Lobenthal.com

FAIR diagrams the “mainstream” commerical media’s double talk about cuts to Social Security.

Thank you, Abbey Zimet of Commondreams.com for alerting me to GW Bush’s interview with the Dallas Morning News.  Seems Dubya’s really, really comfortable with what he unleashed. . . If only the rest of the planet was.  Did I hear the words “clinical narcissist?”

Going through old programs in my my never-ending quest to de-clutter, I found this remark by Sting in a Playbill interview published when he starred in John Dexter’s 1989 revival of The Threepenny Opera on Broadway.

Explaining his disenchantment with the pop music scene, Sting is quoted as saying that the industry “seems to be running on a basis that doesn’t come from any reality.  The music is being narrowed down to what the market is told to accept by the big corporations.  It should come from musicians being courageous about what they put out.”

What he said then, applies doubly for the worlds of publishing and media, which were then in the process of being clamped into what has proved a disastrous vice of corporate control.

Pop music at least has retained an audience; there are still big profits to be made–granted, quality and criteria may be an entirely different kettle of fish.

But in publishing and the media, the disconnect between what the market is told to accept and what the market actually would like to spend money on is a major reason for the ongoing collapse.

On the Morning Joe sideshow, we get buffoonery by James Carville, bragging about how Obama gets off on angering liberals—how about being hated by the majority of both Republicans and Democrats who oppose cuts to Social Security?   Obama may not care about that either, but certainly Democrats up for reelection in 2014 ought to.

It’s interesting that the right wing—where economic issues are concerned, I would have to include Carville among their number–is trying to portray opposition as coming from only liberal advocacy groups.  It’s as if there is no electorate involved at all.

If the president does indeed think that a pat on the head by a right-wing columnist like David Brooks means more than the electorate’s outrage, there is something very wrong behind his governing calculus—but of course we’ve known all along that there was.

Writing in Rolling Stone:

“In 50 years, no one will care about the fiscal cliff or the Euro crisis. They’ll just ask, “So the Arctic melted, and then what did you do?”

Here’s the good news: We’ll at least be able to say we fought.”

“What’s craziest about this whole fiasco is how shellshocked the White House appears about it. It’s as if they expected to be greeted with rose petals for ‘making the tough choices’ or whatever bullshit they want to call it today”

Go figure: the more treacherously the GOP behaves toward Obama, the more avidly he does their work for them, meanwhile making sure that he and his ostensible Party own the opposition’s most unpopular platforms.

Norman Solomon on commondreams.org reminds us there IS a tipping point:

“From this spring onward, a wide range of progressive groups should be prepared to work together to effectively renounce Obama’s leadership.”

I would also say, btw, that while I’m by no means sold on a Hilary Clinton presidency, it would certainly behoove her, if she’d like to ensure that a Democratic Party base remains energized in 2016, to get her butt back to Capitol Hill and disarm Obama, Pelosi, and Reid’s sandbagging of the Party.  A disastrous triumvirate.

Richard Eskow at the Campaign for America’s Future rightly calls this latest self-Party-and-American people saboutage a “moral challenge” and a “wake-up- call.”

Paul Krugman in his Times blog alludes to the abjectness in Obama’s character that keeps him over and over again “DESPERATELY SEEKING ‘SERIOUS’ APPROVAL”–endlessly bidding for acceptance by those most obdurately opposed to him.  And endlessly espousing the “Serious” credo that the poor and middle class must pay for the rapacity of the rich.

“David Webb: The Quintessential American Jeweler,” will be published by Assouline.