to please ever-elusive, ever-contradictory, endlessly-proficient-at-fatuous-sophistry Joe Manchin.
We’re seeing a redux of the defensive panic that plagued the Obama administration.
Manchin is being paid by major GOP donors to sandbag Biden’s agenda.
Once again, progressives have to draw the line.
And this time they have to hold it.
Fance lobbied hard to have this hideously dangerous, expensive, and altogether regressive technology classified as green by the EU.
The EU is not in the forefront of climate crisis mitigation.
I attended my first opera performance.
Verdi’s “La Forza del Destino” at the Metropolitan, sitting in the Dress Circle, listening to Leontyne Price, Carlo Bergonzi, Cesare Siepi, Kostas Paskalis, Fernando Coreno, led by Michelangelo Veltri. It was an altogether intoxicating performance.
It came about because my parents decided they had had enough of my brother and I making falsetto ridicule of operatic expression. My parents were actually not big opera buffs at the time and most of their classical records were symphonic.(Although they did own Beecham’s 1956 Boheme, and they did watch the Bell Telephone Hour.) But nevertheless they were offended on opera’s behalf.
Even before the performance, Price btw meant something special to us because my aunt had studied piano at Juilliard when Price was a graduate student there.
I went with my mother and with downstairs neighbor Ernestine Stewart, whose family was the first of color admitted to our little co op in Jackson Heights, Queens. Ernestine attended in high school a young singer’s training program at the Met, but after getting married she became a social worker and worked for NYC, if I recall correctly.
I mentioned this in a piece for City Arts in 2009 but since I couldn’t find the program I wasn’t sure whether it was Bergonzi or Franco Corelli who had sung Don Alvaaro opposite Price. They alternated in the role that season. So I put one, then thought better of it and replaced it with the other. Both names wound up in the piece–vagaries of copy editing. But whatever.
My father took my brother to a Rigoletto with Gail Robinson, Richard Tucker, and Robert Merrill.
Needless to say I was hooked.Soon we would be taking my parents to performances, insisting that they must also hear Birgit Nilsson, Joan Sutherland, Luciano Pavarotti, et. al.
When you begin with that level of performance, you find it very difficult to accept anything less.
Hochul is one more elected official dedicated to giving developers whatever they want–and the cost to our cities be damned.
She has thrown her support behind the developer-backed plan to allow residential buildings of any possible size to be built. Obviously opposed to transparency, she has slipped this disastrous deregulation surreptitiously into the state budget.
And of course, she’s perpetuating Mayor de Blasio’s sleazy, insidious claim that it’s justified because it will incentivize “affordable” housing.
It won’t. It will guarantee luxury buildings even more monstrous in size that the ones we have.
NY State Legislature must oppose.
January 6, the RNC has just declared ,was “legitimate political discourse.”
by Associated Press’ Matt Lee.
Why can’t the State dep’t produce any actual evidence to back up their allegations?
Oh, well.
It reminds me of an interview I watched with Bill Gates: the moment his policies are challenged, he starts shrieking, squeaking, and waving his arms.
No defensiveness there.
The minute I heard that Victoria Nuland was back at the State Department, I knew that we’d be sending troops to Eastern Europe.
At Common Dreams, Benjamin details the blood on Nuland’s hands and the inconvenient facts that the corporate media won’t acknowledge.
Elizabeth Warren wants to know why Biden is continuing Trump’s plan to completely privatize Medicare by decade’s end.
I called my senators today and asked why they have been asleep at the wheel on this crucial issue.
“Nobody ever talks about the deficit when Republicans are in control.”
He packs a lot of history and a lot of logic into a five-minute video.
From The Millionairess:
“Ninety percent of our selfmade [sic] millionaires are criminals who have taken a five hundred to one chance and got away with it by pure luck.”
