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.

Link Code:   <a href="URL">text</a>

OR here's a link generator. The one I had posted died, then Akhilleus found one, but it too bit the dust. He found yet another, which I've linked here, and as of September 23, 2024, it's working.

OR you can always just block, copy and paste to your comment the URL (Web address) of the page you want to link.

Note for Readers. It is not possible for commenters to "throw" their highlighted links to another window. But you can do that yourself. Right-click on the link and a drop-down box will give you choices as to where you want to open the link: in a new tab, new window or new private window.

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

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Monday
Apr252011

The Commentariat -- April 26

The comments page for David Brooks is up on Off Times Square. Karen Garcia & I have posted our comments -- hours before you'll see them (if ever) on the New York Times site. Post your own. Update: Garcia & I have made the NYT cut, but Akhilleus, who now has posted on Off Times Square, has not.

My favorite definition of a humanist: 'One who strives to behave decently and honorably with no expectation of eternal rewards or punishments.' -- David Clark, commenting on Off Times Square on Ross Douthat's column

The Guantánamo Files page in the Guardian provides a pretty handy way to review the newly-released WikiLeaks documents. ...

... New York Times Editors: "The internal documents from the prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, published in The Times on Monday were a chilling reminder of the legal and moral disaster that President George W. Bush created there. They describe the chaos, lawlessness and incompetence in his administration’s system for deciding detainees’ guilt or innocence and assessing whether they would be a threat if released." ...

... Scott Shane & Benjamin Weiser of the New York Times: "The newly revealed assessments ... have revived the dispute, nearly as old as the prison, over whether mistreatment of some prisoners there and the prison’s operation outside the criminal justice system invalidate the government’s conclusions about the detainees. Hina Shamsi, director of the national security project at the American Civil Liberties Union, said the assessments 'are rife with uncorroborated evidence, information obtained through torture, speculation, errors and allegations that have been proven false.'"

... Richard Serrano of the Los Angeles Times: "Fresh and often chilling portraits of [Khalid Shaikh] Mohammed and the other most-prized 'high value' detainees at Guantanamo emerged from the latest release of classified material by WikiLeaks...." ...

... Glenn Greenwald: "How could anyone possibly justify prosecuting WikiLeaks for disseminating classified information while not prosecuting these newspapers who have done exactly the same thing?" Greenwald goes on to contrast U.S. (New York Times & Washington Post) coverage with British stories on the files. Link to the Guardian stories Greenwald highlights here. ...

... Yesterday, I linked this WashPo article on why President Obama failed to close Gitmo. Marcy Wheeler zeroes in on the important take-aways from the Post's reporting.

A friend sent me this video on how to deal with a racist someone who makes a racist remark:

What the Ryan/Republican budget plan really means:

By Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Thanks to A. Friend for sending it my way.

Like the odds of typing monkeys eventually keying in the complete works of Shakespeare, there's a chance Donald Trump will get something right. He just did:

The seniors are afraid. The plan Paul Ryan put forth has made the Democrats so happy. -- Donald Trump 

Michael Fletcher of the Washington Post: "The state funds that pay pension and health-care benefits to retired teachers, corrections officers and millions of other public workers faced a cumulative shortfall of at least $1.26 trillion at the end of fiscal 2009, according to a new report. The study, to be released Tuesday by the Pew Center on the States, found that the pension and health-care funding gap increased by 26 percent over the previous year. Pew officials said the growing shortfall was driven by inadequate state contributions, an aging population and market losses that accompanied the recession." ...

... Michael Cooper & Mary Williams Walsh of the New York Times: "Conventional wisdom and the laws and constitutions of many states have long held that the pensions being earned by current government workers are untouchable. But as the fiscal crisis has lingered, officials in strapped states from California to Illinois have begun to take a second look, to see whether there might be loopholes allowing them to cut the pension benefits of current employees." ...

... Paul Krugman debunks the "zombie" claim that "there has been a huge expansion in the federal government under Obama.... What we’re seeing isn’t some drastic expansion of Big Government; we’re seeing the government we already had, responding to a terrible economic slump."

Steve Mufson & Jon Cohen of the Washington Post: "The Post-ABC poll shows that 60 percent of independents who say they’ve been hit hard by surging gas prices also say they definitely won’t support Obama in his bid for reelection. In a hypothetical matchup with former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, the top GOP performer in the Post-ABC poll, Romney wins by 24 points among the independents who have taken a severe financial hit because of gas prices, and the president is up 7 percentage points among other independents.

