REALITYCHEX.COM - Constant Comments - The Commentariat -- January 21, 2012

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.

Washington Post: “First came the surprising discovery that Earth’s atmosphere is leaking. But for roughly 60 years, the reason remained a mystery. Since the late 1960s, satellites over the poles detected an extremely fast flow of particles escaping into space — at speeds of 20 kilometers per second. Scientists suspected that gravity and the magnetic field alone could not fully explain the stream. There had to be another source creating this leaky faucet. It turns out the mysterious force is a previously undiscovered global electric field, a recent study found. The field is only about the strength of a watch battery — but it’s enough to thrust lighter ions from our atmosphere into space. It’s also generated unlike other electric fields on Earth. This newly discovered aspect of our planet provides clues about the evolution of our atmosphere, perhaps explaining why Earth is habitable. The electric field is 'an agent of chaos,' said Glyn Collinson, a NASA rocket scientist and lead author of the study. 'It undoes gravity.... Without it, Earth would be very different.'”

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.'”

Page Links

Friday

Jan202012

The Commentariat -- January 21, 2012

President Obama's Weekly Address:

... The transcript is here.

David Dayen of Firedoglake: "After the death of PIPA this morning comes the news that Lamar Smith, the Republican chair of the House Judiciary Committee who planned on resuming the markup of SOPA, the House version of anti-piracy legislation, in February, has put the bill into cold storage.... It must have killed Smith to put the stake through the heart of SOPA, considering his own staffers wrote the bill – right before becoming entertainment industry lobbyists.... The lobbyists of the entertainment giants will still work tirelessly to get something passed that asserts their control over the Internet. But this episode does show that activism can work, at least to stop unpopular legislation. Maybe not all the time, but when a lot of energy is thrown into political engagement, sometimes it makes a big difference." ...

... Here's the kind of guy who "will still work tirelessly to get ... control over the Internet": former Democratic Senator Chris Dodd [D-Conn.], a sleazy wheeler-dealer who now heads the Motion Picture Association of America; i.e., he's one of the top lobbyists in Washington. This story by Michael Cieply & Edward Wyatt of the New York Times is pretty interesting. The wheeler-dealers are rethinking the wheel as a result of the successful Internet campaign to kill the bills. ...

... ** What if Citizens United Actually United the Citizens?" Ilyse Hogue of The Nation: "After a long, dark period of stagnant progressive momentum and pay-to-play politics, this week saw a flurry of progressive victories that could upset the conventional wisdom about a post–Citizens United world.... What if the net result of Citizens United is a realization by progressive groups that financial competition is futile, one that prompts altered strategies that play to progressive strengths? In the two years after the Citizens United decision, we've seen a renewed commitment to deep organizing and innovative rapid response that is threatening corporate-backed electeds and industry-promoted legislation alike." ...

... But Seriously, Colbert. Melinda Henneberger of the Washington Post: "Calling himself the 'Martin Luther King of corporation civil rights,' [Stephen] Colbert said [at a rally in South Carolina] that in a time maybe not everyone in the audience could remember — two years ago — corporations were sadly limited in the amount of money they could pour into political campaigns. But that changed, he said, when 'five courageous justices' on the Supreme Court ruled in the 2010 Citizens United decision that 'corporations are people,' that people are entitled to free speech, that free speech equals money and that corporations should thus be entitled to dump as much money as they like into the political water table, provided they don’t coordinate with the campaigns they’re funding."

