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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
Sunday
Feb132011

The Commentariat -- February 14

Short-sighted & Wrong-headed. Paul Krugman: House Republicans have decided to "focus [budget] cuts on programs whose benefits aren’t immediate; basically, eat America’s seed corn. There will be a huge price to pay, eventually — but for now, you can keep the base happy." ...

... Lori Montgomery of the Washington Post: "President Obama drew fire Sunday from congressional Republicans and independent budget experts for his reluctance to advance a plan that would tackle the nation's biggest budget problems in the spending blueprint he will submit to Congress on Monday." ...

... Lori Montgomery: "will roll out a $3.7 trillion budget blueprint Monday that would trim or terminate more than 200 federal programs next year and make key investments in education, transportation and research in a bid to boost the nation's economy and reduce record budget deficits." ...

... Jackie Calmes of the New York Times: "President Obama ... on Monday released a fiscal year 2012 budget that projects an annual deficit of more than $1 trillion before government shortfalls decline to 'sustainable' levels for the rest of the decade." ...

... "Fighting Fire with Gasoline." Robert Reich in Salon on how Obama got the budget wrong: "Obama [has allowed] Republicans to frame the debate as how much federal spending can be cut and how to shrink the deficit. The President has to reframe the debate around the necessity of average families having enough to spend to get the economy moving again. He needs to remind America ... we’re still in a jobs crisis...." Reich offers a proposal on what the FY 2012 budget should look like. ...

... The President's budget proposal just came up online. Start here.

... AND OMB Director Jack Lew explains why his budget proposal is really, really a good one:

** Felix Salmon in a New York Times op-ed: "... the stock market is becoming increasingly irrelevant — a trend that threatens the core principles of American capitalism.... What the market is not doing so well is its core public function: allocating capital efficiently.... To invest in younger, smaller companies, you increasingly need to be a member of the ultra-rich elite [which don't trade on the NYSE]."

Happy Valentine's Day, Mr. President, Love forever, Fox "News." Here are the results of a Fox presidential match-up poll, via Brooklyn Mutt:

Obama 54% - Jeb Bush 34%

Obama 48% -  Mitt Romney 41%

Obama 49% - Mike Huckabee 41%

Obama 55% - Newt Gingrich 35%

Obama 56% - Sarah Palin 35%

... Here's a related story from Andy Kroll at Mother Jones: Republican dreams of a Jeb Bush run don't look so hot.

David Kirkpatrick & David Sanger of the New York Times report on the pan-Arab youth democracy movement which has been years in the making & centers on nonviolent techniques. ...

... Kim Murphy of the Los Angeles Times: "Governments across the Middle East are scrambling to step up political concessions, dole out financial benefits and — when that fails — deploy riot police in an attempt to ease instability and buy time.... Protesters from Morocco to Iran are setting aside the region's traditional religious and geopolitical divides to take on common culprits of corruption, police violence, political repression and vast gaps in wealth." ...

... Marc Lynch of Foreign Policy: "The Obama administration also deserves a great deal of credit, which it probably won't receive. It understood immediately and intuitively that it should not attempt to lead a protest movement which had mobilized itself without American guidance, and consistently deferred to the Egyptian people. Despite the avalanche of criticism from protestors and pundits, in fact Obama and his key aides -- including Ben Rhodes and Samantha Power and many others -- backed the Egyptian protest movement far more quickly than anyone should have expected."

Mark Lacey & James McKinley of the New York Times report some of the details of Gabriel Giffords' rehabilitation. ...

... Malcolm Ritter, a science writer for the AP, on Gabrielle Giffords' rehabilitation. "Too little has been revealed and it's too early to say if Giffords might be able to return to her job in Congress. One expert questioned whether that would be the best thing for her to do. Most people with such injuries have some level of impairment for the rest of their lives." ...

... which is why stories like this one, that Politico ran over the weekend, pretty much irritate me.

Right Wing News

Stephanie Mencimer of Mother Jones: "Two years ago, Tea Party Patriots got its start as a scrappy, ground-up conservative organization....Lately..., TPP has started to resemble the Beltway lobbying operations its members have denounced. The group's leaders have cozied up to political insiders implicated in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal and have paid themselves significant salaries. TPP accepted the use of a private jet and a large donation of anonymous cash right before a key election, and its top officials have refused to discuss how the money was spent. And recently, the group has hired several big-time fundraising and public relations firms that work for the who's who of the Republican political class...." Part 1 of a 3-part series.

The Koch Bros. Don't Have Funny Bones. Noam Cohen of the New York Times: they have gone to court to shut down a pretty harmless parody site. CW: kinda reminds me of Bill O'Reilly & Fox "News" suing Al Franken. The judge laughed their suit out of court. ...

