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.” ~~~

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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

Page Links
Saturday
May142011

The Commentariat -- May 15

I've posted an Open Thread on Off Times Square for Sunday, & I've added a couple of my own comments.

** Nicholas Kristof reveals what Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke, who died last December, really thought about American policy in Pakistan & Afghanistan. It's a must-read, especially for the slew of lefties who held low opinions of Holbrooke, a few of whom demanded or asked that I link to anti-Holbrooke essays while his body was still warm. (I didn't.)

Maureen Dowd: "Some of the new fall TV shows will take you back to a time when the only threat women posed was ruining your martini."

Paul Krugman has a longish article in the New York Times Magazine about the two-tiered international economy. "... The biggest danger for the United States ... is ... that we’ll get confused by all the crisscrossing signals in the global economy and end up focusing on the problems we don’t have while ignoring the problems we do... I’m worried that Ben Bernanke may end up being bullied into raising interest rates when he should do no such thing. There will eventually come a day when the Federal Reserve Board should tighten — but that day is years away.... Our economic policy should be concerned with jobs, jobs and jobs."

"For He's an Unpleasant Fellow." Andrew Goldman interviews Larry Summers for the New York Times Magazine. Here's the takeaway. Summers may have made mistakes in the Clinton years but they weren't his fault & Bush would have fucked up anyway. He's probably right about that last part.

John Hightower in the Colorado Springs Independent: Hedge fund billionaire John "Paulson could've worked one single hour in 2010 and hauled off a paycheck equal to what a typical household gets for a lifetime of work. Now guess who gets the lower tax rate.... Thanks to a loophole..., billionaire hedge fund dealers like Paulson escape the usual 35 percent tax rate, instead paying (at most) 15 percent. That's ... immoral. In Washington, Wall Street-backed Congress critters are working fervently to kill Medicare and defund everything from education to environmental protection — all on the grounds that the only way to cope with the growing federal deficit is to bulldoze programs that Americans count on. But ... if just the 25 [biggest hedge fund deals] were taxed at the 35-percent rate, Congress would have an additional $4 billion this year to use for filling the deficit hole, rather than gleefully throwing sick seniors into it."

HUD, Where Your Tax Dollars Go Directly down the Rabbit Hole. Debbie Cenziper & Jonathan Mummolo of the Washington Post: The federal government’s largest housing construction program for the poor has squandered hundreds of millions of dollars on stalled or abandoned projects and routinely failed to crack down on derelict developers or the local housing agencies that funded them. Nationwide, nearly 700 projects awarded $400 million have been idling for years, a Washington Post investigation found. Some have languished for a decade or longer.... The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which oversees the nation’s housing fund, has largely looked the other way: It does not track the pace of construction and often fails to spot defunct deals...." There's a slideshow & link to an interactive map here.

Karen DeYoung & Karin Brulliard of the Washington Post: "Two weeks after the death of Osama bin Laden, the Obama administration remains uncertain and divided over the future of its relationship with Pakistan, according to senior U.S. officials.... Some officials, particularly in the White House, have advocated strong reprisals [against Pakistan], especially if Pakistan continues to refuse access to materials left behind by U.S. commandos who scooped up all the paper and computer drives they could carry during their deadly 40-minute raid on bin Laden’s compound."

Mark Mazzetti & Emily Hager of the New York Times: "... a secret American-led mercenary army [is] being built by Erik Prince, the billionaire founder of Blackwater Worldwide, with $529 million from the" United Arab Emirate. "The force is intended to conduct special operations missions inside and outside the country, defend oil pipelines and skyscrapers from terrorist attacks and put down internal revolts, the documents show. Such troops could be deployed if the Emirates faced unrest or were challenged by pro-democracy demonstrations in its crowded labor camps or democracy protests like those sweeping the Arab world this year."

Edward Cody of the Washington Post: "Whatever its outcome in the courts, IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s arrest seemed likely to change the political landscape in France. The longtime Socialist Party figure and former finance minister has been cited in opinion polls for months as the strongest potential challenger to President Nicolas Sarkozy in presidential elections scheduled a year from now." ...

... This story by Colleen Long of the AP, which includes details of the alleged assault, makes the same point as Cody's story. ...

... NEW. Katrin Bennhold & Liz Alderman of the New York Times: "For months, France has been buzzing with speculation that Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the popular chief of the International Monetary Fund, would quit his job in Washington to take on President Nicolas Sarkozy in next year’s presidential elections. But on Sunday, French politicians and media met news of his arrest in New York for alleged sexual aggression with stunned disbelief and expressions of national humiliation."

David Neiwert of Crooks & Liars weighs in on Mike Obama-Is-an-Indonesian Huckabee's announcement that he won't be running for president & his chat with Donald Obama-Is-a-Kenyan Trump. Wth video I couldn't bring myself to watch. ...

... Ben Smith of Politico: "Mike Huckabee's announcement this evening that he wouldn't run for president -- along with forcing much of the nation's political class to watch his show through for the first time, a kind of mass hostage-taking -- kicks off Republican candidates' efforts to ingratiate themselves to him."

Bill Maher: "You're Not a Christian if ...."

Lawrence O'Donnell talks to Michael Isikoff about "those" bin Laden videos. My favoite bit -- Isikoff says finding pornographic videos among the effects of terrorists is not unusual, and the CIA has been "studying them to find out if the vids contained any hidden message." Yeah, I'll bet the guys (and it's the official position of this Website that they were guys) who were "investigating" the porn videos hated that job:

CW: I missed Adam Nagourney's profile of California Gov. Jerry Brown that appeared in the New York Times Magazine last week, but it's a pretty interesting, easy read.

News Ledes

New York Times: "Israel’s borders erupted in deadly clashes on Sunday as thousands of Palestinians — marching from Syria, Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank — confronted Israeli troops to mark the anniversary of Israel’s creation. More than a dozen people were reported killed and scores injured."

Atlanta Journal Constitution: "First Lady Michelle Obama spoke about community service, helping others and overcoming obstacles when she addressed 550 Spelman College graduates Sunday in College Park." AP story here.

Times-Picayune: "In a historic action designed to minimize the risk of catastrophic flooding in Baton Rouge and New Orleans, the Army Corps of Engineers has begun opening the Morganza Floodway to divert water from the rain-swollen Mississippi River into the Atchafalaya basin." Washington Post story here.

New York Times: "Pakistan stepped up its condemnations of the United States as Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and a longtime emissary to Pakistan in times of crisis, was preparing to land in Islamabad. He was arriving with a list of actions — and some offers from Washington to ease tensions — that he finalized in meetings with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, the national security adviser, Thomas E. Donilon, and other top American security officials."

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