Lobenthal.com

is proving too much even for the feckless European Union.

Steven Erlanger and Benjamin Novak discuss in the Times how the EU has no choice but to impose consequences for Orban’s authoritarian transformation of Hungary.

which translates in Kayleigh McEnany’s feverish, venomous little mind to “upscaling testing.”

McEnany lied to the public every single day she was in the White House, then said that Jesus would never have let her lie, is now part of the freak line-up at Fows “News,” the rehab employer for disgraced GOP functionaries, where she spits out her lies with a newly hysterical manufactured rage.

Will they ever, ever learn?

then uses his money as a battering ram to undermine democracy and impose his policy choices. The latest case in point is the nuclear reactor he’s building in Wyoming, for which, once again, he has conscripted elected officials to enable his autocratic ukase.

It’s clear that Gates is badly misinformed about virtually every issue. His proposed policies are inevitably retrograde. He is interested only in top-down, power-centralized problem solving, which translates by his lack of judgments into routinely-ruinous problem creating.

That’s anecdotal, but I think statistics will back me up. You know, statistics based on fact, not the misinformation and disinformation on global warming provided by the GOP and the oil companies, or the say-one-thing-and-do-another that the Biden administration is not infrequently giving us.

Sci-Fi gets real: if someone had told me when I was growing up in the ’60s and ’70s that weather like this was possible, I wouldn’t have believed it.

Belen Fernandez at Common Dreams is appalled. Shouldn’t we all be?
Don’t forget how much of our tax dollars went to prop him up; in return for which, he refuses to pay it back in the form of contributing his fair share of taxes.

This is one reason that Trump was able to turn his cult against all apprehension of facts and categorically against mainstream media: look at what the corporate media has fed, and continues, to feed the public.

Watching the very black, very funny “Don’t Look Up,” I thought of what Janis Joplin said introducing “Mercedes Benz” at her final concert: “This is a song about our entire social, political, and religious set up. It covers the whole thing.”

He wants to be governor or even president. He’s not going to be: his outrageous corruption, the irrevocable damage he has done to New York City’s landmarks, architectural heritage, our neighborhoods and our skyline will not be easily explained away. I’m sure, however, that the real estate developers for whom he worked so tirelessly over the past eight years will find some employment for him.

The Daily News surveyed some of the wreckage.

“‘It is really shocking to see how much de Blasio has been able to get away with, and it bodes very poorly for New York City,’ said John Kaehny, executive director and founder of Reinvent Albany, a good government group active in the city. ‘You’re reminded that there are still so many things that are dysfunctional and corrupt in New York.'”

“It’s been one scandal after another,” outgoing NYC councilmember Ben Kallos told the News. Kallos, you remember, was one of just five council members to vote to save Soho/Noho/Chinatown from the massive displacement that de blasio’s upzoing scheme will create.

Disgraced councilmembers Chin and Johnson, prime movers in the race to get downtown upzoning over the finish line, are also outgoing; while Carlina Rivera, downtown’s displacement and demolition doyennne, has three more years before term limits kick in.

Grandma Lobenthal had to be using her decades-earlier vaudeville training to execute this stunt.

It was somewhere around March 1975. I was going to Stuyvesant High School, eight blocks south on First Avenue from where my father’s parents lived in Peter Cooper Village. Sometimes I would stop by on my way home from school before hopping the subway to Queens.

I had a erratic school record, largely depending on what the subject was and whether I was interested. But on this particular occasion I’d gotten 100 or an A on three different quizzes or tests.

Grandma was in the kitchen when I pulled out these three high grades to show her. In an instant, she plunged backward to the ground, in a feigned paroxysm of celebratory astonishment, doing so without banging her head or seeming to dislocate any other part of her 78-year-old frame. And then in the twinkling of an eye, she was back up again on her feet.

I’ve never forgotten her tour-de-force.

“The Young Turks” goes ballistic on the obscene absurdity of corporate media spinning Manchin’s betrayal of Biden and of Manchin’s own constituents as a legitimate or moral response to Manchin claiming his feelings were hurt by something or other.