Lobenthal.com

“Put deed and song where they belong,” Wagner’s great master singer instructs the aspirant Walther.  However —

The perils, or rather the trade-offs that result when opera singers are cast by celebrity and physical attributes rather than vocal appropriateness are evident in Jonas Kaufmann’s Parsifal at the Met.  Parsifal is a guilless youth.  Kaufmann has a legitimately tenorial but neverthelss dark and mature voice.

Kaufmann is being recruited for Wagnerian roles above all because he is a box office draw, but in addition because he can produce the requisite volume.  There simply aren’t enough viable tenors around to sustain this rep.  His sound was not really clarion enough for Siegmund when he sang it here two years ago and it certainly isn’t youthful enough for Parsifal.  But he is tall and slim and so he can spend much of Francois Girard’s production shirtless in a way that other singers could not.

And yet, all that said—why be doctrinaire about it? For one thing his enunciation of the German text goes a long way.  For another, despite some telltale signs of vocal wear in the early parts of the opera—Wagner will do that to you— Kaufmann’s piano singing in act 3 could serve as every type of redemption.

But if you want to hear what a true Parsifal voice really is, listen to Sandor Konya’s many broadcasts from the 1960s.

I want to talk about the deep, emphatic collective denial about what was going on in this country that has been practiced by most of the middle class over the past twenty years, coming on the heels of the retreat from politics that happened after the sixties.

I’ll never forget, as  the wealth-restributive juggernaut started accelerating during the 1990s, a relative of mine, after a lifetime of work in education, telling me that she thought teaching would remain an economically stable profession.  She also insisted that we remained the world’s most mobile society.

Well, Joseph stiglitz has something to say about that in The New York Times.

Lauren McCauley at Common Dreams reports on Flip the Debt, a new group confronting the enormously wealthy tax dodgers who insist that the poor,  the middle class,  and the elderly subsidize them.

Listen to what one Flip the Debt protester got up and said at a recent Fix the Debt shindig:

“Fix the Debt claims to seek bipartisan solutions to reduce the deficit, but Fix the Debt is nothing more than a CEO lobby whose real objective is huge corporate tax breaks and drastic cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. David Cote and his CEO friends receive a lot from government: In 2011, Honeywell received $725 million in government deals, making it the 35th largest federal contractor. However, Honeywell and other companies pay next to nothing in taxes. Honeywell’s tax rate from 2008-2011 was 2 percent. Does anyone in this room pay 2 percent?”

And the euphemistic double talk that both Obama and his surrogates keep practicing is almost on the GOP level.  Viz,  Jay Carney today.

According to Carney, Obama is brokering:

“as part of that deal, a technical change in the so-called CPI is possible and is on offer as part of a big deal.”

Technical change my ass.

The Dems will be finished for the new few election cycles if they go along with this crap–remember there’s still an electorate out there–and they will deserve to be.

Greg Sargent in the Washington Post describes the rejection of common sense in today’s governance, occasioned by the Congressional Progressive Caucus offering a budget proposal that actually conforms to empirical need:

“No plan that prioritizes job creation as the best means of reducing the deficit; no plan that cuts defense while determinedly avoiding any cuts that would hurt the poor and elderly; no plan that includes equivalent concessions by both sides — could ever have a prayer in today’s Washington. It’s yet another indication of how out of whack Washington’s priorities are.”

Glenn Greenwald in The Guardian:

“The core distortion of the War on Terror under both Bush and Obama is the Orwellian practice of equating government accusations of terrorism with proof of guilt.”

Harry Reid’s wimpishness on filibuster reform — with bipartisan deals like this, three cheers for partishanship!–if only the Dems knew how to practice it.

Reid handed Republicans another cudgel with which to demolish any government function that benefits anyone other than the top 1%.  Now they’ve got the Consumer Finanical Protection Bureau in their rifle sights.  Brian Beutler at Talkingpointsmemo explains.

In the Columbia Journalism Review, David Cay Johnston runs the numbers on the true dimensions of the United States’s military spending (hint: it’s the first thing the self-styled “deficit hawks” would be vetting if they were serious).  And Johnston also is frank about which publications are willing to come clean about it.

John Atcheson at Common dreams. org poses “political imponderables”:

“If Republicans really hate deficits, why did the last three Republican Presidents run up more than 66% of the nation’s cumulative deficit  – more than all other Presidents combined?  And why didn’t rank and file Republicans utter a peep against it when they did?. . . .

“Why does the press mindlessly repeat conservative fear mongers’ debt warnings even as the deficit is disappearing?”

On the New York Times “Opinionator” Erin Hatton describes “The Rise of the Permanent Temp Economy.”