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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Wednesday
Mar092016

The Party of Racists

For good reason, Donald Trump & his cadre of white supremacists, flagrant & muted, have dominated the discussion of the GOP's racist leanings. But there's another, equally pernicious form of racism that further defines the GOP. Since Mitt Self-Deportation Romney lost the 2012 election, many party elders looked at the exit polls, discovered the party had a problem attracting Latino voters, & openly (or anonymously) admitted it. (Black voters they don't care about so much because Republicans imagine -- revealing the limited scope of their imaginations -- that blah people are all hanging out in their welfare hammocks chatting on their ObamaPhones about food stamps & other "free stuff.")

But what to do? Rather than robustly supporting immigration reform, for instance, which would appeal to many Latinos but horrify the GOP's white racist base, the poobahs got together & decided to back a symbolic Latino. That is, the white Republican elites thought Hispanic voters would be just thrilled to Dump the Dems in favor of one of their own whose boyhood lusts happened to make him a Latino-by-marriage. Sure enough, Jeb! proved he could speak to the little brown ones, in gringo-accented Spanish, of the horrors of "multi-culturalism" & of "anchor babies," too. But, really, he's one of them: the family eats tacos at home! Problem solved.

A funny thing happened on the way to the primaries. Despite his giant party-raised campaign chest, which put him on the early-state teevee all the time every day, nobody voted for Jeb! "After spending $2800 per vote in Iowa, Jeb Bush and his super PAC, Right to Rise, have continued the spree by paying $1,150 per vote in New Hampshire." Wow! New Hampshire was a bargain!

When Jeb! dropped out of the race after the next round of primaries, GOP elites looked around & turned their lonely eyes to a certified Spanish-speaking Latino, whose name (first AND last) ends in a vowel rather than an exclamation point. This is where the party's inherent racism becomes obvious. Not only do the party elder's think they can shove a guy out front just because he can rumba, but its base of more open, visceral racists have rejected the dancing guy, no doubt because he can rumba.

You can attribute Jeb!'s favored status among party leaders to his family connections, but the old boys' come-lately allegiance to an equally-flawed Hispanic candidate shows their true colors: white, white & whitey-white. It never occurs to them to change the party platform to make it more appealing to Latino voters; it never occurs to them that Hispanic voters may have unique concerns; it never occurs to them that substance matters. What matters is that their new model looks great in a respectable Republican suit & Cuban heels.

There are all kinds of ways to demonstrate racism, & the GOP knows them all. The more genteel among them share their prejudlces in "quiet rooms"; the more honest (if ignorant) ones complain Rubio would grant "amnesty" to Puerto-Rican Americans. The Republican party is the party of racists, from top to bottom.

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Reader Comments (1)

Marie,

Party of Racists, indeed. And yet you still hear Confederate apologists try to disprove blatant facts by screaming that Lincoln freed the slaves and he was a Republican and that the KKK was founded by Democrats, ergo, it's impossible for Republicans to be racist. Sure. So Joe Whitey-White can't possibly be racist because his great, great grandfather, who grew up on a farm in Georgia in the 1850's never owned slaves. Also, something, something, something, other guys with hoods but not me.

Makes sense, don't it?

This is still the party of Lee ("nigger, nigger, nigger") Atwater, Philadelphia, Mississippi, site chosen specially by Reagan to kick off his presidential bid, the party of the Southern Strategy, the party of Willie Horton ads, a party whose majority whip, Steve Scalise, was an honored guest speaker at a convention of white supremacists. Did party big wigs decide a guy who is held in high regard by avowed racists maybe shouldn't be their whip? Hell no. They doubled down on him. This is a party who finds the nastiest, most disgusting thing they can say about Barack Obama is that he is from Kenya (even when he's not). This is a yuuuge giveaway. This party is the one that benefited enormously from the organization of the conservative movement, a movement once headed by William F. Buckley who stated as clearly as he could that blacks are an inferior race.

And this is a party which has been directing its dog whistles at both Bull Connor thugs and country club bigots whose only knowledge of other races comes from jostling past dark skinned busboys in hoity-toity restaurants and stiffing black servers with small tips.

This is the party that was once so scared of blacks that Ronald Reagan, as governor of California, passed strict gun ownership laws to keep those scary black men from getting their paws on weaponry, the same party that years later decided that every white man needed a gun to kill those uppity, raping nee-groes if they came sniffing around their women or their property.

The only difference between Reagan and Trump is that the dog whistles are now passé.

They don't even bother trying to hide it anymore.

March 9, 2016 | Unregistered CommenterAkhilleus
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