One of the Many Hidden Costs of Racial Bigotry. Tara Bernard of the New York Times: "Blacks are about twice as likely as whites to wind up in the more onerous and costly form of consumer bankruptcy as they try to dig out from their debts, a new study has found. The disparity persisted even when the researchers adjusted for income, homeownership, assets and education. The evidence suggested that lawyers were disproportionately steering blacks into a process that was not as good for them financially, in part because of biases, whether conscious or unconscious. The vast majority of debtors file under Chapter 7 of the bankruptcy code, which typically allows them to erase most debts in a matter of months. It tends to have a higher success rate and is less expensive than the alternative, Chapter 13, which requires debtors to dedicate their disposable income to paying back their debts for several years." CW: for those of you who still think it doesn't matter which candidates win the elections, this is a good example of why Elections Have Consequences. When you award these GOP dog-whistlers your vote, especially when that award leads to their elections, you're giving them more opportunities to continue to reinforce racial bias.

Chris McGreal of the Guardian: "The owner of a Jewish newspaper in Atlanta has said he deeply regrets writing a column suggesting that Israel consider 'a hit' on Barack Obama if he stands in the way of the Jewish state defending itself. Andrew Adler told the Guardian he wrote the column in the weekly Atlanta Jewish Times 'to get a reaction' from the paper's readers." CW: Yes, because a newspaper editor's urging the assassination of a U.S. president is such a good idea. That's exactly what legendary Hearst editor Arthur Brisbane did -- shortly before an anarchist assassinated President William McKinley. (Ironically, writing a column "to get a reaction from the paper's readers" is also what Brisbane's grandson, Art Brisbane of the New York Times said he did when he asked if journalists should fact-check politicians' remarks.) The original Gawker story (updated) on Adler's editorial is here. An ABC News story, which reports that the Secret Service "is aware" of Adler's editorial, is here.

"How Big-Time Sports Ate College Life." Laura Pappano of the New York Times: "... big-time sports has become the public face of the university, the brand that admissions offices sell, a public-relations machine thanks to ESPN exposure."

AND Obama's been singing a long time. (See yesterday's Commentariat for context.) I think this clip is from a 2009 event:

Right Wing World

Nate Silver: "Newt Gingrich, who had trailed Mitt Romney by a double-digit margin in South Carolina in several polls conducted just after the New Hampshire primary, may instead be headed to a big victory there, recent polling suggests."

Alexander Burns of Politico: "... as voting begins in the South Carolina primary, Mitt Romney’s remaining opponents sound more determined than ever to make him wage a long and potentially costly battle for the Republican presidential nomination. Driven by a range of personal resentments and unlikely strategies, the surviving anti-Romney candidates are ... pressing on with guerrilla-style campaigns that were never allowed much hope of success.... But for Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul, the campaign has always been a desperate errand — a windmill-tilting exercise in ignoring the overwhelming conventional wisdom that says that they have no chance."

Janine Gibson & Richard Adams of the Guardian: "The comedian and satirist Stephen Colbert arrived in Charleston aboard Herman Cain's 999 bus to ask Republican voters to choose the former candidate in Saturday's South Carolina primary. Of course, that was barely the point. To marching bands, cheerleaders and a crowd of over 3,000 on the College of Charleston's manicured campus, Colbert took to the stage and led a stirring version of This Little Light of Mine, with a gospel choir. A close harmony of The Star Spangled Banner followed."

... Colbert King of the Washington Post does not find Colbert's involvement in the GOP race "the least bit funny.... Too much has gone into getting the right to vote to treat the ballot like a game." CW: King has a point, but what he doesn't seem to get is that a vote for Cain/Colbert is a protest vote against All of the Above. I don't normally favor protest votes, but when the candidates all as whacked out, sleazy and/or cravenly anti-99 Percent as those in this race, None of the Above is an appropriate ballot choice.

... Colbert appears on "Morning Joe." CW: You might have guessed who my candidate in the South Carolina GOP presidential primary is. And, no, I never thought I'd say, "Vote for Herman Cain":

Kristin Ford of Faith in Public Life: "More than 40 national Catholic leaders and prominent theologians at universities across the country released a strongly worded open letter [Friday] urging 'our fellow Catholics Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum to stop perpetuating ugly racial stereotypes on the campaign trail.'” Post contains text of letter & signatories. CW: read the letter. It's pretty good. Too bad no "journalists" will ask Gingrich & Santorum about stuff like this during a debate.

