Lobenthal.com

That would be corporate courtesan Ajit Pai and the we-love-them-massacres NRA.

In a typically Orwellian gesture, the NRA salutes Pai for destroying the Internet, a process they label an act of courage worthy of their Charles Heston citation.

How sick can the right wing become? Sicker?

Rep. Lieu tweets:

Just when you thought @NRA could not be more out of touch with the overwhelming majority of Americans, it turns out the NRA randomly supports repealing net neutrality. What’s next, is the NRA going to support repealing seat belts?

Also, was this a permissible gift to Ajit Pai?

Common Dreams commemorates the end of government ethics in their report.

I mean, Tallulah knew in 1939 that the Federal Theatre Project was probably doomed because the Republicans insisted it was riddled with Communists. yet she went down to Washington, D.C. with a raft of Broadway powerhouses to give a barn-burning speech to the Senate subcommittee, then headed back to New York to give a different kind of performance that night in The Little Foxes.

Now, that’s a laugh.

Tucker “I’ll lie about anything if you pay me” Carlson is the epitome of a rich elitist. He’s never had a moment’s financial insecurity in his life, and now this parasite pulls down a big salary at Fox “News” as part of a vicious line-up of anti-American saboteurs, who pollute the airwaves with toxic lies.

Maggie Doherty in The New York Times reminds us that Carlson has been promoting Trump’s evisceration of the National Endowment for the Arts, calling it “welfare for rich, liberal elites.”

Carlson knows this is hogwash, but hey, he’s being paid, right?

Carlson can attend any arts event he might possibly care to sample, because he’s got loads of blood money pouring in from Fox.

Most Americans aren’t so fortunate, and they are the ones being nurtured by the NEA.

Doherty makes clear in her Op-Ed that the NEA has done and is doing an enormous service to low income rural residents of America–the ones that Carlson couldn’t give a shit about.

Because before our eyes we’re seeing how it happened.

Fox “News” and Trump and their traitorous accomplices are showing us how it happened.

THIS IS JOEL:

If sixteen-year-old Chadwick took office right now, I’m sure at the very least she would be nowhere as damaging as Rubio.

Btw, automatic defilement discharger Laura Ingraham put out a pissy tweet chastising this young woman for speaking out.

Ingraham may not know or care what democracy is, but she knows she doesn’t like it.

Last summer, Philip Kennicott in the Washington Post questioned whether the Kochs’ domination of arts philanthropy is morally or pragmatically tenable any longer.

“It’s increasingly clear that the Koch brothers’ climate campaign has had a larger moral and intellectual cost to our society. They have undermined a critical set of our most important human capacities, and some of the same ones that the arts are often thought to enhance.”

Short-term gain vs. long-term catastrophic cost:

“By actively promoting policies that will make the world more unstable, dangerous and unhealthy, the Kochs’ campaign to discredit climate science will make it much more difficult for the arts to compete for limited philanthropic largesse. And they have furthered a worldview — based on unreason and selfishness — that undermines the basic good things we assume the arts promote.”

in ballet, or probably anywhere else for that matter.

It’s work and work and work, on little things as much as big.

A few years after the premiere of La Valse in 1951, NYCB was performing it in Chicago, “and it was obvious,” one dancer recalled, that Balanchine had been spending time with Le Clercq on it. “Because it was even better. The scene where she puts the gloves and jewelry on–it was so magnificent. You got chills watching her.”

She was so excessively made-up at the CNN town hall last night where she lied all over the place that I thought, either she’s put on war paint to intimidate every body there and hide behind some kind of mask, or she’s preoccupied with how’s she going to project on TV and decided not to take any chances. The transparent look isn’t for her.

Now we learn from screenwriter Paul Guyot on twitter that the NRA spokeswoman has seen herself as quite the star-in-the-making for at least a decade now.

Yes, well, I mean of course Lisa and I have included negative or lukewarm responses to Soloviev in People’s Artist.

No performer, no matter how great or celebrated, is subject to anything but a wide range of opinions, and describing what someone thought a performer couldn’t do not only maintains impartiality but illuminates that performer’s work.

But if the quality of the performer you’re writing about didn’t mean something to you, would you really put in heart and soul and every other faculty you’ve got to muster to do a book?

CON’T

And so it was nice, when I went to the electronic Financial Times Historical Archive (I was steered to it by the librarians at the NYPL business branch in the old B.Altman’s) to check the date of a quote by Andrew Porter cited in Diane Solway’s biography of Nureyev —

to find the full descriptions that Porter gave of Soloviev during the Kirov’s London debut in 1961.

Among them:

“His leaps are astounding. Every limb of his body seems to fall, by natural enchantment, into its ideal position at each moment of a phrase. His motion is heart-catchingly beautiful. We have seen no one like him.”

That’s the reality, and that’s what the Democrats need to press home.

Kirsten Gillibrand on Stephen Colbert last night was a small step in the right direction.

As she said, “It has nothing to do with the Second Amendment.”