged homes, scoured collapsed buildings and steered thousands from overflowing dams as Helene carved a destructive path Friday, knocking out power and flooding a vast arc of communities across the southeastern United States. At least 40 people were confirmed killed in five states since the storm made landfall late Thursday as a Category 4 behemoth, unleashing record-breaking storm surge and tree-snapping gusts. 4 million homes and businesses have lost electricity across Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas, prompting concerns that outages could drag on for weeks. Mudslides closed highways. Water swept over roofs and snapped phone lines. Houses vanished from their foundations. Tornadoes added to the chaos. The mayor of hard-hit Canton, N.C., called the scene 'apocalyptic.'” An AP report is here.

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
Dec272011

The Commentariat -- December 28

My column in today's New York Times eXaminer is on Ross Douthat and the Seven Dwarfs. Douthat found something to like in all seven GOP presidential candidates. As you might suspect, I didn't. The NYTX front page is here.

Toddlers Can Be Heroes, Too. Many thanks to Lane Moore of Jezebel for the video & to Akhilleus (also a hero) for sending the link to the video of Riley, the Littlest Feminist:

** Stephen Marche of Esquire: "... a class system has arrived in America — a recent study of the thirty-four countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that only Italy and Great Britain have less social mobility.... In the United States, the emerging aristocracy remains staunchly convinced that it is not an aristocracy, that it's the result of hard work and talent. The permanent working poor refuse to accept that their poverty is permanent. The class system is clandestine.... The majority of new college grads in the United States today are either unemployed or working jobs that don't require a degree. Roughly 85 percent of them moved back home in 2011, where they sit on an average debt of $27,200. The youth unemployment rate in general is 18.1 percent.... The Tea Partiers blame the government. The Occupiers blame the financial industry. Both are really mourning the arrival of a new social order, one not defined by opportunity but by preexisting structures of wealth." ...

... ** "Income Inequality Is a Symptom, Not the Disease." Charles Pierce on how Bill Clinton made you poor and the New York Times and University of Chicago say it isn't so.

Batocchio, the Vagabond Scholar, links the best blogger posts of the year, chosen by the bloggers themselves. I've read several, & they are indeed quite fine -- and many are funny.

Ron Klain, a former Obama administration official, writing in Bloomberg News, credits Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner & then-economic counsellor Gene Sperling with setting up the payroll tax extension face-off between the President & the Republican Tea Partiers in Congress.

Nate Silver explains why he "concurs with the conventional wisdom that Republicans are favorites to win control of the Senate next year." CW: I keep thinking, "Surely voters will come to their senses." But I trust Silver's stats a lot more than I trust my own wishful thinking.

Greg Miller of the Washington Post: "The Obama administration’s counterterrorism accomplishments are most apparent in what it has been able to dismantle, including CIA prisons and entire tiers of al-Qaeda’s leadership. But ... in the space of three years, the administration has built an extensive apparatus for using drones to carry out targeted killings of suspected terrorists and stealth surveillance of other adversaries. The apparatus involves dozens of secret facilities, including two operational hubs on the East Coast, virtual Air Force cockpits in the Southwest and clandestine bases in at least six countries on two continents. Other commanders in chief have presided over wars with far higher casualty counts. But no president has ever relied so extensively on the secret killing of individuals to advance the nation’s security goals."

Dana Milbank reveals "the cracks in his crystal ball." ...

... Steve Benen fesses up to some of his predictions gone awry.

Ben Nelson, Cornhusker Cowpie. Steve Benen: "Democratic leaders from the White House and Capitol Hill pleaded with Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), asking him to run for re-election for one main reason: the party is desperate to keep its Senate majority and it has no one else to run in Nebraska. As is often the case, Nelson is letting his party down.... Nelson waited until after Democratic and allied groups had invested [more than $1MM] ... to strengthen his standing in Nebraska, and then decided to retire.... Nelson has voted with the right many times over the last couple of years — even on filibusters — offering Republicans cover on a wide range of issues. When pressed, Nelson would often tell his Democratic allies the votes were necessary to bolster his re-election bid."

Lee Spears of Bloomberg News: "With Facebook considering the largest Internet IPO on record and regulatory filings showing that at least 14 other Web-related companies are planning sales, the industry may raise $11 billion next year.... That would be the most since $18.5 billion of IPOs in 1999, just before the dot-com bubble burst."

