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 Ledes

Thursday, September 26, 2024

The New York Times:' live updates of Hurricane Helene developments today are here. “Hurricane Helene was barreling through the Gulf of Mexico on Thursday en route to Florida, where residents were bracing for extreme rain, destructive winds and deadly storm surge ahead of the storm’s expected landfall. The storm could intensify to a Category 4, if not higher, before making landfall late Thursday, and forecasters warned Helene’s anticipated large size could make its impacts felt across an extensive area. Areas as distant as Atlanta and the Appalachians are at risk for heavy rains.... Many forecast models show the storm making landfall late Thursday near Florida’s Big Bend Coast, a sparsely populated stretch....” ~~~

     ~~~ The Washington Post has forecasts for some cites in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina & Tennessee that are in or near the probable path of Helene. ~~~

     ~~~ This morning, an MSNBC weatherperson said Tallahassee (which is inland) would experience wind gusts of up to 120 m.p.h. and that the National Weather Service said expected 20-foot storm surges near the coast would be “unsurvivable.”

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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
Sep122011

The Commentariat -- September 13

Joe Nocera recalls his reactions to 9/11. In his recollections, Nocera observes, 

I remember something else about those initial days after the terrorist attack. I’d bump into friends, liberals like me — or so I thought — who were suddenly railing about Muslims, or how the police needed to start racial-profiling and locking up people who 'looked suspicious.'

After 9/11, we invaded Afghanistan — justifiably — to take the fight to our enemies. But we also invaded Iraq, an unjustified war for which 9/11 provided the cover. We have killed Osama bin Laden and many other Al Qaeda leaders, but 9/11 has also given us waterboarding, Guantánamo, and the gradual erosion of some of our civil liberties, which we foolishly accept in the name of security.

I've added a Nocera comments page to Off Times Square. Write about this or something else.

Stupid Econ 101. Shrink the Government because the Private Sector Is So Cost-Effective. Ron Nixon of the New York Times: "Despite a widespread belief that contracting out services to the private sector saves the federal government money, a new study suggests just the opposite — that the government actually pays more when it farms out work. The study found that in 33 of 35 occupations, the government actually paid billions of dollars more to hire contractors than it would have cost government employees to perform comparable services. On average, the study found that contractors charged the federal government more than twice the amount it pays federal workers."

UPDATE: Stupid Econ 102. Robert Pear of the New York Times: "... President Obama is expected to seek hundreds of billions of dollars in savings in Medicare and Medicaid, delighting Republicans and dismaying many Democrats who fear that his proposals will become a starting point for bigger cuts in the popular health programs." A document by Rep. Sander Levin (D-Mich.) "criticizes the idea of raising the Medicare eligibility age to 67, from 65, and notes..., 'This policy does nothing to control costs; it simply shifts substantial costs from Medicare to other parts of government and to private and public employers.'”

Jesse Holland of the AP: "President Barack Obama is moving at a historic pace to try to diversify the nation's federal judiciary: Nearly three of every four people he has gotten confirmed to the federal bench are women or minorities. He is the first president who hasn't selected a majority of white males for lifetime judgeships. More than 70 percent of Obama's confirmed judicial nominees during his first two years were "non-traditional," or nominees who were not white males. That far exceeds the percentages in the two-term administrations of Bill Clinton (48.1 percent) and George W. Bush (32.9 percent)...."

A Protest Grows in Brooklyn. M. Powell (I guess) of the New York Times: since taxpayers/homeowners bailed out the banks, why won't the banks bail out homeowners? Some citizens are appealing to their municipalities to retaliate; and some town boards are doing just that.

"The Misuse of Life without Parole." New York Times Editors: "In the last decade in Georgia, one of the few states with good data on the sentence, about 60 percent of offenders sentenced to life without parole were convicted of murder. The other 40 percent were convicted of kidnapping, armed robbery, sex crimes, drug crimes and other crimes including shoplifting. Nationwide, the racial disparity in the penalty is stark. Blacks make up 56.4 percent of those serving life without parole, though they are 37.5 percent of prisoners in all state prisons.The overuse of the sentence reflects this excessively punitive era.... A fair-minded society should not sentence anyone to life without parole except as an alternative to the death penalty." (Emphasis added.)

