Lobenthal.com

A male friend of mine who’s married to a woman nevertheless describes himself, thank you very much, sexually as not “straight” but rather “crooked.”

As for race, he’ll describe himself “off-white.”

Will the corporate media continue to choose not to notice?

So the Street is really, really worried about the minefield of another Trump presidency–or rather the beginning of a perpetual Trump/Trump clan presidency–but it’s going to vote for him anyway.

Why are these myopic vultures considered societal leaders?

The Republicans, who submit blindly to the current neo-Nazi, white supremacist GOP front runner, have now fallen upon the current Israeli crisis to pass censorship bills that mandate penalty for anything THEY call anti-Semitic. Who  the hell are they to tell us what is or is not anti-Semitic?

The same lies and defamation, phrased exactly the same way, day after day after day, until, so he hopes, the American public gives up the ghost.

I’m trying to research this, but aren’t press conferences illegal on courtroom premises? Aren’t the steps of the courthouse the place for that?

If so, yet another example of the special treatment given Herr Trump by our judicial system.

It was nice that the media gave Suzanne Shepherd’s death on November 17 a lot of play, largely highlighting her appearances on “The Sopranos” sand in “Good Fellas.”

I’d called her a month earlier to say that I’d finally finished transcribing our interviews of a year earlier, which related to a career accomplishment of hers that largely flew under the mainstream media’s radar.

Shepherd had formerly been married to David Shepherd, who founded the watershed improvisation group “The Compass,” in Chicago in the early 1950s.(Two books have been published about it.) She was  herself a Compass member. In 1962, David Shepherd put together a new Compass configuration and booked them into a two-month engagement at the Yachtsman in Hyanisport on Cape Cod.

Ever game to essay new career challenges, Diana Sands was one member of the group; the others were Suzanne, Alan Alda, Reni Santoni, and Ron Weyand. Two years later, Diana and Alda starred together in “The Owl and the Pussycat” on Broadway.

I told Suzanne that I wanted to come over and review my chapter on that summer engagement when I’d finished it. No, I don’t give interview subjects approval over text, but I will work with them to clarify their thoughts, and hopefully record them accurately.

In her late-eighties, and not in good health, Suzanne remained enormously vital. I’m glad I told her in October that I’d started watching her movies. She told me that she’d written a paper on Chekhov when studying at Bennington. I wonder if it exists. 

You’ll read a lot about Suzanne and the Compass in our book on Diana.

Perry Bacon, Jr. writes in The Washington Post that:

“The cancellation of Mehdi Hasan’s show is the latest in a series of recent moves by MSNBC that are pushing the network in the direction of being the television arm of the Democratic Party leadership, as opposed to a news outlet that upholds left-wing values and perspectives. The network should reverse its decision on Hasan and make clear that it embraces progressive criticism of President Biden and other Democratic leaders.”

Reich, one of the few sagacious economic advisors to Clinton, recalls the time he made Clinton’s team very angry.

Reich publicly predicted the rise of Trump three decades ago–and if Hillary really, really wants to know why she lost, she might factor in resentment over her husband’s indifference to radical levels of inequality. Did Hillary renounce any single plank of Clintonism?  No, she told us that racism and sexism had nothing to do with structural economic factors.

Bill Clinton ignored Reich and listened instead to the likes of self-dealing plutocrats like Sandy Weill, repealing the Glass-Steagal act and making inevitable the 2008 collapse. Then, when Obama saved the banksters and abandoned the foreclosed, the countdown to Trump began.

aamid both the right wing’s attempt to expurgate the true history of race in this country as well as the left’s assailing the Western canon as well as the across-the-board cultural illiteracy that plagues our society as well as the American penchant for historical amnesia.

“A people which loses contact with its past becomes culturally psychotic.” — Dwight MacDonald.