Lobenthal.com

At New York City Ballet, Maria Kowroski danced Mozartiana last night better than she had ten years ago!

When the Republicans started hauling out Hitler’s Big Lie playbook as a campaign strategy in 1944, FDR swung into action.

Thom Hartman of the the Independent Media Institutes quotes at Alternet the words of a Democrat who fought back–and boy, do we need more of them today.

“The opposition, in this year, has already imported into this campaign a very interesting thing, because it’s foreign. They’ve imported the propaganda technique invented by the dictators abroad. Remember a number of years ago there was a book, Mein Kampf, written by Hitler himself. The technique was all set out in Hitler’s book and was copied by the aggressors of Italy and Japan.

“According to that technique, you should never use a small falsehood. Always a big one. For its very fantastic nature would make it more credible. If only you keep repeating it over, and over, and over again.”

Sort of like the final scene in Dangerous Liaisons, when society decides it has finally had enough.

Fray-hardened snowflake Haberman gets into yet another snit because now it’s John Cusack asking her to call Trump’s lies what they are.

There are two reasons why The New York Times cannot yet wean itself away from decades of finger-in-the-air euphemisms when right-wing leaders blatantly lie. It has cowered so long before the right-wing’s accusations of apocryphal liberal bias that it bends over backwards to treat the right wing with excessive respect and even protectionism.

And two, Haberman is too dependent on access to celebrity politicians–and their flacks like Ozark Princess Sanders– and to the court of Trump.

Better to have less access = not be a mouthpiece = be able to tell the unvarnished truth.

Bartiromo’s co-conspirator Judge Jeanine cannot anymore–if ever she could–conduct a rational discourse when her propaganda bytes are challenged by troublesome intrusions of fact and reality. Her totally over-the-top histrionics are meant to compensate for the fact that she can hardly put an actual sentence together, relying instead on a scrambled salad of buzzwords designed to arouse the Fox/Trump cult viewership.

Raw Story directs us to footage of her latest shreik-a-thon.

John Norton tweets: “Sen. Schatz you and your colleagues need to be much more vocal in pushing back on Trump’s nonsense. You have great message on Twitter. Please do some television interviews.”

“What is at stake now is the identity of the university itself,” Jon Paul Sydnor writes at Daily Kos. “And with it, the fate of knowledge and citizenship in America.

“The conflict is between two different visions of what the university should be. The tension is between economism, propounded by those who assign a dollar value to everything, and humanism, propounded by those who believe that many goods far exceed any financial value-added.”

Why is 574 Fifth Avenue, a former brownstone mansion transformed in the 1890s into one of Fifth Avenue’s most interesting and important low-rise commercial structures, being demolished to allow some internal mall project that’s already too big to become even bigger?

Tom Miller’s Daytonian in Manhattan tells you about 574/5’s extraordinary evolution.

It is absolutely outrageous what is being done to this city, and if the Mayor doesn’t start living up to his campaign promises about ending inequality and doesn’t stop acting as shill for the developers, he needs to be primaryed rather than being given a third term in the Bloombergian manner.

For a long time my father had his office at 401 Broadway, and I was in the area a lot. Believe me, Canal Street was bustling. Any moron knows that.

But not, apparently, the upscale forces of hyper-gentrification.

It’s galling to see the New York Times print without comment a jewelry store owner’s claim that “I think we’re just beginning to see the neighborhood come alive.”

Jeremiah Moss decries the racist, elitist absurdity of such a claim.

And jewelry store owner, I have to say, au contraire: as Moss describes, hyper-gentrification is turning Manhattan into a moribund waxworks.

“This place has been alive for a long time,” Moss insists correctly. “And now it is being killed by the same force that is killing so much of the city.”

She and her clown act are as tacky as they come, which makes her perfect for Fox “News,” and she’s demonstrating more than ever that she’s nothing but a me-too lying member of the traitorous Fox tag team.

P.S. It’s positively bizarre as well as chilling the way that Murdoch has obviously made it an all-hands-on-deck moment, with Bartiromo leaving her business wheelhouse to go along with the WITCHHUNT BY HILLARY CLINTON AND THE PIZZA COMMUNITY gag.