Lobenthal.com

The Democrats, despite Schumer’s promise to come up with a sharp and bold manifesto, never, ever, do nothing sharp and bold.

In the Guardian, Thomas Frank responds to their attempt to rebrand themselves.

Our aspiring-dictator president is engaged in a pissing match with the dictator of North Korea.

If he had any knowledge, good will, understanding of diplomacy or understanding of reality, period, he would comprehend that North Korea is now so desperately poor that it’s leader would gladly back off from nuclear provocation in exchange for aid or at least relief.

Trump, however, is frantic to change the subject from RussiaGate.

He’s also saddled with the demented whisperings of Steve Bannon, whose apocalypse-orgasm-meter is set to detonate.

Trump has no gauge on empirical reality, so he cannot visualize what the endgame of nuclear confrontation would be.

At least Trump’s shrill, nasal, saber-rattling sounds so tin pot and ridiculous that cooler heads may encourage all concerned to laugh the whole thing off.

Miller’s accusations of “cosmopolitan bias” are lifted straight from Uncle Joe’s rhetorical tool box.

Ninety-two and unquenchable, Robert Barnett has just returned from staging Serenade at the Hawaii Ballet.

Serenade was Barnett’s late wife Virginia Rich’s favorite ballet.  Balanchine made it in 1934, the year Virginia was born, and while dancing at New York City Ballet during the 1950s, she used to say to Balanchine “Thank you for my birthday present!”

There are many things wrong about the new East Midtown zoning, which, according to the editorial in today’s New York Times is about to be approved by the City Council. One of the worst features is that air rights transfers will be, no questions asked, automatically approved. Thus ever-more monstrously scaled buildings will be rubber-stamped.

Despite the closeness of the Times to the real real estate establishment, I am shocked that the paper is endorsing what is so clearly a hustle. In a city run by developers and landlords, we need a newspaper of record to protect the municipal interest.  When Bloomberg tried to ram through an even more blatant edition of the scam four years ago, the paper opposed it. At that time they flagged as worth preserving the human scale still manifest in much of East Midtown.

We’ll now see how long that lasts.

How could anyone look at Fifty-seventh Street and not understand how damaging Bloomberg’s assault on the cityscape and his exploitation of the air-rights fandango has been?

Today’s Times editorial does raise a few questions concerning the excessive amount of discretionary power that will be vested in developers: they get to decide what civic improvements they will be responsible for in return for the air-rights windfall they’ll reap.

As Peter Moscowitz notes in How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood, “With little federal funding for housing, transportation, or anything else, American cities are now forced to rely on their tax base to pay for basic services.”

The fact that de Blasio has endorsed this demonstrates the way that the  city is still working under the false-paradigm that establishes real-estate taxes as almost the primary source of municipal revenue.  Making corporations pay their fair share would be much more beneficial.

De Blasio’s proposal to tax high-earners to subsidize badly-needed mass transit upgrades is also a step in the right direction.

The more you realize that Kennicott is right–it is disaster when four of the five Kennedy Center honorees are avatars of centralized, corporatized, for big profit popular culture. Only one, Carmen de Lavallade represents classical, non-profit art forms.

It’s not that popular art forms don’t belong in what is, at least by default our national theater, it’s that KC should not become a pawn of the faux-elitist witch hunts.

And it’s time to disabuse ourselves of the fantasy that something like hip-hop, at this stage of its development, remains some kind of demotic, folk art form, for all that it may have begun that way.

It’s fine with me to put hip-hop into the KC pantheon, but not at the expense of other things, and not because KC has decided to play defensive.

KC should be reiterating that it is championing art forms that the public does not get to see enough of–that have been crowded out by our insanely marketplace-driven corporate entertainment behemoths. These art forms comprise an essential role in America’s cultural legacy and identity.

Kennedy Center remains a great institution that hosts an enormous range of cultural offering. I love seeing ballet there because the stage is relatively big and the auditorium not too big–the perfect balance.

But Kennicott identifies dangerous policy capitulation that seems to be gaining momentum there.

Have the Kennedy Center annual honors now become another index of America’s cultural decline?

Philip Kennicott in the Washington Post thinks that they have.

“For years now, the Kennedy Center Honors have been devolving from an event that recognizes stellar achievement across a diverse and rich tradition of American arts into an entertainment-driven event that rewards star power and pop-culture cachet. Representatives of the wide range of traditional arts, including classical music, opera and ballet, have been slowly edged out until, it seemed, they were lucky to have a single medal among the five given out each year. This year even that toehold looks precarious.”

I don’t know what it is.

Wingnut author Dinesh D’Souza writes a book * accusing the left of Fascistic tactics. He knows he’s peddling bullshit, of course, and tweets that he’s at the White House to “discuss how President @realDonaldTrump can flip the accusation of fascism back on the Left pic.twitter.com/m4KlV4jqYZ.”

Seems, however, that Batshit and 1930s West End star Gorka may have violated some ethics rules when they were photographed slobbering over the book.

Matt Shuman at Talking Points Memo poses the questions.

A friend emailed:”Have you seen what has happened on Bleecker street where all the Marc Jacobs stores were? They are gone, driven out by the very rent increases they started.”