The Ledes

Thursday, September 19, 2024

New York Times: “A body believed to be of the suspect in a Kentucky highway shooting that left five people seriously injured this month was found on Wednesday, the authorities said, ending a manhunt that stretched into a second week and set the local community on edge. The Kentucky State Police commissioner, Phillip Burnett Jr., said in a Wednesday night news conference that at approximately 3:30 p.m., two troopers and two civilians found an unidentified body in the brush behind the highway exit where the shooting occurred.... The police have identified the suspect of the shooting as Joseph A. Couch, 32. They said that on Sept. 7, Mr. Couch perched on a cliff overlooking Interstate 75 about eight miles north of London, Ky., and opened fire. One of the wounded was shot in the face, and another was shot in the chest. A dozen vehicles were riddled with gunfire.”

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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 -- September 4

Jan, I call upon you today to say there are no beheadings. -- challenger Terry Goddard to Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, uttering the sentence least likely to be heard in a gubernatorial debate

If she doesn’t change her ways, then Palinism will be equated with other forms of McCarthyism that fomented division among the populace and acts of hatred among the populace. -- Richard Trumka, AFL-CIO President, on Sarah Palin

Campaigns are built to fool us into thinking that we're voting for individuals. We learn about the candidate's family, her job, her background -- even her dog. But we're primarily voting for parties. The parties have just learned we're more likely to vote for them if they disguise themselves as individuals. -- Ezra Klein

Newt is more to the right of Mussolini on this. -- scholar Victoria de Graziathe, on Gingrich's opposition to the Downtown Islamic cultural center

He's the last person I'd vote for for president of the United States. His life indicates he does not have a commitment to the character traits necessary to be a great president. -- Republican Sen. Tom Coburn on Newt Gingrich, via Tulsa World

Kevin Drum of Mother Jones: "... the responsiveness of senators to the views of the poor and working class is ... zero. Or maybe even negative. And that's true for both parties. The middle class does better — again, with both parties — and high earners do better still. In fact, they do spectacularly better among Republican senators." ...

... See What Drum Means? Michael O'Brien of The Hill: "There's 'plenty of the room' in the federal budget to cut $700 billion in spending to pay for extending high-end tax cuts, [Rep. Paul Ryan, (R-Wis.)] said Friday." ...

... More from Ryan: TheCBO is right only when I say so. Alex Seitz-Wald of Think Progress. "Ryan quoted the Congressional Budget Office approvingly when their numbers supported his argument, but questioned their estimates moments earlier when they did not fit his narrative." With incriminating video.

Henry Payne of the Detroit News: "... Detroit’s Channel 7 reports that the Reverend [Jesse Jackson]’s Caddy Escalade SUV was stolen and stripped of its wheels while he was in town last weekend ... leading the 'Jobs, Justice, and Peace' march promoting government-funded green jobs.... Add Jesse to the Al Gore-Tom Friedman-Barack Obama School of Environmental Hypocrisy. While preaching to Americans that they need to cram their families into hybrid Priuses to go shopping for compact fluorescent light bulbs to save the planet, they themselves continue to live large."

CW: if you were to read only one article on what ails the American economy, Robert Reich's op-ed in the New York Times would tell you pretty much all you needed to know.

The Great Depression and its aftermath demonstrate that there is only one way back to full recovery: through more widely shared prosperity. -- Robert Reich

J Street launches a new site & produces an ad on the radical right:

David Leonhardt of the New York Times: "We don’t seem to be in a double-dip recession. We do seem to be in a long slog."

Rachel Maddow & Gene Robinson on the new fake history of the South. Do not believe anything a Republican tells you. Ever:

Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times: Obama & Dubya have a chilly relationship.

CW: Harold Meyerson, who writes for the Washington Post, is a self-avowed socialist & a great patriot. His column on the organization Working America, which was created by the AFL-CIO, is illuminating.

If Obama and the Democrats are to have a fighting chance against Beck, O'Reilly and the Republicans, they need to acknowledge how our power elites have betrayed Main Street America, and how Main Street America is right to be enraged. -- Harold Meyerson

Dana Milbank: at her "valedictory" dinner at the National Press Club, Christiana Romer, outgoing chair of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, served up bitter soup & a sickening entree. And she has no idea what the dessert will be -- but don't get your hopes up. ...

... Michael Scherer of Time: the shift in Americans' perception of Barack Obama -- from "political savior to ... creature of Washington" -- is evident nation-wide." ...

... Glenn Greenwald ticks off a few more reaons for the "enthusiasm gap"; you can't read Greenwald & come out even slightly enthusiastic about Obama.

Smoking Gun. Ben Smith of Politico finds evidence that Glenn Beck is really into exploting racial politics, protestations from the right notwithstanding. CW: see what you think.

Jeanna Bryner of LiveScience: "Perhaps the belief that President Obama is a Muslim has nothing to do with him and everything to do with us, a new study suggests.... 'Careless or biased media outlets are largely responsible for the propagation of these falsehoods, which catch on like wildfire,' [psychology professor Spee] Kosloff said. 'And then social differences can motivate acceptance of these lies.'"

Kathleen Parker is the best conservative writer around because she's not afraid to lampoon the loonies on the right:

Glenn Beck's tent-less revival last weekend ... was right out of the Alcoholics Anonymous playbook. It was a 12-step program distilled to a few key words, all lifted from a prayer delivered from the Lincoln Memorial: healing, recovery and restoration.... He may as well have greeted the crowd of his fellow disaffected with: 'Hi. My name is Glenn, and I'm messed up.'"

On the One Hand..., on the Other Hand." Fred Kaplan of Slate, widely considered an objective expert on the Iraq War, complains that President Obama's speech was unfocused & offered no "consistent theme" or "clear road to the future." ...

... Joe Conason of Slate on what President Obama could not say. CW: Conason ticks off a list of the U.S.'s essential blunders in Iraq, & their effects. What I wonder is, why couldn't the President allude to the fiasco that underlay his address?

Blissful Ignorance. Glenn Greenwald smacks down the "nobody could have known" MSM school of journalism, concentrating this time on New York Times war correspondent John Burns, who had no idea there might be lots of violence in Iraq after our invasion. ...

... CW: Greenwald points to Simon Owens' post on the clash between The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg & Greenwald. I haven't linked to many of Greenwald's posts on Goldberg's so-called reporting because they were kind of in-the-weeds & repetitive, but Owens' post is quite a good summary. Also, it will tell you why I never link to Goldberg's Atlantic posts.

** Joan Walsh nicely summarizes the Truth about Obama, based on Brian Williams' telling interview of the President: "... he sounds unprepared for the fight he's in." CW: my sentiments exactly. See what you think:

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