Lobenthal.com

The Manhattan Borough President has to know that she can’t just talk the talk but must indeed walk. Somewhere. In some direction. We need to demand that she take a stroll.

I hope she walks down Broadway from 14th street and takes a gander at all the historic, beautiful, low-rise 19th-century buildings that are going to be crushed unless she takes some action to protect them. And forget any affordable housing remaining in the area once it becomes Silicon Valley East. Take a look at San Francisco.

De Blasio & Deputy Mayor Glen’s proposed Tech Hub on 14th Street is a Trojan Horse (except that they’re up front about it) to open B’way, Second and Third Avenue southwards to massive new redevelopment. This area has already been decimated in the past couple of decades. I cannot tell you how many historic buildings are gone because the city has so far refused to extend landmark district protection to this area.

Brewer’s approval for Tech Hub must come with a demand that the area receive zoning and landmark protections. And the Mayor needs to come around as well.

I’m tired of hearing both of them say they support things that they will not actively support.

On development issues as well as public education, there are now, at best, distinctions w/o a difference.

Diana Ravitch describes De Blasio’s betrayals of public education and capitulation to private charters.

His latest utterly fact-and-logic free stemwinder in Philadelphia demonstrates, once again that he is an existential danger to American democracy and to global humanity.

Tchernichova when talking to [complaining to] Baryshnikov about his lieutenant (often more than that, practically deputy ABT director at times) Charles France used to, in the late-1980s, mock-Russify and feminize his name into “Charlita Franzovna,” which Misha found hilarious!

Sen. Schumer is doing nothing to stop the passage of the bank deregulation bill, about which Sen. Warren is crying foul. Minority Leader Schumer is allowing Democrats to ensure passage of this disgraceful bill, which totally undermines the Dems’ claim to be looking out for consumers. “This bill could be a neat encapsulation of a corrupt administration and an out-of-touch Republican Party,” Alex Shephard writes in The New Republic. “Instead, it has become a totem of a feckless and incompetent Democratic Party.”

Naturally, all the Republicans are on board. We know whose side they’re always on. No ambiguity there.

So it’s bi-partisanship at its worst. “In their eagerness to show voters that they’re not just obstructionists, Democrats have simply rolled over” Shephard writes.

Once again.

Next fiscal crash and big bank bail-out, here we come!

We need better Democrats, better Democratic leadership.

when it comes to preserving neighborhoods and affordable housing.

The Midtown East scam, the Mayor’s refusal to stop the Rizzoli demolition, his reluctance to ensure that new zoning protections accompany the proposed Tech Hub on 14th Street–when it comes to grotesque overbuilding, and neighborhood destruction, it’s almost Bloomberg’s fifth term.

In The New York Review of Books, Jeremiah Moss writes about the impending demise of the 19th-century St. Denis Hotel at 11th Street and Broadway. Real-estate developers are salivating over the opportunity to destroy the neighborhood’s stock of low-rise, as yet-unlandmarked 19th-century buildings.

Woolf quotes Andrew Berman, executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation:

“The type of change we’re seeing now is unprecedented in the neighborhood’s history, and would erase all the layers that have accumulated over the generations.”

as I sat watching Shuffle Along on Broadway in the summer of 2016 that those very same cast members dancing, singing, tapping were also germinating the Broadway Advocacy Coalition.

Why don’t we let them tell the story, as they do here.

He jump-started America’s plunge into the Trumpapocalypse, argues James Carroll persuasively at Tom Dispatch.com

“The Crusades were, of course, a centuries-long medieval catastrophe. Bush’s Global War on Terror, in contrast, has already wreaked comparable havoc in a paltry 17 years, leading to almost unimaginable mayhem abroad and a moral collapse at home personified by President Donald J. Trump.”

Joan McCarter at Daily Kos has a good laugh over the Washington Post op-ed in which Charles Koch, who as McCarter notes, is “the guy who with his brother has bought the whole Republican House conference and about a third of the Senate’s,” is suddenly all choked up with upset over the corporate influence in politics.

So the Democratic senators betraying their constituencies and their party don’t like being called out by Sen. Warren for rolling back the mild regulations of the Democratically-propelled Dodd-Frank bill?

You know what you can do with yourselves.

A lot of elected officials sure don’t like the idea of the electorate knowing what they’re doing, do they?