Jeanne Sahadi of CNN Money: "On Thursday night, just as the final debate before South Carolina's Republican primary was getting underway, [Newt] Gingrich posted online the 2010 joint federal tax return he filed with his wife, Callista. The headline number was 31%. That's the percentage of the couple's total income -- $3,162,424 -- they owed in federal income taxes. Their total tax bill was $994,708. Gingrich's opponent Mitt Romney said this week that he estimates his effective federal tax rate is about 15% -- a number driven down by Romney's millions in investment income, which is typically taxed at a lower rate than ordinary income such as a salary."

Jim Rutenberg, et al., of the New York Times: "After arriving [in South Carolina] last week fresh off of what seemed to be two victories in a row in Iowa and New Hampshire, [Mitt] Romney was suddenly confronting the prospect of leaving as the winner of only one of the first three nominating contests." ...

... Mendacious Mitt, Con'd. Steve Benen continues his featured Top Romney Lies of the Week. The Week. Benen caught Romney in ten whoppers this week. Many of these lies are not just "misinterpretations" or shadings of the truth; they flat-out falsehoods. The man has no relationship with the truth. ...

... Adam Serwer of Mother Jones: oops! During the last debate, Mitt Romney accidentally admitted that the Affordable Care Act isn't "socialism," though you can be sure that went right over the heads of the dunces who will vote for him. "To the Republican candidates, manipulating the tax code for the benefit of corporations is 'free market capitalism.' Manipulating it to provide everyone with health insurance coverage is 'socialism,' which is so precious to Republicans that they only want veterans to have it."

"Crass Warfare." Like me, Steve Benen cannot figure out why the right thinks it is rank "hypocrisy" for wealthy Democratic candidates to champion the middle-class and poor. To wit, Scott Brown's campaign is calling Elizabeth Warren an "elitist hypocrite" because now that she and her husband are well-to-do, she still wants to help people in the middle class achieve success, too. CW: A couple of days ago, I read an op-ed column in the right-wing Boston Herald by some regular dimwitted columnist to exactly this effect. When I wrote a comment pointing out that it was laudable for the wealthy to give others the same chances they have had, the reasoned retorts I got were (1) you're a Marxist Nazi, and (2) hahahahahahahaha. That second one was the whole response, only it was longer. See Akhilleus's comment in yesterday's thread. I know some leftists who are self-righteous, strident bores/boors, but the right does seem to be dominated by dumb fuckers.

Local News

Himanshu Ojha, et al., of Reuters: "Former Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour's grants of commutations or pardons to more than 200 prisoners, all but eight in his final days in office, disproportionately benefited white offenders among a predominantly black prison population, a Reuters analysis found." CW: I am shocked to learn Haley Barbour is a bigot. I thought all that "folksy bashing of poor black people" he did and said were just light-hearted "tradition." (The linked essay by Kai Wright of Color Lines, written last April, is instructive.)

News Ledes

New York Times: "Surprising his rivals and upending the highly unpredictable Republican race for the presidency, Newt Gingrich won the South Carolina primary on Saturday, just 10 days after a fifth-place finish in New Hampshire left the impression his candidacy was all but dead. So strong was Mr. Gingrich’s performance that the major television networks declared him the winner the minute the polls closed, basing their projections on exit polls that showed him winning a plurality of voters among a wide swath of important Republican voting blocs." The Times has informative blog here. The Washington Post has the full results here.

New York Times: "President Obama will use his election-year State of the Union address on Tuesday to define an activist role for government in promoting a prosperous and equitable society, hoping to draw a stark contrast between the parties in a time of deep economic uncertainty." ...

...

Here's the "video preview" of President Obama's SOTU address, which the Obama campaign e-mailed to supporters:

Reuters: "With the crucial Republican presidential primary in South Carolina just hours away, longtime front-runner Mitt Romney is acknowledging what some opinion polls are suggesting: He could lose Saturday." CW: the election is today. ...

