Lobenthal.com

as they attack Bernie Sanders, someone voters actually are enthusiastic about.

For Common Dreams, John Atcheson describes “A Confederacy of Dunces: The Democratic Establishment’s Assault on Sanders Begins.”

So now Bloomberg wants to be president. What is it about the insatiable power-hunger of plutocrats?

What’s he going to run on?

Rising poverty and homelessness rates in NYC under his tenure?

Closing St. Vincent’s?

Big tax abatements to his developer friends?

Allowing foreign businesses looking to spin-and-rinse money via condo purchases that make housing costs for actual NYC residents prohibitive?

One thing he CAN run on, however, is allowing the New York City Opera to fold, because that dovetails with the anti-culture zeitgeist that the right wing has been hard at work on for more than three decades.

Are we surprised?

Now we start returning more troops to Iraq, as Obama presides over what looks like a full re-jiggering of GW Bush’s catastrophic foreign policy.

The fact that so-called Defense Secretary Carter can even mention phrases such as “take and hold” with a straight face tells you all you need to know about Obama’s failure to generate any paradigm shift.

She is the illogical but inevitable culmination of the mostly-GOP right-wing’s war on literacy and culture. So if you don’t think that the defunding, defamation, and neglect of the arts in this country has ominous and wide-ranging implications, think again.

in the case of Hillary’s foreign policy.

As Adam Johnson writes at Alternet, “there hasn’t been a major foreign policy decision in the Middle East she pushed for that didn’t end up being a disaster both at home and the countries she advocated meddling in.”

So you belly  over to the counter to order your mocha-choca-laca with extra-skim only-slightly frothed soy milk, and the barista tells you there’s only enough for a demi-tasse worth.

You see, as National Geographic reported in the September 2015 issue, climate change is likely going to halve the amount of land hospitable to harvesting coffee beans–the plants can only thrive within a particular, narrow temperature range.

I have a problem with men on ballet’s artistic staffs telling women dancers to lose weight. Whether the man is gay or straight, it rankles me because it takes the objectification and abstraction of the female form just a bit too far. All over the world, ballet dancers are now too thin–probably one reason why their torsos no longer read with the eloquence of old. It’s true for men as well as women, although it’s far less frequent for a man to be told to shed some pounds. Of course it’s often women artistic staff telling women dancers to lose. But when a man does it it’s just so redolent of a particular type of power asymmetry that’s prevailed over centuries.

For History News Network.org, I write  “I Spent Years Interviewing a Soviet Ballerina For a Biography. . . What I learned is especially important to remember at a time of crisis in Russian-American relations.”

We’re now seeing the Republicans rev up two of their biggest and most successful hustles:

a) the hysteria and fear-mongering that kept Bush in office, kept Democrats even more quiescent than usual, and made people forget that the Bush-league team had completely ignored the threat from Al-Qaeda, thus making it possible for the Bush squad to lie us into the catastrophic Iraqui invasion that led to ISIS

AND

b) the derailing of the US government and the Clinton presidency over the fact that he’d lied about his sex life, which also, need we add, damaged the country’s ability to focus on counter-terrorism efforts.

Both of these GOP campaigns were patently fraudulent hit jobs on the U.S. which damaged the country immeasurably, and both were aided and abetted at every turn by the Democrats and by the country’s “mainstream” “news” medias.

particularly in ballet.  And I like overlap, too.

Alla Osipenko and the late Evgeni Scherbakov: two fascinating dancers and people.

Together they perform a minute from Grigorovich’s Legend of Love, act 3 in a compilation put together by zonSatzu2 on youtube.

She is so vulnerable with her delicate bones, and he is so strong and tall–

and they’re both shapely and sensuous.