Lobenthal.com

A week ago Wednesday I went to a hearing convened by Community Board 2 with representatives from City Hall pontificating on why the landmarked Tony DaPalito Recreation Center must, so they say, be demolished. It was, it goes without saying, a total exercise in coercion, although I do not question the credentials of the engineers present. 

What makes the entire proceedings suspect is that no alternatives to demolition were presented. This is the way the city does things: it allowed the Center to fall into disrepair, then it announces demolition as fait accompli or foregone conclusion. If the Center is now badly in need of repair work–do he work. Do your job.

If, as was claimed, that work will not allow the Center to remain a gym and pool, consider adaptive reuse, about which there was not a peep from the  NYC delegation.

Today’s the last day to submit comments on NYC’s plan: you can access a portal on Village Preservation’s web site.

From “fishnmike” at Daily Kos;

“You sit there as your Republican colleagues ram through nominations of people like Kennedy, Bondi, Vought, Patel and Gabbard.  You wring your hands and clutch your beads as you watch Elon Musk and his goons trash the Treasury while your Republican colleagues remain silent.  And then you ask your Democratic colleagues to work in a spirit of “bipartisanship” on Trump’s budget?  Get your head out of your ass, Senator Schumer.”

David Cay Johnston lays it, and them, out in an interview with the BBC.

The astonishing thing is that Democratic leadership seem to be utterly impervious or indifferent to their messaging failures, no matter how many losses it costs them. They’re perfectly happy with themselves.

The moral vacuum that is J.D. Vance took his trademark petulance and fake outrage to Germany in the service of trying to normalize the Trump administration’s aggressive assaults on America. And he continued his defense of hate speech, calling attempts to regulate it “censorship.”  

He actually had the nerve to go to Germany and promote neo-Nazism.

As an ambassador on the world stage, Vance is both lightweight and repellent, and his prominence in Europe continues Trump’s obliteration of America’s international authority.

Trump’s uninformed, uncultured, politically fanatic board has just nixed the tour of a show that Kennedy Center was sending out because it promoted tolerance and not hate. 

According to the Washington Post: 

“In 2023, the center commissioned “Finn,” a children’s musical about a shark who finds he fits in more with smaller fish than his fellow predators. A creator of the show said it could be read as a metaphor for LGBTQ+ experience, though there is nothing in the musical explicitly about the community.”

Trump’s Comintern acting as cultural commissars is part of the nation-wide degradation he is attempting.  It is, the Post writes, “without precedent in the United States, and most if not all democratic countries.” 

If only there was a single member of Congress who would stand up for culture and cultural independence. 

The Washington Post reports that comedian and actress Issa Rae canceled her scheduled performance at the Kennedy Center,  explaining it was “”due to what I believe to be an infringement on the values of an institution that has faithfully celebrated artists of all backgrounds through all mediums.”

Trump and his wrecking crew will program the Kennedy Center with schlock MAGA spectacle, destroying the Center’s reputation, and when attendance drops–who knows, they might even turn it into condos!

Why hasn’t the Washington “press corps” walked out in protest of Trump banning the Associated Press?

The White House Correspondents Association also has done nothing, revealing that they are nothing but a suck-up-to-power guild. [2/14 – my bad, the issued a statement 2/11]

to get time server Schumer and ex-corporate lawyer Jeffries actually to lead.

No messaging, no media strategy, and a refusal to use every procedural lever to stop the coup are what we’re seeing now.

As “CupaJoe” writes at Daily Kos: “Every one of the cabinet nominees could have been mired in literally scores of hours of debate, process, stalling, and other kinds of valuable procedural bullshit. Maybe even longer.”

We are in a national emergency and they’d better start acting like it.

You’re no moderates, Sens. Collins and Murkowski, and, no, Mitch McConnell, after all your sins against America, it is too late for you to redeem your reputation.

Republicans no longer belong to an actual American political party; they’re simply part of a cult dedicated to Mad Emperor Trump and Malicious Tween Musk.

Schumer and Jeffries insist that they’re powerless: the same refrain the Democras make year in and year out, equally when they’re in the majority.  

Jake Johnson at Common Dreams quotes progressive organizer  Aaron Regunberg. “‘Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer are architects of the crisis that allowed Trump’s fascism to arise and succeed.” The Democratic Establishment engineered two defeats against Trump via their efusal to insist that Democrats be Democrats, and now the shit has hit the fan.

When the Republicans lost everything in 2008, did they whimper that they were helpless?

Schumer and Jeffries should have resigned their leadership positions after the last election, given the disastrous non-campaigns they waged. It is only constituent pressure that has now forced them to get off their duff, and apparently they’re sore about it. We’re not having any of it. They can get ready to be sore for the foreseeable future.