Lobenthal.com

The Kremlin hasn’t hosted such a bunch of pushover saps in 500 years.

Here’s what it’s about:

1. screw the public and the public interest like nobody’s business.
2. kiss Trump’s ass shamelessly.
3. steal so much that you make Trump look normal.

The preserved acts 2 & 3 from the Met’s Die Walkure of December 18, 1937 star Australian Marjorie Lawrence as Brunhilde, Norwegian Kirsten Flagstad as Sieglinde, German Friedrich Schorr as Wotan, Danish Lauritz Melchior as Siegmund, Swedish Kerstin Thorborg as Fricka, and German Ludwig Hoffman as Hunding. Austrian Artur Bodanzky conducts.

The thousands of miles separating this cast’s respective nationalities are bridged by a fearless common abandon such as we rarely hear today in Wagner. Scorching.

Why is it that the children of totalitarian Supreme Court justices are so fatuous?

I wonder.

As an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, Philip Alito, son of the infamous Supreme Court “Justice” Samuel Alito, wrote a laugh-riot bio from his editor’s perch at the University’s publication “The Forum.”

He recapped his accomplishments to date, which included serving “as a parking aide to Nancy Pelosi (I won’t even start on her) but was fired when Barbara Boxer came onto me.”

Obviously, this is a party-line family.

Behind Alito’s simply dazzling wit, lies the same old partly-sexual paranoia toward the perceived Other that informs Samuel Alito’s rulings.

Junior Alito, I’ve got news for you:

In about 15 years, when you begin to emerge from your amniotic bubble of entitlement and realize that your beach house has flooded, that your kids’ future is impaired by your father’s anti-democracy, anti-regulatory rulings, you will curse those very same rulings tossed out by your Dad with such ruthless recklessness.

Justice Kennedy’s family and the Trumps are the new-normal bedfellows.

They belong, as David Little writes in the Washington Post, to:

“an elite increasingly cloistered not just from the poor but also from America as a whole. America’s super-rich and super-powerful are losing touch with the middle class and the professional class, with black and brown communities, with immigrants seeking refuge, and with citizens using public services. Their bubbled reality is not merely reflected in Kennedy’s decision to retire but also in his decisions on the court. A common theme of this term’s major 5-to-4 rulings is the belief that those in power — whether it’s a president seeking to ban Muslims in Trump v. Hawaii, a corporation looking to dilute the political power of its workers in AFSCME v. Janus, or a fake health clinic hoping to deceive vulnerable women in National Institute of Family and Life Advocates v. Becerra — should be free to wield their power however they choose.”

NPR’s decision to air the Declaration of Independence again this year is therefore, naturally once again assailed by the cult as evidence of partisan bias.

Democratic congress people must be sure to ask whether his documented animus towards Hillary Clinton compromised his work on the email investigation.

I remember in the fall of 2000, Tchernichova was glued to the TV day after day watching the electoral debacle unfold. When I asked her how she could stand to watch so much of it, she said she was virtually obsessed with discovering whether American democracy would survive. Having grown up in a police state, her concern was certainly understandable.

As we now know, American democracy has only become more imperiled since the partisan right-wing judicial aberrations–notable among them the allegedly moderate Anthony Kennedy–awarded the presidency to George W. Bush. With predictably catastrophic results.

I’m reading Jamie Raskin’s Overruling Democracy: The Supreme Court versus The American People. Turns out that at the University of Chicago my father was Assistant Resident House Head in the dorm he shared with Raskin’s father Marcus. Dad says he was brilliant. But that’s not why I’m reading his son’s book.

Raskin has choice things to say about the blatantly compromised 2000 ruling, one of the outstanding acts of judicial activism in this country’s history–and at the same time virtually singular,  Raskin writes, in its audacious implementation of bias.

Raskin, today Representative from Maryland, could be invaluable in defeating the latest totalitarian justice Trump and McConnell will select to further bolster the GOP majority, and, most importantly, shield Trump from legal jeopardy.  Senate Democrats are turning out to be so gellatinous when it comes to formulating strategy to defeat Trump’s takeover of the Court. Perhaps Raskin in the House should be consulted.

Vicious Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin goes on a rampage, denying vision and dental services to the state’s Medicaid patients because a court told him that his draconian work requirements are illegal.

Gov. Bevin’s paroxysms of vengeful hate toward the citizens of Kentucky are a graphic portrayal of the point at which the Republican Party has now arrived.