Lobenthal.com

Why is Julie Hirschfeld Davis allowed to make the hogwash claim that Medicare and Social Security are the two largest drivers of US debt?

One more time:

Social Security is self-funded.

We spend more on military than on Medicare.

This insufferable operative is lying his head off about Trump’s budget and its devastating cuts.

is more new buildings of greater height, but apparently something called the East Midtown Steering Committee, connected to the NYC Planning Commission, is trying to push through new zoning to allow just that in an already monstrously overdeveloped neighborhood. To do so they’ve tried to invent a crisis that at this point is even less than hypothetical: at some time in the future, the area’s office buildings might not be considered posh and new enough. Therefore we must encourage a new era of leviathans.

This is, of course, transparently balderdash.

Winnie Hu in The New York Times makes the mistake of incorporating the Steering Committee’s sales pitch into the body of her article without offering us a independent perspective on their claims. But the real focus of her article is the way that Greenacre Park on East 51st Street is projected to be covered in shadow from the supersized buildings to come. A NYC Planning Commission flack offers a limp, boilerplate denial.

Sounds like the latest NYC real estate boondoggle.

Hu’s piece is a must read.

Wilbur Ross’s effusions over demonstration-free Saudi America is so telling.

That was a Freudian slip.

I mean, why would the MSNBC head want to retain ratings champ Lawrence O’Donnell?

Corporate media is about championing ideology at least as much as profit.

Ailes, writes Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone “is on the short list of people most responsible for modern America’s vicious and bloodthirsty character.

“We are a hate-filled, paranoid, untrusting, book-dumb and bilious people whose chief source of recreation is slinging insults and threats at each other online, and we’re that way in large part because of the hyper-divisive media environment he discovered.”

“We were so lucky: we were in exactly the right place at the right time. . .”

So did Maria Tallchief tell Tanaquil Le Clercq years after their dance careers were over.

So did Tallchief recount this to me in 1981.

These two singular dancers were in the right place in the 1940s to be made by Balanchine charter ballerinas of New York City Ballet, and have great role after great role created for them by Balanchine and other choreographers of genius.

But no matter how gifted, ballet then as well as now is a buyer’s market. For every dancer who gets to the very top, as they did, others of equal gifts do not. That is more true today than ever before, as the talent pool keeps expanding even as the art form itself is beleaguered.

Not that both legendary ballerinas and Balanchine muse/wives didn’t enjoy a belief in their own entitlement, but no question: they understood the nitty and the gritty of it.

Not so, it seems the monster mutant oligarchs–the Kochs, the De Voses, the “cat people” Mercers, the Stephen Schwarzmans, the Jamie Dimons who have fomented the incredible delusion that they did it all by themselves. They have seceded from any notion of gratitude or civic responsibility–demanding in fact, more and more subsidy from the state that has allowed them to accumulate the vast fortunes they now command. And demanding, as well, that the rest of the country receive less and less.

Of course we had no idea what was going on. . . yes it was right under our noses, and we were active players, but you know, our set was engaged in a lot of bridge tournaments. . .

Pence is every bit as guilty as Trump, and has been complicit every step of the way.

Josh Marshall cautions: “Don’t Believe That Pence Was ‘Out of the Loop'”

is, of course, Trump’s favorite.

As John Nichols tweets: “In the 1960s & 1970s Roger Ailes and Richard Nixon plotted to implement what they called’A Plan for Putting the GOP on TV News.’ It worked.”

Of course Trump bombed Syria today.

Will the “mainstream” media roll over once again?