The Ledes

Tuesday, October 1, 2024

Washington Post: “ John Amos, a running back turned actor who appeared in scores of TV shows — including groundbreaking 1970s programs such as the sitcom 'Good Times' and the epic miniseries 'Roots' — and risked his career to protest demeaning portrayals of Black characters, died Aug. 21 in Los Angeles. He was 84.” Amos's New York Times obituary is here.

New York Times: “Pete Rose, one of baseball’s greatest players and most confounding characters, who earned glory as the game’s hit king and shame as a gambler and dissembler, died on Monday. He was 83.”

The Ledes

Monday, September 30, 2024

New York Times: “Kris Kristofferson, the singer and songwriter whose literary yet plain-spoken compositions infused country music with rarely heard candor and depth, and who later had a successful second career in movies, died at his home on Maui, Hawaii, on Saturday. He was 88.”

~~~ The New York Times highlights “twelve essential Kristofferson songs.”

The Wires
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Public Service Announcement

Washington Post: "Americans can again order free rapid coronavirus tests by mail, the Biden administration announced Thursday. People can request four free at-home tests per household through covidtests.gov. They will begin shipping Monday. The move comes ahead of an expected winter wave of coronavirus cases. The September revival of the free testing program is in line with the Biden administration’s strategy to respond to the coronavirus as part of a broader public health campaign to protect Americans from respiratory viruses, including influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), that surge every fall and winter. But free tests were not mailed during the summer wave, which wastewater surveillance data shows is now receding."

Washington Post: “Comedy news outlet the Onion — reinvigorated by new ownership over this year — is bringing back its once-popular video parodies of cable news. But this time, there’s someone with real news anchor experience in the chair. When the first episodes appear online Monday, former WAMU and MSNBC host Joshua Johnson will be the face of the resurrected 'Onion News Network.' Playing an ONN anchor character named Dwight Richmond, Johnson says he’s bringing a real anchor’s sense of clarity — and self-importance — to the job. 'If ONN is anything, it’s a news organization that is so unaware of its own ridiculousness that it has the confidence of a serial killer,' says Johnson, 44.” ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: I'll be darned if I can figured out how to watch ONN. If anybody knows, do tell. Thanks.

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.”

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Friday
Jun292012

The Commentariat -- June 30, 2012

The President's Weekly Address:

CW: I'm reposting this, since it didn't go up till late yesterday. My column in the New York Times eXaminer today is titled "David Brooks -- Constitutional Scholar." The NYTX front page is here.

New York Times Quote of the Day. Right now, it's scary to get sick, because if you don't die from the sickness, you die when you see the bill. -- Gladys Vasquez, 50, a Houston home health aide who lacks health insurance.

Robert Pear & Michael Cooper of the New York Times: "Millions of poor people could still be left without medical insurance under the national health care law if states take an option granted by the Supreme Court and decide not to expand their Medicaid programs, state officials and health policy experts said Friday. Republican officials in more than a half-dozen states said they opposed expanding Medicaid or had serious doubts about it, even though the federal government would pick up all the costs in the first few years and at least 90 percent of the expenses after that." CW: And Krugman called these people cruel. Oh, how could he?

Jeff Toobin, Rick Hertzberg & Amelia Lester of the New Yorker on the Affordable Care case:

Michael Scherer of Time reports on how President Obama got the news of the Supreme Court's decision.

Peter Baker of the New York Times reviews the White House's failure to sell the Affordable Care Act; looks like they have big plans to drop the ball again. CW: big mistake. Obama, Biden & Democratic candidates should brag every day in every way on the popular aspects of the ACA, & they should append their boasts with, "And Republicans want to take that away from you. They want to deprive you of health insurance, put your family at risk, blah-blah." How hard is that? P.S. It's not an "individual mandate"; it's a "freeloaders fee," courtesy of Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-NY) who appears on "Up with Chris Hayes" on MSNBC today.

The Broccoli Head Speaks. Prof. Randy Barnett, the righty-right libertarian who invented the legal thesis that Congress cannot regulate "inactivity" & who argued one of the anti-ACA cases before the Supremes, writes a Washington Post op-ed boasting that he won & telling you why you should vote for Willard (basically, because the Mittster will repeal the New Deal). Barnett, in my opinion, is a selfish piece of dung, & I disagree with most of what he writes, but I find it helpful to know the rationales of rational-sounding righties. And Barnett reinforced what I wrote about Brooks' column -- that the right is trying to expand the meaning of Roberts' ruling by interpreting his interpretation of the Constitution to bend their way. Also, if you tend to think lefties are exaggerating when they claim the right wants to repeal the New Deal & bring us all the way back to the gilded age, Barnett's op-ed will convince you we flamethrowers got it right. His op-ed is an admission of guilt that would hold up in court.

