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
powered by Surfing Waves
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[.]”

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, then Akhilleus found one, but it too bit the dust. He found yet another, which I've linked here, and as of September 23, 2024, it's working.

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
Thursday
Nov032011

The Commentariat -- November 4

"Oligarchy, American Style." Paul Krugman: "we have a society in which money is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few people. This threatens to make us a democracy in name only.... The usual suspects have rolled out some familiar arguments: the data are flawed (they aren’t); the rich are an ever-changing group (not so); and so on. The most popular argument right now seems, however, to be the claim that we may not be a middle-class society, but we’re still an upper-middle-class society, in which a broad class of highly educated workers, who have the skills to compete in the modern world, is doing very well. It’s a nice story.... But it’s not true."> ...

... Cheer Up! Jason DeParle, et al., of the New York Times: "On Monday..., the Census Bureau releases a long-promised alternate measure meant to do a better job of counting the resources the needy have and the bills they have to pay. Similar measures, quietly published in the past, suggest among other things that safety-net programs have played a large and mostly overlooked role in restraining hardship: as much as half of the reported rise in poverty since 2006 disappears."

Kevin Roose of the New York Times: "... customers are seeking out alternatives [to big banks] like community banks and credit unions. Without the obligations to generate huge returns for public shareholders, these smaller banks often can charge lower fees and pay higher interest rates than their bigger competitors. More than 650,000 people have joined credit unions since Sept. 29 — the day Bank of America announced its debit card fee — and have brought in an estimated $4.5 billion in new deposits...." ...

... Tomorrow, Guy Fawkes Day, is Bank Transfer Day. Jeff Gelles of the Philadelphia Inquirer: "Occupy Wall Street activists and their allies have been touting Saturday as 'Bank Transfer Day.' Credit unions say they're already seeing results, thanks to the firestorm over Bank of America's $5 debit-card fee: Since Sept. 29, when BofA announced plans for the new fee -- since reversed -- credit unions have gained an estimated 650,000 members and $4.5 billion in new deposits." Andrew Yarrow of the Baltimore Sun has more. AND here's the Bank Transfer Day Facebook page.

New York Times Editors: "... when President Obama’s plan to spend $60 billion on infrastructure repairs came up for a vote in the Senate, not a single Republican agreed to break the party’s filibuster. That’s because the bill would pay for itself with a 0.7 percent surtax on people making more than $1 million. That would affect about 345,000 taxpayers..., adding an average of $13,457 to their annual tax bills. Protecting that elite group — and hewing to their rigid antitax vows — was more important to Senate Republicans than the thousands of construction jobs the bill would have helped create, or the millions of people who would have used the rebuilt roads, bridges and airports." ...

... Steve Benen: but you wouldn't know the Republicans killed the infrastructure jobs bill if you got your news from "bipartisan" CNN & recently-anointed "left-wing" Politico. So the GOP wins another round in the game of hide-the-elephant. ...

... Jay Newton-Small of Time: "In case you haven’t heard, the government is at risk of shutting down in two weeks. On Nov. 18 the federal government risks running out of funding yet again unless Congress can pass a budget for fiscal year 2012." ...

MEANWHILE, the Deficit Reduction Super-Duper Committee is hard at work. Brian Beutler of TPM has the Chart of the Day: "Recently committee Republicans and Democrats presented each other with competing plans — some details of which were leaked to the press. Aides note that the Dem plan contained about $300 billion in expansionary measures, while the GOP plan contained… well, see for yourself":

     ... Beutler adds, "The GOP plan contained about $2.2 trillion in cuts — well over the $1.2 trillion minimum required of the Super Committee by the debt limit law. That left the Republicans ample room to include many kinds of near-term growth measures, but they picked none." Super.

** Your History Lesson for the Day. Charles Pierce of Esquire: How a Gilded Age Supreme Court reporter made Citizens United a person. CW: fascinating. ...

... Mitt Romney weighs in (via the DNC):

Azam Ahmed & Ben Protess of the New York Times: "Months before MF Global teetered on the brink, federal regulators were seeking to rein in the types of risky trades that contributed to the firm’s collapse. But they faced opposition from ... Jon S. Corzine, the head of the then little-known brokerage firm. As a former United States senator and a former governor of New Jersey, as well as the leader of Goldman Sachs in the 1990s, Mr. Corzine carried significant weight in the worlds of Washington and Wall Street. While other financial firms employed teams of lobbyists to fight the new regulation, MF Global’s chief executive in meetings over the last year personally pressed regulators to halt their plans."

As Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) prepares to pound AG Eric Holder on the ATF "gun-walking" scandal, he might bear in mind that newly-released documents show that Bush AG Mike Mukasey was briefed on the gun-walking tactic back in 2007. Pete Yost of the AP reports.

Laurie Goodstein of the New York Times: "The official newspaper of the Roman Catholic archdiocese of Boston has apologized for a column that said that homosexuality is caused by Satan. The column’s author, Daniel Avila, is a lawyer and policy adviser at the Catholic bishops’ conference in Washington, where he works in the office that opposes the spread of same-sex marriage." CW: In a follow-up column, Avila, a defense attorney, will say the devil made him do it. Then he will go right back to work lobbying Congress against teh gays.

If you must read David Brooks today, you must also read the comments. Do not let that mendacious gasbag snooker you.

Right Wing World

Letters from Baltimore Half-way House. M. J. Lee of Politico: "Jack Abramoff, the infamous K Street ex-lobbyist, says in an upcoming '60 Minutes' interview that he had 100 congressmen in his pocket and reveals his best weapon for gaining influence was to promise a high-paying job to the lawmakers’ top staffers.

I've been as consistent as human beings can be. -- Mitt Romney ...

