Lobenthal.com

This is what the last thirty years of public arts funding keeping its head down brings:

At the very moment that the National Endowment for the Arts should be using the Public Theater’s Ceasar as a platform to inform the public about freedom of expression and its importance–

We knew that Delta and Bank of America will always run for the hills at the slightest hint of controversy, but when the NEA wimps out it is abdicating its public responsibility. Corporations don’t believe they have any responsibility to anyone but their shareholders. They contribute funding for tax advantage and to clean up their public image.

Btw, has anyone heard of the Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre?

Can we please–once and for all–disabuse ourselves of the idea that government should be run like a business?

That’s like saying I should be head of General Motors.

Farren Cousins at Ring of Fire decries the delusional fallacy.

A unique fusion: the company is classically trained but totally uninhibited. I mean, if Tallulah had put on pointe shoes. . .

I went to see them last weekend in Eifman’s Red Giselle and once again experienced the way they put over their own technique and their own world.

Their season at City Center closes tomorrow.

vs. Tony Blair’s is calibrated by Jonathan Cook at CommonDreams.

“The corporations mobilized their entire propaganda machine to get Blair into power. And yet he managed it with only 2 percentage points more than Corbyn, who had that same propaganda machine railing against him.”

Watch it try to shut down Nancy Pelosi–and watch her prevail, courtesy Now This News and Daily Kos’s Leslie Salzillo.

A fitting pendant to Mitch McConnell’s harrasment of Elizabeth Warren.

And then, Nota bene, McConnell continued the mind fuck by getting all silent treatmenty when Warren was big enough to observe basic courtesy in the hallways of the Capitol.

Erlanger refers with a straight face to Jeremy Corbyn’s “proto-Marxist program.”

Fairness in Accuracy and Reporting identifies this piece as “a case study in how to disguise an op-ed as reporting. . . .In the report, the Times quoted eight people: four professors, three voters, and a politician. Not a single person said anything positive about Corbyn. All eight were used to paint of a picture of the leftist Labour leader as unelectable and out of touch—a stereotype that simply does not reflect the polls.”

The Times does not need to be buying out/firing its editors. It needs more editors in place as a firewall against crap like this.

Equally shocking is Britain’s Guardian’s long-held bias against Corvyn–something that the paper is, however, now finally trying (somewhat) to reform.

And Kellyanne is shocked, shocked about it, and wants his head on a platter.

Almost funny to watch the Fox and Friends apparatchiks cue her manufactured outrage.

No, Kellyanne, it’s we the American people who are genuinely outraged about what you and your boss are doing to our national security.

This is how the game is played: do the most horrific things to a population, then whine that you’re being victimized if said population puts up any resistance.

It’s Daddy Donnie’s constant tactic, and son Eric is now trying it out–on Fox “News,” natch!!

One of the exciting discoveries I made researching my book on Tallulah was the fact that the ending of Hellman’s play that reached Broadway is not the ending that Hellman originally intended, which was performed during the try-out in Baltimore.

Interesting that two actresses are alternating in the current revival: it would take at least two (or a giant personality as protean as Tallulah’s) to get out everything that’s in the role of Regina!

I wonder–does either actress bring out Regina’s sense of humor?

And of course the role of Birdie is not so complex but tugs at the audience’s sympathies in the most powerful way.

Tallulah reportedly told producer/director Herman Shumlin she’d play either role–and that’s exactly what these two current Foxes stars are doing at alternate performances.

Let Josh Marshall do the analysis:

“The mix of the deepening Russia scandal crisis and European leaders harsh rejection of him at Brussels have pushed the President into a rage and humiliation cycle that is playing out before our eyes.”