REALITYCHEX.COM - Constant Comments - The Commentariat -- January 22, 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.”

The Wires

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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.'”

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Sunday

Jan222012

The Commentariat -- January 22, 2012

My column in the New York Times eXaminer is on Tom Friedman's advice to Obama & Romney. The NYTX front page is here. You can contribute here.

Maureen Dowd, writing her book report on Jody Jodi Kantor's The Obamas, writes that President and Mrs. Obama feel victimized by the press and unappreciated by the public.

Glenn Greenwald: "... just as the celebrations began over the saving of Internet Freedom, something else happened: the U.S. Justice Department not only indicted the owners of one of the world’s largest websites, the file-sharing site Megaupload, but also seized and shut down that site, and also seized or froze millions of dollars of its assets — all based on the unproved accusations, set forth in an indictment, that the site deliberately aided copyright infringement.... Many SOPA opponents were confused and even shocked when they learned that the very power they feared the most in that bill ... is a power the U.S. Government already possesses and, obviously, is willing and able to exercise even against the world’s largest sites (they have this power thanks to the the 2008 PRO-IP Act pushed by the same industry servants in Congress behind SOPA as well as by forfeiture laws used to seize the property of accused-but-not-convicted drug dealers).... It’s wildly under-appreciated how unrestrained is the Government’s power to do what it wants, and how little effect these debates over various proposed laws have on that power.... The U.S. really is a society that simply no longer believes in due process...."

Right Wing World

I think grandiose thoughts. -- Newt Gingrich, during last night's victory speech

Jeff Zeleny of the New York Times: "The rebirth of Newt Gingrich, a notion that seemed far-fetched only weeks ago, has upended a litany of assumptions about this turbulent race. It wounds [Mitt] Romney ... and raises the likelihood that the Republican contest could stretch into the springtime.... Mr. Gingrich’s showing [in South Carolina] suggests that Mr. Romney may no longer be able to count on his rivals splitting the opposing vote into harmless parcels, or on the support he is getting from the party establishment to carry him past a volatile conservative grass-roots movement." ...

Steve Kornacki of Salon on what's next for the GOP presidential nominating process; Kornacki posits four plausible outcomes.

** New York Times Editors: "On Saturday, [South Carolina] veered in an extreme direction, and the outcome spoke poorly for a party that allowed itself to be manipulated by the lowest form of campaigning. Newt Gingrich won the primary by a decisive margin of 12.5 percentage points, and there is no mystery about how he did it. Two-thirds of voters interviewed in exit polls said they made their decision on the basis of the two South Carolina debates, where Mr. Gingrich exploited racial resentment and hatred of the news media to connect with furious voters." ...

... Or, as Driftglass puts it, the Great Klansman prevailed once again in South Carolinam "flying though the night to dance on the bones of Abraham Lincoln and promise to restore the rage-drunk, inbred remnants of the Confederate South to their former glory, but only if they are sufficiently sincere in their hatred of the usual suspects -- gays, Negroes, uppity women and, of course, the Liberal media which spreads their terrible lies."

... It's not that I'm a good debater. It's that I articulate the deepest felt values of the American people. -- Newt Gingrich, in his victory speech last night ...

... Dave Weigel of Slate: "This was hilarious, and it was true. Gingrich had gained ground by punishing the media in Monday’s and Thursday’s debates.... The 'elite media' isn’t running stories about the personal scandals of those other guys, because those scandals don’t exist. That wasn’t the point: Gingrich was saying that all criticism of Republicans from the media should be suspect.... In his victory speech..., he warned [that the elite media] 'have been trying for half century to force us to quit being American and become some other kind of system.'" See this related story which I linked a few days ago; conservatives trust only right-wing news because people like Gingrich have been extremely successful in their campaign to discredit honest reporting. There really is a Right Wing World, and it really is a parallel meta-world where the fact-based world is feared and loathed. This is extraordinary, and extraordinarily bad for our democracy. ...

... "I Think Grandiose Thoughts." Charles Pierce credits this Romney campaign release as the "best press release of the night." Read it. You might treasure it as an "historical" document. If you're not sure of the meaning of "grandiose," here it is: "characterized by affectation of grandeur ... or by absurd exaggeration." ...

... Jonathan Bernstein in the Washington Post: "Newt Gingrich remains almost as implausible a nominee as he’s been from the beginning of the campaign."

Charles Pierce: "If he is to be nominated — and I still think he probably will be — Willard Romney will be nominated by a party that would move en masse to the other end of a subway car rather than listen to him talk any more." ...

... Jia Lynn Yang of the Washington Post: the best way to understand Mitt Romney may be to see him as a corporatist whose bottom-line mindset is designed to improve corporate efficiency -- but at a human cost to which the consultant in Romney gives little consideration. Yang wonders if Romney can overcome his efficiency-expert self. The evidence she presents suggests he hasn't even tried.