... Really? Peter Wallsten & Juliet Eilperin of the Washington Post: "Romney made assurances to activists for [abortion rights,] gay rights and the environment, according to people familiar with the discussions, both as a candidate for governor and then in the early days of his term. The encounters with liberal advocates offer some revealing insights into the ever-evolving ideology of Romney, who as a presidential candidate now espouses the hard-line opposition to abortion that he seemed to disparage less than a decade ago."

Tim Egan: "Cain is not the problem. It’s his party. Cain gets away with saying that we should have a moat along the Mexican border filled with alligators because there is no reality cop on the Republican beat."

Ken Vogel, et al., of Politico have more details on one of the incidents in which GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain allegedly made "unwanted sexual advances" to a female employee at a restaurant. ...

... Jim Rutenberg & Jeff Zeleny of the New York Times: "One of the women who accused the Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain of sexual harassment while working for him at the National Restaurant Association in the late 1990s complained that the workplace turned hostile after she alleged that he made advances toward her during a work-related outing.... The advances were said to have taken place during a festive night in which Mr. Cain and several younger staff members drank until late in the evening, and his flirty banter with the woman crossed over into propositions that she leave with him...." ...

... Michael Shear of the New York Times: after his campaign manager backed off charges that Rick Perry's campaign had leaked the sexual harassment settlement to Politico, Cain went on Sean Hannity's radio show & reignited the claim. He blamed other people for other stuff, too. CW: he is so finished, thank goodness for the nation.

... Trip Gabriel of the New York Times: Mark Block, Cain's campaign manager, faces tough questions on two fronts: (1) his handling of the sexual harassment revelations, & (2) his financing of Cain's campaign in its infancy. ...

... AND finally, we know where Cain got the idea for his 999 plan: here's part of a Politico headline on the Cain harassment matter: "Settlement dated 9/99."

Via Buzzfeed.Pardon My Pettiness. Is it odd, or what, that Rick Perry signs his name using block print letters instead of cursive? And that he uses a combination of upper- and lower-case letters following the initial letters? See the other presidential candidates' signatures here.

News Ledes

AP: "Greece's prime minister survived a confidence vote early Saturday, calming a revolt in his Socialist party with an emotional pledge to step aside if need be and seek a cross-party government lasting four months to safeguard Europe's new debt agreement. George Papandreou won the critical confidence motion with a vote of 153-145 after a week of drama in Athens that horrified its European partners, spooked global markets and overshadowed the Group of 20 summit...."

Bloomberg News: "MF Global Holdings Inc., the bankrupt futures brokerage, has located $658.8 million in customer funds in a custodial account at JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), according to two people with knowledge of the matter." ...

     ... Update: Never Mind. New York Times: "The missing customer money at MF Global is still missing."

Guardian: "A second Iraq war veteran has suffered serious injuries after clashes between police and Occupy movement protesters in Oakland. Kayvan Sabehgi, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, is in intensive care with a lacerated spleen. He says he was beaten by police close to the Occupy Oakland camp, but despite suffering agonising pain, did not reach hospital until 18 hours later." ...

... San Francisco Chronicle: "Oakland Mayor Jean Quan says the Occupy Oakland protesters camped outside City Hall need to move to a 'less disruptive' location if they can't learn to behave themselves." ...

... Oakland Tribune: "Clergy members and public safety advocates appealed to Occupy Oakland organizers Thursday to reopen talks with City Hall in light of the city's overworked, understaffed Police Department and the need for extra police vigilance caused by the movement's lack of communication."

New York Times: "A journalist at the tabloid The Sun was arrested Friday on suspicion of making illegal payments to police officers, a sign that a scandal has spread beyond The News of the World to other papers in Rupert Murdoch’s British media empire." Guardian story here.

Presidents Obama & Sarkozy participated in a ceremony honoring the alliance between the U.S & France today. ABC News story here.

President Obama held a press conference this morning. AP story here.

Bloomberg News: "The jobless rate unexpectedly fell in October while employers added fewer jobs than forecast, illustrating the 'frustratingly slow' progress cited by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke this week. The unemployment rate fell to a six-month low of 9 percent from 9.1 percent, even as the labor force expanded. The 80,000 increase in payrolls followed gains in the prior two months that were revised up by 102,000...."

New York Times: "Jon S. Corzine has resigned from his posts at the embattled brokerage MF Global, the company announced on Friday. Mr. Corzine, the firm’s chairman and chief executive, will not seek severance payments from MF Global, which filed for bankruptcy on Monday, according to the company’s statement."

AP: "Republicans in the Senate have killed legislation sponsored by President Barack Obama to spend $60 billion on building and repairing roads, rail lines and other infrastructure to help kick-start the sluggish economy. The 51-49 vote fell well short of the 60 votes required under Senate procedures to start work on the bill. The infrastructure measure is the third in a string of Senate defeats for Obama's stimulus-style jobs agenda, which would be financed by a tax surcharge on the very wealthy."

New York Times: "Prime Minister George A. Papandreou faces a deeply uncertain confidence vote on Friday, a day after calling off a referendum on Greece’s new debt deal with the euro zone. The decision to abandon the referendum eased a major rupture in relations with Europe and, after a tumultuous day of political gamesmanship, won for the prime minister a measure of support from his opposition."

AP: "President Barack Obama has sent a letter to Bosnian leaders urging them not to support the Palestinian bid for statehood at the U.N. Security Council."

AP: "Jurors in the involuntary manslaughter case of Michael Jackson's doctor begin deliberations Friday after a six-week trial that painted Conrad Murray as either an inept and opportunistic physician or a naive outsider granted access to the pop superstar's inner realm."

Comments Off