The Ledes

Thursday, July 3, 2025

CNBC: “Job growth proved better than expected in June, as the labor market showed surprising resilience and likely taking a July interest rate cut off the table. Nonfarm payrolls increased a seasonally adjusted 147,000 for the month, higher than the estimate for 110,000 and just above the upwardly revised 144,000 in May, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Thursday. April’s tally also saw a small upward revision, now at 158,000 following an 11,000 increase.... Though the jobless rates fell [to 4.1%], it was due largely to a decrease in those working or looking for jobs.”

Washington Post: “A warehouse storing fireworks in Northern California exploded on Tuesday, leaving seven people missing and two injured as explosions continued into Wednesday evening, officials said. Dramatic video footage captured by KCRA 3 News, a Sacramento broadcaster, showed smoke pouring from the building’s roof before a massive explosion created a fireball that seemed to engulf much of the warehouse, accompanied by an echoing boom. Hundreds of fireworks appeared to be going off and were sparkling within the smoke. Photos of the aftermath showed multiple destroyed buildings and a large area covered in gray ash.” ~~~

The Wires
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The Ledes

Wednesday, July 2, 2025

New York Times: “The Rev. Jimmy Swaggart, who emerged from the backwoods of Louisiana to become a television evangelist with global reach, preaching about an eternal struggle between good and evil and warning of the temptations of the flesh, a theme that played out in his own life in a sex scandal, died on July 1. He was 90.” ~~~

     ~~~ For another sort of obituary, see Akhilleus' commentary near the end of yesterday's thread.

Help!

To keep the Conversation going, please help me by linking news articles, opinion pieces and other political content in today's Comments section.

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Thank you to everyone who has been contributing links to articles & other content in the Comments section of each day's "Conversation." If you're missing the comments, you're missing some vital links.

INAUGURATION 2029

Commencement ceremonies are joyous occasions, and Steve Carell made sure that was true this past weekend (mid-June) at Northwestern's commencement:

~~~ Carell's entire commencement speech was hilarious. The audio and video here isn't great, but I laughed till I cried.

CNN did a live telecast Saturday night (June 7) of the Broadway play "Good Night, and Good Luck," written by George Clooney and Grant Heslov, about legendary newsman Edward R. Murrow's effort to hold to account Sen. Joe McCarthy, "the junior senator from Wisconsin." Clooney plays Murrow. Here's Murrow himself with his famous take on McCarthy & McCarthyism, brief remarks that especially resonate today: ~~~

     ~~~ This article lists ways you still can watch the play. 

New York Times: “The New York Times Company has agreed to license its editorial content to Amazon for use in the tech giant’s artificial intelligence platforms, the company said on Thursday. The multiyear agreement 'will bring Times editorial content to a variety of Amazon customer experiences,' the news organization said in a statement. Besides news articles, the agreement encompasses material from NYT Cooking, The Times’s food and recipe site, and The Athletic, which focuses on sports. This is The Times’s first licensing arrangement with a focus on generative A.I. technology. In 2023, The Times sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, for copyright infringement, accusing the tech companies of using millions of articles published by The Times to train automated chatbots without any kind of compensation. OpenAI and Microsoft have rejected those accusations.” ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: I have no idea what this means for "the Amazon customer experience." Does it mean that if I don't have a NYT subscription but do have Amazon Prime I can read NYT content? And where, exactly, would I find that content? I don't know. I don't know.

Washington Post reporters asked three AI image generators what a beautiful woman looks like. "The Post found that they steer users toward a startlingly narrow vision of attractiveness. Prompted to show a 'beautiful woman,' all three tools generated thin women, without exception.... Her body looks like Barbie — slim hips, impossible waist, round breasts.... Just 2 percent of the images showed visible signs of aging. More than a third of the images had medium skin tones. But only nine percent had dark skin tones. Asked to show 'normal women,' the tools produced images that remained overwhelmingly thin.... However bias originates, The Post’s analysis found that popular image tools struggle to render realistic images of women outside the Western ideal." ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: The reporters seem to think they are calling out the AI programs for being unrealistic. But there's a lot about the "beautiful women" images they miss. I find these omissions remarkably sexist. For one thing, the reporters seem to think AI is a magical "thing" that self-generates. It isn't. It's programmed. It's programmed by boys, many of them incels who have little or no experience or insights beyond comic books and Internet porn of how to gauge female "beauty." As a result, the AI-generated women look like cartoons; that is, a lot like an air-brushed photo of Kristi Noem: globs of every kind of dark eye makeup, Scandinavian nose, Botox lips, slathered-on skin concealer/toner/etc. makeup, long dark hair and the aforementioned impossible Barbie body shape, including huge, round plastic breasts. 

New York Times: “George Clooney’s Broadway debut, 'Good Night, and Good Luck,' has been one of the sensations of the 2024-25 theater season, breaking box office records and drawing packed houses of audiences eager to see the popular movie star in a timely drama about the importance of an independent press. Now the play will become much more widely available: CNN is planning a live broadcast of the penultimate performance, on June 7 at 7 p.m. Eastern. The performance will be preceded and followed by coverage of, and discussion about, the show and the state of journalism.”

No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land. -- Magna Carta ~~~

~~~ New York Times: “Bought for $27.50 after World War II, the faint, water stained manuscript in the library of Harvard Law School had attracted relatively little attention since it arrived there in 1946. That is about to change. Two British academics, one of whom happened on the manuscript by chance, have discovered that it is an original 1300 version — not a copy, as long thought — of Magna Carta, the medieval document that helped establish some of the world’s most cherished liberties. It is one of just seven such documents from that date still in existence.... A 710-year-old version of Magna Carta was sold in 2007 for $21.3 million.... First issued in 1215, it put into writing a set of concessions won by rebellious barons from a recalcitrant King John of England — or Bad King John, as he became known in folklore. He later revoked the charter, but his son, Henry III, issued amended versions, the last one in 1225, and Henry’s son, Edward I, in turn confirmed the 1225 version in 1297 and again in 1300.”

