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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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Thursday
Mar102011

The Commentariat -- March 11

The President's Press Conference:

     ... Here's the AP story on the news conference. The complete transcript from the White House is here.

Paul Krugman: at a recent conference on healthcare policy, "... Republican staffers jeered at any and all proposals to use Medicare and Medicaid funds better.... Republicans ... have spent the past two years putting cynical, demagogic attacks on any attempt to actually deal with long-run deficits at the heart of their campaign strategy."

Ezra Klein: Speaker John "Boehner frequently says that 'the American people want us to cut spending,' but he never says that 'the American people want us to cut non-defense discretionary spending' [which is all Republicans will put on the table]. And that's because they don't.... What this debate is really about: not cutting spending or reducing the deficit, but cutting spending Republicans don't like while avoiding any and all tax increases -- even if that means the country has higher deficits and the middle- and working-class bear more of the burden."

A Must-Read: Karen Garcia's take on "the Commander-in-Cute," or the President in Abdication. If you, too are wondering where that guy is, Garcia smokes him out at a few photo ops. ...

     ... CW Update: looks as if Garcia really smoked the President out: he just completed a press conference, taking questions covering a wide range of issues.

How Washington Works (Note President Obama's contribution). Economist Keith Hennessey has a good summary of why Congressional Democrats can't win:

Rather than good cop, bad cop, Republican Leaders are playing bad cop, worse cop with their Members.Boehner and Leader McConnell are together the bad cop.... At the same time, they can privately tell the Democratic negotiators, 'You think we’re bad?  You should see our freshman. They’re nuts. We’re not sure we can deliver them for anything short of the House-passed bill.' ... The freshman / Tea Party / conservative rank-and-file Republicans are the worse cop.... The Republican Leaders’ weakness at delivering votes for a weak bill becomes negotiating strength. In contrast, we know that if the President supports a deal, he can deliver a significant fraction of the Democratic party to vote for it. This Presidential vote-delivering strength weakens Democratic negotiators. ...

... Oh, look, here's an example from today's news. See Paul Ryan play bad cop:

They literally think you can just balance it, you know, (by cutting) waste, fraud and abuse, foreign aid and NPR. And it doesn't work like that. -- Paul Ryan, on Congressional tea party Republicans

Justin Lahart & Mark Whitehouse of the Wall Street Journal: "U.S. families — by defaulting on their loans and scrimping on expenses — shouldered a smaller debt burden in 2010 than at any point in the previous six years, putting them in position to start spending more."

Derek Thompson of The Atlantic: the Congressional Budget Office finds that "repealing the health insurance mandate would trim our deficit at the cost of more uninsured people and higher health care premiums."

New York Times Editors: "... stripping the unions of their rights was never about the [Wisconsin state] budget, especially once the unions agreed to significant concessions on pensions and health care. It was always about politics. Governor Walker had hoped to hide behind a cooked-up budget crisis, but the fleeing Democrats at least succeeded in pulling away that facade." ...

... Greg Sargent: "I've got an advance look at some new polling by Survey USA that finds solid majorities in two [Wisconsin] GOP senate districts support the recall of their senators." The poll was taken before the Wisconsin legislature passed the bill to severely curb union bargaining rights. "A MoveOn official adds that the organization has already raised over $800,000 to support the recall drives against GOP senators." ...

... Steve Benen: get over it, conservatives. Recalls are part of the democratic process, and what Gov. Walker & Wisconsin Republican legislators did -- pass a very unpopular law they didn't campaign on -- is exactly what recall elections are for.

... Jennifer Epstein of Politico: "AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka is anointing Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker the 'Mobilizer of the Year' for galvanizing union members and supporters into action." ...

... Think Wisconsin public workers will organize a general strike? Not likely now. Andy Kroll of Mother Jones: The "reform" bill passed by both houses "authorizes state officials to fire any state employee who joins a strike, walk-out, sit-in, or coordinated effort to call in sick."

Alessandra Stanley of the New York Times: "... there were so many angry charges of McCarthyism and countercharges of 'political correctness' that it sometimes seemed that the topic at hand on Thursday in Washington was the radicalization of the House Homeland Security Committee, not American Muslims." ...

... AND the Washington Post headline writer for David A. Fahrenthold & Michelle Boorstein sums it up nicely: "Peter King's Muslim hearing: Plenty of drama, less substance." ...

... Dana Milbank lambastes King & the Republicans on his committee.

New York Times Editors: an amicus brief by former prosecutors "underscores why the [Supreme Court] justices should uphold the judgment of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit that [former Attorney General John] Ashcroft forfeited immunity when he devised the strategy that led to the statute’s misuse." You can read the brief here (pdf).

David Hilzenrath of the Washington Post: "The Securities and Exchange Commission needs more money to meet its expanding responsibilities, but it hasn't made the most of the funds it already has, according to a study of the agency ordered by Congress last year." The agency is experiencing "low morale, few staff members with experience working in financial markets, and a slowdown in reviews of money managers and brokerage firms." Republicans want to cut the SEC budget.

Right Wing World

Your Joke about Rand Paul's Shit Goes HERE. Matthew Jaffe of ABC News: "Sen. Rand Paul, R-KY, today went off on a tirade about toilets in the midst of an Energy & Natural Resources Committee hearing on energy efficiency standards for certain appliances." And here it is:

News Ledes

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: "Gov. Scott Walker signed the bill Friday that repeals most collective bargaining by public employee unions. He signed the bill privately in the morning and will hold a news conference later in the day.... Also Friday, Walker directed the Office of State Employment Relations to rescind layoff notices because the Legislature had passed the bill."

New York Times: "A devastating tsunami hit the coast of northeast Japan on Friday in the aftermath of an 8.9 magnitude earthquake about 80 miles offshore, killing at least 23 people and injuring many more. The earthquake triggered widespread power blackouts, and countries across the Pacific Ocean, from Russia to South America and including Hawaii and the West Coast of the United States, braced for possible tsunami waves." ...

     ... AP Update: "... waves washed ashore on Hawaii and the U.S. West coast, where evacuations were ordered from California to Washington but little damage was reported. The entire Pacific had been put on alert — including coastal areas of South America, Canada and Alaska — but waves were not as bad as expected."

... Washington Post: "The White House announced Thursday that it will send a government aid team into rebel-held parts of Libya and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said she will meet next week with representatives of the transition council, moves that edged the Obama administration closer to the formal Libyan opposition."

New York Times: "Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates sharply rebuked allies at a NATO meeting for effectively abandoning the war."

New York Times: "With little hope of a budget deal being reached before the end of next week, House Republicans are preparing another short-term spending measure to give the House and Senate a chance to come to agreement over a broader plan to keep the government operating through Sept. 30."

Washington Post: "The House on Thursday voted to end the Federal Housing Administration Refinance Program, one of two federal foreclosure-assistance programs on the chopping block this week."

New York Times: "A House subcommittee voted on Thursday to strip the Environmental Protection Agency of its power to regulate greenhouse gases, chipping away at a central pillar of the Obama administration’s evolving climate and energy strategy."

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