The Ledes

Monday, June 30, 2025

It's summer in our hemisphere, and people across Guns America have nothing to do but shoot other people.

New York Times: “A gunman deliberately started a wildfire in a rugged mountain area of Idaho and then shot at the firefighters who responded, killing two and injuring another on Sunday afternoon in what the local sheriff described as a 'total ambush.' Law enforcement officers exchanged fire with the gunman while the wildfire burned, and officials later found the body of the male suspect on the mountain with a firearm nearby, Sheriff Robert Norris of Kootenai County said at a news conference on Sunday night. The authorities said they believed the suspect had acted alone but did not release any information about his identity or motives.” A KHQ-TV (Spokane) report is here.

New York Times: “The New York City police were investigating a shooting in Manhattan on Sunday night that left two people injured steps from the Stonewall Inn, an icon of the L.G.B.T.Q. rights movement. The shooting occurred outside a nearby building in Greenwich Village at 10:15 p.m., Sgt. Matthew Forsythe of the New York Police Department said. The New York City Pride March had been held in Manhattan earlier on Sunday, and Mayor Eric Adams said on social media that the shooting happened as Pride celebrations were ending. One victim who was shot in the head was in critical condition on Monday morning, a spokeswoman for the Police Department said. A second victim was in stable condition after being shot in the leg, she said. No suspect had been identified. The police said it was unclear if the shooting was connected to the Pride march.”

New York Times: “A dangerous heat wave is gripping large swaths of Europe, driving temperatures far above seasonal norms and prompting widespread health and fire alerts. The extreme heat is forecast to persist into next week, with minimal relief expected overnight. France, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece are among the nations experiencing the most severe conditions, as meteorologists warn that Europe can expect more and hotter heat waves in the future because of climate change.”

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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.

 

Contact Marie

Email Marie at constantweader@gmail.com

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Thursday
Aug042011

The Commentariat -- August 5

** There's no Off Times Square today; because of a software glitch that has yet to be fixed, a significant number of commenters (including significant me) can't post comments. If I post a page later, it will be on Krugman's column. If you want to e-mail me your comments, I'll post them in the order received when I get up & running again. My e-mail address is ConstantWeader@gmail.com (Clicking on the link will bring up an e-mail form.) ...

... Paul Krugman: "It’s now impossible to deny the obvious, which is that we are not now and have never been on the road to recovery." ...

... "The Second Coming of Herbert Hoover":

... Floyd Norris of the New York Times on the Great Recession II: "It has been three decades since the United States suffered a recession that followed on the heels of the previous one. But it could be happening again. The unrelenting negative economic news of the past two weeks has painted a picture of a United States economy that fell further and recovered less than we had thought." ...

... Low-Information, No-Plan Legislators. Ezra Klein: "A dramatic gap has opened between the economy as Washington sees it -- and wants to intervene in it -- and the economy that actually exists.... Where will the recovery come from? The problem is that no one has an answer. And as one hopeful hypothesis after another is dashed, the markets are beginning to panic.... Today there's more stability, but we seem to have stabilized into an era of high unemployment, low growth and endless risk. Rather than recovering from the crisis, it is almost as if we have settled into it."

Nate Silver: "... the economy is struggling, and that’s a gigantic problem for Mr. Obama.... The stock market is among the least of a president’s worries.... The past few weeks have probably been bad for the re-election efforts of almost everyone in Washington, and today won’t have made them better." ...

... Here's something President Obama can worry about: Torey Van Oot of the Sacramento Bee: "The California Democratic Party's Progressive Caucus marked the commander-in-chief's 50th birthday by releasing a resolution that supports exploring a potential primary challenge in 2012 to the first-term Democratic president. The resolution, approved at a caucus meeting last weekend, criticizes Obama for 'negotiating away Democratic Party principles to extremist Republicans,' and cites entitlement cuts on the table in the recent budget negotiations, the extension of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy and 'disregard of his promises to the Labor movement' as some of many grievances the caucus has with Obama's performance so far." The post includes a copy of the full resolution.

** Mark Bittman of the New York Times: from tainted turkey to taxes. Essential reading for our conservative friends.

CW: an academic study confirms & quantifies what I've been saying for years. Steven Greenhouse of the New York Times: "The decline in organized labor’s power and membership has played a larger role in fostering increased wage inequality in the United States than is generally thought, according to a study published in the American Sociological Review this month. The study ... found that the decline in union power and density since 1973 explained a third of the increase in wage inequality among men since then, and a fifth of the increased inequality among women."

