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.

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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.

Marie: Sorry, my countdown clock was unreliable; then it became completely unreliable. I can't keep up with it. Maybe I'll try another one later.

 

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.

 

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Friday
Jan212011

Guns and Good Manners

The Times moderators have held back my comments on Gail Collins' & Charles Blow's columns. So here they are:

Gail Collins: "Congress really has been looking a little more civil. Not quite Athens in the age of Pericles, but it’s very possible that this year we’ll get through the State of the Union address without anybody jumping up to scream insults at the president."

The Constant Weader's reply:

The trouble with all this civility is that it masks the reality of what Republicans are hiding behind their new good manners offensive. The House Republican Study Committee, which includes something like two-thirds of the Republican members, has rolled out a plan to cut back spending by $2.5 trillion over the next ten years. Having given a massive tax break to millionaires & billionaires, the newly-civilized ladies & gentlemen now propose that the rest of us sacrifice. Of the Study Group's proposal, Steve Benen says, "if lawmakers were to get together to plot how Congress could deliberately increase unemployment, their plan would look an awful lot like this one."

Jobs for Americans evidently aren't a component of the new civility. When asked about jobs, Speaker Boehner told reporters that the Congress had other priorities: "a ban on taxpayer funding of abortions across all federal programs," he asserted, "is one of our highest legislative priorities." Well, he said it politely.

Besides cutting thousands of public jobs, the House has some other great cost-cutting ideas: "eliminate or decimate: the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Title X birth control and family planning, AmeriCorps, the Energy Star program and work on fuel efficient cars, and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change." [Dana Milbank] If all this sounds vaguely familiar to you, it's because you heard it back in 1995, when the decidedly uncivil Newt Gingrich became Speaker. It's the Contract on America, dusted off &, now, thanks to that cost-saving paperless policy, slapped up online.

Oh, there's more that has got to go -– Amtrak subsidies, food safety inspections, mine safety inspections, fair wages on government contracts. Sissy stuff, favored by East Coast elites.

Of course, repealing the Affordable Care Act -– the House's big legislative "accomplishment" of the week -- is about as uncivil as a Congress member can get. Depriving millions of Americans of an opportunity to obtain affordable medical care – while refusing to give up their own government healthcare plans, of course – is an act of gross incivility no matter how nicely you say it. I’ll take "You lie!" over "You die!" *


As for comparing Republican talking points to Nazi propaganda -– that's just stupid. The House Republican plan stands on its own as a low water mark for legislative depravity. Ad hominem comparisons are superfluous.

So. A good start? People in power can do a lot to unravel civil society even while they maintain courtly demeanors. That's what House Republicans are doing now. In my view, their sadistic actions are all the more vicious when they carry them out with smiles on their faces.


* See the link to the post by Jim White of Firedoglake above. It looks as if Congressman Wilson has figured out a way to combine "You lie!" and "You die!"


Charles Blow: "Pre-presidency, Obama had been a strong supporter of gun-control initiatives. Since then, however, he has remained curiously quiet on the issue in general and following the Tucson shooting in particular. The question now is: which Obama will show up at the State of the Union?"

The Constant Weader sez:


When even Dick Cheney of quail-hunting fame came out in support of semi-automatic gun control this week, how much courage does it take for a Democratic President to do the same? Whether he says it in the State of the Union address or in some other venue, President Obama must get behind an assault weapons ban during this first semester of the new Congress, while there is a still a public will to reinstitute the law. To do less would be a gross disservice to the nation.

As Nicholas Kristof said last week, gun control is a health issue. Arguably, more people are dying for want of gun control than are dying for lack of health insurance. President Obama should not be sending his wife out in praise of Wal-Mart, which has promised to phase more healthful foods into its product line, if he is going to allow some of those new healthy eaters to be mowed down by assault weapons.

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