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.

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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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Sunday
Nov062011

The Commentariat -- November 7

Zaid Jilani of Think Progress has posted a video of Oakland police shooting a protester with a rubber bullet as he filmed them on November 3. It is astonishing video. You can hear the filmmaker asking police, "Is this okay?" He is clearly standing behind some demarcated line, as are all the other protesters. This guy is doing nothing except videotaping the line of police who are standing some 50 feet away from the protesters. Unless something occurred outside of camera range, there appears to be absolutely no provocation for the shooting. None:

Alec MacGillis of The New Republic, in the Washington Post: Occupy Wall Street "needs some new destinations.... Here ... are other culprits in need of occupation":

Bill Clinton, for lowering the capital gains tax after Reagan raised it.
Harvard, for tuition bloat.
Wal-Mart, for union-busting.
Towers Watson, the biggest corporate compensation consultants.
Tysons Corner, home to thousands of government contractors.

Hope Yen of the AP: "The wealth gap between younger and older Americans has stretched to the widest on record, worsened by a prolonged economic downturn that has wiped out job opportunities for young adults and saddled them with housing and college debt. The typical U.S. household headed by a person age 65 or older has a net worth 47 times greater than a household headed by someone under 35, according to an analysis of census data released Monday. While people typically accumulate assets as they age, this wealth gap is now more than double what it was in 2005 and nearly five times the 10-to-1 disparity a quarter-century ago, after adjusting for inflation." CW: let's see how fast Republicans can get to the mic to tout this stunning disparity as an excuse to cut Medicare & Social Security.

The central paradox of financial crises is that what feels just and fair is the opposite of what’s required for a just and fair outcome. -- Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner ...

Translation: You Occupy Wall Street naifs don't understand that saving Wall Street at your expense was good for you. 

Fact: There’s a very popular conception out there that the bailout was done with a tremendous amount of firepower and focus on saving the largest Wall Street institutions but with very little regard for Main Street. That’s actually a very accurate description of what happened. -- Neil Barofsky, former TARP watchdog

Comment: I suspect that negotiations between [New York Times reporter David] Leonhardt and Treasury were required before Geithner’s quote became on-the-record. Which does make me wonder what they thought that they were saying here. -- Felix Salmon

"An Inconvenient Fact." Zachary Goldfarb of the Washington Post: "During Obama’s tenure, Wall Street has roared back, even as the broader economy has struggled.... Behind this turnaround ... are government policies that helped the financial sector avert collapse and then gave financial firms huge benefits.... For example, the federal government invested hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars in banks — low-cost money that the firms used for high-yielding investments on which they made big profits.... Neither the Bush administration nor the Obama administration, for instance, compelled banks to increase lending to consumers...."

... In Defense of Sunlight. Paul Krugman: "... a large part of our political class, including essentially the entire G.O.P., is deeply invested in an energy sector dominated by fossil fuels, and actively hostile to alternatives. This political class will do everything it can to ensure subsidies for the extraction and use of fossil fuels, directly with taxpayers’ money and indirectly by letting the industry off the hook for environmental costs, while ridiculing technologies like solar.... Nothing you hear from these people is true. Fracking is not a dream come true; solar is now cost-effective. Here comes the sun, if we’re willing to let it in." Musical accompaniment suggested by the author:

How Money Corrupts Washington. Lesley Stahl interviews Jack Abramoff:

      ... CBS News has some Web extras here.

... Ironically, Canadian Prof. Gil Troy, writing in the New York Times, says the U.S. has a swell presidential election process. He argues, among other points, that "Considering that Procter & Gamble spent $8.7 billion in 2008 peddling detergents and razors, spending $4.3 billion for the 2008 campaign appears a reasonable price to pay for democracy." Good grief!

Military Math, by Mike Fiore: (Via Susie Madrak of Crook & Liars. Read her post, too: "... Democrats are compulsively cooperative with their oppressors.")

Sadly, Krugman finds it necessary to explain to wingnuts what "hypocrisy" means. In case you know some wingnuts, you might recommend this post to them. ...

