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.

The Wires
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The Ledes

Friday, September 27, 2024

New York Times: “Maggie Smith, one of the finest British stage and screen actors of her generation, whose award-winning roles ranged from a freethinking Scottish schoolteacher in 'The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie' to the acid-tongued dowager countess on 'Downton Abbey,' died on Friday in London. She was 89.”

The Washington Post's live updates of developments related to Hurricane Helene are here: “Hurricane Helene left one person dead in Florida and two in Georgia as it sped north. One of the biggest storms on record to hit the Gulf Coast, Helene slammed into Florida’s Big Bend area on Thursday night as a Category 4 colossus with winds of up to 140 mph before weakening to Category 1. Catastrophic winds and torrential rain from the storm — which the National Hurricane Center forecast would eventually slow over the Tennessee Valley — were expected to continue Friday across the Southeast and southern Appalachians.” ~~~

     ~~~ The New York Times' live updates are here.

Mediaite: “Fox Weather’s Bob Van Dillen was reporting live on Fox & Friends about flooding in Atlanta from Hurricane Helene when he was interrupted by the screams of a woman trapped in her car. During the 7 a.m. hour, Van Dillen was filing a live report on the massive flooding in the area. Fox News viewers could clearly hear the urgent screams for help emerging from a car stuck on a flooded road in the background of the live shot. Van Dillen ... told Fox & Friends that 911 had been called and that the local Fire Department was on its way. But as he continued to file the report, the screams did not stop, so Van Dillen cut the live shot short.... Some 10 minutes later, Fox & Friends aired live footage of Van Dillen carrying the woman to safety, waking through chest-deep water while the flooding engulfed her car in the background[.]”

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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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Tuesday
Nov222011

The Commentariat -- November 23

In today's New York Times eXaminer, I discuss Tom Friedman's strategy for ensuring President Obama's re-election. The Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote come to mind. Here's the lede:

It’s Wednesday, so Tom Friedman has some more advice for President Obama. Well, not more advice. The same old advice. But it has a new date stamp on it.

In today's Off Times Square, we ask the question, "What should President Obama say to address the police attacks on students and other Occupy demonstrators?" ...

... Shawna Thomas of NBC News: "During his speech in Manchester, N.H. today, President Obama found himself interrupted by members of Occupy New Hampshire. The protesters handed out fliers along with attempting to employ a 'human microphone' to deliver a message of dissatisfaction to the president. They got about halfway through before others in the crowd began to counter-chant with the President’s 2008 slogan of 'Fired up. Ready to go.'”

... Here's how Peter Wallsten & Lori Montgomery of the Washington Post report the story. ...

... Here's Karen Garcia on "Obama, Occupied." ...

... See also Adam Martin & Alexander Abad-Santos of The Atlantic. Read the comments here, too.


Rule: When you get a lede like this in Politico, you run it. Josh Boak: "The economy would have been in much worse shape without the 2009 stimulus — which increased employment in the third quarter of this year by as many as 3.3 million full-time jobs, according to a report by the Congressional Budget Office."

Charlie Savage of the New York Times: "The American Bar Association has secretly declared a significant number of President Obama’s potential judicial nominees 'not qualified,' slowing White House efforts to fill vacant judgeships — and nearly all of the prospects given poor ratings were women or members of a minority group, according to interviews."

Chris Spannos of the New York Times eXaminder interviews Julian Assange. Part 4 of the interview:

     ... You can link to the first parts of the interview here.

More on Both Sides Do It! Greg Sargent: "Today’s [actually, yesterday's] false equivalency sweepstakes: We have a winner! Today’s prize goes to National Journal’s Ron Fournier for the most perfect false equivalency of the morning.... What we’re really talking about here is the quest to establish factual reality, which is what journalists are supposed to be doing." ...

... Steve Benen on Fournier: "The high-profile political reporter, who admitted in 2007 that he entered talks to join the McCain campaign as a paid staffer, and later sent encouraging emails to Karl Rove, covered the Obama-McCain race with a series of questionable pieces." CW: And now he's making up stuff at the National Journal. He was always a lazy-assed reporter, and now he's a lazy-assed opinionator.

Right Wing World

Jim Rutenberg & Jeff Zeleny of the New York Times: "The Republican presidential candidates highlighted their party’s lack of a single national security vision a decade after the Sept. 11 attacks, differing on Tuesday night over the pace of withdrawal from Afghanistan, aid to Pakistan and, in an exchange that could resonate dangerously for Newt Gingrich, what to do with illegal immigrants in the United States." ...

... The Times has a quick fact-check here. The Washington Post story, by Dan Balz & Amy Gardner, is here.

Dan Milbank holds Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) responsible for the failure of the supercommittee. And he doesn't pull any punches, calling Kyl "cold and ruthless" and "destructive."

The Fiction, Courtesy of Fox "News"

"It's a food product." -- Megyn Kelly, on pepper spray:

Although this picture just might be Photoshopped, the image of Fox "News" horticulture reporter Megyn Kelly is not. She posed for this photo for GQ magazine. Stay tuned. Next week, she explains why pizza is a vegetable.

