Lobenthal.com

Virginia Rich Barnett’s answer message concludes with, “And please, be kind to the planet.”

Sanders takes it like a mensch: you can tell he’s a bit gobsmacked by Hillary’s recidivism, her obtuse arrogance in selecting Kaine and keeping the love going to Wasserman Schultz.

And he’s not going to lay down and endorse their politics.

But he is going to keep reminding his supporters, as he is doing right now in Philly, of how far they have come and how truly monstrous is the prospect of a Trump presidency.

It will be almost funny to see how Hillary’s idolators in the liberal comentariat wish away the events of the last 48 hours. Do we expect paeans to her brilliantly triangulatory acumen?  And haven’t they been telling us for weeks that the primary process was really rigged–against Hillary?

Oh, well.

There seems to be  complete breakdown occurring at the upper reaches of the Democratic party:

Hillary is allowed to pick the VP candidate who will sink her campaign–of course he’s being praised by the GOP!

Obama continues his make-love-not-war on the GOP, with new effusions over GW Bush’s goodness. Meanwhile he has just given up on pressing his case against the GOP’s seditious refusal to consider his Supreme Court pick. McConnell gets up at the GOP convention and boasts about how he’s sandbagged constitutional precedent–and Obama stays mum.

Perhaps Barry is just too busy gearing up to give Jamie that final end-of-term gift–namely passage of the ruinous TPP.

Incontrovertible evidence appears that the DNC under Wasserman  Schultz actively colluded with the Clinton campaign, and she has not yet resigned.

Every single day, the derelict Democratic establishment gives Sanders supporters more provocation to stay home in November.

This is a party in deep trouble.

Fraudster Paul Ryan, a millionaire because of his wife’s wealth and his sedulous servicing of the billionaire class, gets up at the GOP convention and dares to excoriate “progressive elitists.”

Dares to, because he knows that the Democratic party refuses to challenge this type of defamation. And this is the very same Paul Ryan who never met a $350 bottle of wine he didn’t like.

Why don’t the Dems shoot down this shit? Why do they allow the GOP to incorporate the  most pernicious broad-brush smears into their core party rhetoric? It often seems that the more absurd and easily-debunked the GOP slander, the less avid the Dems are to respond.

Mid-Reagan, playing defensive become Dem SOP, and devolved with Clinton into hard-wired behavorial trait. Warren is one of the very few Dems to understand this and try to reverse it, but I’m afraid that even she doesn’t seem to fully comprehend the way these canards must be cut off at their roots.

Gillian Murphy has some interesting things to say about Pillar of Fire in the new, Summer 2016 Ballet Review.

Listening to Richard Strauss’s heavenly Burlesque for Piano and Orchestra and also thinking of Antony Tudor’s heavenly ballet Dim Lustre to this same music.

By the end of this ballet, the two romantic lead characters have made deep and life-and-relationship-altering realizations about themselves. Yes, a ballet–even one as effervescent as this one–can make that clear.

There were performances by ABT in 1985-86 and 2000 that were absolutely thrilling.

Wouldn’t it be nice to see it again?

Someone close to me came up with the churlish comment that nobody knows that I mean Basquiat if I call him “Jean,” and not “Jean-Michel.” But that’s what we called him and he called himself at CAS. Once when I went to his house his sisters were playing outside and I was surprised to hear them call out “Jean-Michel.”

“Babe,”–and don’t call me sexist because I’d say the same thing to Kaine–“just don’t let that old screen door hit you on the way out. . .”

The filthiest thing about the Kaine pick is that she waited until after Sanders had already endorsed her to say, as John Atcheson writes at Common Dreams, “F-you,” to his supporters.

Hillary reverts to type:

Makes what is practically the worst, most reactionary VP pick she could, leaves herself totally vulnerable to Trump’s attacks on Dem support for trade deals.

The woman is a disaster and  in the likely event that she loses—to TRUMP!!—

there must be a complete house cleaning of the Democratic establishment that foisted her upon us and did everything it could to undermine Sanders.

It is they, and Clinton, not Sanders, who will have ushered fascism into the United States.

Well, they will sure have gotten smething done, won’t they?