Lobenthal.com

You cannot make up the post-Reagan Democratic Party.

Pelosi demands that the Democratic House fall on its sword, manacle itself to fake austerity quid pro quo:

As Jake Johnson explains at Common Dreams:

“If implemented, pay-go would require all new spending to be offset by budget cuts or tax hikes. Such a restriction, progressive lawmakers and economists argue, would unnecessarily hamstring the House Democratic majority’s ability to pursue the bold agenda that voters demanded in the November midterms.”

Oh, gosh, does this mean that since he’s chief of staff that venomous little mug lying, lying, lying is going to be in our face every day on every news platform?

People like Mulvaney, Conway, Huckabee Sanders could transition in a heartbreak to administrative detail in a labor camp. I mean, they’re ready. And they wouldn’t lose a minute’s sleep over it, either.

Really, Establishment Democrats never change, particularly when they’re of a certain age and are simply too complacent.

Soon-to-be Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi ensures that the House committee that will allegedly address the climate crisis will be as ineffectual as she can make it.

We need new Democrats who are in touch with the reality of global events and the threat to humanity posed by the environmental catastrophes we see unfolding all around us.

Yeah, right.

They would like us to think that they are backing off from their attempted takeover of American democracy, but, please, Daddy Mercer and Baby Doll Mercer aren’t really going anywhere.

They may be hitting the high seas in one of their yachts, however–fleeing arrest by Robert Mueller.

And they do so love playing the victim, remember?

Bloomberg reports.

Which party is the one that holds America hostage–over and over and over again?

In the apotheosis of Sergei Vikharev’s restoration of Petipa’s The Sleeping Beauty, as pictured in my squib on Vikkarev  in Ballet Review, I want to point out something I’d forgotten: amid the assembled suspended in the sky is not just good fairy Lilac and her retinue, but evil fairy Carabosse as well. You know, the one who caused all the problems.

S/he, too is a guest at Aurora’s wedding, having arrived, like Lilac via palanquin at the top of act 3, to jubilant fanfare by Tchaikovsky.

Forces for both good and bad are in balance, or perhaps the bad has been humbled, and may even have repented. Or perhaps s/he has simply been forgiven, in tune with the benevolent magnanimity of everything surrounding Lilac and her blessed kingdoms.

If Trump has taught us anything, it should be that the mindless veneration of the rich encouraged by the “mainstream” media as well as so many deferential politicians is catastrophic.

No, government should not be run like a business.

No, the trustees of the New York Public Library should not have been able to sell off the Donnell library for a song to a developer chum so that another hotel tower could rise on its site and a “replacement” library stashed in the basement.

Jack London writes in The Iron Heel:

“But outside the realm of business, these men are stupid. They know only business.  They do not know mankind or society, and yet they set themselves up as arbiters of the fate of the hungry millions and all the other millions thrown in.”

Hey, is Sen. Murphy thinking of running for President?

Unlike most Democrats, he’s got a foreign policy handle that isn’t an anemic me-too-ism,trailing after the GOP.

Sen. Murphy tweets:

And so I was walking up to the CUNY Graduate Center for my first Proust class almost a year ago.  I opened the door to the lobby. . . and stepped back forty years.  back to the B.Altman department store in the 1970s.

When the landmark turn-of-the-twentieth century department store shuttered and was repurposed for CUNY two decades ago, it was entirely gutted and rebuilt–save for this ornately wood-carved vestibule, the boiserie now buffed to a high restored gleam.

I loved B. Altman–not only it’s evocatively intact interior and exteriors, but it’s high-quality, higher-end but not outrageously expensive men’s clothes.

Some weeks after that first Proustian immersion, I was alerted that the elevator was retained inside what is now the libary.  I checked that out, and again experienced a heady recollection.

Hard by the 34^th Street façade,  the elevator cage now travels only between the first and second floors of the library. The rather lavish staircase from first to second floors has been retained as well.

A corner of the past still embedded amid a dramatically-transformed new surround. And an express trip back to a personal past and a lost era in retail.

They repel and fascinate me by their shlockiness and disturbedness.

Watching again video of his meltdown with Schumer & Pelosi last week.

Contrast him to the expressive but economical command of gesture by the two Democratic leaders. Trump’s, on the other hand, are totally out of control and robotic, usually having no connection to what he’s saying. They are just a compulsive accompaniment. (Won’t use the word “obliggatto” so I don’t get called an elitist.)

Trump is a man profoundly ill-at-ease with himself and with the world.