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Farron Cousens reminds him that it doesn’t.

As we head into 2018, let the campaign ads commence!

The Metropolitan Opera administration certainly has a lot to answer for, but nevertheless it was sad to attend Thais last night and see how many empty seats there were for this fine performance. Gelb may have done a lot wrong, but he’s also fighting an uphill battle.

This morning I went to look for reviews from the production’s opening earlier this month and, unbelievably, there don’t seem to have been any proper reviews in either the NY Times or the WSJ.

The Times had a piece by Zachary Woolfe coupling Thais with Virgil Thomson’s The Mother of Us All. There were two paragraphs dedicated to the actual performance.

Certainly much of what little opera coverage there is in the “mainstream” media could be better than what it has been, but on the other hand, excluding a full review of an opera that has not been heard at the Met in 9 years, that stars an international name such as Gerald Finley, is just plain DUMB. As well as highly injurious to NYC culture.

Does anyone in the “mainstream” media really care about culture any more?

In any case, Thais is not a great opera but gives lots of opportunities to its performers, and they certainly availed themselves of all they could last night.

ever looked as stupid and hapless as Trump did yesterday?

Democratic challengers to both Collins and Murkowski need to step up immediately — these two have betrayed their constituents and must not be allowed to hide behind any cloak of Moderation.

They are lying and damn well know they are lying about what the consequences of repealing the ACA individual mandate will be.

about what the results will be of vaporizing the ACA’s individual mandate.

Who knew?

After all the hideously disrespectful and traitorous acts that McConnell committed against President Obama and the American people, this worm, who has enabled Trump every step of the way, this bad-tempered lout who won’t speak to Sen. Warren, has the audacity to claim that the Democrats’ refusal to continue to behave like abused spouses compares unfavorably to his record of deigning to meet with Pres. Obama.

Naturally, McConnell is lying, as he does on a daily, if not hourly basis.

Nicole Lafond at Talking Points Memo:

“In 2010, House Democratic leader Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD) criticized McConnell and other Republican leaders, saying he was ‘disappointed” that Republicans were too busy to accept a bipartisan meeting with Obama and Democratic l’aders, the Wall Street Journal reported. At the time, a McConnell spokesperson said the White House made the mistake of announcing the meeting before checking to see if he was available for it.”

And Esme Cribb reports more:

From The Hero With a Thousand Faces:

“The figure of the tyrant-monster is known to the mythologies, folk traditions, legends and even nightmares of the world; and his characteristics are everywhere essentially the same. He is the hoarder of the general benefit. He is the monster ever avid for the greedy rights of ‘my and mine.’ “

Joan McCarter at Daily Kos reports that when Judge Kelly questioned CFPB Acting Director English’s lawyer, Deepak Gupta, about whether the interim nature of Imposter Mulvaney’s appointment lessened its illegality, “Gupta argued that compounds the problem because it ‘circumvents the prerogative of the Senate’ to confirm permanent agency heads.

“That raises this conflict from a single flashpoint with this particular agency to a potentially precedent-setting power grab. If Trump gets away with cutting the Senate out of the nomination and confirmation process for federal appointees, it’s one more constitutional crisis.”

how the corporate-owned print media could possibly think it would attract readers with banal, homogenized, cookie-cutter content, but what Atcheson makes clear is that the ownership of course is not interested in quality but rather the political possibilities in consolidation.

Homogenization is the watchword of state-controlled media, now manifested in the U.S. by a corporate sector that purchased the government, uniting both institutions to impose a monolithic message of ersatz reality and propaganda.

Just remember those megaphones on the streets of Russian cities.