This Washington Post article by Robert Barnes & Del Quentin Wilbur explores whether or not Chief Justice Roberts changed his opinion late in the game.

There's more to a Supreme Court ruling than just the first page:

The real Frank Rich sees the Court's ruling as a second chance for President Obama and CNN's colossal blooper as the network's Waterloo. ...

... Andy Borowitz reports some other reactions to the ObamaCare decision. ...

... And Donald Trump says Chief Justice John Hussein Roberts' birth certificate is a fake; Sean Hannity finds Trumps revelation "very concerning."

Kyle Cheney of Politico: "The Supreme Court's decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act's individual mandate as a 'tax' has Republicans [CW: and Rush Limbaugh, whatever his party preference may be] charging that President Barack Obama has hiked taxes on millions of middle-class Americans. But they may run into a problem: Mitt Romney's individual mandate in Massachusetts works exactly the same way. And people are starting to notice.

Hoodwinked! Steve Benen: NPR, NBC, MSNBC & Fox "News" have all featured a guy named Joe Olivo, whom they represent in stories as an independent small business owner who doesn't like the Affordable Care Act. Well, guess what? Independent Joe is a member of the National Federation of Independent Business, the group that brought the suit against the ACA. "The NFIB -- which promotes Olivo's public appearances -- is also 'linked to the ALEC and Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS.' ... The Affordable Care Act is generally a great help to small businesses.... [Olivo is] not just expressing his own perspective; he appears to be representing the interests of a group trying to kill the health care reform law."

Presidential Race

Trip Gabriel & Robert Pear of the New York Times try to figure out Mitt Romney's health care preferences since Romney won't spell them out. What they come up with is pretty pitiful: higher costs for the old & the sick; not much for the poor.

Steve Benen chronicles 21 of Mitt's whoppers this week. And they are that: whoppers. Scripted lies, not slips of the tongue. Widely-debunked claims.

Right Wing World

Justin Sink of The Hill: in a Fox "News" interview, House Oversight Committee Chair Darrell Issa, who led the charge against AG Eric Holder, likens Holder to "the Menendez brothers who killed their parents." With video.

News Ledes

New York Times: E-mails found by an investigative team headed by former FBI director Louis Freeh suggest that Penn State head football coach Joe Paterno may have actively sought to keep university officials from reporting to law enforcement the 2001 rape which Mike McQueary says he witnessed & reported to Paterno. Paterno did not write any of the e-mails which suggest his influence.

News outlets reported late Tuesday that Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY) had beat back a primary challenge. Maybe not. Politico reports "... a strange case of missing precincts, questionable ballots and utter confusion over who's to blame for the mess and when the race might be settled.... As of Friday evening, 32 precincts -- six percent of all votes cast -- had yet to be accounted for. And another 2,447 affidavit ballots and 667 absentee votes hadn't been counted yet either. According to the city Board of Elections, Rangel's lead over second-place finisher state Sen. Adriano Espaillat stood at 1,032 votes, with enough outstanding ballots to alter the outcome."

New York Times: "Gov. Chris Christie on Friday curbed an effort by the New Jersey Legislature to improve oversight of the state's system of large, privately run halfway houses. Mr. Christie, a Republican who has close ties to a company that is the dominant operator of halfway houses in the state, used a line-item veto to reduce new disclosure requirements about halfway houses that the Democratic-controlled Legislature inserted in the state budget approved this week." CW: it seems the last governor New Jersey had who wasn't a criminal was Christie Todd Whitman, and that was a long time ago.

Washington Post: "More than 1.5 million homes and businesses across Maryland and Virginia lost power Friday night as one of the most powerful and punishing storms in months swept across the Washington region. Two fatalities were reported in the Springfield area of Fairfax County."

Denver Post: "Standing among the charred remains of the neighborhood hardest hit by the Waldo Canyon fire, a stunned President Barack Obama on Friday told the same firefighters who days earlier had fought to contain the flames and their devastation that the families whose homes they saved -- and the rest of the country -- are in their debt."

Washington Post: "The U.S. ambassador to Kenya, J. Scott Gration, a close adviser and friend of President Obama, announced his resignation Friday, weeks before the scheduled release of a U.S. government audit highly critical of his leadership at the embassy."

