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.

 

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The Commentariat -- May 31, 2014

Internal links removed.

Greg Jaffe & Ed O'Keefe of the Washington Post: "Eric K. Shinseki resigned as secretary of veterans affairs Friday, apologizing for a scandal in which employees throughout the VA's massive hospital system conspired to hide months-long wait times that veterans faced when seeking care. The size and scope of the coverups in an agency that he had presided over for more than five years left Shinseki dumbfounded and President Obama searching for a replacement for one of his longest serving and most trusted Cabinet officials." ...

... David Nakamura of the Washington Post: "Even when President Obama at last decided to fire someone for the scandal at the Veterans Affairs Administration, he made clear it was not his idea. In fact, Obama said, he had to be convinced by the man who was being let go":

... New York Times Editors: "... the department's problem was not Mr. Shinseki. It has been broken for years. No one should expect his removal to be anything but the beginning of a much-needed process of change." ...

... ** Mariah Blake of Mother Jones: "... according to VA inspector general reports and other documents that have gone overlooked in the current firestorm, federal officials knew about the scheme at the heart of the scandal — falsifying VA records to cover up treatment delays -- years before Obama became president. VA officials first learned of the problems in 2005.... White House spokesman Jay Carney says the commander in chief was unaware of these allegations until news of the Phoenix VA scandal hit. But according to a memo obtained by the Washington Times, Obama's transition team briefed him on the issue before he took office." Read the whole article. ...

... Michael Tomasky of the Daily Beast: "... at an earlier job, as Army chief of staff, [Shinseki] was awfully prescient about how bad things were going to get in Iraq if the United States followed the advice of Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz. After Shinseki testified before that war's start that securing Iraq would require several hundred thousand troops to pacify the country, he was subject to a relentless campaign of vilification led by those three and their associates, carried out by the right-wing media.... He may have messed this assignment up, but he still comes out of the wash way ahead of the people who gave us, by choice, all the damaged veterans he was supposed to care for." ...

... Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times: Sloan Gibson, "the man who is temporarily replacing Eric Shinseki as secretary of veterans affairs, is a West Point graduate, a onetime banker and a former chief executive of the United Service Organizations (known to most Americans as the U.S.O.) who joined the Department of Veterans Affairs just three months ago." ...

... ** David Fahrenthold of the Washington Post: The VA has been crooked from the git-go. "For decades, the VA was a byword for bureaucracy itself, seen as Washington's ultimate paper-pushing, mind-bending hierarchy. That reputation was rooted in the VA's history: It came about because the agency's first leader was an audacious crook." ...

... Paul Steinhauser of CNN: "Minutes after Obama delivered the news, Republicans made it clear that Shinseki's departure doesn't bring an end to this controversy, and shifted their attention from the outgoing VA secretary to the President." ...

... MEANWHILE, on Fox "News." Steve M. has the answer: "Old Fox Line: Shinseki must go! New Fox Line: Yeah, he resigned -- so what?

David Nakamura: "President Obama announced Friday that Jay Carney will step down as White House press secretary after more than three years and be replaced by his deputy Josh Earnest, who worked on the Obama campaign in 2008":

Matthew McKnight of the New Yorker: "On this week's Political Scene podcast, David Remnick and Ryan Lizza join host Amelia Lester to discuss President Obama's speech at West Point and criticisms of his foreign policy":

Would Boehner Drink Drano? Jonathan Chait on the GOP talking point "I am not a scientist": "Very few of us are scientists, which is exactly why we tend to defer to scientific judgment. It might make sense to question expert consensus in a field where you are an expert, but if you know very little about it, you probably want to just go along with what the experts think. Scientists do, in fact, have a nearly unanimous view of anthropogenic global warming.... 'I'm not a scientist' allows Republicans to avoid conceding the legitimacy of climate science while also avoiding the political downside of openly branding themselves as haters of science. The beauty of the line is that it implicitly concedes that scientists possess real expertise, while simultaneously allowing you to ignore that expertise altogether."

