Lobenthal.com

confronts us again in all his perverse duplicity via newsreel footage in Gavin Hood’s Official Secrets. His lies and posturing were almost as grotesque as Trump’s. The corporate media fell right into line, functioning for a time practically as a propaganda adjunct of Bush’s White House, as it led this country into a catastrophic war based on sham.

Watchng Official Secrets brings it all back–it was appalling then, and it’s appalling still.

Monstrously unfit and dishonest politicians like GW softened America up for Trump.

A handwritten note to me, postmarked August 10, 1978, from Sir Cecil Beaton: “Tallulah was such a difficult woman to know & liked to put on a different act each time.”

I didn’t know him, don’t know what he was “really” like, but when I called him cold and said I wanted to interview him about Diana Sands, and he said, “It would be my pleasure. . .,” well, you knew why he was a star.

to be publishing James Comer’s heaping hee-haw of lies about President Biden and his imaginary crimes.

Sort of reminds you of the days when old Rupert wanted regulatory “relief” from Congress, and incoming Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich was magically offered by HarperCollins a whopping, wholly-unwarranted advance  as part of a two-book deal. 

Biden’s rising in the polls now that he has finally decided to wage a full-frontal response to Trump’s daily dose of defamatory toxin.

Let’s not forget that it was NBC, sexual harrasing Jeff Zzucker, and Christo-fascist producer Mark Burnett who rehabilitated Trump from punchline to putative national success story on The Apprentice.

Now, NBC has just nailed its colors to the mast–as if we had any doubt–by platforming Trump’s coup accomplice Ronna Romney McDaniel.

Without the corporate media, Trump would be a used car salesman in Queens right now.

Lawrence Tribe tweets: “The NY appellate court’s unexplained reduction from $454M to $175M in the bond Trump must post in 10 days to secure the judgment pending appeal is a travesty of justice.”

Dr. Schultz (you’ve read her in Ballet Review) writes from New Zealand about a biography she’s working on, with the working title Stepping Lightly: The Dancing Life of Thomas O’Carroll/Jan Caryll. 

It is the first biography of “one of New Zealand’s most significant, but forgotten male dancers.” Born Thomas O’Carroll, in Rangiora, North Canterbury in 1893 he ended life as “Jan Caryll” in London in 1985. 

He was called the “first male ballet student in New Zealand.”

James Baldwin in 1964: 

“The plight in my view is simply that we confuse democracy with mediocrity. There is a virtue in this country in being simple-minded.”

This is a minicipality that bends over backwards to give billions of dollars of tax breaks to real estate plutocrats, yet is proposing massive cuts to our public library system.

Go to the New York Public Library’s web site at nypl.org and send a letter to our elected officials demanding that they get their priorities straight.