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Washington Post: “Towns throughout western North Carolina ... were transformed overnight by ... [Hurricane Helene]. Muddy floodwaters lifted homes from their foundations. Landslides and overflowing rivers severed the only way in and out of small mountain communities. Rescuers said they were struggling to respond to the high number of emergency calls.... The death toll grew throughout the Southeast as the scope of Helene’s devastation came into clearer view. At least 49 people had been killed in five states — Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia. By early counts, South Carolina suffered the greatest loss of life, registering at least 19 deaths.”

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Washington Post: “First came the surprising discovery that Earth’s atmosphere is leaking. But for roughly 60 years, the reason remained a mystery. Since the late 1960s, satellites over the poles detected an extremely fast flow of particles escaping into space — at speeds of 20 kilometers per second. Scientists suspected that gravity and the magnetic field alone could not fully explain the stream. There had to be another source creating this leaky faucet. It turns out the mysterious force is a previously undiscovered global electric field, a recent study found. The field is only about the strength of a watch battery — but it’s enough to thrust lighter ions from our atmosphere into space. It’s also generated unlike other electric fields on Earth. This newly discovered aspect of our planet provides clues about the evolution of our atmosphere, perhaps explaining why Earth is habitable. The electric field is 'an agent of chaos,' said Glyn Collinson, a NASA rocket scientist and lead author of the study. 'It undoes gravity.... Without it, Earth would be very different.'”

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.'”

Page Links

Wednesday

Mar142012

The Commentariat -- The Ides of March

Robert Reich hits on exactly what's wrong with the whole Republican playbook: "There is moral rot in America but it’s not found in the private behavior of ordinary people. It’s located in the public behavior of people who control our economy and are turning our democracy into a financial slush pump. It’s found in Wall Street fraud, exorbitant pay of top executives, financial conflicts of interest, insider trading and the outright bribery of public officials through unlimited campaign 'donations.'” ...

... Jobs, Jobs, Jobs. Andy Rosenthal of the New York Times states the obvious: "A job at a Michigan car factory is not inherently better than a job at a clothing store or a restaurant; it’s more desirable because it pays better, and it pays better because a few generations ago the Detroit labor force unionized. A job at Walmart with a pension upon retirement doesn’t sound too bad. It could happen through collective bargaining." There is a connection between Reich's post & Rosenthal's. Republicans want to talk about the immorality of your sex life, not just because it's fun for them, but more because they don't want you to notice the immorality of your employer's wage & salary policies.

** Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone in a major piece on the Bank of America -- "Too Crooked to Fail": "It's been four years since the government ... saved this megabank from ruin by pumping $45 billion of taxpayer money into its arm. Since then, the Obama administration has looked the other way as the bank committed an astonishing variety of crimes.... Bank of America has systematically ripped off almost everyone with whom it has a significant business relationship, cheating investors, insurers, depositors, homeowners, shareholders, pensioners and taxpayers. It brought tens of thousands of Americans to foreclosure court using bogus, 'robo-signed' evidence – a type of mass perjury that it helped pioneer. It hawked worthless mortgages to dozens of unions and state pension funds, draining them of hundreds of millions in value. And when it wasn't ripping off workers and pensioners, it was helping to push insurance giants like AMBAC into bankruptcy by fraudulently inducing them to spend hundreds of millions insuring those same worthless mortgages."

The $2 Billion-Dollar Good-bye. Christine Harper of Bloomberg: "Goldman Sachs Group saw $2.15 billion of its market value wiped out after an employee assailed Chief Executive Officer Lloyd C. Blankfein’s management and the firm’s treatment of clients, sparking debate across Wall Street. The shares dropped 3.4 percent in New York trading yesterday, the third-biggest decline in the 81-company Standard & Poor’s 500 Financials Index, after London-based Greg Smith made the accusations in a New York Times op-ed piece." ...

... Matt Taibbi, who has written extensively about Goldman Sachs -- a/k/a "giant vampire squid" -- comments on Greg Smith's boffo buh-bye to Goldman, linked in yesterday's Commentariat & at the end of the Bloomberg link above. ...

... George Zornick of The Nation: Paul Volcker weighs in. ...

