Lobenthal.com

A new report issued by Village Preservation demonstrates the way that NYC landmark designations have ground to a halt; there are fewer under the Adams regime than any under any previous mayor since the Landmarks Presevation Commission was established in 1965.

To cover its ass, today’s Landmarks “Preservation” Commission has devised a bait-and-switch whereby, as Village Preservation director Andrew Berman writes,  the LPC is now ” focusing on sites that face no immediate or foreseeable threat, while those that do are passed over.”

In The Guardian, Rebecca Solnit writes that “The first thing to say about the hate and scorn currently directed at the mainstream  US media is that they worked hard to earn it. They’ve done so by failing, repeatedly, determinedly, spectacularly to do their job, which is to maintain their independence, inform the electorate, and speak truth to power.”

A.G. Sulzberger takes to the pages of the Washington Post to insist that when the Times is asked to practice journalism, it is actually being asked to practice electioneering. That’s now become the go-to dodge for the corporate media when it comes to parrying evidence of their flagrantly permissive coverage of Trump.

By way of explaining that he does really, really understand how ominous is Trump’s praise of Viktor Orban, Sulzberger resorts to a familiar rationalization for why his paper treats Trump’s  panegyrics as effluvia.

Sulzberger: “I disagree with those who have suggested that the risk Trump poses to the free press is so high that news organizations such as mine should cast aside neutrality and directly oppose his reelection.”

Jamison Foser in his newsletter zeroes in on the hustle that Sulzberger is plying:  “That’s a straw man Sulzberger invents because he does not dare engage our actual argument, which is that the Times is not neutral, and does not even define the term correctly, and the paper often deploys double standards and false equivalencies that benefit Trump and the Republican Party.”

Remember, this is  the publisher of the New York Times talking,  and that would be the newspaper that directly aided Trump’s victory in 2016 by its absurdly over-credulous, grotesquely disproportionate and always prominently placed coverage of the Hillary Clinton non scandal. 

And we will never forget what the Times did to Joe Biden in service to its protectionism toward Trump.

at the demented babble that gushed out of Trump during their “interview.” But Levin didn’t dare interrupt, which just made it all the more damning for Trump.  He demonstrated that it is time for him to go into Assisted Living–not anywhere near the White House.

No, Mr. Trump,American Jews do not recognize Netanyahu as their president. And a significant percentage of Israelis realize that he’s not their president, either.

Jack Johnson at Common Dreams reports that “The strike was called by Histadrut, Israel’s largest trade union. Arnon Bar-David, the union’s chairman, said ahead of the action that “this is not a matter of right or left; it is a matter of life and death.”

No, he’s not just urning his head from to side to read (haltingly, because he’s functionally illiterate) the teleprompter. He can barely face America head on, or maybe he can’t control his head movements or he’s too dilapidated to hold up his  head.   Those weird, wandering head slumps may also in some way indicate that he knows every word he says is a lie, and he’s tired of having to go through the same sham motions over and over again.  The twitchy, spastic temper of those movements is a further sign of his condition.  

We could go on.

or the Dems will be wiped out in the 20226 midterms, the way they were in 1994 and 2010.

Contrary to how the corporate media and Establishment Dems spun those losses, they occurred largely because both Clinton and Obama abandoned in major ways the progressive agendas on which they had run. (In Obama’s case, as well, he was so demoralized by GOP attacks on Affordable Care that he just gave up campaigning to save his House majority.) 

Many, if not most, actors offer a dominant theme of characterization deployed with variations throughout their careers. In Tallulah! I analyzed the veritable critical furore over Tallulah “playing herself” and how much it had to do with the self she embodied both personally and professionally being a threat to the status quoa of acceptable female archetypes.

 In Lesley Ferris’s Acting Women: Images of Women in Theater, she offers additional context.  Surveying the chronology of the theater, when women’s roles were finally played by women rather than men or boys, “far from being credited with artistic invention, skill or talent,” they were stigmatized as able merely to enact themselves: “a patriarchal premise that conveniently and skillfully removes women from any possibility of cultural creativity.”

will break any law to benefit himself or his cult-and-ring leader Donald Trump–and will then use his professed Christianity as an alibi.

Stoehr’s commentary at Raw Story:

“It didn’t matter what Joe Biden did – pull the country out of a pandemic, dodge a recession, tame inflation, grow jobs, grow wages, enforce anti-monopoly laws, revive every single one of the so-called ‘left behind’ counties that voted for Trump in 2016 because of ‘economic anxiety’ – it didn’t matter what he did. The press corps decided nothing was more important than his age, and lo! 2024 became an election about vibes and vibes ended his candidacy.”