Lobenthal.com

As his bytes to the world get more and more unhinged, vicious, and dishonest, they provide all material the Dems need to prove to America that it’s been had big time.

I had a good lunch Christmas Day at the Indian restaurant Havelli on Lower Second Avenue. I hadn’t been to this neighborhood landmark in many years, and, in fact I don’t get get down to that neighborhood all that often.

But wen I’m there I’m always miffed about the way our lousy civic administrations have condoned the disappearance of too many neighborhood landmarks: fixtures of Yiddish culture transformed during the 1960s into counter- culture destinations.

The Second Avenue facade of the Fillmore does survive, but that’s it: behind it there is a completely anonymous apartment building.

Seeing it prompted a memory of 1976, when I was hanging out in the neighborhood with some mates from school.

The Fillmore had been closed by Bill Graham in 1971 and by ’76 had been broken into by  squatters. And so we made our way freely into the abandoned theater.

It was in disrepair but traces of recent history remained.Splattered on the floor were old tickets to Fillmore concerts. There was a hall of dressing rooms reached by a kind of parapet at the back of the stage accessible by stairs. It really a bit like an archeological dig: five years in the life of a sixteen-year-old will seem like an epoch but certainly the Fillmore already belonged to a distinct historical cultural epoch.

Later in the ‘70s it became the gay disco The Saint.

Now it is something that just contributes so little to the neighborhood, the urban landscape.

A horsewoman told me after a busy day of errands, et. al., that she’d been “ridden hard and put away wet!”

They must be the new order of the day because. . .

Trump discuss an issue? Defend a policy decision?

He’s simply not capable of it.

Talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater —

Fox “News” agitates for discontinuing food stamps because, as Philip Bump reports in the Washington Post, it claimed that food stamp fraud was at an all-time high.

(But of course, that’s not true, which is why, as Erik Wemple further reports in the Post, the Agriculture Dep’t is demanding a corrections from Faux News.)

But I’ve got an idea: How about discontinuing Fox “News” because of the overwhelming preponderance of vicious, vile bullshit it spews?

As “Hunter” at Daily Kos writes:

“In Trump’s world you are either currently praising Trump, in which case you are a friend and he has  ‘great respect’ for you, or you are currently not praising Trump, in which case you are a scheming plotter and a terrible person and Donald Trump is going to have a very public fit at you for days, or weeks, or even months to punish you for saying an unkind word in his general direction even if he himself has spent much of his recent life declaring that you were crooked or a weakling or not even truly an American citizen.”

He’s Dr. Mabuse, the aspiring world-wrecker in Fritz Lang’s classic silent thrillers.

Except, and this is a big one, Bannon is for real.

— and it is guess who?

We, the population of the United States.

They’re not planning all this awful stuff to curtail some insidious group of Others.

We the people and our democracy are the ones being assailed.

Very few of our leaders in either party seem to care overly about the poor, but the GOP of course has them in their cross hairs.

Crippling Medicaid is high on its to do list.

In the Times, Gene B. Sperling writes about “The Quiet War on Medicaid.”

Once again, if the Democrats could bestir themselves to defend a program that benefits the poor, yes the POOR, and not only what remains of the middle class, and if they could somehow muster the messaging skills to explain to the poor how they are defending their interests, said poor might actually come out and vote in larger numbers.

Fascism is always a union of state and corporate power, public and private sector working hand-in-glove to institute authoritarian rule.