Right Wing World

Dan Balz & Amy Gardner of the Washington Post: "The Republican presidential candidates opened an intensive week of campaigning in wide-open Iowa Tuesday with the embattled Newt Gingrich casting rival Mitt Romney as an establishment defender of big government and accusing Romney’s supporters of lying about his record." ...

... AND if you'd like to know what nasty things the GOP candidates are saying about each other in Iowa, Jeff Zeleny & Michael Shear of the New York Times provide a sampling. ...

... Oh, Here's a Sample. Alex Moe of NBC News: "The Strong America Now Super PAC is sending direct mail pieces to Iowans this week in support of Newt Gingrich while attacking Mitt Romney – something the Gingrich campaign has vowed not to tolerate. 'Romney is the second most dangerous man in America and will perpetuate Obama's slide into financial crisis,' one of at least two mailers from the Super PAC floating around the state reads." ...

... AND Here's Another. Ron Paul is "The One." The other guys are "serial hypocrites" and "flip-floppers":

Steve Benen sums up why Mitt Romney -- unlike every presidential candidate since Watergate -- won't release his tax returns:

1. Mitt Romney is worth $250 million.
2. He got rich by laying off American workers.
3. He pays a lower tax rate than you and the rest of the middle class.
4. He wants to be president so he can keep it this way.

America must decide who to trust: Al Gore’s Texas cheerleader, or the one who stood with Reagan. -- Ron Paul campaign ad

More Implicit Lies from Ron Paul. Josh Hicks of the Washington Post: "We pulled this comment [above] from an ad that accuses Rick Perry of trying to 'undo the Reagan Revolution' when he backed Al Gore for president in 1988.... Paul has little room to criticize politicians for changing their party affiliations. He campaigned for president as a Libertarian in 1988, after running for office seven times as a Republican and serving as a GOP member of the U.S. House for more than six years at that point. So why didn’t he vie for the Republican nomination? Because he’d renounced the party — along with Reagan’s presidential policies — a few years earlier, resigning from the GOP and forgoing a bid for reelection to Congress."

Charles Pierce: South Carolina's Gov. Nikki Haley is "outraged" that U.S. AG Eric Holder has gone all lawyery on her state & is enforcing the Voting Rights Act. Pierce suggests she move to Oshkosh, by gosh.

Jason Easley at Politicus USA: All those nice Christians over at Fox "News" are "outraged" that the Obama family has taken a Christmas vacation which will cost taxpayers $4MM, including "the cost of everything from transportation to accommodations for the First Family, the White House staff, and the White House press corps." But somehow they weren't outraged with President Dubya spent much, much more on his many trips to his Crawford ranch. "He was the most expensive vacation president in US history." Thanks to Kate M. for the link.

Here's an update on Worst Christmas Songs Ever. This is an actual campaign video, which should disabuse you of the notion there could ever be a President Newt:

     ... Update: Ha ha ha. "This video has been removed by the user" -- the "user" of course being the Newt. Luckily, somebody else captured it (Newt can probably take this down, too, so watch it while it lasts, but definitely before lunch -- and not while you're drinking a beverage to preclude the chance of a spit-take that might zap your keyboard):

News Ledes

New York Times: "Hosni Mubarak, the former president of Egypt ousted in the revolution last February, was wheeled back into a courtroom [in Cairo] on a hospital gurney on Wednesday to resume his trial amid reports from both supporters and opponents that the proceedings appeared to be going in his favor."

New York Times: "Italy’s short-term borrowing costs were halved Wednesday at an auction of government bills, easing the immediate pressure on the country’s economy."

Reuters: "Closing off the Gulf to oil tankers will be 'easier than drinking a glass of water' for Iran if the Islamic state deems it necessary, state television reported on Wednesday, ratcheting up fears over the world's most important oil chokepoint."

New York Times: Sergei Filippov, a high-ranking member of Vladimir Putin's United Russia party "disrupt[ed] scheduled debates [at a meeting of a regional legislature] on forest fire prevention and a transportation tax, to make an appeal to his fellow party members: acknowledge and repair the fraud that many people here believe United Russia committed in recent parliamentary elections." Putin has dismissed criticisms of the elections.

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