Lobenthal.com

Truth is to Fox as sunlight to a vampire, which is why Governor Newsom utterly vanquished Fox carnival barker Sean Hannity. Newsom showed what happens when you go on Fox armed with facts and a refusal to be intimidated.

I can’t wait for the egg-dripping-down-face  by GOP politicians, and penny-dropping-in-mind by the American public we’ll see when it’s revealed that Trump was selling or leveraging his cache of secret documents.

Kaitlin Collins: “Did you show them to anybody?” [paraphrase]

Trump: “Not really.” [Verbatim]

She’s trying to ram through her heinous proposal to lift ALL caps on residential development in this state.  Remember, she’s got to perform for her developer contributors. This is part of a concerted, coordinated attempt to hamstring any check on mega development.

Go to the Village Preservation web site and you’ll be given a direct conduit to make yourself heard on this proposed outrage.

And remember, it has nothing to do with building affordable housing. Anything but.

Progressives aren’t buying the president’s snow job on his utterly unnecessary capitulation/collusion with the most reactionary, seditious Republican caucus in history. This is the most humiliating moment of his presidency so far. It could all go downhill from here.  He and his handlers know that.

The fact that Biden calls “a big win” a bill that rolls back environmental protections, expedites the wealthy’s tax avoidance, increases starvation, et. al., et.al., tells you what his true priorities are.

The reality, which the corporate media isn’t telling us, is that his re-election is now severely imperiled. He has insulted every core Democratic constituency. He and the neoliberals are still entertaining the delusion that progressives have “nowhere else to go.” Of course, progressives, as they have shown again and again, don’t have to go anywhere–not even to the voting booth.

Council Member Rivera is downtown Manhattan’s doyenne of displacement and demolition, consistently pleasuring the developers who are ruining our city and funding her campaigns, while making ersatz proclamations of new victories for affordable housing. In reality, everything that Member Rivera does is a net loss for affordable housing.

Now that her council catchment has been redrawn to include part of the West Village, Villagers must ensure that she does not win this seat.

In 2018, Rivera pledged that she would remain faithful to her campaign pledge of opposing the Union Square South upzoning unless neighborhood and landmarks protections were baked into the deal.  Then she pivoted to rubber -stamping a terrible deal that was and is an assault on neighborhood and landmark preservation.

Even in NYC, it’s rare to see an elected representative sell out that brazenly, that completely that quickly.

And adopt her degree of duplicity.

During Rivera’s failed, developer-funded Congressional run last year, she had the audacity to get huffy about the fact that wealthy inhabitants don’t want affordable housing built in their neighborhoods and she was holding their feet to the fire.

Bullshit. Complete fabrication. Not a word of it true.

She was referring to, and totally distorting the dreadful Soho-Noho-Chinatown upzoning bill she went to the mat for in 2021.  There is not a single guarantee in that piece of legislation that a single piece of affordable or even “affordable” (given the income minimums demanded in Manhattan subsidized housing) housing will be built. Just the opposite: developers have now been incentivized to tear down more low-rise, rent-regulated buildings to put up behemoths for the international investment strata.

If Rivera gets her claws into the West Village, we are on a runway path to upzoning and 100-story buildings. Rivera will also do her best to undo landmark protections in the historic district, since she was completely on board with De Blasio’s successful initiative to cripple the Landmarks “Preservation” Commission.

Now they’re going after Social Security and Medicare, after pledging earlier this year that they wouldn’t.

Jessica Corbett at Common Dreams writes that “As the U.S. House of Representatives prepared to vote on President Joe Biden’s debt limit deal with GOP negotiators Wednesday evening, the youth-led Sunrise Movement warned Democrats that the so-called Fiscal Responsibility Act could have a major impact on the 2024 elections.”

It’s incredible: Democratic neoliberals never understand the cost to their popularity of selling out to the extreme right wing.

Biden degrades himself, ridiculing legitimate claims about the hundreds of thousands of Americans who will be kicked off food assistance as a result of him caving to the deathmongers of the GOP.

And he agrees to shovel more money down the grotesquely overstuffed money pit that is the Pentagon–a government institution that cannot pass an audit.

“There is a really weird kind of identity politics going on in American publishing,'” she said when addressing the Hay festival.

Lucy Knight at The Guardian reports.

FRIENDS OF HE EARTH Government and Political Affairs Director Ariel Moger continues:

“After initially proclaiming he wouldn’t negotiate on the debt ceiling, he gifted MAGA extremists legislation filled with polluter giveaways and devastating spending limitations. Even Senator Manchin, who has done as much as Republicans to sabotage the Democratic agenda, has been rewarded with the forced approval of his pet project, the Mountain Valley Pipeline.  

This agreement is far from a compromise. It’s a surrender to Big Oil and Republican hostage-takers in Congress. Democrats should vote NO on this disgraceful deal and force a vote on a clean debt limit increase.”