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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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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Friday
Jun272014

The Commentariat -- June 28, 2014

Internal links removed; obsolete audio removed.

Jim Kuhnhenn of the AP: "In a scathing appraisal, a review ordered by President Barack Obama of the troubled Veterans Affairs health care system concludes that medical care for veterans is beset by 'significant and chronic system failures,' substantially verifying problems raised by whistleblowers and internal and congressional investigators. A summary of the review by deputy White House chief of staff Rob Nabors says the Veterans Health Administration must be restructured and that a 'corrosive culture' has hurt morale and affected the timeliness of health care." The New York Times story, by Michael Shear & Richard Oppel, is here. The summary report is here.

... this decision came from people who work in a building where the protesters aren't allowed within 250 feet of the front door. -- Gail Collins, on the Supreme Court's unanimous decision that buffer zones around abortion clinics create an unconstitutional infringement of the First Amendment right to free speech

Scott LeMieux has an excellent rebuttal in the Guardian to Justice Scalia's claims that the Constitution "unambiguously" forbids the President to make intrasession recess appointments. He elaborates in Lawyers, Guns & Money. ...

... Jeff Toobin demonstrates that both Scalia's dissent/concurrence & Breyer's majority opinion are pretty stupid. ...

... CW: So why don't the Supremes expect the Senate to do its job? The Constitution reads, "... he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States...." While it's true this clause appears in the presidential powers section, doesn't it also imply that the Senate has a duty to advise? To me the authors of the Constitution imply by this arrangement that (a) these appointed officers are so important that one person -- the president -- should not have the soul discretion to choose them; so (b) the Senate must consent or deny the appointment -- because these officers are so important to the functioning of the government. That is, if they're so important, they need to be in place. Putting holds on nominations, tying them up in committee, just failing to bring them to the floor, etc., represents an unconstitutional dereliction of duty. ...

** Massive, Multi-$$Billion Big Brother Op Does Practically Nothing. Spencer Ackerman of the Guardian: "The National Security Agency was interested in the phone data of fewer than 250 people believed to be in the United States in 2013, despite collecting the phone records of nearly every American. As acknowledged in the NSA's first-ever disclosure of statistics about how it uses its broad surveillance authorities, released Friday, the NSA performed queries of its massive phone records troves for 248 'known or presumed US persons' in 2013." CW: How intrusive is that? I think your Fourth-Amendment rights are safe with the NSA. Of course it's hardly impossible that the NSA is notbeing transparent & are listening in on your phone conversation now, plotting your undoing &/or laughing at your personal foibles.

Greg Sargent: "Republicans have ... opted to be the party of maximum deportations. Now Democrats and advocates will increase the pressure on Obama to do something ambitious to ease deportations in any way he can. Whatever he does end up doing will almost certainly fall well short of what they want. But determining the true limits on what can be done to mitigate this crisis is now on him." ...

... Here's the Politico story, by Seung Min Kim & Carrie Brown, to which Sargent refers. "The best chance in three decades to rewrite immigration laws has slipped away just one year after the Senate garnered 68 votes for sweeping reform of the system, 20 months after strong Hispanic turnout for Democrats in the 2012 election sparked a GOP panic, and five years after Obama promised to act.... Reformers underestimated how impervious most House Republicans would be to persuasion from evangelicals, law enforcement and big business, and how the GOP's animus toward Obama over health care and executive actions would bleed into immigration reform." ...

... Worse Than Mitt. Ed Kilgore: "You may recall that the whole push within the Republican Party to do something on immigration was impelled by fears that Mitt Romney's 'self-deportation' position had fatally damaged the GOP's standing among Latinos. I'd say becoming the party of forced deportation by government is worse." ...

... Kevin Drum of Mother Jones: "For years, [President Obama] followed a strategy of beefing up enforcement in hopes of gaining goodwill among conservatives. In the end, all that accomplished was to anger his own Hispanic supporters without producing anything of substance." ...

... CW: I do think it possible that elected Republicans would have behaved just as badly toward Obama if he were as white as the driven snow, but I just can't help seeing the connection between the GOP's rejection of all of Obama's conservative-friendly outreach efforts over the years & Thad Cochran's refusal to sponsor voting rights reform (see Greg Sargent's reporting linked below). These ole boys feel no need to reciprocate any favors from black people because they have no respect for people who aren't the same color they are. They genuinely believe they're not racists because as far as they're concerned, having people of color kowtow to them is the natural order of things, not a racist POV. Pigs.

Laurie Goodstein of the New York Times: "The Vatican has defrocked its former ambassador to the Dominican Republic, an archbishop from Poland who was accused of sexually abusing boys while he served as the pope's representative in the Caribbean nation. The former archbishop, Jozef Wesolowski, 65, is the first papal nuncio known to have been removed from the priesthood because of accusations of child sexual abuse."

Congressional Races

Colleen Jenkins of Reuters: "The Tea Party-backed candidate who has refused to concede defeat to Republican U.S. Senator Thad Cochran in Mississippi's primary runoff said his campaign has found more than 1,000 instances of ballots cast by people who were ineligible to vote. Chris McDaniel said his supporters continue to look for evidence of voters who participated in the state's Democratic primary on June 3 and then voted in the Republican runoff primary on Tuesday, which would not be permitted by Mississippi law." ...

