Lobenthal.com

If the Democratic party has sunk to this, what is the point of continuing to support them?  That is a question the base will be asking themselves as they don’t head to the polls in 2014.  Obama has set up the Party for a replay of 2010.

At this point, the president has become a liability to the Party, and he’s certainly not doing the American people any favors.

Oh, if votes of no-confidence were permitted!!

Jon Walker at firedoglake.com asks:

“Is Obama activity trying to prevent Democrats retaking the House in 2014 or does he simply just not give a damn about his fellow Democrats’ election prospects?”

I’d like to know: is Obama a Manchurian Democrat?

“What is Even the Point of Trying to Make Pelosi Speaker?”

Jon Walker at firedoglake.com asks this very pertinent question, bemoaning the Democrats’ abandonment of meaningful filibuster reform:

“Until the Democratic Party decides it actually wants to govern, it is hard to make an honest case for why people should try to get them elected.”

I remember our downstairs neighbor Ernestine Stewart, coming up as we watched the TV reports that night.  A woman of color, Ernestine recalled at my father’s 80^th birthday party that he had helped her and her husband win approval in 1966 to buy their apartment from a somewhat reluctant co-op board in Queens.  She was not surprised by King’s assasination; she told us that night that she had been expecting it, as, of course, had many people, including King himself.  I’ve kept some of the publications commemorating King that I bought in the following months.

Just in time for you to tiptoe through the tulips: the Winter 2012-2013 issue of Ballet Review!

As ALWAYS: there’s an extraordinary variety of contributions and topos, including reviews from around the world and. . . my interviews with Mimi Paul, who needs no introduction, and David McAllister, artistic director of the Australian Ballet, which visited New York last summer.

Which means decoupling from Obama’s austerity-maddened, surrender-monkey march to the austerity seas.   And if Pelosi and Reid can’t put their party’s and the American people’s interests ahead of Obama’s obsessions, they should be ignored also.

At Policy Shop Blog/Demos Robert Kuttner predicts exactly what is very likely to happen if there’s not a course correction.

It’s interesting: back in the Dark Ages when opera singers couldn’t act or move, they couldn’t act so badly and they were so fat and unattractive that Hollywood recruited them to star in movies!

A case in point: Rise Stevens, who died March 20 at age 99.

It so happened that just a few days before Stevens’ death, I’d been thinking about her, since I ran into Ruth Peltason on the research collection floor of the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center.

Peltason’s both written and edited a lot on design.  She was looking for a photo of Stevens wearing a necklace made for her by David Webb, who’ s the subject of Peltason’s new book, to be published

by and when I’ll let you know t’row.

Here I am in Yorkshire, England, wet and tired and happy.

Forgot something !!

But who indeed were/are the primary victims of Rahm Emanuel’s transference of public money to private coffers on behalf of the charter school industry?  The schoolchilden of Chicago of course.  But of course, as Perlstein points out, collateral damage includes the very viability of urban communties.

His loathsome behavior toward–and the consequent haircut administrated him by—Chicago’s public school teachers sure didn’t, shall we say, teach Rahm Emanuel a lesson.

Emanuel is not anything remotely resembling a legitimate public servant—he is a corporate lobbyist, pure and simple, and he’s been highly paid (as in campaign funded) by the charter school industry.

Rick Perlstein on the Nation blog contextualizes Emanuel’s draconic, unilateral school-closings as

“shock-doctrine stuff—an announcement utterly rewiring a major urban institution via public rationales swaddled in utter bad faith, handed down in a blinding flash, absent any reasonable due process. Though Mayor Emanuel is learning that the forces of grassroots democracy can shock back too. And boy, does he have it coming.”

That’s really what the national “mainstream” news media seem by and large determined to create.  Example of the day: the blackout on reporting concerning passage by voice vote of Bernie Sanders’ ammendment defending Social Security.

Dean Baker reports on Truthout.com.