... Politico: "On the eve of the South Carolina primary, Iowa Republicans dealt Mitt Romney’s campaign a blow by formally declaring Rick Santorum the winner of their Jan. 3 caucuses. At 18 minutes before midnight Friday, South Carolina time, the Republican Party of Iowa released a statement revising its Thursday announcement that reported Santorum ahead of Romney but also saying the two-week-old race had no clear winner."

Reuters: "Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps said on Saturday it considered the likely return of U.S. warships to the Gulf part of routine activity, backing away from previous warnings to Washington not to re-enter the area. The statement may be seen as an effort to reduce tensions after Washington said it would respond if Iran made good on a threat to block the Strait of Hormuz -- the vital shipping lane for oil exports from the Gulf."

New York Times: "The Supreme Court on Friday rejected elections maps drawn by a federal court in Texas that had favored Democratic candidates there. The unanimous decision said that redistricting is primarily a job for elected state officials and that the lower court had not paid enough deference to maps drawn by the State Legislature, which is controlled by Republicans. The justices sent the case back to the lower court, extending the uncertainty surrounding this major voting-rights case. The new maps to be drawn by the lower court could play a role in determining control of the House of Representatives."

Reuters: "Lawmakers stopped anti-piracy legislation in its tracks on Friday, delivering a stunning win for Internet companies.... Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid said he would postpone a critical vote that had been scheduled for January 24 'in light of recent events.' Lamar Smith, the Republican chairman of the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, followed suit, saying his panel would delay action on similar legislation until there is wider agreement on the issue."

Reuters: "The Congress has the constitutional right to legislate permits for cross-border oil pipelines like TransCanada's Keystone XL, according to a new legal analysis released late on Friday. The study by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service could give a boost to Republicans drafting legislation to overturn a decision this week by President Barack Obama to put the $7 billion Alberta-to-Texas project on ice."

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Reader Comments (3)

Will the Republicans finally pick their nominee? They have now only two real choices, Romney and Gingrich. Neither of them qualified for the presidency but not as crazy as Paul and Santorum.

Their 'primary' season following a 'pre-primary' season has been too long and the fun is out after Cain left.

Please, dear Republicans, make up your minds!

January 21, 2012 |

Ladislav Nemec

It is hard for white losers, poor white trash, to feel superior to black people when the President of the United States is black, "Take back the country" is their cry and what they mean is they can't stand black success, The poor white trash of the south will never forgive Obama for taking away their ability to feel superior.

January 21, 2012 |

Carlyle

@Carlyle. Unfortunately, you're right. I just checked to see how old Newt was and he's just my age. So Newt grew up in Georgia at the same time I was growing up in Miami in an era when there were still plenty of Florida "crackers" around. When I was in the 2nd grade, one of them asked me if I was a Yankee or a Rebel. I had no idea. Turned out I was a Yankee. My point is that Newt's generation is still fighting the Civil War. Every generation gets better, but as the song goes, "You have to be carefully taught," and the Newt generation has produced yet two more generations who in the aggregate may not be as racist as our generation, but are still larded with plenty of "carefully taught" racists.

That Newt Gingrich is openly encouraging racism for his own personal gain is beyond disgusting. It isn't just Newt, of course. The Republican party is essentially a racist, sexist party and the candidates are all anti-populists, no matter what they say -- just look at their policies. I forget who it was who called Ron Paul's political philosophy, "libertarianism for white dudes." And there was Santorum and "blah" people. The only GOP presidential candidate who isn't actively sending out dog whistles is Romney. He learned better at home. I'm really waiting to see a journalist bring up that letter from the 40 Roman Catholic leaders cited above. Maybe David Gregory -- technically a journalist -- will do it tomorrow as Gingrich will be on his show.

January 21, 2012 |

Marie Burns

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