Igor Volsky of Think Progress: "Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) has joined Mitch McConnell in suggesting that Kentucky could maintain its Obamacare exchange if health care reform is repealed, saying that he's 'not sure' if the new marketplace (Kynect) should be unraveled. Paul's comments come as a growing number of Republicans aim to repackage the key tenets of President Obama's health care law as unique state solutions, designed and built by state officials far away from Washington D.C."

New Yorker: "On this week’s Out Loud podcast, [New Yorker staffer Ken] Auletta joins Nicholas Thompson, the editor of newyorker.com, to discuss the strategies he used to report the story" of New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson's firing.

2014 Elections

Gail Collins on the Texas & Mississippi GOP primaries.

Quack, Quack. Jim Newell of Salon has a sneaking suspicion of why RNC chair Reince Priebus can't convince Americans that the Republican party is "the party of equality."

Presidential Election

Elias Isquith of Salon: Chris Christie will not be president; he can't even manage New Jersey.

Marie's Sports Report

When $2BB Is Not Enough. Tim Stelloh of NBC Sports: "After being forced to relinquish control of the Los Angeles Clippers, embattled owner Donald Sterling filed a lawsuit Friday seeking $1 billion in damages from the NBA. The complaint, which was filed in federal district court in California, assailed league commissioner Adam Silver." ...

... Brent Schrotenboer of USA Today: "Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling does not have the authority to stop a $2 billion sale of his team because he has been determined to be mentally unfit to make decisions related to the family trust, a person familiar with the situation told USA TODAY Sports."

Travis Waldron of Think Progress: "As challenges against the name of the Washington Redskins have persisted for more than four decades, the teams ownership and management has held on to a consistent story: that the team changed its original name -- the Boston Braves -- to the Boston Redskins in 1933 to honor its coach, William 'Lone Star' Dietz, who maintained at the time that he was a member of the Sioux tribe. But in a 1933 interview with the Associated Press, George Preston Marshall, the team's owner and original founder, admitted that the story wasn't true." ...

... Travis Waldron: "The Washington Redskins ... started a Twitter campaign to rally support Thursday afternoon" for keeping a racial slur as their name. "No one, other than perhaps the people running the team's communications effort, thought this was going to go well." Waldron reproduces some Twitter responses.

News Ledes

ew York Times: "An American who blew himself up in an attack in Syria on Sunday has been identified by law enforcement officials as Moner Mohammad Abusalha, a man in his early 20s who grew up in [Vero Beach,] Florida and traveled to Syria late last year."

AP: "A friend of the brothers suspected of bombing the Boston Marathon was accused Friday of obstructing the investigation into the deadly attack by deleting information from his computer and lying to investigators. The friend, Khairullozhon Matanov, 23, of Quincy, was arrested at his apartment.... About 40 minutes after the bombs went off, Matanov called Tamerlan Tsarnaev and invited him to dinner, the indictment said, and all three of them dined together at a restaurant that night."

Guardian: "Google has launched a webpage where European citizens can request that links to information about them be taken off search results, the first step to comply with a court ruling affirming the 'right to be forgotten'."

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Reader Comments (3)

CW thanks for the link to Jim Newell over on Salon re the Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans. Wholeheartedly agree with his conclusion:

"That’s the worst list of speakers I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been to many CPACs. You know it’s bad when the closest thing to gravitas is Newt Gingrich."

Yeah! do take a look at that list! It's so laughable, you'd almost think it was made up by the opposition!

May 31, 2014 | Unregistered CommenterMAG

Even Phil Robertson thought the Repugs were desperate if they asked him to speak.

May 31, 2014 | Unregistered CommenterBarbarossa

Re Washington Redskins. I kinda liked one commentor's suggestion: "The name's okay, just change the mascot to a potato."

Seriously, though, people have been bitching about that name/mascot for 50 years that I know of, and probably longer. Which makes me doubt I'll live to see it change.

May 31, 2014 | Unregistered CommenterJames Singer
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