Lobenthal.com

He’s apparently going to allow cuts to Social Security, while tacitly condoning future cuts to Medicaid and Medicare by Congess.

Ezra Klein reports on the dirty details.

I knew it was a bad idea to let him alone with Boehner.

for Nation of Change on the establishment media’s current quagmire.  And with a hopeful note!

The Orange County Register is actually seeking to reverse the now perpetual and seemingly irrevocable  attrition of significant content production by so many of its sister news publications.

A major reason for the declining fortunes of book and periodical publishing is the fact that these industries are still operating in thrall to an MBA-hatched formula that is both retrograde and thoroughly inappropriate to the industries operating—now groaning–under its yoke.

As media companies went public and started to be owned by the banks, the banks demanded not simply healthy but unrealistic, onerous profit margins.  And the way to those margins was a process of standardization that could make sense only to an MBA.  In fact it was a lunatic methodology to be applied to publishing.

In book publishing what it instituted was a massive re-alignment of editorial decisions.  It must be noted that in today’s commercial book publishing world, editors are not the ones making the decisions.  The sales departments are.  There are literally no more than a handful of Manhattan editors who can defy the verdict of a sales department.  And what the sales departments can overwhelmingly relate to is the most formula-ridden, generic fodder.

Where periodicals are concerned, the decision has similarly been not only to turn news into propaganda and distraction but to entirely eliminate coverage of subjects for which anything less than a mass audience potentially exists. In doing so, the publications have not only made themselves virtually indistinguishable from each other but they have turned off a lot of readers whose interests are thus summarily dissed.  Nor have they really gained a compensatory infusion among people who’d been going to TV for that type of coverage.  Commercial TV, of course, has for its part been getting more and more substance-free as well.

Ballet Review Fall 2012

Gorgeous photos? We’ve got them.

Indispensable words?  We’ve got those too.

Try not to miss my review of the Paris Opera Ballet’s season here last summer as well as my interview with POB’s Karl Paquette.

About heading off another Obama fold.

After all, when Pelosi began her career, Democrats were still Democrats.  (Where is Tallulah Bankhead when we need her?)

And so I suppose I was wrong in my earlier read on what she was up to.  But given the willingness of elected Democrats to abandon the Party’s core platform and the achievements that have gotten them elected,  Pelosi herself may indeed have been wavering.

But she knows she is dealing with the most capitulatory Demoratic president in recent memory, and a cut in Medicaire eligibility will not only send America’s seniors “over a cliff” as she says, but the Democratic Party as well.

Brian Beutler at Talkingpointsmemo.com describes her words as a ”a subtle warning” to the Republican guy and the kinda-sorta guy.  Because we all know what happened the last time they got together in a room alone. . .

A relative told me something: Another relative had started a company and the two had worked together almost since the inception.  The company was sold by its owner.  My relative who stayed on there described to me the way a platoon of MBA’s then showed up.  They had no interest in the particulars of the business; they simply were intent on implementing formulas they’d learned at school.

Still speaking anecdotealy, I was talking to a friend about what had happened to the University of Missouri Press, and practically before the story of their closing was out of my mouth she said, “An MBA came in?”   She was married to one for a long time.

Certainly both stories are relevant to the decline of book and periodical publishing.

For The Wall Street Journal, Laura reviews Ronaldus Shamask’s show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art: “beautiful ideas that women can wear.”

in Washington:

“beating up on people without money and power. It’s that simple.”

Dean Baker at Nationofchange.com also notes that:

“At a time when tens of millions of people are still unemployed, underemployed or out of the labor force altogether as a result of the fallout created by the collapse of the housing bubble, in Washington it is serious to argue that our biggest problem is that custodians at the VA hospitals are getting paid too much.”

For Capital New York, I talk to some of the savvy and hardy upstate.

Where would Congress be w/o Senator Sanders?

“Think about the arrogance of these guys on Wall Street who were bailed out by the middle class of this country when their greed and recklessness nearly destroyed the financial system, and now they come to Capitol Hill to lecture Congress and the American people about the need to cut programs for working families.  This is what class warfare is all about.”