Josh Marshall of TPM: By his own definition & legal theory of "voter fraud," Chris McDaniel himself is one of the few Mississippi voters who openly committed voter fraud under a (probably unenforceable) provision of state law. Marshall admits, "Yes, the whole thing is sort of a reductio ad adsurdum down the rabbit hole of Chris McDaniels' world of derp. But this is his theory. And the theory seems to fit him way better than it fits the voters whose votes he wants to invalidate." CW: Read the whole post to get the gist of the legal/theoretical argument. ...

... Jimmie Gates of the Jackson, Mississippi, Clarion-Ledger: "Attorney Mark Mayfield was found dead of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound Friday at his Ridgeland home. Mayfield, vice chairman of the Mississippi Tea Party, and is one of the three men charged with conspiring with Clayton Kelly to photograph U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran's bedridden wife in her nursing home and create a political video against Cochran.... Mayfield of Ridgeland, an attorney and state and local tea party leader, was arrested last month along with Richard Sager, a Laurel elementary school P.E. teacher and high school soccer coach. Police said they also charged John Beachman Mary of Hattiesburg, but he was not taken into custody because of 'extensive medical conditions.' All face felony conspiracy charges." The New York Times story, by Jonathan Weisman, is here. ...

... James Hohmann of Politico: "State Sen. Chris McDaniel's policy director lashed out at the GOP establishment Friday over the apparent suicide of a supporter charged with felony conspiracy related to pictures taken of Sen. Thad Cochran's wife. 'A good man is gone today [because] of a campaign to destroy lives,' Keith Plunkett, a Mississippi GOP operative, tweeted. 'To all "so called" Republican leaders who joined lockstep: I WILL NOT REST!' Plunkett deleted the post after others on Twitter responded negatively and accused him of using a tragedy for political gain." ...

... Thad Cochran to black Mississippi voters who made his primary win possible: Thanks, suckahs. P.S. I'm not supporting a fix to the Voting Rights Act. CW: Those Southern white politicians are all class acts, aren't they?

So you think Chris McDaniel is a doofus for challenging black voters who voted in a "white primary"? Well, here's a sore loser to beat all:

... Courtney Francisco of KFOR Oklahoma City: "An Oklahoma congressional candidate has announced he plans to contest Tuesday's primary election of long time Rep. Frank Lucas. In a bizarre letter obtained by NewsChannel 4, Tim Murray says ... 'it is widely known Rep. Frank D. Lucas is no longer alive and has been displayed by a look alike.' ... His campaign website goes into detail about his theory that Lucas was hanged '... executed by the world court on or about jan. 11, 2011...' in Ukraine." Via Sam Levine of the Huffington Post. ...

... Charles Pierce quotes at length from what he calls Murray's "completely awesome Website." Something about Starship & President Ford & tiny body doubles in Space (with a capital "S." CW: Okay, so the guy is a completely insane conspiracy theorist. That doesn't make him much different from much of the GOP base. I'm surprised he only got 5.2 percent of the vote, and not just because he was running against a body double (or two).

Gail Collins: Colorado GOP Senate candidate Cory Gardner has had a change of heart about personhood: "Gardner had supported the unsuccessful personhood referendums in Colorado when he was a state representative. Then he went to Congress in 2010, and twice co-sponsored Life Begins at Conception bills there. Then he announced he was running for the Senate against Mark Udall. Then he announced that he had changed his position on personhood entirely.... Supporters said it was unfair to presume that his change of heart was inspired by the need to run a statewide race in a state that had twice rejected the idea by 3 to 1 majorities."

News Ledes

Reuters: "A U.N. expert panel has concluded that a shipment of rockets and other weapons that was seized by Israel came from Iran and represents a violation of the U.N. arms embargo on Tehran, according to a confidential report obtained by Reuters on Friday. The finding comes just days ahead of the next round of negotiations in Vienna between Iran and six world powers.... Despite Israel's public statements that the seized arms were destined for Gaza -- an allegation that Gaza's governing Islamist militant group Hamas dismissed as a fabrication -- the experts said the weapons were being sent to Sudan."

AP: "The US has confirmed it is flying armed drones over Baghdad to protect US troops who recently arrived to assess Iraq's deteriorating security. The military for more than a week has been flying manned and unmanned aircraft over Iraq, averaging a few dozen sorties daily for reconnaissance, according to the Pentagon."

New York Times: "In one of the most significant coordinated assaults on the government in years, the Taliban have attacked police outposts and government facilities across several districts in northern Helmand Province, sending police and military officials scrambling to shore up defenses and heralding a troubling new chapter as coalition forces prepare to depart." ...

     ... AFP Update: "Afghan security forces on Saturday claimed victory against a Taliban offensive in the country's volatile Helmand province after days of fighting seen as a test for the country's security forces as NATO-led troops pull out."

Comments Off

Reader Comments (3)

I thought this was relatively important, and will no doubt waste Supreme Court time next year.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/23/nyregion/judge-upholds-policy-barring-unvaccinated-students-during-illnesses.html

June 27, 2014 | Unregistered CommenterJames Singer

No tricky colorization or Photoshopping going on here. Interesting to undercover 'living color' scenes from the grayscale era of WWI: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/06/are-there-really-color-photos-of-world-war-i.html

June 28, 2014 | Unregistered CommenterMAG

http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2014/06/04/obama_doctrine_don_t_do_stupid_s_t_new_york_times_replaces_with_stuff_in.html

I didn't know the Obama Doctrine is "Don't Do Stupid Shit!"

Too bad the Bush 43 crowd didn't follow a like philosophy.

June 28, 2014 | Unregistered CommenterBarbarossa
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