... The Facts

** "Banned for Use in War." Meredith Melnick of Time: "... in the mid-1990s, the U.S. Department of Justice cited nearly 70 fatalities linked to pepper-spray use.... Getting pepper-sprayed is worse than getting maced [PDF] — mace causes burning but no respiratory effects [which pepper spray causes].... Classified as a riot-control agent and banned for use in war by Article I.5 of the Chemical Weapons Convention, pepper spray is meant to be used against violent attackers who are resisting arrest and threatening physical harm to others.... According to guidelines [PDF] for all California State schools, pepper spray is meant to be used for less than one second on any one person." Thanks to a friend for the link.


Steve Benen: "Mitt Romney’s very first television ad of the 2012 campaign pushes a blatant, shameless lie. In 2008, a month before the president was elected, then-candidate Obama told voters, 'Senator McCain’s campaign actually said, and I quote, ‘If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.’” In Romney’s new attack ad, viewers only see part of the quote: 'If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.' Here's how the Romney camp defended the ad: "He did say the words. That’s his voice." ...

...Judd Legum & Jeff Spross of Think Progress: "... the Romney campaign has defended this blatantly dishonest campaign tactic as 'not out of bounds.' Thus, ThinkProgress has created this completely in-bounds 'advertisement' quoting Romney, in his own words:

    ... "Accurate, according to the Romney standard of accuracy." 

As for Romney's ad, it's not just misleading. It's TV-station-refuse-to-air-it-misleading. -- Jake Tapper, ABC News

"The Secret Letters of Gov. Mitt." Michael Levenson of the Boston Globe: "Mitt Romney [Sunday] briefly reiterated his campaign’s assertion that his aides did nothing wrong when they purchased their state-issued hard drives in 2006, as they left their jobs and Romney began his first run for president.... The Globe reported on Thursday that 11 of Romney’s aides ... took the unusual step of buying 17 hard drives from the Massachusetts governor’s office, paying $65 for each one. The Romney administration also wiped the server for the governor’s office and replaced the remaining computers in the office as they prepared to turn over power to Governor Deval Patrick, a Democrat. 'We actually put 700 boxes of information into the archives that wasn’t even required, so we followed the law exactly as intended and as written,' he said." ...

     ... Charles Pierce of Esquire: "I would bet all the federal tax dollars we've sunk into Michele Bachmann's family farm that all that's in those e-mails is a bunch of stuff that would have complicated Willard's 426 ideological and cultural makeovers that he's undergone since he went national with his bad self. Seventeen hard drives at $65 per? You know what's cheaper? Having deeply held convictions that last longer than 11 minutes." ...

... AND on That Note. Josh Rogin of Foreign Policy: "In advance of [Tuesday] night's GOP foreign policy debate, the Obama campaign has put out a memo identifying all the ways the presidential hopeful Mitt Romney has 'flip-flopped' on the major foreign policy issues of the day. Romney's 'penchant for changing positions is of particular concern on matters of national security,' Obama for American campaign manager Jim Messina wrote in a memo released ahead of tonight's CNN-AEI-Heritage debate in Washington. "A Commander-in-Chief only gets one chance to get it right. But Mitt Romney has been on all sides of the key foreign policy issues facing our nation today."

News Ledes

Washington Post: "Medicare administrator Don Berwick has stepped down from his position, effective next Friday.... The White House intends to appoint Marilyn Tavenner, currently second-in-command at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, as Berwick’s replacement." CW: read the post. Republicans' treatment of Dr. Berwick was a travesty.

The Obama family participated in a service event this afternoon.

Sacramento Bee: "Four days after the pepper spraying incident at UC Davis Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, acting governor while Gov. Jerry Brown is on vacation out of state, issued a statement Tuesday night condemning the 'senseless violence' and praising UC officials for ordering an independent investigation." CW: as far as I know, Newsom is the highest-ranking official to speak out against U.C. Davis police brutality. Not a word from President O'Bambi. Thanks to reader James S. for the link.

President Obama pardoned the national Thanksgiving turkey:

New York Times: "Banks clamored for emergency funds from the European Central Bank on Tuesday, borrowing the most since early 2009 in a clear sign that the euro region’s financial institutions are having trouble obtaining credit at reasonable rates on the open market."

Washington Post: Pakistan named a liberal female lawmaker as its new ambassador to the United States on Wednesday, swiftly filling a crucial diplomatic vacancy created amid a scandal that highlighted civil-military tensions. The appointment of Sherry Rehman, a prominent former journalist known for her human rights work, surprised observers who expected a choice with a more obvious stamp of approval from the powerful military."

New York Times: "After months of street protests calling for his resignation, President Ali Abdullah Saleh traveled to Saudi Arabia on Wednesday to sign an agreement that would require him to immediately transfer his powers to his vice president, a move that could pave the way for an end to Mr. Saleh’s 33-year rule."

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