Lobenthal.com

Thank you, presidents Reagan and Clinton, for deregulating our media so that anti-American hate sites likes Fox “News” could thrive.

(Btw, AOC should echo Hilary’s implied threat of a lawsuit for defamation–that’ll lead Fox and woman-hating Tucker to target someone else.)

The grotesque Fascist sideshow on Fox last night: screaming totalitarian fanatics inventing an imaginary heroic, patriotic Donald Trump–not the actual one who groveled before Putin and every other dictator he could cozy up to–was straight out of Stalin’s Soviet Union or Hitler’s Germany or North Korea today.

Enough is enough. We must not enable or tolerate Fascist hatred and censorship. Governors De Santis and Abbott are evil and they are enemies of American democracy.

It is truly amazing that anyone could take seriously the ludicrous human cartoons appearing nighty on Fox “News.”

If the Supreme Court was contained by any code of ethics whatsoever, Clarence Thomas would immediately resign after today’s expose in the NY Times Magazine.

But come to think of it, if the Supreme Court was subject to any ethical review, the political hacks who make up the GOP majority would never be sitting there at all.

Rather than fight to protect House members in swing districts, the Demoocratic Establishment has decided to circle their wagons around incumbents in safely blue seats who may face progressive primary challengers.

As Ryan Grim tweeted, Jeffries “appears to want to be the leader of a corporate-controlled permanent minority opposition.”

So there we have it: the Democratic Establishment would rather lose the House and relinquish democracy than do anything that might annoy their corporate paymasters.

Inflation could have been a winning issue for Democrats in November, had they explained its true etiology in corporate monopolization. And for a little while, it looked like that’s exactly what they were going to do.

But now, as Robert Reich demonstrates at substack, Biden is backsliding, listening to superannuated neoliberal advisors like Larry Summers. You know, those so-called mandarins whose advice led to Democratic wipeouts in 1994 and 2010.

Remember, the Democratic establishment wants to lose, if the alternative involves rethinking failed ideologies. (In the case of Manchin & Sinema, they are being paid by the Republicans to tank Biden’s presidency.)It is concerned with maintaining its own economic privilege. If it’s a choice between protecting its own financial flanks or extending a lifeline to working Americans, we see which direction they’ve decided to take.

The real vitality and the winning economic message emanating from the Dems now is Bernie & the Squad. But of course, they’re the ones who will blamed if/when the Dems lose in November.

Gov. Hochul’s attempt to lift all caps on building height by furtively slipping it into the must-pass state budget is awful enough.
But there’s more.

Albany is pushing for–this began with Gov. Cuomo– a mega re-development of the midtown Penn Central district that could hardly be more deleterious and more contemptuous toward NYC.

One outstanding period building after another is to be demolished–including the last remaining piece of the original Stanford White station complex–so that nine huge office towers can be built–even though the market for office space post-pandemic is woefully flat.

This is astonishingly misguided city planning that harkens back to the bad old days of Robert Moses and his flatlining of entire NYC neighborhood.

This evening at 6:00 p.m., NYC’s Historic Districts Council is hosting a Zoom teach-in about the plan and about what we can do to save the Penn Central district.

Writing for TomDispatch, retired lieut. colonel William Astore noes the irony of what our wars waged allegedly to spread democracy have wrought here at home.

Chauncey De Vega, who has always been clear-eyed and prescient about Trump, Trumpism, and what they represent, writes in Salon:

“Americans who support democracy must now accept that elites and other political leaders will not save them. In fact, they must pressure the country’s elites through a range of actions, perhaps including national strikes, boycotts, civil disobedience and other forms of direct action. They should consider joining (or even forming) local organizations and other civil society groups to make possible the grassroots organizing that can resist and then defeat American neofascism. Those who have the material resources to support such efforts must consider how best to use them.”

as the Trumps?

Every day the outrages go on: garishly made up Lara Trump spews racist lies about Black Lives Matter on Fox –garsihly made up and senile Trump attacks Biden’s mental capacity in some promotional video with Bill O’Reilly, while declaring himself an enemy of this country.