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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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The Commentariat -- November 24

It feels pretty good to stop at least one shellacking this November. -- Barack Obama, on pardoning the National Thanksgiving Turkey

     ... BUT They're "Too Fat to Live." In case you're wondering why the President does this, here's "the (somewhat dark) history of presidential turkey pardoning" from Melissa Lee of Mental Floss.

Sarah Palin aims her class warfare artillery at Barbara Bush:

I don't want to concede that we have to get used to this kind of thing, because I don't think the majority of Americans want to put up with the blue-bloods -- and I want to say it will all due respect because I love the Bushes -- the blue-bloods who want to pick and choose their winners instead of allowing competition. -- Sarah Palin

       ... Matt DeLong of the Washington Post has more.

Vice President Joe Biden, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, makes the case for ratification of the New START treaty. ...

... President Jimmy Carter in a Washington Post op-ed: "No one can completely understand the motivations of the North Koreans, but it is entirely possible that their recent revelation of their uranium enrichment centrifuges and Pyongyang's shelling of a South Korean island Tuesday are designed to remind the world that they deserve respect in negotiations that will shape their future. Ultimately, the choice for the United States may be between diplomatic niceties and avoiding a catastrophic confrontation." ...

... AND in more important presidential opinionating, President Bill Clinton , in a Sports Illustrated op-ed, writes that he wants the 2022 World Cup to be played in the U.S.A.

Both Maureen Dowd & Bob Wright have terrific columns in today's New York Times that will have you painting peace signs instead of basting turkeys:

     ... Dowd writes about the con man who probably fooled Hamid Karzai & definitely fooled NATO & American intel & leaders, including Gen. David Petraeus, into thinking he was a top Taliban commander. They wasted months negotiating with & paying off this guy, whom they inexplicitly let get away. "And we wonder why we haven’t found Osama bin Laden," Dowd sniffs. (The backstory, which Dowd doesn't link, is here.). * ...

     ... Wright compares the Afghanistan War to the Vietnam War & concludes, "... in terms of the long-run impact on America’s economic and physical security, the Afghanistan war is as bad as the Vietnam War except for the ways in which it’s worse."

* Top Ten Ways to Tell Your New Taliban Friend Is an Imposter.

I don't think about Sarah Palin. -- Barack Obama, via ABC News ...

... Michael Shear of the New York Times writes a brief post that will pretty much save your reading Sarah Palin's latest contribution to literature.

** Todd Lassa of Motor Trend writes on of the best putdowns of Rush Limbaugh (& George Will, too) I've ever seen. A classic retort from somebody who knows what he's talking about to a blowhard or two without a clue. CW: but in Limboville, who cares about facts?

Eighty-eight years of the presidential vote, using county-level data:

You Knew This Was Coming. Peter Baker of the New York Times: Sen. Kit Bond of Missouri, "t he top Republican on the Senate intelligence committee said Tuesday that he opposes ratification of a new arms control treaty with Russia because he considers its verification measures inadequate.... Administration officials ... disputed his characterization, saying the reformulated inspection system would provide what one called a 'more detailed look than ever before' at Russia’s nuclear arsenal." CW: expect a roll-out of more of these unsupported Republican assertions.

"We [Are Not] the People." Alan Fram of the AP: "Tea party backers fashion themselves as 'we the people,' but polls show the Republican Party's most conservative and energized voters are hardly your average crowd. According to an Associated Press-GfK Poll this month, 84 percent who call themselves tea party supporters don't like how President Barack Obama is handling his job — a view shared by just 35 percent of all other adults. Tea partiers are about four times likelier than others to back repealing Obama's health care overhaul and twice as likely to favor renewing tax cuts for the highest-earning Americans. Exit polls of voters in this month's congressional elections reveal similar gulfs."

Americans on Hypocrisy Watch. Tom Jensen of Public Policy Polling: "Most Americans think incoming Congressmen who campaigned against the health care bill should put their money where their mouth is and decline government provided health care now that they're in office." ...

