Lobenthal.com

— around Obama that is now necessary to ward off disaster for the Democratic Party.

Reid co-sponsors Bernie Sanders’ Strengthen Social Security Act, which requires the income of the wealthiest Americans be taxed just like everyone else’s.  That would, of course, completely ameliorate any shortfall Social Security faces, without any need for reducing seniors’ $15,000 a year benefits.

Peter DeFazio has introduced a companion bill in the House.

Reid is hardly the most effective majority leader.  You feel it’s more important to him to preserve schmoozing rights with the opposition than exerting himself to tame them.

Nevertheless—he apparently understands that Obama is out of control in his zeal to cut Social Security benfits, do the Republicans’ work for them, and set up his own party to take the fall.

And Reid has seen it play out over and over — in December 2010, when Obama said he just was’t in the mood for a fight with the Repulicans and so he’d keep the Bush tax cus in place.

And Reid recalls being side swiped by Obama in 2009, when the President sent Rahm Emanuel over  to Reid’s office and demanded that the pubic option be taken out of the bill that Reid had already presented.

And let’s not even mention, but we will, Obama’s disastrous cave/collusion with the Repulicans in 2011 that brought us humungous cuts to social services, no new revenues, and brought us as well  that little sequester thing.

And, oh, yes, the terrible fiscal cliff deal; Reid was similarly dissed and excluded by the President on that one, too.

It has got to stop and we can only hope that Reid joining forces with Sanders means that it will.

They’re at the Koch theater through March 24.  It’s their annual New York season.  I went Friday night and they were in great  form.  I was fascinated to see Taylor’s 1961 piece Junction, danced to Bach.  It was brought back last year, for what–the first time since 1986?  Certainly that was the first and last time I’d seen it until last year. 

Junction opened the program and it’s a perfect intro to Taylor’s work.  You’ll see a lot of things that he developed in later repertory and some things that he didn’t carry on with.  It all holds together like finely-joined carpentry.  The dancers here gave as good a demonstration of Taylor style and just plain kineticality–I guess I made that word up in the spirit of Taylor’s own “zunch”– as you could want to see.  They certainly hit the ground running Friday night.

Junction will be repeated and a lot of other marvelous works by Taylor will get on stage during the season. 

Btw the company looks to the manner born on the big stage of this theater, bigger than their former home City Center.  They have really taken the measure of the space.

Richard Eskow at the Campaign for America’s Future lays out exactly what is going on–something that, as Eskow points out, the liberal commentariat apparently doesn’t get or something about which it has decided to play dumb.

For my new book, I’m expanding my Sallie and Joe article that was in Ballet Review in 2011.  As I wrote then, my grandmother Sallie had definite linguistic skills, learning to speak a number of languages and becoming a Ham radio operator.

Last year I learned that her skills had been utilized by our military in World War II.  When her youngest son, my Uncle Richard visited New York he recalled her being picked up every morning in an official car.  She was driven tto some undisclosed location, then returned home in the evening. Apparently she was attempting to intercept enemy signalling. 

We’ve got a certificate she was sent commemorating her service to the Military Intelligence Division of the War Department from June 4, 1943 until October 29 of that year.

I was talking to a physician today about the major cuts to public health programs mandated by Obama’s 2011 deal with the Republicans.   Has the “mainstream” news media already made those cuts disappear down the memory hole?   At this point, the only way that deficit reduction could possibly be “balanced” would be for there to be no more additional cuts to social programs at all.

“MinistryofTruth” at DailyKos.com   makes the point that Obama is helping the Republicans enact the policy that voters reject them for.

The sight of the President now partnering with Republican senators over back-room dinners to plan the way earned-benefit programs will be cut is just too revolting.

He is so obsessed that he’s entirely lost any vision into what the cost will be.  He has absolutely no concept of the consequences to the Democratic Party–or simply doesn’t care.  And both Pelosi and Reid have shown that they are compliant sell-outs who couldn’t mange a candy store, let alone a national political party.

Someone who does get it is Congressman Alan Grayson, who said recently, “if they go through with cuts, you’ll see people pouring into the streets. Pouring into the streets of Washington, D.C. and every other capital, state capital, and major city in the country. This is going to be intolerable for people, this is in fact a matter of life and death in their own lives.”

Go to Boldprogressives.com to hear/read more.

— Or something like that.

Here we go again:

Superficially Republicans and Obama are at loggerheads, but basically they are  working in tandem.  The sequester that they jointly negotiated in 2011 is traumatizing a country already in the throes of economic depression.  As bad as sequestration is, it’s been made worse in the minds of the public by politicans and a “mainstream” media determined to induce in the public every last possible drop of panic.

They will likely twist this country’s arm until it cries Uncle, which which in this case means accepting cuts to earned-benefit programs paid for with our tax dollars.

Obama for one thing is simply too callow for the job.  Even as most respectable economists are now finally coming clean about the way that austerity is counter-indicated amid an economic meltdown, Obama remains in thrall to the austerity myth peddled by a circle of charlatan advisors.

If Obama decided to go empirical, he wouldn’t be able to overlook the economic wreckage austerity has visited across southern Europe.  But this very callowness often seems to make him incapable of reversing a disastrous course even when its folly has been made loud and clear.  Easier to just burrow back into that circle of charlatans.

Now it may be, however ,that despite Obama’s enthusiasm about working with the Republicans to cut so-called “entitlements,” their refusal to accept even the most minimal revenue enhancements will queer any deal.   On the other hand, it’s very likely that Obama will,  in the end, surrender completely–if surrender is the right word.  It is and it is isn’t.  Obama has been avid to cut “entitlements” since his first day in office, but surely, after acquiescing to the Republicans again and again, would like a little token reciprocity.

If he does sign these cuts into law, the Republicans will turn around in 2014 and pin blame for them on Obama, and the Democratic party will be taken to the woodshed by voters.   There is absolutely no deficit-reduction to be had by cutting Social Security, and the country has every right to ask what the hell is going on.

What’s  truly startling about Sperling’s email communication with Woodward is the degree to which the Obama administration was (and is, as we all know) committed to cutting so-called “entitlements.”  To which, I might add, we, the working people of this country, might well believe we’re entitled by virtue of the fact that we’ve paid for them with our tax dollars.

I’d like to make one thing perfectly clear:

I am GLAD that the President isn’t sending a second aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf, whatever his motivation or stated motivation.

I’m glad we’ve retreated a half step from the perpetual brink of war with yet another Middle Eastern nation.

What’s “madness,” Mr. Woodward, is the fact that this country has been at war more or less uninterruptedly since 1941.

What’s “madness” is that we spend 1.3 trillion a year on military, while giving credence to crackpots who screech that we must cut Social Security’s recipients’ $15,000- per-anum benefits.

What has the Iraq debacle cost so far, something like 3 trillion?

On the subject of Woodward’s crackpot bellicosity, William Boardman at Reader Supported News asks, “What About This Isn’t War-Mongering?”

I really want to barf when I get broadcasted emails from the President’s office, asking my support for his “balanced” plan to replace the sequester by inflicting huge cuts to social programs, including Social Security.  And his deception is aided and abetted by a “mainstream” commercial news media that for the most part stays fixated—and attempts to keep the electorate fixated–on the peripheral  flank of issues, not on what the real range of possible scenarios, let alone intentions, actually is.

William K. Black, however, lays out the disconnect between the president’s rhetrocial feints and his actual agenda.