Lobenthal.com

Obama doubles down on neo-con failure, hard-wiring the catastrophic Cheney-Bush foreign policy doctrines. As Phylis Bennis, who actually knows something about the Middle East, attests in an interview with Real News, “the more weapons that get sent, the more weapons end up in the hands of ISIS. That’s true in Iraq, it’s true in Syria.”

In the chapel in Churaevka, the Russian Village in Southbury, Connecticut this Tuesday, June 9th at 1:30 p.m.

Wilde’s first season with New York City Ballet was its London debut in the summer of 1950. Reviewing the season, Arnold Haskell wrote in his Ballet Annual that NYCB had done more “for the artistic prestige” of the U.S. “than a carload of crooners, ten years’ run of musicals, a high powered comedian and a million reels of Hollywood celluloid together.”

To reiterate: does anyone in the U.S. gov’t even give a thought to our artistic prestige abroad? Or give a thought to whether it might be nice to export something else besides perpetual war, our ever-dwindling manufacturing sector, and Apple lap tops? If a politician got up in Congress to talk about our artistic prestige, why, Marco Rubio would be lumping him together with the art historians! And you know what that means.

I was out with a friend last week who’s a regular visitor there, and I finally went in–I’d passed it any number of times. The selection of new and used is panoramic. The spare and elegant space makes literacy stylish and well as substantive. Literarily and visually a compelling destination on Avenue A. They’re open late, too.

Check out on youtube the 1959 Pathe news squib on Paris’s Salle Wacker–featuring among other instructors Olga Preobrajenskaya and Valerie Camille.

And take a gander at Pathe’s tease on 1927’s The Gold Diggers at the Lyric in London–Tallulah doing a highly personal Charleston!

It is of course ludicrous the way so many “mainstream” journalists can call TPP, as Politico does this week, a bid by Obama for a “legacy-burnishing accomplishment.” TPP, if passed, will ensure that Obama leaves office in disgrace. Obama appears to be so out of touch with what’s really driving him psychologically that he just doesn’t care how much humiliation he sets himself up for. TPP will pull the curtain back on the entire two terms of bait-and-switch. But Jamie wants it.

Together with Hilary’s own triangulation addiction, Obama’s aggressive, belligerent, duplicitous lobbying for one of the most dangerous and regressive power-grabs by multi-national corporations could very well spell her defeat. Obama will then, once again, have thrown an election to the so-called “opposition,” who have never, in all his years in office, been subject to the abuse the President has heaped on Senator Warren and the Democrats in more-than-name-only who are so heroically fighting to defeat this monstrosity.

And when Obama tells lawmakers that he’s going to watch their back and campaign for them if they deliver for him, their credulity defies belief. By the time the next election rolls around, no one is going to want Obama anywhere near his or her campaign.

Thirty years after ex-American Ballet Theatre Anna Spelman and I went to New York City Ballet we were back to watch Sunday’s matinee. That was after Saturday night’s Giselle at ABT. Anna is one of those people who’s always on her own wavelength. It was great to see her and others from the old days during ABT’s reunion weekend. What I realized as I saw people I was watching and sometimes writing about decades ago–there is so much talent! Some people get the chance to exploit their talent fully; some don’t. Looking back, personal preferences I had as critic/spectator seem trivial–or at least secondary. . . everyone has something to offer. And you learn from whomever you see.

Secret technology in my laptop allows me to discern who does and who doesn’t.
Just kidding.
BUT
As I said to a relative, I may have missed her birthday, but that doesn’t let her off the hook!!

that left hundreds of thousands dead, cost trillions, is still raging, and has now led to ISIS. No one knows that better than Ambassador Joe Wilson, who was slimed by Cheney and his low-life crew for telling the truth. You’ve got to read him at talkingpointsmemo.

It’s time to take the gloves off–and time to declare soft-ball questions like Megyn Kelly’s for what they are–and expose the “if you’d known what we know today” false-bottom. They did know. It was a homicidal fraud from beginning to end. And, as Greg Sargent insists in the Washington Post, it’s time for Hillary to tell us why she played along.

And what the right-wing echo chamber is doing when it goes ballistic on Bush is basting him for not playing along with Kelly’s own fraud–not validating the revisionist meme she was peddling. “Nooooo. . . not if I knew NOW what we DIDN’T know then….” That’s the command performance Jeb was expected to give. He got shellacked for not going along with the right-wing game. In other words, he spectacularly flubbed his cue.

Harvey Wasserman at Common Dreams asks how close NYC and environs came to annihilation in the most recent Indian Point fire — there have been no fewer than three there in the past decade. Even the useless Nuclear Regulatory Commission admits that Indian Point “among other reactors—-has been out of compliance on simple fire protection standards for years.”

While the “mainstream” media obfuscates and the corporate ownership issues their boilerplate assurances, Wasserman notes that Indian Point, the ancient, derelict nuclear complex 38 miles from New York City, is basically functioning–as, indeed is the entire nuclear industry–“in open defiance of the laws of the public, the economy and basic physics.”