Lobenthal.com

We thought that the Dem leadership couldn’t get more stupid and craven.

We were wrong.

It seems that the superannuated Dems at the top are going to embrace “pay as you go” as one one of their platform planks, which means once more buying into the GOP sham deficient hysteria. No new spending without cuts or tax hikes, therefore hamstringing Congress’s ability to fund programs that Americans need.  Military spending, of course, is always exempt from such pinched little rules.

Have the Dem already forgotten how Obama strait-jacketed his presidency by listening to charlatan Timothy Geithner and buying into the deficit hustle?

Instead of combating catastrophic GOP fiscal policy, the Dems are determined to double down on it. It is the GOP, not the Dems, that always busts the budget, and the Dems always find ways to take the heat for it. They assidously search for ways to own the worst catastrophes drummed up by the GOP.

Incredibly, Pelois is stepping up to ensure that everything she did to make sure she lost the gavel in 2010, she’s going to do all over again if the Dems somehow retake the House.

With policy ideas like this, that’s looking more and more unlikely.

It was mid-April and the rites of early spring were in full riot. And I was in the throes of them.

First, I went to hear Timothy Young give the final talk of this season’s Wave Hill lecture series. Wave Hill is, of course the Arcadia on the Hudson in Riverdale, but the lecture was downtown at the NY School of Interior Design.

Young is a curator at Yale’s Beinecke  library, and he spoke about archival acquisitions documenting the thought and design processes of master gardeners: “Paper and Trails–Writers and Gardens in the Archives” referenced legendary gardens like Vita Sackville-West’s Sissinghurst in England. Hers was of particular interest because I’ve been to see it.

Plans, notes, to-do lists are first-hand sources preserved in these acquisitions.

Then after listening to Young, my feet just followed a straight line West to Fifth Avenue, where the Frick’s great old star-and-saucer magnolias were just about to reach peak. They were late this year because of our freaky weather–I’ve seen them at this stage at least three weeks earlier some years. But the delay was  all the more welcome because I so rarely catch them at their peak.

I left the Upper East Side edified and beguiled.

I look forward to next season’s Wave Hill lecture series and will give a heads up.

After what came out of Trump and Giuliani’s spoutholes this weekend, and the minimal pushback given it by the GOP, this is what the Democrats must use as ONE of their campaign platforms in the midterms.

“I’ll never forget it, because he was like an insane man. He was like a panther out of a cage. I had never seen Scheherazade like that.”

Why does it continue to claim that nuclear-generated energy is “carbon-free”?

Why?

In the Los Angeles Times, Ron Rodarte penned a letter rebutting this pernicious myth, which the LA Times editorial board also tried to perpetuate. “How does one cheer nuclear as ‘clean’ in the sense of carbon dioxide emissions when the entire process of mining uranium ore, processing the uranium into fuel pellets and loading the fuel frames into the reactor core are all carbon-intensive aspects of this power source?”

The Times continues to promote nuclear power as Fukushima continues to pump out toxic radioactivity. And there is no solution in sight to the problem of nuclear waste disposal.  And the again, dilapidated reactors are in many cases (such as NYC’s) close to giant metropolises.

And on and on and on, but the Establishment media won’t stop covering its eyes and sticking its fingers in its ears on energy.

and so beautiful: Farrell, Morris, and Paul bourreeing around each other in the dream scene of Balanchine’s Don Quixote, recorded for posterity by Bert Stern at the ballet’s preview premiere night in May 1965.

who shoots herself in the foot on a regular basis.

“WHY WAS SHE GIVEN A SHOW IN THE FIRST PLACE?”

Kelly Macias at Daily Kos wants to know.

Up-is -down maestro Pruitt signals the deformed double-think now proffered by Trump and his lieutenants.

Want cleaner air? Burn more coal. Yeah, right.

Remember Estelle Winwood in The Producers, beseeching Zero to play “The Countess  and the Chauffeur?”

Well, Graham really gets into “Dictator Over Country.”

Jonathan Lemire, Eric Tucker and Lisa Mascaro at Talking Points Memo report that Sen. Graham is “warming” to Trump’s determination to fire Sessions and end the Mueller probe.

The craven, doddering rich white men who run the NFL colluded with the craven, addled, rich-from-criminality President Trump to suppress the civil rights of United States citizens.

Will the Democrats dare murmur a protest?