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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Monday
Oct102011

The Commentariat -- October 11

I have a comments page up on Off Times Square on Occupy Wall Street. ...

... Helen Kennedy of the New York Daily News: "The Occupy Wall Street protesters are planning to get in the face of some of New York's richest tycoons on Tuesday. A 'Millionaires March' will visit the homes -- or, more realistically, the gleaming marble lobbies -- of five of the city's wealthiest residents. On the target list: NewsCorp CEO Rupert Murdoch, JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, conservative billionaire David Koch, financier Howard Milstein and hedge fund mogul John Paulson. Between 400 and 800 marchers plan to go to their homes to present them with oversize checks to dramatize how much less they will pay when New York State's 2% tax on millionaires expires at the end of the year. 'Ninety nine percent of the residents of New York are going to suffer from this tax giveaway so the 1% who already live in absolute luxury can put more money in their pockets,' said Doug Forand, one of the march organizers." ...

... Wall Street Journal: "Mayor Michael Bloomberg said on Monday that he’ll allow the Wall Street protesters to stay indefinitely, provided they abide by the law, marking his strongest statement to date on the city’s willingness to let demonstrators occupy a park in Lower Manhattan." (Also linked in Monday's Ledes.)

I, for one, am increasingly concerned about the growing mobs occupying Wall Street and the other cities across the country. And believe it or not, some in this town have actually condoned the pitting of Americans against Americans. But you sent us here to fight for you and all Americans. -- House Majority Leader Eric Cantor last week at a conservative Values Voters meeting

Tea Party, the acronym is Taxed Enough Already. People are tired of seeing ... Washington balloon and the federal government grow in every aspect of our lives. And enough is enough.... Tea Party is an organic movement. This is not some movement that started in Washington. It’s about the people. And that’s what, I think, the message from this election is about. Get the government in D.C. working for the people again and not the other way around.  I think the Tea Party has a lot to do with the energy that came out at the polls because they’re like the tip of the spear. They represent and reflect the frustration that Americans have at what’s going on in Washington. -- Eric Cantor, last year, on the Don Imus show

Translation: If you agree with me, you're an energetic, organic movement. If you disagree with me, you're a mob. Jonathan Capehart of the Washington Post has the videos.

Vanity Fair photo.** Suzanna Andrews of Vanity Fair has a fine profile of Elizabeth Warren & how brutally bankers & their Congressional lackeys came down on her. And, yeah, Andrews' profile makes President Obama look like an opportunistic wuss & Tiny Tim look way meaner than Scrooge. ...

 

 

... AND here's the video Andrews cites in her article: "Elizabeth Warren Makes Timmy Geithner Squirm":

Karen Garcia: Jeffrey Immelt, the $15.2-million-a-year CEO of General Electric -- a company that paid no federal tax in 2010 & in fact was the recipient of federal corporate welfare over and above that, a company known for shipping jobs overseas, undercutting unions & paying its workers low wages -- was President Obama's choice to head up the Administration's Jobs Council. AND Jeff Immelt wants you to "root for" him & GE:

The ever-smarmy David Brooks begins his column by setting up a series of big lies about the Occupy Wall Street protesters -- they're hippies! -- then goes on to explain why the real heroes of American governance are his right-wing "Big Thinker" buddies who get down into the policy details only to extrapolate big ideas. ...

     ... We do love it when Driftglass beats up on Our Mister Brooks. who "has once chosen to use his national media platform to paint a group that he despises from head to toe with every peacenik, tree-hugging boogieman caricature that has terrified him since before he was in long pants." ...

     ... AND Paul Krugman joins Driftglass today. After explaining the deception inherent in the Tax Foundation figure that Brooks cites to make his case, Krugman writes, "This deliberate fraud — because that’s what it has to be — is an example of the reasons knowledgeable people don’t trust the Tax Foundation." (Emphasis added.) Ergo, Krugman says flat-out that his colleague Brooks is not a "knowledgeable person." Thanks to John F. for the link.