Paul Krugman: "... the two years or so after 9/11 were a terrible time in America – a time of political exploitation and intimidation, culminating in the deliberate misleading of the nation into the invasion of Iraq. It’s probably worth pointing out that I’m not saying anything now that I wasn’t saying in real time back then, when Bush had a sky-high approval rating and any criticism was denounced as treason. And there’s nothing I’ve done in my life of which I’m more proud." ...

... AND this reader response to Paul Krugman's earlier blogpost, published under the title "A Furor over Paul Krugman's 9/11 Post." The post was link in yesterday's Commentariat. ...

... Greg Sargent provides some egregious examples of Karl Rove & Rudy Giuliani in 2004, & Charlie Black, a top McCain 2008 advisor, using 9/11 scare tactics for political gain. ...

... George Lakoff, in Nation of Change, writes a thoughtful piece explaining how conservatives -- led by the Great American Villain Dick Cheney -- used framing the 9/11 attack, the media and intimidation to consolidate power.

What conservatives really want is to run the country and the world on conservative principles: to control reproduction (no abortion); to control what is taught (no public education); to control religion (conservative Christianity); to control race and language (mass deportation of Hispanic immigrants); to guarantee cheap labor (no unions); to continue white domination (no affirmative action); to continue straight domination (no gay marriage); to control markets (eliminate regulation, taxation, unions, worker rights, and tort cases); to control transportation (privatize freeways); to control elections (institute bars to voting).

President Obama spoke to NBC News' Brian Williams over the weekend:

Jeff Zeleny & Michael Shear of the New York Times: "The decision on Monday by Tim Pawlenty, a former Republican presidential rival, to support Mr. Romney’s campaign signals the beginning of an effort by some party leaders to try to slow the ascent of Mr. Perry — or to push him to explain positions that are considered provocative.... The endorsement was a visible marker in a quietly continuing battle for the soul and direction of the Republican Party between traditional party leaders and grass-roots conservatives."

Right Wing World

The Candidates Debate

This is as much as I can tolerate:

Dan Balz & Nia-Malika Henderson of the Washington Post: "The debate helped to underscore divisions between the establishment and tea party wings of the party, and the battle for tea party support will continue to be an important subplot of the nomination fight."

Dana Milbank: "On the defensive from beginning to end, Perry resorted to the time honored tradition of making up stuff."

Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post reports on more instances of the candidates' "resorting to the time-honored tradition."

New York Times reporters fact-check Perry's claims about Social Security, his fact-free attacks on the 2009 stimulus law, his fast-changing views on troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, Bachmann's distortions about Medicare & the ACA, Romney's version of death panels and more.

Andy Kroll of Mother Jones on Perry's great idea of "freeing up" Wall Street to create jobs and grow the economy -- because that has worked so well in the past:

Let's not forget, it was all those 'freed,' under-regulated banks, mortgage companies, and investment firms that imploded the economy. Years of deregulatory policy under Democratic and Republican presidents — including tearing down the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999, which walled off commercial banking from more risky investments and speculation, and passing the Commodity Futures Modernization Act in 2000, which essentially transformed Wall Street into a casino — helped bring the financial markets to their knees in 2008.

Karen Tumulty of the Washington Post: "For all their promises to put the nation’s books back in order, the candidates offered little that would suggest that Americans might actually have to give anything up to do it. Instead, they repeatedly insisted that economic growth could take care of the problem or that — in the hoariest of all political claims — rooting out waste is the answer."

Tom Curry of NBC News: "A Republican debate that was expected to be a showdown between the two heavyweights, Rick Perry and Mitt Romney, turned into something resembling a football pile-on with five of the GOP contenders swarming over the Texas governor. What’s emerging from the GOP presidential debates is a portrait of Perry — painted by his opponents — as one scary guy, a threat both to young and old."

Charles Babington of the AP: Rick Perry's "rivals attacked [his Texas] record as never before, led by a newly energized Mitt Romney and hard-charging Michele Bachmann."