... Hypocrisy, Part 2, from Krugman. See also yesterday's Commentariat for the backstory on family man Joe Walsh. ...

... In the first blogpost above, Krugman mentions a 2000 review by Michael Lind of the Mel Gibson film The Patriot. Lind's thesis is that the film depicts a "hero" who is by no means a patriot; in fact, the Gibson character rejects patriotism for "amoral familism." The review is well-worth reading. CW: And, yes, Mel Gibson is a flaming A. Always was, always will be.

Justin Elliott of Salon on the broader implications of tomorrow's vote on public employee collective bargaining in Ohio.

Photo via Esquire.Charles Pierce of Esquire: "Over the weekend, some 12,000 people surrounded the White House as part of the ongoing protest against approval of the proposed XL Keystone pipeline, the engineering experiment that is supposed to bring the products of tar sands in Alberta all the way to Texas, while passing through the Ogallala Aquifer along the way.... A president already laboring under the widespread notion among his supporters that he's too ready to settle for half-a-loaf, and among his detractors that he's dilatory and uncertain, can't exactly ignore 12,000 people outside his house. He should make the call, stand behind it, and tell the country that's what presidents do."

"Reefer Madness." Ethan Nadelmann, director of the Drug Policy Alliance, in a New York Times op-ed, urges President Obama to reassert himself into federal policy on enforcement of marijuana laws. Obama ran for election on a promise of not using the DOJ to override state laws allowing medical marijuana use, but federal agencies, including the DOJ, are doing just that.

"The Big Lie." Barry Ritholtz in the Washington Post: "A Big Lie is so colossal that no one would believe that someone could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. There are many examples: Claims that Earth is not warming, or that evolution is not the best thesis we have for how humans developed.... Wall Street has its own version: Its Big Lie is that banks and investment houses are merely victims of the crash. You see, the entire boom and bust was caused by misguided government policies. It was not irresponsible lending or derivative or excess leverage or misguided compensation packages, but rather long-standing housing policies that were at fault. Indeed, the arguments these folks make fail to withstand even casual scrutiny.... The Big Lie made a surprise appearance Tuesday when New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg ... stunned observers by exonerating Wall Street: 'It was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis. It was, plain and simple, Congress who forced everybody to go and give mortgages to people who were on the cusp.'” Ritholtz has a useful list of factors that actually cause the crash.

Carol Williams of the Los Angeles Times: "The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday will take up [a] hot-button 4th Amendment issue: whether GPS surveillance without a warrant constitutes an unreasonable search. The case, United States vs. Jones, will decide the law on GPS tracking across the country.... Court rulings since [Katz v. United States, which the Supreme Court decided in 1965] have significantly limited what people can expect to keep private. This shift has accelerated as new technologies — including smartphones and GPS — have emerged."

"They Might Be Terrorists (So Let's Blow Them Up)." -- CIA. Glenn Greenwald on U.S. drone attacks on unknown people.

Alex Rodriguez & Martin Magnier of the Los Angeles Times: "In cautious increments, nuclear archrivals Pakistan and India have been easing the pall of tension that has overshadowed the two nations in recent years.... The latest move toward rapprochement came last week, when the Pakistani Cabinet announced it would normalize trade relations with India by granting its longtime foe 'most favored nation' status."

Right Wing World

The Week That Was. David Remnick of the New Yorker: "A chronicler could profit richly from reviewing the week just experienced by those ambitious members of the Republican Party who have put themselves forward as candidates to revive a fallen nation and lead the march down Nostalgia Avenue and up to the City on a Hill.... The spectacle of the Republican field is a reflection of the hollowness in the G.O.P. itself."

Why Speaker John Boehner Is Not a "Servant of the Rich": That’s very unfair. Listen, I come from a family of 12. My dad owned a bar. I’ve got brothers and sisters on every rung of the economic ladder. -- John Boehner ...

... Translation: I cannot be a servant of the rich because I used to be poor and some of my relatives are still poor. ...

... Analysis: Non sequitur def: "an inference that does not follow from the premise...; fallacy ... resulting from the transposition of a condition & its consequent." The fallacious inference here is that poor people -- or even people who are related to poor people -- cannot grow up to be "servants of the rich." See Dickens' "A Christmas Carol."

