The Wires
powered by Surfing Waves
Help!

To keep the Conversation going, please help me by linking news articles, opinion pieces and other political content in today's Comments section.

Link Code:   <a href="URL">text</a>

OR here's a link generator. The one I had posted died, but Akhilleus found this new one that he says is easy to use.

OR you can always just block, copy and paste to your comment the URL (Web address) of the page you want to link.

Note for Readers. It is not possible for commenters to "throw" their highlighted links to another window. But you can do that yourself. Right-click on the link and a drop-down box will give you choices as to where you want to open the link: in a new tab, new window or new private window.

Thank you to everyone who has been contributing links to articles & other content in the Comments section of each day's "Conversation." If you're missing the comments, you're missing some vital links.

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."

Contact Marie

Click on this link to e-mail Marie.

Page Links
Saturday
Nov202010

The Commentariat -- November 21

Economist Dean Baker in Firedoglake on why the Congress should not cave to catfood commission plans to cut Medicare & Society Security benefits. Baker lays out the economic & political reasons the plans are stupid.

** Sabotage. Steve Benen: "We're talking about a major political party, which will control much of Congress next year, possibly undermining the strength of the country -- on purpose, in public, without apology or shame -- for no other reason than to give themselves a campaign advantage in 2012.... [The Republicans'] general approach has shifted from hoping conditions don't improve to taking steps to ensure conditions don't improve. We've gone from Republicans rooting for failure to Republicans trying to guarantee failure." ...

     ... CW: commenters to the New York Times, myself included, have been saying this for more than a year. Why have main-streamish pundits taken so long to smell the stench? Indeed, the title of Benen's post is "None Dare Call It Sabotage." Oh, yes, we do.

     ... Update: here's a case in point: my comment on Paul Krugman's column last week; it's at the top of the page, probably the most popular Times comment in a few weeks. It isn't just people who take the trouble to write comments who recognize the Republican Plot against America; people who read agree that Republicans are American saboteurs. ...

... Kevin Drum of Mother Jones disagrees with me: "... my own view isn't that Republicans are consciously trying to sabotage the economy. Rather, I think it's really easy to convince yourself of things that are in your own self-interest, and that's mostly what they've done. A bad economy is in their self-interest, so they've convinced themselves that every possible policy to improve things is a bad idea. Of course, excuses like that from mushballs like me are the reason the liberal noise machine is sort of anemic in the first place." ...

... Digby: in the new media world, "strategy is considered a moral value in itself," so sabotage -- if it proves a winning strategy -- becomes a virtue.

Vice President Joe Biden in a New York Times op-ed: "The United States must also continue to do its part to reinforce Iraq’s progress. That is why we are not disengaging from Iraq — rather, the nature of our engagement is changing from a military to a civilian lead."

Deborah Solomon of the New York Times interviews Speaker Nancy Pelosi for the magazine.

I sat next to her once. Thought she was beautiful. And she's very happy in Alaska, and I hope she'll stay there. -- Barbara Bush, on Sarah Palin

Jeff Sommer of the New York Times: Based on the facts at hand right now, Mr. Obama is likely to win the 2012 election in a landslide. That, at least, is the prediction of Ray C. Fair, a Yale economist and an expert on econometrics and on the relationship of economics and politics. What’s the basis of this forecast? In a nutshell: 'It’s the economy, stupid.'”

Julie Pace of the AP: President Barack Obama has asked security officials whether there's a less intrusive way to screen U.S. airline passengers than the pat-downs and body scans causing a holiday-season uproar. For now, they've told him there isn't one, the president said Saturday in response to a question at the NATO summit in Lisbon. 'I understand people's frustrations,' Obama said, while acknowledging that he's never had to undergo the stepped-up screening methods." ...

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on the new TSA security procedures. Clinton herself, as Jeff Zeleny of the Times reports, does not have to go through the TSA gauntlet when she travels: "cabinet members if they are escorted by agents or law enforcement officers ... are allowed to go around security":

... The TSA Won't Touch His Junk. Jeff Zeleny of the New York Times: "Representative John A. Boehner, the soon-to-be Republican speaker, pledged recently that he would fly commercial airlines back home to Ohio, passing up the military plane used by the current speaker, Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat. But that does not mean he will endure the hassles of ordinary passengers.... [At] Ronald Reagan National Airport..., there was no waiting for Mr. Boehner, who was escorted around the identification-checking agents, the metal detectors and the body scanners, and whisked directly to the gate."

Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone comments on the reported federal probe of insider-trading: "... there is a mounting pile of evidence suggesting a sort of widespread culture of insider trading in which a few players (specifically the major banks and a few of the biggest and best-connected hedge funds) have milked a seemingly endless stream of exclusive information, not occasionally or opportunistically but as an ongoing commercial strategy."

Shahien Nasiripour of the Huffington Post on oversight of the Home Affordable Modification Program, known as HAMP. HAMP is subsidizing financial institutions even when the institutions can't provide paperwork proving they own properties & when they back out on homeowners because they say the individuals haven't provided proper paperwork. 

"7,000 Ways to Fix the Deficit." David Leonhardt of the New York Times: "... the online you-fix-the-deficit puzzle that accompanied a Week in Review article last Sunday ... [received] more than one million page views, and more than 11,000 posted Twitter messages about the puzzle, most including their own solution. The Times analyzed those solutions, each of which cut at least $1.345 trillion from the 2030 deficit, to get a sense of readers’ choices." You can still play with the budget here.

Republican Judges to Party of No: "Say Yes." Ian Millhiser of Think Progress: in an "exceptionally rare" plea, "... seven Republican-appointed federal judges [joined Democratic appointees &] co-signed a letter [to the Senate leadership] warning of the consequences of the GOP’s systematic obstruction of President Obama’s judges: "We respectfully request that the Senate act on judicial nominees without delay." The full letter is here (pdf).

Local News:

Ana Valdes of the Palm Beach Post: Florida's "Republican Gov.-elect Rick Scott is giving no indication he intends to bow to Christian protesters' demands that he give up his investment in a Spanish-language social networking site they consider immoral because it partners with Playboy Mexico and allows users to share provocative photos and messages." CW: isn't it stunning that these "Christian protesters" didn't mind voting for Scott even tho they knew he ran a multi-million-dollar fraud against the U.S. taxpayer (the firm of which he was CEO settled for a $1.7 billion fine), but now they're outraged because he has an indirect investment in an enterprise that publishes "provocative photos and messages"? The real porn is the Medicare fraud, you idiots.

Down & Out in Fort Myers, Florida. Washington Post: a photo essay. Chris Walker used to make $100,000 a year as a nursing home executive. She has been out of work for a year-and-a-half. Story by Wil Haygood.

Thoughts on Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell from the Folks Back Home. From the Editors of the Lexington Herald-Tribune: "Despicable sounds like a better fit [than 'cynical'] for someone willing to sacrifice American lives in the pursuit of winning and keeping political power." AND McConnell's acquiescence to a moratorium on earmarks was merely a symbolic exercise & a way to avoid a showdown with tea party Republican Senators-elect; it will have little or no effect on the deficit -- or on creating jobs & improving the economy, which is what Americans really want. Thanks to Jeanne B. for the links.

Comments Off