Lobenthal.com

I’m tired of hearing crap about Injustice Roberts being in institutionalist. What he is is an incrementalist, who has strategized his attack on American democracy to unfold in stages. His current endorsement of partisan gerrymandering, together with his gutting of the Voting Rights Act and his dismantling of limits to corporate interference in elections, is the coup de grace. He is one of the most dangerous, extreme Chief Justices in the history of our Supreme Court.

In Patricia Mears’ office at FIT, she’s got Ballerina: Fashion’s Modern Muse all diagrammed out on her exhibition board.

Talking to an American educator who teaches abroad, she noted that it may take some years for curriculum changes to manifestly impact the Zeitgeist: I thought of how civics was dropped years ago from the public school curriculum and the way that today so many Americans seem to be totally ignorant of the way that American democracy is designed to function. And eliminating music and art from the required curriculum has surely been both symptom of, as well as cataclysmic influence on America’s cultural decline.

Juan Cole at Informed Consent:

“Trump created this crisis by breaching the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. Having pocketed Iran’s mothballing of 80 percent of its uranium enrichment program, Trump slapped the harshest sanctions ever seen against any country on Iran, unilaterally and in the teeth of opposition from NATO allies and the permanent members of the UN Security Council. In other words, he screwed Iran over.”

She cries foul on the gigantic, ever-increasing military budget.

“These are huge checks being written to Boeing and Lockheed Martin, when we should be cutting checks to everyday people struggling to make ends meet.”

Rep. Cheney now makes an habitual, almost daily defense of totalitarianism.

The Nazis’ first concentration camp was built years before the Final Solution.

And AOC is correctly identifying what could be the ultimate culmination of Trump’s anti-immigrant dehumanization.

She didn’t say it’s happened already.

Early in Hitler’s reign, my grandmother’s rabbi told her what the Nazis were doing and my grandmother always regretted never writing Washington, D.C. and demanding that FDR do something. Her family remaining in Hungary suffered horribly during World War II, which makes me all the more outraged at Liz Cheney’s twisted, cynical, exploitation of the anti-Semitism card. This in defense of a president who not only demonizes immigrants, but surrounds himself with anti-Semites like Steve Bannon.

So if you want to do something about anti-Semitism, Rep. Chney, why don’t you start in your own filthy backyard?

We spend ten times more subsidizing the humanity-extinguishing fossil fuel companies than we do on education.

Walter Einenkel at Daily Kos finds that–well, morally repugnant.

“Nothing signifies how backwards our country’s priorities are more than what we spend our money on.”

How stupid does he think America is?

We know how.

“Socialism” is now McConnell’s go-to, all-purpose epithet for any constructive policy he wants to pre-empt or destroy.

McConnell is socialism-for-the-rich’s best friend–forever!

If any Democrat–Bernie’s an independent, remember–has any sense they will pile on over Sen. McConnell’s latest splenetic outburst of socialism-baiting.

And, of course it’s time his ethical lapses and brazen corruption are investigated.

We shall see. But certainly the new legislation coming out of Albany is a good start to arresting NYC landlord’s assault on the city, which has been ratcheting ever higher since vacancy decontrol took effect in 1993.

But will there be reparations for all the rent-regulated tenants bullied and harassed out of their apartments over the last 25 years?

So much so that they suddenly got scared-shitless at what he was saying at George Washington University the other day and suddenly pulled the plug on their live coverage.

“President Trump and his fellow oligarchs hate democratic socialism because it benefits working people, but they absolutely love corporate socialism.”

Read Ernest A. Canning’s analysis of Sen. Sanders’ speech at Common Dreams.