... Speaking of lawsuits, here's one we like. Peter Finocchiaro of Salon: "Former USDA official Shirley Sherrod has filed a lawsuit against conservative firebrand and web entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart. The suit stems from the notorious video Breitbart posted online last year, showing an out-of-context excerpt from a speech Sherrod gave to the NAACP Freedom Fund in March 2010. The clip suggested she had used her position at the Department of Agriculture to discriminate against white farmers.... The NAACP denounced Sherrod and the Obama administration fired her. The charge was, in fact, entirely untrue."

Mitt Romney lies even when he's telling the truth:

"President Obama has stood watch over the greatest job loss in modern American history, and that, my friends, is one inconvenient truth that will haunt this president throughout history." -- Mitt Romney ...

     ... BUT Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post writes, "Romney's statement is technically correct but lacks context, making it meaningless. He attributes some job losses to Obama that are arguably not Obama's fault. And just using raw numbers is misleading, especially when, placed in context, the job losses under Obama are about the same at this point as under Romney's hero, Ronald Reagan."

Haley Barbour might not have given much thought to black civil rights BUT Michael Scherer of Time reports that he has a consistent history of favoring a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. With video. CW: this is good with me, but how good will it be for Republican presidential primary voters?

Don't Pick on Palin. CW: as is my habit, I've tried to stay in the Palin-free zone, but Andy Barr's February 12 Politico story on the political costs of criticizing Sarah Palin is germane to the 2012 Republican presidential primary. Besides, it's about two of the worst presidential candidates ever:

Rick Santorum, in a little-watched Web radio interview, on why Palin wasn't attending CPAC: “'I have a feeling that she has some demands on her time, and a lot of them have financial benefit attached to them.' He added that Palin had 'other business opportunities' as well as 'all these kids' to look after as a mother, both of which caused constraints on her time.

Sarah Palin on Fox "News": "My kids don’t hold me back from attending a conference. I will not call him the knuckle-dragging Neanderthal. I’ll let his wife call him that instead.”

Local News

Rick Scott & the nasty rich guy Charles Montgomery Burns. A number of writers have pointed out Scott is meaner than Burns; Scott looks & acts like super-villain Lex Luthor. Karoli of Crooks & Liars: Florida Gov. Rick "Scott's budget is so draconian to the poor and middle class and so enriching to corporations and their wealthy overlords that he makes Simon LeGree look charitable. And as Ed Kilgore notes, the entire budget is intended to redistribute wealth from the bottom 90% to the top 10%."

Steve Benen: "The governor's plan cuts billions from already-underfunded public schools, cuts billions from Medicaid, would close a third of the state's public parks, and would eliminate every penny of funding that currently goes to assist the homeless and prevent teen suicides."

The President's speech this morning in Baltimore:

     ... Here's the transcript from the White House.

News Ledes

Buh-bye, Birther Bill. Arizona Republic: "An Arizona Senate committee rejected a proposal to require candidates for the presidency to show their birth certificates. The bill by Republican Sen. Ron Gould of Lake Havasu was defeated in a 3-to-5 vote Monday by the Senate's judiciary committee.... The bill was aimed at making President Barack Obama prove his nationality by birth.

New York Times: "The House on Monday voted to reauthorize and extend through Dec. 8 three ways in which Congress expanded the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s counterterrorism powers after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.... Sixty-five Democrats voted for it..., and 27 Republicans voted against it...."

AFP: "The possible heirs of Egypt's uprising took to the streets Monday in different corners of the Middle East: Iran's beleaguered opposition stormed back to central Tehran and came under a tear gas attack by police. Demonstrators faced rubber bullets and birdshot to demand more freedoms in the relative wealth of Bahrain. And protesters pressed for the ouster of the ruler in poverty-drained Yemen." ...

... AP: "Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has expressed support for the tens of thousands of protesters in Iran's capital, saying they "deserve to have the same rights that they saw being played out in Egypt and are part of their own birthright." ...

... NBC: "Clashes between Iranian police and tens of thousands of protesters wracked central Tehran on Monday with security forces beating and firing tear gas at opposition supporters looking to evoke the recent popular uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia."

AP: "Egypt's military rulers called for an end to strikes and protests Monday as thousands of state employees, from ambulance drivers to police and transport workers, demonstrated to demand better pay in a growing wave of labor unrest unleashed by the democracy uprising that ousted Hosni Mubarak's regime." ...

... AP: "More than 1,000 people protested in Yemen for a fourth straight day Monday, demanding political reforms and the ouster of the U.S.-allied president in demonstrations inspired by the upheaval in Egypt."

... AP: "Egypt's ambassador to the United States says Hosni Mubarak may be in 'bad ealth,' the first word on the 82-year-old ousted president's health."

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