Washington Post: "Gov. Robert F. McDonnell on Friday reappointed Helen E. Dragas to a second four-year term on the University of Virginia's governing board, saying that the embattled board leader could help the school move past its recent leadership crisis. Dragas drew fierce criticism this month for orchestrating the ouster of the school's popular president, Teresa Sullivan. On Tuesday, Dragas reversed course and voted as part of a unanimous Board of Visitors to reinstate Sullivan."

New York Times: "President-elect Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood pre-empted the military's choreographed swearing-in ceremony by taking an oath of office a day early on Friday, in a televised speech to tens of thousands of supporters in Tahrir Square. But a promise Mr. Morsi made as part of his speech may provoke Washington: to work for the release of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the Egyptian-born militant Islamist convicted after the 1993 World Trade Center attack of plotting to bomb several New York City landmarks."

AP: "Russia's determination to preserve its last remaining ally in the Middle East collided head-on with U.S. and other Western powers' desire to replace Syrian President Bashar Assad with a democracy at a pivotal U.N.-brokered conference on Saturday. Efforts at bridging the Russia-U.S. divide hold the key to international envoy Kofi Annan's plan for easing power from Assad's grip through a political solution that ends 16 months of violence in a country verging on a full-blown civil war, in one of the world's most unstable regions."

Reuters: "U.N. Security Council called on Friday for global help to equip an African Union force hunting fugitive Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony and his Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), which lacks basic resources such as boots, food, transport and training."

Comments Off

Reader Comments (5)

In light of the Right's fury at John Roberts, I remember the "Impeach Earl Warren" billboards from my childhood in early 1960s California. Now that Roberts is and will be under constant attack from Fox News and the AM radio jocks who cater to the tinfoil topper set, I wonder whether that experience, which may go on much longer than even he imagines, will open his eyes to the viciously insane posse with whom he's allied himself.

June 30, 2012 | Unregistered CommenterJack Mahoney

Marie, your Brooks post shows again the variability game played by SCOTUS on states rights. States have the right to do whatever they want, even in violation of federal law, as long as it meets the right wing motive. While I am fully aware that to some extent the Constitution was an agreement between 13 separate entities, those entities, called States, did in fact create a country. The idea that somehow each State is still a separate country was never the truth. However I do have a solution to offer for this confusion. If States want to play their own game and not be part of the U.S. when it suits them we can provide a Constitutional amendment that would solve the whole problem. Here it is.
"Any State my leave the Union at its discretion upon approval of the majority of its voters. No State my receive more funds from the Federal Government than its taxpayers provide for the Federal budget." Now we have true States rights. Problem solved.

June 30, 2012 | Unregistered CommenterMarvin Schwalb

Robert Pear & Michael Cooper of the New York Times: "Millions of poor people could still be left without medical insurance under the national health care law if states take an option granted by the Supreme Court and decide not to expand their Medicaid programs..."

Pity the poor that live in a state in which a Scrooge-like governor rejects Medicaid money. Dickens's characters are alive and well in this country of mythical equality for all. Imagine, though, what fun the press and the MSM could have with this. Wouldn't these states be hung out to dry? Wouldn't there be an outrage? What governors would dare do such a thing. A reasonable person would, I'm sure, say of course, and no governor would be that cruel. Oh, how I go on––I'm almost as bad as Scotty Brown who believes he dines with Kings and Queens.

June 30, 2012 | Unregistered CommenterPD Pepe

It's an interesting development, PD. Just as states give away possible tax revenue to lure companies away from other states, so the win/win in this for the Republican governors is that by turning down the Medicaid money they might be able to convince their state's less well-off people to pull up stakes and move to another state. Another social services crisis solved by Governor Bat Boy!

June 30, 2012 | Unregistered CommenterJack Mahoney

PD,

Unfortunately, I don't think there will be any shortage of states that will opt-out of broadened Medicaid. Let's start with Texas who has the most greatest percentage of uninsured citizens (25%) and follow up with Marie's home, Florida. But the one I want to watch is New Jersey. Let's see what Christy will do.

Here's some good news... Vermont has single-payer health insurance. I've read that most everyone is now covered. I wonder how that impacts their Medicaid dollars.

June 30, 2012 | Unregistered CommenterHaley Simon
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