... Roben Farzad of Business Week: Today is "a nightmare scenario for what was long Wall Street’s most storied and secretive partnership. Ultimately, the events of March 14 will be inextricably linked to another landmark day in Goldman Sachs history: May 4, 1999. That’s when Goldman went public, eschewing the need for partners to constantly risk their own capital and maintain superconservative risk controls on traders and department heads." ...

... BUT Felix Salmon of Reuters is skeptical of Smith's motives & his pretense at innocence. He detects "a strong smell of faux-naive." ...

... AND Donald Drezner of Foreign Policy notes that the op-ed is all about Smith, who fails to own up to his own complicity. ...

... Goldman honchos Lloyd Blankfein & Gary Cohn respond in a Guardian op-ed to Smith's op-ed. Surprisingly, they see Goldman entirely differently from Smith's POV. ...

... AND Andy Borowitz: Blankfein announces he is replacing Smith with Joseph Kony, who -- like Blankfein -- is doing the Lord's work. ...

... Susanne Craig & Landon Thomas of the New York Times on reactions to Smith's op-ed.

Jonathan Weisman of the New York Times: "... Senate Democrats are beginning a push to renew the Violence Against Women Act, the once broadly bipartisan 1994 legislation that now faces fierce opposition from conservatives. The fight over the law, which would expand financing for and broaden the reach of domestic violence programs, will be joined Thursday when Senate Democratic women plan to march to the Senate floor to demand quick action on its extension. Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, has suggested he will push for a vote by the end of March."

To compare [me] to Rush is ridiculous -- he went after a civilian about very specific behavior, that was a lie, speaking for a party that has systematically gone after women's rights all year, on the public airwaves. I used a rude word about a public figure who gives as good as she gets, who's called people 'terrorist' and 'unAmerican.' Sarah Barracuda. The First Amendment was specifically designed for citizens to insult politicians. Libel laws were written to protect law students speaking out on political issues from getting called whores by Oxycontin addicts. -- Bill Maher, in an interview with Jake Tapper of ABC News

Rod Nordland of the New York Times: why a cold-blooded mass murder of innocent adults and children is not as bad as incinerating a holy book. CW: another example of why fundamentalist religious beliefs are bad for humanity.

Laura Rozen of Yahoo! News: "Bashar al-Assad ... and his London-born wife Asma al-Assad appear to live in a surreal psychological bubble, insulated from the grotesque violence that has claimed the lives of 8,000 Syrians, according to a cache of some 3,000 alleged emails and documents obtained by Syrian activists and published by the Guardian Wednesday." Here's the Guardian's page on the e-mails.

We’re about promoting the private sector. They’re about protecting the privileged sector. We’re a fair shot, and a fair shake. They’re about no rules, no risk and no accountability. -- Prepared remarks for a speech Vice President Joe Biden will deliver today to the UAW in Toledo, Ohio

Right Wing World

It's easy to make Republicans look bad. -- Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa)

Fundamentalist Factoid: "More than 70 percent of voters in [Alabama & Mississippi] said it was important that a candidate shared their religious beliefs."

Jonathan Cohn of The New Republic: "During a local television interview in Missouri on Tuesday, GOP presidential front-runner Mitt Romney said 'Planned Parenthood, we’re going to get rid of that.' ... Romney was reiterating a previous promise to 'Eliminate Title X family planning programs benefiting abortion groups like Planned Parenthood.'” Cohn goes to to review the effects of Rick Perry & the Texas legislature's decision to defund the state's women's health clinics. CW: This infurates me. I have no sympathy or regard for any person who votes for Republicans. None. They stand proudly for the oppression & intimidation of women. I wish some of our conservative contributors would weigh in, but they do so at their peril. ...

... Irin Carmon of Salon: "The mainstreaming of anti-woman extremism within the Republican party is a fact of life that, most recently, Mitt Romney has had to come to terms with."

Romney isn't alone: His presidential rivals have pledged to the same thing.

Charles Pierce suggests a game plan for the liberation of Willard Romney. CW: It is, in a way, a good apologia for Romney (tho contributor Jack Mahoney is right -- Pierce's use of "bitches" as a poetic device doesn't work). Underlying Pierce's premise is this: Romney doesn't care about poor people; he doesn't care about middle-class people; you probably could count on your fingers & toes the number of people Romney does care about, & use fewer digits if he didn't have such a large family. Romney is in it to win it, & that is his only goal. Completely missing from Romney's raison de campaign: principles of governance or patriotism or moral rectitude or whatever it is decent people think are valid reasons for running for public office. You might argue this is true of most politicians, but Romney wears his craven, principle-free ambition on his sleeve. ...