NPR lists all of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize winners. Poynter lists the prizes awarded in journalism as well as the finalists in these categories.

 

Contact Marie

Email Marie at constantweader@gmail.com

Saturday
Aug222015

Aliens Among Us!

In a field of candidates who collectively hold such radical, xenophobic ideas against immigrant Americans, it is remarkable that so many are themselves the children of aliens.

The parents of these Republican presidential hopefuls come from exotic lands where the majority of people are communists or non-Christians, even from one country where men wear short skirts. Under the Constitution, the President of the United States must be a "natural born citizen." Do these shady birthright citizens qualify? Equally as unsettling: three candidates are married to foreign-born women. Do we really want an alien First Lady rifling through the White House silver & speaking in foreign tongues to world leaders plotting to undermine the American way?

Marco Rubio. Both of his parents were non-citizen immigrants when Marco was born. Despite Marco's claims that his parents were political refugees from Communist Cuba, the Washington Post revealed that the parents were economic opportunists who immigrated to the U.S. in 1956 during the Fulgencio Batista regime. In hopes of moving back to their native land, Marco's parents returned to Cuba several times after Fidel Castro gained power. Rubio's wife Jeanette is the daughter of Colombian immigrants. Prudent "real" Americans should question Marco's obviously shaky allegiance to the U.S. Rubio said this week that he was "open to exploring ways of not allowing people who are coming here deliberately for that purpose to acquire citizenship."

Ted Cruz was born in a socialist foreign country where his parents were working. Ted's mother Eleanor Wilson was born in Delaware to American parents. His father Rafael was Cuban-born & did not become a U.S. citizen until 2005. Meanwhile Teddy retained his foreign citizenship until last year, and then only after the Dallas Morning News outted his foreign allegiance to a nation which long threatened U.S. sovereignty and has harbored tens of thousands of enemies of the U.S. Like many a foreign spy, Ted dissembled when confronted with the facts: he claimed to have no idea he was a Canadian citizen. Ted said this week, "We should end granting automatic birthright citizenship to the children of those who are here illegally. That has been my position from the very first day of my running for the Senate." Notably, he told a different story when he was actually running for the Senate. We one-hundred-percent U.S. citizens should not trust this guy. The U.S. has already fought one Revolution to win independence from the British Empire into which Ted was born & maintained citizenship. The very purpose of the Constitutional requirement that the president be a natural-born citizen was to protect the new nation from a return to British (or other foreign) rule. Would President Ted invite another Canadian invasion? Would we soon find ourselves singing "God Save the Queen"? 

Bobby Jindal is a true "anchor baby." Both his parents came legally from India to the U.S. six months before Bobby's birth in Baton Rouge. Obviously, they sneaked into the U.S. with a fiendish plan to endow their child with birthright citizenship. Curious, isn't it, that they chose a part of the country where a lot of people speak a foreign language? Although prestigious American universities invited Jindal to do his post-graduate work here in the U.S., Jindal chose to attend a foreign university which is a font of radical thought. Jindal's wife Supriya is an immigrant from India. Yet Jindal tweeted this week, “We need to end birthright citizenship for illegal immigrants.”

Rick Santorum. His father Aldo immigrated to the U.S. from Italy when he was a child. According to Rick, his paternal grandfather -- also a U.S. immigrant -- was an acquaintance of Adolf Hitler's. Rick has close relatives in Italy who are communists. Real reds! The question is -- is Santorum a communist plant or a fascist? Santorum wants to end birthright citizenship.

Jeb Bush. Jeb! himself is a blueblood American, but his wife Columba was a Mexican who immigrated to the U.S. when she married Jeb! A known smuggler who lied repeatedly to U.S. Customs officials, Columba represents the criminal element of such concern to Republicans. While Bush calls birthright citizenship a constitutionally protected right,' he said this week that we should find a "targeted way" to "solve abuses, of people coming into the country so their children can become citizens."

Donald Trump. His mother immigrated from Scotland. Although Donald claims to be of Swedish descent on his father's side, his paternal grandfather was Friedrich Drumpf, who immigrated from Germany, not Sweden, first to New York City, then to Seattle & then to the Canadian Klondike & finally, via Germany, back to Queens. Two of Donald Trump's wives are natives of communist countries with ties to Russia & the old Soviet Union. Donald Trump says he would "end birthright citizenship" without bothering to amend the Constitution's Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees citizenship to "all persons born or naturalized in the United States."

OR, maybe we could reject these exclusionary candidates & elect a Democrat who welcomes people from around the world & celebrates their contributions to our culture and our economy.

Reader Comments (3)

@Marie: you provide a brilliant rundown of some of the leaders of the Republican field - hypocrites all.
So who does that leave under the category "real American:" Carson, Walker, Huckabee.....Deez Nutz?
On the other hand, were Trump elected, it might be interesting to have a Slovenian born first lady. Although it's really funny that Melania's provenance doesn't seem to be a turnoff for Trump's nativist base. (Maybe they just aren't aware.)

August 22, 2015 | Unregistered CommenterVictoria D.

Gosh, he does look like a Donald Drumpf!

Think of the ads! The billboards! The plane!

August 22, 2015 | Unregistered CommenterMAG

Well done, Marie!

August 22, 2015 | Unregistered CommenterJanice
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