How RomneyCare Became ObamaCare. Michael Isikoff of NBC News: "Newly obtained White House records provide fresh details on how senior Obama administration officials used Mitt Romney’s landmark health-care law in Massachusetts as a model for the new federal law.... The records, gleaned from White House visitor logs..., show that senior White House officials had a dozen meetings in 2009 with three health-care advisers and experts who helped shape the health care reform law signed by Romney in 2006, when the Republican presidential candidate was governor of Massachusetts. One of those meetings, on July 20, 2009, was in the Oval Office and presided over by President Barack Obama.... [One of these experts] told NBC News he attended one meeting ... in which [Romney] forcefully insisted on including ... the 'individual mandate' ..., a controversial provision that some of his political advisers were wary about....'”

When Democracy Goes Awry. Prof. James Fishkin, in a New York Times op-ed: "... as California, the nation’s most populous state, marks [the 100th] anniversary [of the ballot initiative], the accumulated impact of direct democracy has made it virtually ungovernable.... [But there] are reforms that people support once they really think through their implications.... If the ballot initiative process is to survive for another century, it must take into account the considered judgments of voters coming together to deliberate hard choices and not just cast a vote based on sound bites. If this succeeds it will help bring California much closer to the ideal that voters were striving for 100 years ago: legislation genuinely initiated by the people."

Right Wing World

It would be the biggest tax shift from the wealthy to the middle-class in the history of taxation, ever, anywhere, and it would bankrupt the country. -- Michael Ettlinger, an economist with the Center for American Progress on Herman Cain's "999" tax plan ...

... CW: as Herman Cain (or Herbert/Herb Cain, as he is known to Sarah Palin [video here]) surges in the polls, it's a good idea to see what he stands for. While some media outlets -- e.g., the Washington Post, give him a pass on his tax plan, we should not. Pat Garofalo of Think Progress crunched the numbers last week, and found that Cain's plan would create the largest deficit since World War II, but would increase taxes on most Americans:

... someone in the bottom quintile of earners — who currently pays about 2 percent of his or her income in federal taxes — would pay about 18 percent under Cain’s plan (9 percent on every dollar they make, plus 9 percent on every dollar they spent, which would likely be close to all of them). A middle-class individual would see his or her taxes go from about 14 percent to about 18 percent. But someone in the richest one percent of Americans would see his or her tax rate fall from about 28 percent to about 11 percent. ...

... Bruce Bartlett of the New York Times delves as deeply into Cain's 999 tax plan as one can go given Cain's lack of specificity. Read Bartlett (whose analysis is very understandable) & gasp -- again and again. Bartlett concludes:

At a minimum, the Cain plan is a distributional monstrosity. The poor would pay more while the rich would have their taxes cut, with no guarantee that economic growth will increase and good reason to believe that the budget deficit will increase. Even allowing for the poorly thought through promises routinely made on the campaign trail, Mr. Cain’s tax plan stands out as exceptionally ill conceived. ...

... BTW -- Andy Kroll of Mother Jones (May 2011): "... scrubbed from Cain's official story is his long tenure as a director at a Midwest energy corporation named Aquila that, like the infamous Enron Corporation, recklessly dove into the wild west of energy trading and speculatio n— and ultimately screwed its employees out of tens of millions of dollars.... Cain served on the board of directors throughout Aquila's ill-fated trading misadventure and the subsequent collapse of the company's retirement fund. In fact, he chaired the board's compensation committee, which ... push[ed] to get employees to invest more and more in Aquila stock.... Cain also saw fit to dole out $30 million in bonuses, not including stock options, to the top five execs at Aquila in 2002, with the company's stock plummeting."

Suzy Khimm of the Washington Post: "Conservative activists have created a Tumblr called 'We are the 53 percent' that’s meant to be a counterpunch to the viral 'We are the 99 percent' site that’s become a prominent symbol for the Occupy Wall Street movement. The Tumblr is supposed to represent the 53 percent of Americans who pay federal income taxes, and its assumption is that the Wall Street protesters are part of the 46 percent of the country who don’t. 'We are the 53 percent' was originally the brainchild of Erick Erickson [a notorious right-wing blogger].... But there is some tension between the site’s critique and conservative tax policy. Part of the reason that over 40 percent of Americans don’t pay taxes is because of the continual push to lower them — a cause that conservatives have championed."

