Lobenthal.com

Once-respected attorneys Todd Blanche and Susan Necheles have now decided to become enthusiastic carriers of Trump contagion. Blanche reportedly wants a high-level position in a second Trump administration. Guess he can’t wait to help Trump shred the Constitution. Trump marionette Necheles even tried to get Stormy to extoll Trump’s crowd size at their golf tournament. Blanche’s  and Necheles’s buffoonish requests for mistrial every time their Trump-initiated courtroom antics go astray compounds the stupid. Their reputations are shot. It didn’t take long.

joins Herr Trump in the courtroom today, after adding his voice to Trump’s contempt megaphone.

Only the best people.

Speaker Johnson put on one of his prosthetic facial expressions and threw down the gauntlet against this country yesterday as he vowed to place ex-President Trump above the law, making cl clear that  that will be his domestic policy priority this yeae,

That may leave him less time to attempt to destroy Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid. Let’s be glad for small favors.

Then today he further clarified the GOP’s plan to steal the November election by insisting that “illegals” are voting despite presenting not a single speck of evidence to that effect.

They will simply keep overturning any law or right that they don’t like.

Biden has got to face the reality of what we’re up against and in his second term he has to do something about the Supreme Court.

in New York City cannot be separated or considered in isolation; ; each feeds the other.  What we are now seeing is the housing crisis exploited by City Hall and the developers to exacerbate and juisify the overdevelopment crisis. We are also seeing what happens to privately owned businesses as well as tenants in afordable hosing when historic low-rise buildings are torn down to make way for cost-intensive new construction. 

When a rare old 19th-century private house like the one at 137 West 14th Street that’s part of some assemblage is torn down, the small, independent window-blind business that had been housed in it is also forced to look for new premises–and good luck with finding something comparable. 

Goes without saying: the rents in whatever new building is going up there, be they commercial or residential, will be astronomical.

of outrage or disgust by Hope Hicks at her boss’s disgusting comments extolling sexual assault–

just a scramble to erect a firewall before the conflagration consumed Trump’s presidential bid.

It is indeed an amoral world Trump lives in –check any principles you may have had at the gate.

Unlike her prior appearances before Congress, Hicks at least realized that the stakes–for her–were higher, and she couldn’t get away with the coy evasions she’s plied in the past.

Remember when he was blaming the heroic health care workers for the shortage of respirators?  Not to mention that he later admitted lying to the Amerian public about the severity of the pandenmic. 

Biden has to hammer home these facts to Americans–for millions of the U,S. population, suffering as they do from collective amnesia,  four years ago might as well be fifty.

He’d reform his Executive Board, which as it now stands is an echo chamber populated by Sulzberger family, NYTimes Corp. employees, and finance & tech people.

The Board’s composition wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that the Times is so abysmally negligent about existential issues of land use in NYC, would it?

I googled “FAR cap + New York Times,” and what I found was a propagandistic piece last fall by Times Editorial Board member Mara Gray, where she buys into the lies and sham being advocated in the name of “building affordable housing.”

Gray makes absolutely no distinction between what ncreaesed density means  in a monstrously over built Manhattan, and what it means to exurban areas, which is something entirely different, and to outer NYC boroughs, which is something somewhat different. This is deceptive as well as thoughtless reductiveness by Gray, and this is about as good as it gets on land-use issues in the Times.

Newark could have saved the 1886 Paramount theater, built as a vaudeville house but then converted to  a movie palace  by renowned architect Thomas Lamb–

instead it’s giving us an apartment tower on the site, rising  behind the sham of another dubious exercise in “facadism” preserving the exoskeleton of the building.  

Of course, the building is now 28 stories when it was originally approved to be 12. Just like that. Something about funding issues.

And, of course, Newark’s Landmarks and Historic “Preservation” Commission approved the demolition, and gave fulsome thanks to the developer for retaining the little that is going to be retained.

Oh, but everything’s OK because some of the apartments will be “affordable.” 

How affordabe for whom is TK.

He could run through any number of novels while he’s sitting there napping, and making faces and pointing chimp-like at reporters.