Greg Sargent: Rush Limbaugh warns Republican presidential candidates, specifically Mitt Romney & Michele Bachmann, for all candidates "that it’s politically risky to protest the claim that Social Security is a criminal enterprise"; i.e., a Ponzi scheme, as Rick Perry has called it.

News Ledes

NY1 has updated results for the New York 9th Congressional District special election. In this solidly Democratic district the Republican candidate Bob Taylor is leading Democrat David Weprin 11:30 pm ET. ...

     ... BTW, Glenn Thrush of Politico writes in a tweet that (despite Republican hype), "Not to dismiss the NY special: But any race that includes David Weprin -- for a seat that will soon disappear -- is a bellwether of nuthin'"

No Surprise Here. New York Times: "Three Transportation Security Administration officers have been charged with accepting bribes to let couriers smuggle painkillers and cash undetected through security checkpoints at airports in New York and Florida, federal prosecutors said Tuesday."

Boston Globe: "After weeks of testing the political waters, Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard Law School professor and Wall Street critic, will officially announce her run for the US Senate tomorrow morning against Republican incumbent Scott Brown."

President Obama on how the American Jobs Act will modernize America's schools:

President Obama spoke at the Fort Hayes, Ohio, Arts & Academic High School this afternoon. AP: "President Barack Obama is visiting a school undergoing a multimillion-dollar renovation to sell his proposal for creating more jobs. And it's no coincidence that the school is in Ohio, the home state of House Speaker John Boehner, a critic of the president's proposal to tax the rich to pay for his plan."

New York Times: "Democrats on Tuesday sought to avoid a jolting upset in a heavily Democratic House district last represented by Anthony D. Weiner, dispatching hundreds of volunteers around Brooklyn and Queens in an effort to turn people out to vote. The Republican candidate, Bob Turner, who held a six-point lead in a poll released on Friday, expressed confidence that victory was within reach, and that the city’s Democratic machine would not be able to overcome his momentum and push his opponent, Assemblyman David I. Weprin, to victory."

New York Times: "The Republican presidential candidates aggressively confronted Gov. Rick Perry at a debate here on Monday night, and pressed him to explain his views on Social Security and his decade-long record in Texas, including an effort to require the vaccination of schoolgirls and granting children of illegal immigrants a college tuition break."

Guardian: "Rockets are being fired at the US embassy in Kabul, say police in Afghanistan. The Taliban has claimed responsibility and says the attackers are armed with rocket-propelled grenades, AK-47s and suicide vests." This page is a liveblog. AP story here.

NBC News: "Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told NBC News Tuesday that two Americans given eight-year prison sentences for spying and entering the country illegally will be released 'in a couple of days' in what he called a 'humanitarian gesture.'” Includes video. ...

... AP: "An Iranian court Tuesday set bail of $500,000 each for two American men arrested more than two years ago and convicted on spy-related charges, clearing the way for their release a year after a similar bail-for-freedom arrangement for the third member of the group, their defense attorney said. Lawyer Masoud Shafiei said the court would begin the process to free Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal after payment of the bail, which must be arranged through third parties because of U.S. economic sanctions on Iran." CW: is this paying ransom for hostages, or what?

AP: "German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Tuesday sought to calm market fears that Greece is heading for a chaotic default on its debts as Europe struggles to contain a crippling financial crisis. Her comments come a day after her deputy raised the possibility of a default, and come ahead of another telephone discussion between Greece's finance minister and his German counterpart." ...

... Bloomberg: "Greece has a 98 percent chance of defaulting on its debt in the next five years as Prime Minister George Papandreou fails to reassure investors his country can survive the euro-region crisis."

Politico: "The national poverty rate in 2010 hit 15.1 percent — the highest level since 1993, according to a report Tuesday from the Census Bureau.The report also indicated that median household income, adjusted for inflation, was lower last year than any year since 1997."

New York Times: "A parliamentary panel investigating the phone hacking scandal within the British outpost of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire said on Tuesday that it would recall his son, James Murdoch, to answer more questions about his knowledge of the affair. Guardian story here.

The Hill: "Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) endorsed Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) for president on Monday."

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