A Word of Warning from Dave Weigel of Slate: "When Republicans say they would consider tax increases, they're just pretending."

Mitt Romney, Moderate Republican. Stephen Foster of Addicting Info: "During a speech to a group of conservative activists on Friday in Washington, Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney said exactly what right wing extremists want to hear. Romney laid out his vision of government which includes privatizing Medicare, raising the retirement age, wiping out government agencies and jobs, making balanced budgets mandatory via constitutional amendment, and slashing funding for the arts, public broadcasting, family planning and passenger rail services. He also wants to give states more budget power." (Emphasis added):

Ha ha. Emmarie Huetteman of the New York Times: The new Man-of-the-People Mitt flies coach, but is "aloof" & uncommunicative when voters politely approach him.

Leonard Pitts of the Miami Herald: "Social conservative pundits tend to be astonishingly obtuse when discussing race..., so it is good they rarely do so. Last week was an unfortunate exception, as one of 'their' blacks struggled to frame a coherent response to allegations that he harassed female colleagues in the 1990s.... Though accusations of sexual impropriety have beset a bipartisan Who’s Who of black and white politicians, the right wing came out in force to argue that people are only questioning Cain because he is a black conservative. This would be the same Cain who not so long ago said racism was no longer a significant obstacle for African Americans. This would be the same right wing that is conspicuous by its silence, its hostility or its complicity when the injustice system imposes mass incarceration on young black men, when the number of hate groups in this country spikes to over a thousand, when the black unemployment rate stands at twice the national average, when the president is called 'uppity' and 'boy.'” ...

... Sexual harassment is hilarious (and people pick on Mike Huckabee unfairly):

CW: I'll admit I didn't link to articles about this story or embed the video because I can't stand Rick Perry sober let alone high (or appearing so). But to make up for my lapse, here's Perry explaining what happened in that weird speech in New Hampshire last week:

News Ledes

The Hill: "The White House is not expected to comply with a subpoena issued by House Republicans for documents related to the $535 million loan guarantee to the failed solar firm Solyndra."

Los Angeles Times: "Michael Jackson's personal physician has been found guilty of involuntary manslaughter for causing the pop icon's 2009 death by a powerful surgical anesthetic. The verdict against Dr. Conrad Murray comes after a jury of seven men and five women  deliberated for about nine hours over two days. The 58-year-old cardiologist, who was charged with the lowest possible homicide offense, faces a maximum sentence of four years in state prison and a minimum sentence of probation. Murray now also faces the probable loss of his medical license."

President Obama met with NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen this afternoon. AFP story here.

President Obama spoke about the American Jobs Act at noon:

New York Times: "Greeks awaited word on Monday on the formation of a unity government under a new leader after Prime Minister George A. Papandreou and his chief rival agreed to create a transitional administration to oversee the country’s debt-relief deal with the European Union and then hold early elections. Mr. Papandreou agreed to resign once the details are completed."

New York Times: "An imminent report by United Nations weapons inspectors includes the strongest evidence yet that Iran has worked in recent years on a kind of sophisticated explosives technology that is primarily used to trigger a nuclear weapon, according to Western officials who have been briefed on the intelligence. But the case is hardly conclusive.... The Obama administration, acutely aware of how what happened in Iraq undercut American credibility, is deliberately taking a back seat."

Reuters: "Two journalists close to Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said he could resign as early as Monday, immediately boosting bond and stock markets."

Reuters: "Thousands of protesters opposed to a new oil pipeline from Canada to the United States circled the White House grounds on Sunday to press President Barack Obama to reject the project for environmental reasons. Opponents to TransCanada Corp's Keystone XL pipeline, which would transport crude produced from oil sands, have dogged the president for months, arguing that the carbon emissions produced in the process of extracting oil from the sands would exacerbate climate change."

New York Times: "Penn State Athletic Director Tim Curley and a university administrator, Gary Schultz, will step down amid a sexual abuse scandal involving a former football assistant, the university announced early Monday morning."

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