... Steven Thomma of McClatchy News, in an article titled "New Poll Undercuts GOP Claims of a Midterm Mandate": "A majority of Americans want the Congress to keep the new health care law or actually expand it, despite Republican claims that they have a mandate from the people to kill it, according to a new McClatchy-Marist poll. The post-election survey showed that 51 percent of registered voters want to keep the law or change it to do more, while 44 percent want to change it to do less or repeal it altogether." CW: when are weasly, scaredy-cat Democrats going to stop hiding from the fact that Americans are on their side? Americans want Democratic programs, and Democrats are afraid to run on them. What idiots! ...

... A Congressman with a Sense of Humor. Julian Pecquet of The Hill: "Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-N.Y.) is daring Republicans to make good on one of their top legislative priorities: repealing the healthcare law."  Ackerman will "introduce a series of bills" he calls, get this, HIPA-CRIT (Health Insurance Protects America -- Can't Repeal IT), which "will give Republicans a chance to 'put up, or sit down' on their campaign promise to repeal the eight-month-old law":

These bills will be their chance to at long last restore liberty and repeal the evil monster they've dubbed 'Obamacare.' -- Gary Ackerman

Ryan Grim: "By a double-digit margin, voters want Congress to amend the Constitution to overturn the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United that allows unlimited corporate spending on elections, a new poll paid for by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee has found." CW: this is yet another issue where Democrats are in sync with popular opinion & Republicans are not.

Dana Milbank: "The party committees, as they are known, deserve much of the blame for the lamentable state of our politics. In recent years, these long-standing bodies - the DSCC, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee - have become leading causes of the dysfunction in Congress."

Susanne Craig & Kevin Roose of the New York Times: "Two years after the onset of the financial crisis, the stock market is recovering and Wall Street’s moneyed elite are breathing easier again. And this means in some cases they are spending again — at times cautiously, but sometimes with a familiar swagger." With video. CW: how nice for them; their irresponsibility took away millions of Americans' livelihoods, but, hey, they're buying luxury cars & throwing lavish parties. ...

... David Dayan of Firedoglake on the best corporate profits ever: "This is something of a dream for corporate America – bigger profits without those meddling workers to pay....  'Uncertainty' is blamed for the lack of job growth, but corporations are sitting on giant mounds of cash while they bask in the glow of their strategy to increase their profit margins by cost-cutting.... In the other side of the funhouse mirror, American workers continue to have little hope for returning to the job.... But capitalism is working, and the great malefactors of wealth are happy. Happy Thanksgiving." ...

... Steve Benen: "It's pretty ironic that those complaining about the Obama administration's alleged 'anti-business' policies also happen to making money hand over fist. Corporate profits are up; all of the major Wall Street indexes are up; and private-sector job growth is up, but fat-cat conservatives and corporate lobbyists nevertheless ... were, apparently, outraged by the scourge of corporate prosperity." ...

... Here's why I love Digby. The Politico article to which she refers & which I ignored as crap, is here. As Digby says, she doesn't know if the article is cover for Obama so he can kowtow to business "or if it's just thuggish behavior designed to bend him to their will, but it really doesn't matter does it?" ...

... BUT Matt Yglesias' commentary suggests maybe we should all get a grip. Corporate profits aren't really at an all-time high if you adjust for inflation, which only makes sense.

Jordy Yager of The Hill: "The next step in tightened security could be on U.S. public transportation, trains and boats. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano says terrorists will continue to look for U.S. vulnerabilities, making tighter security standards necessary."

Tanya Somanader of Think Progress: Kentucky Senator-elect Rand Paul is really a loon, You can see why Paul's campaign suppressed the accompanying video, recorded in 2009, in which Paul shares his "insights on the inevitable coming of the thought police, a new Hitler, and 'martial law.”

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