Lobenthal.com

There’s a part of me that believes that the Gates are, in their own way and by their own lights well-meaning, but also extremely blinkered and prey as well to charlatans. After all, the more successful the individual, the more susceptible to flattery and blandishment–that seems to be a constant through history.

On the other hand, the Gates exemplify the way that the right wing’s destruction of the public sector in this country has opened the floodgates to inappropriate intervention into public policy by private individuals who operate without any accountability whatsoever. It’s government by mogulship. It’s a flipping disaster.

What in the world possessed Bill to start paternalistically lecturing Bolivia about chicken production? Bolivia, of course, has told Gates basically to go S.T.E.M. himself, which is what I say to Gates and other moguls who want to turn public education into technocratic obedience training (with calamitous consequences to so many things, including the arts.)

Diane Ravitch on her smashing blog asks: “Wouldn’t it be great if public schools and superintendents could respond like that to Bill Gates? Something like this: ‘We are professional educators and we know what we are doing. Please don’t offer money to try out your experiments on our children. Please take your advice and your money elsewhere.'”

Haven’t seen anyone in the U.S. government do it better–and few nearly as well–as Representative Gwen Moore of Wisconsin.

She’s sick of the criminalization of poverty in this country, and the way that tax breaks for the rich somehow go under the radar while the relative pittance that we spend to combat poverty is constantly under attack. She proposes a bill requiring drug testing for the rich as a condition of the lavish tax breaks they’re able to scarf up.

Just what’s needed to combat the trend toward more and more punitive treatment of those who receive what remains of safety net assistance.

Moore had had enough when she saw fraudster Paul Ryan unveil his “anti-poverty” program in front of a drug treatment center–the innuendo and implication couldn’t have been more graphic.

As Moore told Megan Carpentier of the Guardian, “The benefits we give to poor people are so limited compared to what we give to the top 1%.”

His charming one-man performance in “Fully Committed” at the 1903 Lyceum Theatre is unplugged and so much the better for it.  Bravo for not turning it into television!

The NY Phil annual free Memorial Day concert at St John began with a slow walking New Orleans funeral dirge up the main aisle led by Wynton Marsalis in honor of Maestro Masur. Masur, an East German, defused a confrontation with the police in Leipzig in September 1989 that is credited with setting a template of peaceful, nonviolent confrontation that bore remarkable fruit the next month in Berlin when the wall came down unchallenged by the security forces. For this heroism he was awarded the music directorship of the Phil, perhaps the thought being he could ease the confrontational nature of the orchestra vis a vis music, which he is widely credited as having done.

Last Sunday afternoon, I saw the closing performance of David Hare’s The Judas Kiss at BAM’s Harvey theater. At the very end, when Oscar Wilde intones his own apotheosis over swelling musical strains, I thought that Rupert Everett’s voice might have been miked, but overall it was a pleasure to hear what certainly sounded like the self-amplified yet modulated voices of trained stage actors, without the phony electronic reverb that is endemic on Broadway. And everyone’s diction was good, which is not always the case with fast-talking British actors. My first exposure to that was when I saw John Wood in Sherlock Holmes in 1975. I still remember his performance, the excitement of the play, but the rapid fire delivery swallowed a lot of dialogue for me.

Q: How improper was AP’s intervention into the primary process this week?

Writing for Truthout, Williams Rivers Pitt characterizes it “as undemocratic an act as I have ever witnessed after Bush v. Gore and the shenanigans in Ohio in 2004, and there will be consequences down the line, especially for Clinton. Good luck bringing Bernie’s folks into the fold for the big push to November after that crud.”

Hillary’s  one viable punt would be to select Warren as VP.

I was watching Warren’s latest takedown of Trump, and thinking, if Obama could speak like this, if he could muster this kind of passionate outrage, if he had Warren’s stamina to advocate for progressive positions– and I’m sorry, if he cared that much–we would already have been living in a very different country.

As a rule our “mainstream” media keep us as ignorant as possible about the heinous civilian casualties of our endless wars, but in the Washington Post Greg Jaffe and Loveday Morris describe the “high toll of Obama’s low-cost wars.”

Richard North Patterson at Huffington Post flails their elevation of Trump and tenacious attempt to normalize an obviously deeply disturbed personality.

“They have countenanced lie upon lie; recast his disturbed behavior as strategic genius; marveled at the immunity from his own vacuity and vulgarity that they have helped create. Even more than Trump himself, they have thrust ‘Trump’ upon a confused and vulnerable country. By doing so, have disgraced themselves and betrayed their obligations to the rest of us.”

Democratic party establishment is a blinkered, sclerotic, bought-and-paid-for excuse for a political leadership, without any demonstrated commitment to solving the catastrophic problems now besetting the U.S.–but with a real gift for gab about how much it cares.

It sold its soul and traded away its identity with its abandonment of the country’s working class under Bill Clinton. Don’t forget it just told Sanders it didn’t want a representative of organized labor working on drafting its convention platform, insisting on vetoing his selection of National Nurses United head Rose DeMoro.

Party leadership doesn’t know how to win elections. It doesn’t know how to govern. It cannot get any traction against GOP extremism. Where, Mr. President, are the confirmation hearings for your nominee?

Almost every decision the Dem leadership has made during this election cycle has been a misstep, and Hillary Clinton has run a terrible campaign. Instead of welcoming into the fold the huge influx of young voters attracted by Sanders, she insults them.

Equally distressing is the liberal commentariat establishment’s unchecked zeal to push us toward the precipice of a Trump presidency via it’s smug, dripping-with-condescension treatment of Sanders.

I will vote for Clinton if she gets the nomination, but if I were a Sanders diehard reading this stuff, I would barricade myself at home election day.

Hillary is a weak and compromised candidate, a direct expression of the current Dem Party malaise and dysfunction. It will take every imaginable vote to elect her.

You knew when the “mainstream” “news” media is launching one of its hit jobs because of the co-ordination, rather similar to the way Stalin and the front page of Pravda functioned together. Definitely, truly anti-democratic, anti-journalistic.

The latest shameful episode occurred yesterday when AP & NBC “News” declared Clinton the nominee before today’s primaries, in direct defiance of the Democratic National Committee’s explicit directive that the super delegates do not vote until the convention, and therefore there should not be second guessing about their votes.

The story was, as filmmaker John Fox tweeted, “incorrect, fabricated trash.”

Of course–lockstep coordination at its finest–the story was immediately picked up and blazoned everywhere else in corporate-media world.

It was indeed, as Jon Queally at Common Dreams quotes outraged spectators to the assassination attempt, “a blatant and despicable attempt to undermine the electoral process by suppressing voter turnout.” It’s all of a piece with the corporate media’s behavior during this election cycle–during every election cycle.