AND Hunter Walker of the New York Observer: Hank Williams, Jr., is fighting back against the forces of evil who dissed him for comparing President Obama to Hitler in a new song which [CW: I guess] is titled "I'll Keep My Shit." [Walker is too polite to report the full title.]

News Ledes

New York Times: "President Obama’s chief of staff, William M. Daley, will step down at the end of the president’s current term in January 2013, Mr. Daley told a Chicago television station. Mr. Daley, who has come under criticism for his handling of relations with lawmakers, said he was confident Mr. Obama would win re-election next year, but Mr. Daley said he would not stay on for a second term."

AP: "United against Barack Obama, Senate Republicans voted Tuesday night to kill the jobs package the president had spent weeks campaigning for across the country, a stinging loss at the hands of lawmakers opposed to stimulus-style spending and a tax increase on the very wealthy. Forty-six Republicans joined with two Democrats to filibuster the $447 billion plan. Fifty Democrats had voted for it, but the vote was not final. The roll call was kept open to allow Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H. to vote. The likely 51-48 eventual tally would be far short of the 60 votes needed to keep the bill alive in the 100-member Senate." ...

     ... The Hill Update: "President Obama blasted Senate Republicans for blocking his jobs bill Tuesday night, saying the American people 'won't take 'no' for an answer.' The president said in a statement that his administration will work with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to get votes on the individual components of the bill 'as soon as possible.'"

New York Times: "Five health and environmental groups sued the Obama administration on Tuesday over its rejection of a proposed stricter new standard for ozone pollution, saying the decision was driven by politics and ignored public health concerns."

New York Times: "... the Senate passed a bill that would require the Treasury Department to order the Commerce Department to impose tough tariffs on certain Chinese goods in the event of a finding by the Treasury that China was improperly valuing its currency to gain an economic advantage. The measure passed 63 to 35, with 16 Republican votes, an unusual dynamic in the Democrat-controlled Senate. It enjoyed rare support from members of both parties despite the strong disapproval of Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader...."

New York Times: "Federal authorities foiled a plot by men linked to the Iranian government to kill the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States and to bomb a Saudi embassy, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said in a news conference on Tuesday."

New York Times: "Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey endorsed Mitt Romney’s bid for the Republican presidential nomination on Tuesday afternoon by praising his business and government experience, declaring, 'Mitt Romney is the man we need to lead America.'” With video. CW: okay, so now I'm think maybe Christie isn't running. ...

     ... Update: here's a more, um, expansive Times story.

CNN: "A group of union-backed organizations joined the loosely defined Occupy Wall Street movement again Tuesday, leaving behind the confines of New York's financial district for the posh neighborhoods that dot Manhattan's Upper East Side, according to multiple group representatives.... The union-organized march, meanwhile, took protesters past the homes of well-to-do residents like billionaire David Koch, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch and JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon." ...

... New York Daily News: "The attorney for an 'Occupy Wall Street' protester zapped by police pepper spray cited a double standard Tuesday in demanding the arrest of her uniformed assailant.

Republican candidates for president will debate in New Hampshire at 8:00 pm ET. It will air on Bloomberg TV or you can watch a livestream at Bloomberg.com The page linked has a TV channel-finder for Bloomberg.

AP: "President Barack Obama's jobs bill, facing a critical test in the Senate, appears likely to fail because Republicans oppose its spending components and its tax surcharge on millionaires." ...

... CNN: As the Senate prepares to vote on President Obama's jobs bill, the Obama campaign released a memo by senior strategist David Axelrod that seems designed to give wavering senators reason to vote for the bill: it makes the case that 'there is no Republican alternative that would create jobs now.'"

Reuters: "Apple Inc co-founder Steve Jobs died of respiratory arrest caused by a pancreatic tumor, according to the death certificate."

Reuters: "One-time hedge fund tycoon Raj Rajaratnam may get the longest prison sentence to date for insider trading, sending a harsh warning to anyone else who considers becoming a master of trading on confidential information. Prosecutors are seeking one of the longest sentences ever for an insider-trading defendant, arguing that the 54-year-old Galleon Group founder is "the modern face" of illegal stock trading. The sentencing, which had been delayed, is set for Thursday."

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