Lobenthal.com

“Real literature can exist only only when it is produced by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.”
–Evgeny Zamyatin

The shameless demagogue accuses the press of “siding with China” when they kick about his racist insistence on calling Corona “Chinese.”

The whining, blubbering, 73-year-old infant claims once again that the media’s been very unfair to “us”–meaning him. There is no “us” for Trump.But of course, on the other hand, he has thoroughly infected the entire administration with his madness and ineptititude–driving out competence and replacing it with slavering toadies.

Watch for more of this — Trump with camp and ramp it up, seeing an opportunity in the crisis he vastly exacerbated a chance to shut down reportage of reality altogether.

And, of course, he’s the “War President.”

Trump annointing himself “war president” today reminds me of the way that the George W. Bush disaster squad ignored the Al-Quaeda threat all through 2001, then the minute the towers came down exploited the catastrophe to silence Democratic opposition, thus enabling the Bush team to commit one atrocity after another without a cowed Democratic caucus uttering a peep.

We must be extra vigilant.

Robert Reich tweets: “Big Pharma got language in the coronavirus bill preventing government from limiting their profits on any future vaccines, even though many of the same drug companies are receiving funding from the government to combat the pandemic.”

And not to be outdone is the airline industry:

“The biggest U.S. airlines spent 96% of free cash flow over the last decade to buy back shares of their own stock in order to boost executive bonuses and please wealthy investors.

Now, they expect taxpayers to bail them out to the tune of $50 billion.”

David Packman highlights the compulsive lying of “Trump Robot” Verma, one of Trump’s army of metallic-voiced, motor-mouthed shills.

“Praise Trump and avoid answering the question,” is the tactic Verma plies.

Remember that Verma, entrusted with administering the nation’s Medicaid
rolls, has wholeheartedly committed herself to destroying Medicaid.

Trump and his entire administration are abhorrent.

Remarkable things go on in the annals of culture, but of course they now go almost completely under the radar and few people know about them. Certainly the corporate media couldn’t care less. But some people do.

JUST found out that in 2012, Richard Davis’s Wotan’s Daughter: The Life of Marjorie Lawrence was published by Wakefield Press in Australia. Yesterday I ordered it on Amazon.

Richard Bonynge wrote a preface, where he recalls first hearing her as a teenager in Australia in 1944, and then describes the elderly Lawrence singing Waltzing Maathilde at a UNICEF concert in New York in 1976 where he and Sutherland also performed. The audience was in tears.

Why isn’t this book at the Metropolitan Opera gift shop? Or did I miss something? Well, I did, I missed this book when it first came out.

Also, Desiree Records as part of its Great Australian Voices series has issued a four-CD compilation of Lawrence, including lots of private and unpublished tracks.
You can order that on eBay. I just did.

Right-wing oligarchs convinced Americans to confuse their own freedom to denude Americans with the body politic’s freedom to enjoy life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

With the result that the former has accelerated at the expense of the latter.

David Bentley Hart in Commonweal:

“An enormous number of Americans have been persuaded to believe that they are freer in the abstract than, say, Germans or Danes precisely because they possess far fewer freedoms in the concrete. They are far more vulnerable to medical and financial crisis, far more likely to receive inadequate health coverage, far more prone to irreparable insolvency, far more unprotected against predatory creditors, far more subject to income inequality, and so forth, while effectively paying more in tax (when one figures in federal, state, local, and sales taxes, and then compounds those by all the expenditures that in this country, as almost nowhere else, their taxes do not cover).

Vindictive, petty, altogether lacking in honesty or self-awareness.

Bernie’s crime was exposing the truth about Hillary’s record. But I mean, Bernie made like at least thirty campaign appearances for her.

Can’t she act a smidgen bit gracious and grateful?

What is it with people at the top–is there no one who can keep them on a through line of rationality?

He still hasn’t gotten his war on Iran.

He’s very frustrated.

The sick, sick GOP senator from Arkansas seeks to weaponize corona virus into yet another geo political conflagration by taking the Fox “News” ball and running with it.

Just what we need–hostilities with China.

Will someone get Cotton to a shrink before he destroys the world?