... Cheesy Grit. Romney's super-rich donors are irritated the super-rich candidate is not connecting with ordinary voters. Really, they're paying this guy to pander & he just sucks at it.

The dangers of carbon dioxide. Tell that to a plant, how dangerous carbon dioxide is. -- Rick Santorum, accepting the Michele Bachmann chair in biochemistry ...

.. A potted plant on the Jimmy Kimmel set begs to differ with Prof. Santorum:

... Colbert elaborates:

... Reuters: "Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum told Puerto Ricans on Wednesday they would have to make English their primary language if they want to pursue U.S. statehood, a statement at odds with the U.S. Constitution." CW: and perfectly emblematic of the ethnocentric, xenophobic my-way-or-the-highway Republican party. If Romney is the stereotype of a rich Republican, Santorum is a stereotype of the narrow-minded rube wing of the party.

Our political system is so methodically and deliberately stupid – and I use that word deliberately, the willful avoidance of knowledge -- that it’s astonishing. -- Newt Gingrich, last night

Dan Balz of the Washington Post: "... Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign message can be boiled down to five words: The math is with us. It is as accurate as it is uninspiring.... By the GOP delegate numbers, Romney won the night Tuesday. He captured more delegates in the four contests — Alabama, Mississippi, Hawaii and American Samoa — than Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich or Ron Paul.... But ... Romney [is] at best slogging forward slowly, rather than gaining momentum against Santorum, a candidate who is at a huge disadvantage in terms of money and infrastructure and who wasn’t considered a likely contender only a few months ago."

Local News

Blago Goes to Jail. His last goodbye -- a press conference:

... The transcript is here. Chicago Channel 5 NBC News: "Disgraced former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich delivered his final stump speech Wednesday. Blagojevich, who heads to prison in Colorado Thursday, navigated through more than 50 reporters and assembled supporters to deliver a farewell message to Illinoisans before he takes off for his 14 year sentence in a federal prison." Chicago Tribune story here.

News Ledes

Washington Post: "The Pentagon acknowledged Thursday that a security breach during Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta’s visit to Afghanistan was much more serious than officials first reported, saying that an Afghan man tried to ram a stolen truck into a group of VIPs who were waiting to greet Panetta just moments after his plane landed at a military base."

AP: "British Prime Minister David Cameron met Thursday with the mayor of Newark to learn about education reforms and other programs in the impoverished city before concluding his trip to the United States with a planned visit to New York City and the 9/11 memorial. Cameron was briefly greeted by Mayor Cory Booker on the front steps of City Hall before they headed inside to talk about municipal reforms that could be replicated in Great Britain. They also planned a short walk around New Jersey's largest city...."

Bloomberg: "Claims for jobless benefits dropped last week in the U.S., matching the lowest level in four years, more evidence the labor market is improving. Applications for unemployment insurance payments fell by 14,000 to 351,000 in the week ended March 10, Labor Department figures showed today."

Washington Post: "The Afghan Taliban has suspended preliminary peace talks with the United States and will forgo opening a political office in Doha due to Washington’s “alternating and ever changing position,” the group said in a statement on Thursday."

Reuters: "President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron discussed the possibility of releasing emergency oil reserves during a meeting on Wednesday, two sources familiar with the talks said, the first sign that Obama is starting to test global support for an effort to knock back near-record fuel prices."

New York Times: "A fight over a small export credit agency is dividing Congress and holding up a popular bipartisan jobs bill."

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Reader Comments (3)

"CW: and perfectly emblematic of the ethnocentric, xenophobic my-way-or-the-highway Republican party. If Romney is the stereotype of a rich Republican, Santorum is a stereotype of the narrow-minded rube wing of the party."

A perfect description of the Medusa,

March 14, 2012 |

DaveS

Marie, re the Romney inevitability: Charles Pierce wrote a late-night screed perfectly capturing the subtext, although I would imagine that Mormons have a euphemism for "bitches."

March 15, 2012 |

Jack Mahoney

Regarding Assad emails:
The man was an eye doctor in England until his father died.
He may know about eyes and Harry Potter, and he now knows about killing. What a guy!
Mae Finch

March 15, 2012 |

Mae Finch

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