Just ten days after President Obama was sworn into office, Tom Brandt -- or his headline writer -- of the Eastern Echo (Ypsilani, Michigan) explained why Republicans would have such a confrontational relationship with Obama:

CW: the other day, Al Sharpton mentioned on-air that the rural airports for which the House bill cut funding were mostly in states with key Democratic Senators. I thought he might be exaggerating. But if you read Dana Milbank you'll see just what John Mica (R-Fla.), chair of the House transportation committee, was up to when he wrote the bill cutting funding. This idiot and his Congressional collaborators cost us taxpayers a billion dollars or so & put 80,000 Americans out of work for two weeks. Mica's real goal, BTW: weakening unions.

Jeremy Scahill of The Nation on "water treatment" at Guantanamo -- a sickening horror story:

Harold Cook, a Texas Democrat writing in the Texas Tribune, sure came up with a lot of reasons Gov. Rick "Perry Shouldn't Run for President."

Right Wing World

CW: some while back an Obama-hating leftie called me out, in print, for asserting that, among other things, Obama would be better than Mitt Romney on gay rights; ergo, it was okay for progressives to vote for the Republican presidential candidate. So there's this from Ben Smith: "Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has joined Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann and former Sen. Pennsylvania Rick Santorum in signing a pledge to oppose same-sex marriage on a number of specific fronts." Read the terms of the pledge & see if you think Obama would sign it. ...

... Mystery Money. Michael Isikoff of NBC News: "Two campaign reform groups are asking the Justice Department to investigate a mysterious $1 million contribution to a political committee backing Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney from an obscure company that shut down shortly after making the donation. The contribution to Restore Our Future, a so-called 'super PAC' formed by three former Romney political aides, drew scrutiny following an NBC News report on Thursday . The firm that gave the money, called W Spann LLC, was formed in March – with no listed officers or directors — made the contribution in April, then dissolved itself in July...."

Like Rep. Steve King (RTP-Iowa), Stephen Colbert is outraged by Obamacare's wanton new policy of providing reproductive health coverage for women:


This is hard to fathom. It came up on TimesWire (see the middle entry):

     ... CW: When I clicked on the link, I got a slightly raunchy "op-ed" with a NYT Web address that belittles Tom Friedman (oh no!). The writer is ID'd as a co-producer of "The Daily Show." Extremely strange.

News Ledes

AP: "With tens of thousands of jobs, more than $1 billion and their reputations on the line, Senate Democrats gave way Friday to a power play by House Republicans in order to end a partial two-week shutdown of the Federal Aviation Administration. With lawmakers scattered for Congress' August recess, the consent of only two senators was required to pass a bill restoring the FAA's operating authority through Sept. 16. President Barack Obama signed it into law hours later."

New York Times: "In a verdict that brought a decisive close to a case that has haunted this city since most of it lay underwater nearly six years ago, five current and former New Orleans police officers were found guilty on all counts by a federal jury on Friday for shooting six citizens, two of whom died, and orchestrating a wide-ranging cover-up in the hours, weeks and years that followed." Read the whole article. Times-Picayune story here. Related videos here.

President Obama spoke about efforts to prepare veterans for the workforce this morning. Reuters: "President Barack Obama on Friday will propose a $120 million package of new tax credits for businesses that hire U.S. veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan...."...

     ... Update: here's a post-event AP report. See video above.

Bloomberg News: "Employers added more jobs than forecast in July, the jobless rate fell and wages climbed, easing concern the U.S. economy is grinding to a halt.Payrolls rose by 117,000 workers after a 46,000 increase in June that was more than originally estimated...."

Al Jazeera: "Syrian troops have killed at least 45 civilians in a tank assault to occupy the centre of Hama, according to an opposition activist, as President Bashar al-Assad seeks to crush a five-month-old uprising against his rule. Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, has said that Washington believes President Bashar al-Assad's government was responsible for more than 2,000 deaths in the crackdown, repeating that Washington believes Assad has 'lost his legitimacy to govern the Syrian people'."

Al Jazeera: "A Libyan rebel spokesman has claimed that a NATO airstrike on the western city of Zlitan has killed Khamis Gaddafi, one of the sons of Libya's leader Muammar Gaddafi."

Al Jazeera: "European markets have plunged on deepening fears regarding a debt crisis in the European Union and concerns about US economic growth. London's FTSE-100, Paris' CAC-40 and Frankfurt's DAX indices all opened down over 3 per cent on Friday.... Earlier, Asian markets also tumbled, after heavy losses in European and US trading through the day on Thursday."

AP: "A jury convicted polygamist sect leader Warren Jeffs of child sexual assault, in a case stemming from two young followers he took as brides in hat his church calls 'spiritual marriages.' ... Jeffs, who acted as his own attorney, stood mostly mute for his closing argument, staring at the floor, for all but a few seconds of the half hour he was allotted."

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