Josh Israel of Think Progress on how the three Republicans on the Federal Election Commission have made Citizens United even worse.

News Ledes

New York Times: Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Arizona) has announced she will step down from her Congressional seat next week to concentrate on her recovery from a debilitating gunshot wound. "The remainder of Ms. Giffords’s term will be filled by the winner of a special election, to be held on a date determined by Gov. Jan Brewer, a Republican. In November, the district will be redrawn in a way that further favors Democrats, which may scare away some Republicans." Ms. Giffords' husband, retired astronaut Mark Kelly, says he will not run for the seat.

New York Times: "Croats voted by a two-to-one margin on Sunday to join the European Union, signaling that the bloc retains its allure despite the debt crisis engulfing the euro currency that many of its members use."

Los Angeles Times: "Satirist Stephen Colbert’s push for protest votes in the South Carolina primary fell flat Saturday as former candidate Herman Cain took just over 1% of the vote in the GOP presidential primary." CW: I noticed in reviewing the county-by-county totals that you could tell where the college towns were: those counties had an unusually high count for "other."

New York Times: "Mitt Romney said Sunday morning that he would release his 2010 tax returns on Tuesday, bowing to that mounting pressure that might have helped lead to his defeat in the South Carolina primary on Saturday."

AP: "Joe Paterno's doctors said that the former Penn State coach's condition had become 'serious,' following complications from lung cancer in recent days. The winningest major college football coach, Paterno was diagnosed shortly after Penn State's Board of Trustees ousted him Nov. 9 in the aftermath of the child sex abuse charges against former assistant Jerry Sandusky. While undergoing treatment, his health problems worsened when he broke his pelvis — the same injury he sustained during preseason practice last year." ...

... ** Washington Post Update: "Joe Paterno, the former Penn State football coach who was among the most admired figures in the annals of collegiate sports but whose reputation was shattered in the wake of a child abuse scandal involving one of his longtime assistants, died Sunday morning. He was 85. The death was announced by his family." ...

... Update: the New York Times obituary is here.

New York Times: "Egyptian authorities confirmed Saturday that a political coalition dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, the 84-year-old group that virtually invented political Islam, had won about 47 percent of the seats in the first Parliament elected since the ouster of Hosni Mubarak. An alliance of ultraconservative Islamists won the next largest share of seats, about 25 percent."

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From yesterday’s “The Commentariat.” the article by Ilyse Hogue offers hope that Liberals and Conservatives can find common ground on important issues:

“Take the Internet censorship bills: the smug overreach of these industry-backed bills united both poles of the political spectrum and new media companies in an unprecedented wave of online activism that turned the tide and left both bills gasping for life on the eve of their vote.”--Ilyse Hogue, The Nation (Emphasis added.)

“...most Americans crave more limits on election spending. A new CBS poll out yesterday showed majority of Republicans, Democrats and Independents favor limits on how much both how much individuals can give to candidates and how much outside groups can spend on ads. A total of 67 percent of respondents said outside spending should be limited, while less than a third favored the current system.” --Ilyse Hogue, The Nation

Perhaps there is hope that Americans could actually unite long enough throw out our current, utterly corrupt crop of politicians, too.

January 22, 2012 |

Zee

@Zee. It depends on what you call a 'conservative'. It is one thing to disagree over economic methodology and interpretation of the second amendment and another to be the 'conservatives' like much the Republican primary voters. These people have a different agenda. They are determined to get the black bastard out of the White House, ensure that their religion replaces the Constitution, mandate that their children not receive a decent education and live a life of blame on the 'elite media', 'librales', and anyone that does not live their lives.
The one good thing that has come out of these primary contests is an exposure of two things: the large number of racist scum still hiding in America coming out and the fact that the Republican candidates will play to their hate.
So Zee, I have no problem debating with you because you are actually willing to discuss the issues. I am afraid that a significant proportion of our fellow citizens who claim to be conservative will never discuss anything. They already know it all and live in their fantasy world of religion and politics, hiding from reality.
P.S. And some of them are running for POTUS.

January 22, 2012 |

Marvin Schwalb

@Marvin Schwalb--

I agree with you completely. No one could be more ashamed than I am about what today's Republican Party calls "conservatism," and about our current choice of so-called "conservative" candidates.

January 22, 2012 |

Zee

I too "Think Grandiose Thoughts":

Single Payer Health Care

Renewable Energy

Small Scale Local Agriculture

Broad Access to Higher Education that doesn't have entire departments bought by meddlesome billionaires to teach their crafted curriculum

A Supreme Court that hasn't been bought by meddlesome billionaires to decree their crafted legal decisions

A Congress that hasn't been bought by meddlesome billionaires that pass their crafted legislation

Power to the People!

January 22, 2012 |

DaveS

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