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Pres. Biden’s capitulation to the GOP the last time they tried to take our country hostage over the debt ceiling was terrible.  Biden said he wouldn’t negotiate with the GOP’s economic terrorists, then he chose to negotiate with same, instead of taking his case to the American public, encouraging them to let their representatives know that they wouldn’t stand for the shakedown.  Then, after he’d given away the store, the GOP decided to renege on the deal anyway. Of course.  The GOP House caucus is made up of thieves and charlatans, and Biden should not even deign to legitimize them by entertaining the possibility of more spending cuts.

New York will not vote for a Hitlerian disciple as president.

Trump’s latest Aderol-and-megalomania fueled outburst of manic bluff had him threatening to bring his Nuremberg rallies to the Big Apple and other blue redoubts. Then he made some filthy, racist, defamatory comments about blue state culture and education.  Blue mayors and governors need to respond.

Take Nikki  Haley–please:

When her little Raise the Confederacy gambit got called out, instead of taking responsibility, she blamed an apocryphal “Democrat plant” for her attempt to wipe the historical slate clean of uncomfortable–for racists–reality. Then when that little tap dance ran into reality with a thud, she pivoted to the boilerplate GOP/MAGA attack on democracy and self-governance.

and look where we are now.

Led by their corrupt pastors, the evangelicals are now a political movement masquerading  as a spiritual one. They have unmasked.  They embrace the pure evil  of Trump, and they cheer on his apocalyptic agenda because they believe in the Rapture.

Trumpism is the heightened, aggravated culmination of Reaganism.

I recently had to deal with a family of evangelicals–and, let me tell you, if you’re not one of them, you’re not a full human in their eyes; thus they are ripe to support Trump’s neo-Hitlerian, eliminationist rhetoric.

Trump’s dim, addled mind does know one thing: The more he becomes an SNL  parody, the more his cult adores him—the more good about themselves he makes them feel.

His physical clumsiness and ungainliness is an asset–as was proved when he started concluding his Nuremberg rallies by lurching into a dance worthy for freakish discombobulation of Elektra’s finale in Strauss’s opera.

When Trump parodies Biden’s purported disorientation he’s actually engaging in self-caricature—I even wonder if Trump studied some footage of his own disjointed stumbling out of rooms and off planes.

The West Village is being assaulted by the combined and colluded forces of City Hall and the development community.  City Hall’s been caught with its lies down over and over again, as it schemes to blanket the Village with behemoths.

Go to Village Preservation’s web site and there take the opportunity to make your voice heard in defense of the Village.

Alan Alda’s reluctance to talk about Diana Sands, his co-star in The Owl and the Pussycat for a year on Broadway, has frustrated Steve and I, but now it doesn’t. 

Alda has been, to the best of our knowledge, deafeningly silent on the subject of DS for years. Interviewed by Michael Schulman in The New Yorker in 2022 became  almost the first time he’s ever discussed working with her; he says they were competitive on Broadway.  “We got a lot of praise for ‘ensemble acting,’ when what we were doing was the opposite.” And yet, from the front that’s exactly what it probably registered as.

The fact that he didn’t go to London with her when she transferred the play there in 1966 says something.

But I don’t think it started that way, not when they were colleagues with The Compass on Cape Cod in 1962, nor–as producer Philip Rose details in his memoir You Can’t Do That on Broadway!–when Owl and the Pussycat was being read privately for backers early in 1964.

Last January I talked to Rose Gregorio, who was Diana’s understudy in the play, who died last August. She had pertinent things to say. I finally feel that Steve and I can do justice to The Owl and the Pussycat.

Biography is arduous but rewarding! Sleuthing, recovering something from the partly-retrievable past that you hope does conform in large measure to the empirical truth, as well as the subjective truths that also must be acknowledged. 

that they must refute, on a daily basis, every obscene byte of double think and double talk emitted by the distended maw of the orange one.

And you know what, Mr. President? You might retain the youth vote that put you over the top in 2020 by ceasing your aggressive promotion of more drilling, digging, apocalyptic extraction.

A male friend of mine who’s married to a woman nevertheless describes himself, thank you very much, sexually as not “straight” but rather “crooked.”

As for race, he’ll describe himself “off-white.”

Will the corporate media continue to choose not to notice?