Lobenthal.com

He made quite a spectacle of himself at the dinner he threw for members of the radical right-wing elite the other night.

The disgraced ex-Prime Minister throws out his support for Trump, his denigration of Sanders and Corbyn.

Well, didn’t the Baroness tell us that her proudest accomplishment was New Labor?

“Citzens United has destroyed America as we knew it,” Farren Cousins accurately commented on Ring of Fire not too long ago.

Harvard University defecates on itself and on all principles of academic debate.

Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance hosts a Koch-funded multi-day event designed to promote the “school choice” movement, and no dissenters are invited.

The Harvard Institute of Politics has offered fellowships to Corey Lewandowski and Sean Spicer, while rescinding its invite to Chelsea Manning.

So the question now is, Has Harvard University lost any sense of shame? Is it, in its present condition, upholding any precepts of academic independence?

Dane Ravitch excoriates Harvard “for turning itself into a propaganda mill for the privatization movement, at the behest of Big Money.”

I mean, I only voted for her to keep Trump out, and because it was inspiring to imagine us finally having a woman president.

How many voters felt the same way?

“Where did all the concern over deficits go?” asks Adam Johnson at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.

“After two years of the media lamenting, worrying and feigning outrage over the cost of Bernie Sanders’ two big-budget items—free college and single-payer healthcare—the same outlets are uniformly silent, days after the largest military budget increase in history.”

It is only when spending on human needs is considered that the “mainstream” “news” media starts to register skepticism.

Johnson writes that “no one in the media really cares about deficits, they only care about Deficits™, a clever marketing term used by those charged with keeping government money out of the hands of the poor—and in the coffers of weapons makers, banks and other wealthy interest groups.”

Sen. Sasse tried the time-honored extreme-right-wing trick of exploiting the American flag to attack the positions that are most Constitutional.

Rep. Lieu replied: “Dear @BenSasse: Those of us who served active duty know the oath we took was to US Constitution. That means the right to kneel, stand or sit”

David Plouffe was one of the worst of the charlatans pushing Obama toward more and more regressive stances on taxation and on “entitlements”–yes, Plouffe was advocating tax cuts for the wealthy and he was routinely smearing Medicare and Medicaid.

Naturally, Plouffe now is one of Zuckerberg’s closest advisors.

Zuckerberg can go on as many staged listening tours as he wants, but if he’s being tutored by the likes of Plouffe we all know exactly what to expect.

I refer to the Mendoza book store on Ann Street near City Hall. When it closed in 1990, it was NYC’s oldest book store, having opened there in 1894!

I remember the Mendoza well. It was positively Dickensian. When I was a child, my father’s office was right across Broadway and it must have been he who first brought me there. The wood floors creaked, the books sorted by topic on shelves were augmented by piles everywhere. Except for those creaks, it was usually very quiet.  If you were browsing on one of the three floors where the owner wasn’t stationed, you were kind of in your own world.

I was down around there recently and thought I’d seek it out, although I dimly remembered it had closed long ago.

The building now houses some kind of luncheonette, but at least it’s still there. But what it was and what it represented will, in all likelihood, never been seen again in this city.

As a society?

Locally, as the City of New York?

Bellevue Hospital is the lifeblood of this city — serving more patients today than ever before.

Why are we allowing staff to be cut?

Why aren’t the philanthropic-minded having benefit dinners on its gorgeous old/new bridging concourse?