Lobenthal.com

Almost. (You know how I value nuance.)

The Editorial Board and/or Bezos apparently consider Trump attempting a coup to be an “official action.”

A new low.

Former Post columnist Philip Bump Blueskys:

“I spent more than a decade at The Post. It was good to me and I was proud to work there. I’ve largely refrained from being critical since I left. But this framing of the special counsel probe is embarrassing and flatly wrong. Stunning, but not.”

Bumps is one of many excellent Post staffers who were bought out by Bezos as he pillages the newspaper.

The outage doesn’t stop at Bump, as Robert Davis at Raw Story documents.

A major lieutenant in Trump’s not-so-slow moving coup, Pam Bondi’s C-list histrionics reminded us, as if we needed reminding, how subversive this regime is, how contemptuous of America and our democracy. They really are defecating on our nation. And no matter how many hours Bondi practiced in front of the mirror, she just doesn’t have it.

Let’s look forward to cheering when Bondi is jailed for perjury and obstruction of justice–the way that Bill Barr should have been.

Thank you to Sen. Schiff for calling out her “canned tricks” –the fake outrage, the performative petulance, the insults, the Dynasty fleering, the deflection–and reciting an inventory of her chronic stonewalling.

I’m reading Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here, a fictionalized, quasi-verite (FDR is a character) chronicle of a fake populist fascist’s takeover of America.

Lewis understood America to a T: “There’s no country in the world that can get more hysterical—yes, more obsequious! than America,” one character states.

This was one prong of their all-out attempt to get Trump re-elected.

Stephen Prager at Common Dreams surveys the gathering outrage.

we might remember what D.D. Guttenplan said in The Nation last May: “Identifying, conditioning, and credentialing the ruling class is what Ivy League universities are for.” But, still, we expect them to stand up for freedom of thought and expression–for everyone.

Dye her hair blonde and have plastic surgery in order to look like the army of MAGA media zombie women.

Evince hyperventilation as she accuses Trump’s political opponents and his victims of malfeasance.

Play victim the moment her lies are exposed.

Like shameless and incessantly. Pepper your lies with “frankly,” the way that Trump does.

Wear a crucifix necklace at all times.

Triump lies constantly, but we have to take it seriously when he said that Harvard is going to forfeit their status to conform to the Trump agenda that wants to denigrate higher education and insists that education should be primarily utilitarian. The White House doesn’t want an informed public that knows how to deploy critical thinking. Instead, Harvard is apparently going to be spending $500 million on setting up vocational training schools.

Harvard’s president and trustees demonstrate that no matter how educated you are, without integrity and emotional intelligence you’re not fit to lead.

Our current Supreme Court majority is the most corrupt, anti-democracy, and partisan in our history, and one of the most heartless. They proved that today when they clawed back the legal status and green lighted the deportation of thousands of Venezuelans, who will almost certainly face abuse. Of course they did so by the stealthy shadow docket-the Republicans are the party of personal responsibility, remember–and as well they oevrturned a lower court ruling–sometehing they do all the time. They are lawless.

that people could live without limbs but not without a torso, a center–by way of explaining the importance of an expressive torso in his work? Of course you do. It’s in my 1995 interview in Ballet Review with his assistant Airi Hynninen. I told that to a ballerina once and she said it gave her a key about how to perform his ballets. It showed on stage.

Anyway, I was thinking about that today and how people like Vance lack any ethical or patriotic center–let alone a spiritual one, despite how strenuously they use their professed Christianity as sword, shield and alibi. As a result, they are existing in a weird, unstable limbo where every statement, interaction is flyaway because completely transactional.

Would his seething, insatiable rage at America and his chronic duplicity be at quite the same level on the Richter scale that it is now?

The muddled, amorphous identity confusion at his core has made him particularly ripe for fascist recruitment, as we see with his all-in allegiance to Trump and Vance’s mentor Peter Thiehl.