Lobenthal.com

Remember when our public schools were funded?

Remember when they taught music and art?

Remember when libraries were funded and they weren’t run by the trustees?

Remember when infrastructure was repaired?

When the federal government practiced revenue sharing with cities?

Rep. Ocasio -Cortez wants the highest federal marginal rates back at 70%, the way they were in the 1960s.

I don’t blame her.

Imagine what the country could accomplish if Jeff Bezos, Charles Koch, David Koch, Mark Zuckerberg and Donald Trump paid incomes tax rates higher than their administrative underlings?

Sen. McConnell is putting on his obi, all right–joining Sen. Graham in devoting his life to pleasuring Herr Trump.

Of course, geishas are delicate and poetic–there’s none of that here.

is implicated by formerly one-of-its-own, erstwhile  NBC correspondent William Arkin, writing at CNN.

Patrick Caldwell in Mother Jones profiles this travesty of a public official’s determination to deny health care to as many deserving Americans as possible.

–and make private corporations even richer in the process.

Caldwell’s sidebar is a part of Tracie McMillan’s long form: “How One Company is Making Millions Off Trump’s War on the Poor.”

Why aren’t Democratic presidential contenders talking about this?

House Democrats need to start investigating Verma.

And every time Mike Pence talks religion, the media needs to ask him how he can square that with his promotion of Verma, who managed to infiiltrate the federal government due to Pence’s sponsorship.

Let’s all make “Vice” the biggest-grossing flick of all time!

No matter how much taxpayer-funded plastic surgery is performed on Liz Cheney, she is one of the ugliest-minded people in Congress.

Rep. Cheney is obsessed with vindicating the legacy of her scoundrel father, who lied the country into a disastrous war that he personally profited from.

She will defend any inhumanity in the service of exercising her Electra complex.

Her ludicrously stupid attack on what she calls “socialism” is vintage Cheney dynasty.

Todd VanDerWerff stands up for cultural criticism at Vox.

But because he advocates for popular-culture critique only, or rather can’t seem to see beyond it to discussions of anything else in the cultural sphere, he perpetuates the anti-culture bias that has wiped out attention to conservatory, yes, “high” art forms.

From Nation of Change, Rep. Khanna:

“I do not understand why the Democrats don’t have the courage of our convictions and make the case that our policies will lead to growth.  PAYGO is to protect members in vulnerable districts who can say that Democrats are for fiscal responsibility. I’m all for raising taxes on the 1 percent and multinational corporations and stopping our excessive spending on the bad wars. But we should make an economic growth argument in swing districts instead of thinking the ’90s playbook of fiscal responsibility will work.”

I had my own little experience with “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” author, the late Lee Israel.

Seems she wasn’t thrilled about my writing a book on Tallulah Bankhead–perhaps given the fact that she’d already written one??

Lee was not a great person, but I do truly regret that she didn’t live to see her final book made into a Major Motion Picture.

I’ll pick this up later when I retrieve my transcription of the phone message she left me back in 1995!

At Daily Kos, Laura Clawson rebuts the current CW about Biden:

“Let’s be clear: a 2020 presidential run is more likely to tarnish Biden’s current legacy than it is to end in victory. . . What makes him a competitor now is his association with Obama combined with his status as a white man who radiates folksiness without alienating the wealthy, but that’s not going to be enough to carry him through a campaign given everything else in his record.”

Like so many others, I enjoy Biden’s wisecracks, like to hear him speak, like the way he smacked down Paul Ryan in the 20002 VP debate,

— and wouldn’t give him my primary vote in a million years.

You wouldn’t have been a good army general. You would have been the bestest. Ever. A big, beautiful army general. And you know more about the army than anyone else.

It’s get the net time–Trump is ready.