Andrew Cohen of The Atlantic: "Former Solicitor General Paul Clement took quite the parting shot at his former Washington law firm Monday when he announced that he would leave King & Spalding so that he could continue to represent House Republicans in their effort to defend the Defense of Marriage Act." Read Cohen's whole post.

Nate Silver "on the largely irrelevant news about Haley Barbour not running for President." CW: an interesting post in which Silver explains why Barbour appears to be shrewder than the Serious People. ...

... Karen Garcia is not joining the Obama campaign. Here's the video that Garcia found so unconvincing. It's a snoozer:

Fox "News" Shocker! President Obama Didn't Tell You Sunday Was Easter. Steve Benen: "Fox News today slammed President Obama for not issuing a proclamation acknowledging Easter. (Somehow, Christians managed to hear about the holiday anyway.) Conservative activists quickly followed suit.... It's a garbage story, even by the standards of GOP media.... President Obama hosted an Easter prayer breakfast; the Obamas attended Easter services; and the White House hosted a big Easter Egg Roll for families today. No proclamation was issued, but no other modern presidents -- from either party -- have issued Easter proclamations, either."

After auditing the Obamas' tax return, Stephen Colbert assesses the Republican field of presidential candidates, with emphasis on the Donald:

... Hooray! More Conspiracy Theories from the Donald. Beth Fouhy of the AP: "... Donald Trump suggested in an interview Monday that President Barack Obama had been a poor student who did not deserve to be admitted to the Ivy League universities he attended. Trump ... offered no proof for his claim but said he would continue to press the matter as he has the legitimacy of the president's birth certificate. 'I heard he was a terrible student, terrible. How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard?' Trump said in an interview with The Associated Press. "I'm thinking about it, I'm certainly looking into it. Let him show his records." ...

... PLUS ... CNN: Trump claims Barack Obama's birth certificate is "missing." Too bad that "CNN's Gary Tuchman also interviewed the former director of the Hawaii Department of Health, who said she has seen the original birth certificate in the vault at the Department of Health." ...

... AND ... Fox "News": "Donald Trump slammed Robert De Niro Monday, following the Oscar-winner’s criticisms of him this weekend, telling Fox News that the actor is 'not the brightest bulb on the planet.'"

Jonathan Chait of The New Republic. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker makes a gross misstatement about Medicaid, which he wants to dismantle. CW: It's always hard to know when Walker is out-and-out lying and when he just doesn't know WTF he's talking about.

* Where facts never intrude.

News Ledes

Politico: "The Justice Department has dropped its long-running criminal investigation of a lawyer who publicly admitted leaking information about President George W. Bush’s top-secret warrantless wiretapping program to The New York Times – disclosures that Bush denounced as a breach of national security and that stoked a congressional debate about whether the government had overstepped its authority.... The decision not to prosecute former Justice Department lawyer Thomas Tamm means it is unlikely that anyone will ever be charged for the disclosures that led to the Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning story in December 2005...." Update: the New York Times story is here.

New York Times: "Federal investigators said Monday that they had discovered flaws in the riveting of the roof of the Southwest Airlines plane that tore open in flight on April 1, a finding that experts said probably showed manufacturing defects.

Still Playing Chicken. Politico: "Speaker John Boehner won’t guarantee a vote on raising the debt limit, the latest threat in an increasingly high stakes game of chicken with the White House over whether Congress will inch closer to letting the nation default on its credit."

AP: "A recall effort targeting two Democratic state senators has fallen short at the deadline. Organizers had until Monday afternoon to turn in petitions to recall Sen. Lena Taylor of Milwaukee and Sen. Fred Risser of Madison. But the organizers failed to meet the deadline."

AP: "Gunfire reverberated Tuesday in the southern Syrian city of Daraa where the dead still lay unclaimed in the streets a day after a brutal government crackdown on the popular revolt against President Bashar Assad, residents said." ...

... Al Jazeera Update: "As the Syrian government intensifies its crackdown against pro-democracy protesters, the international community steps up its pressure on president Bashar al-Assad to stop the bloodletting. In a session on Tuesday, members of the UN Security Council discussed the uptick in violence, but failed to issue a collective statement. Still, Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, condemned the violence against 'peaceful protesters' and called on the Syrian government to respect the people's rights to freedom of expression."

New York Times: "The Ford Motor Company reported on Tuesday its largest first-quarter profit since 1998, despite a shift in sales to smaller, more fuel-efficient cars."

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