Lobenthal.com

Senator Wyden provides facts on the debt ceiling crisis. The “mainstream” media might want to follow suit.

“It’s clear that nothing unites House Republicans more than helping rich people cheat on their taxes. Republican cuts to the IRS made it far too easy for wealthy tax cheats to get away with breaking the law, and they want to keep it that way. Democrats passed funding for tax enforcement specifically to crack down on the wealthy cheats and scofflaw corporations who rip off all the Americans who follow the law and pay their taxes. Repealing that funding was the first bill House Republicans passed this year, and it’s a centerpiece of the ransom Speaker McCarthy has cobbled together as he threatens to trigger a catastrophic default.

“The rest of this McCarthy bill is no better. By repealing the clean energy provisions I authored in the Inflation Reduction Act, House Republicans are proposing a total surrender to the climate crisis. Big Oil would celebrate, but it would be an enormous loss for American workers and manufacturers who have an opportunity to thrive as a result of the clean energy transformation the IRA is already driving across the country. Firms in China and elsewhere will grow at our expense if Speaker McCarthy gets his way. Even Republican priorities like carbon capture and biodiesel would suffer.

“No House Republican economic plan is complete without an attack on health care in America. Speaker McCarthy’s ransom now includes health care for millions of working people, and even their food. The so-called ‘work requirements’ he’s proposing are nothing more than a scam aimed at burying people in paperwork as a backdoor way to prevent them from getting the help they need to get by. Republicans have tried this scam before at the state level in Arkansas, and it did nothing to increase employment. All it did was boot tens of thousands of people off their Medicaid coverage.

“Republicans manufactured this crisis, and Speaker McCarthy’s proposal to get out of it would destroy jobs, worsen health care, increase hunger, hurt the climate and make millions of American families poorer. This hostage taking cannot continue.”

What is being peddled by the corporate media is, as Robert Reich documents, utter “rubbish.”

My thoughts for Air Mail on the Metropolitan Opera’s Der Rosenkavalier.

John Robert’s reputation is, of course, in tatters and will remain so–his vaunted image as an institutionalist is a complete fraud.

Clarence Thomas must immediately resign to spend more time with his family.

In a cover profile for Vanity Fair, “The Trials of King Rupert,” Gabriel Sherman writes that “Murdoch’s ability to blithely rationalize the violence on January 6 is a microcosm of how he evaded any responsibility for the immense damage his media empire has done to the public square over the past 50 years.”

Vicious, corrupt dingbat Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn told America how terribly, terribly sorry she and hubby were about the mass killings in her state as well as over the state line. (Red states have much higher crime rates than blue.)

But of course Marsha really doesn’t give a shit. The NRA has paid her well over a million dollars to ensure that she enables the violence every way she can, vide her insistence that schools must be armed so that the gun industry sell more guns.

Message to Marsha: A lot of Tennessee youth will have come of voting age by the time you’re next up for re-election.

It’s bad enough that we, the blue, wealthier states pay the freight for the impoverished red states–and a lot of thanks we get for it, too–but as these states become less and less inhabitable, due to abolition of gun regulations, book bans, destruction of public education, refusal to expand Medicaid, closing of rural hospitals, travel and abortion restrictions–our state borders are going to be swamped!!!!!!!

In response to Mayor Adams’ budget proposals, NY State Senator Brisport tweets:

“Producing more caviar would technically increase ‘egg supply’ but wouldn’t lower egg prices for you at the store. Any proposal to increase ‘ ‘housing supply’ should specify what kind.”

With a vengeance.

It’s way past time that this leadership pedigree confront some accountability about the damage they’ve done to this country.

Why do they hate America so much, after all we’ve done for them?

In just the latest indication that the Republicans want to turn America into a theocratic police state, Idaho is now making it a crime for women to travel outside the state to elude Idaho’s draconian abortion restrictions.