Lobenthal.com

I would suggest to our President that he immerse himself in replays of Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren and thus reacquaint himself with what is proper deportment at a political debate.

It’s easy to feel that much of the rich and super rich in this country have collectively lost their minds.  They’re paying the lowest tax rates they’ve enjoyed since 1928, but they don’t want to pay any taxes at all.  But they do want the poor and middle class to pay through the nose.

And of course the dance world is wackier than most worlds, so the behavior is perhaps even more aberrational.  In dance and above all in ballet, what’s happened is exactly what I described was happening in my 1999 piece for Ballet Review, “Ballet and the Individual Talent.”

With ballet now almost completely dependent on private and corporate funding, the resultant entitlement experienced by patrons often seems so obdurate that even basic socialization seems to have gone by the  wayside.  And that is pushing the ballet world further down.

These people aren’t my friends, but sometimes they’re people I’ve met and spoken to.  I have to say I find them jaw-droppingly foolish and rude when they suddenly don’t return greetings after I’ve written something that was not totally adoring of someone they’ve funded or simply admire.   Their proprietary sense has reached such an extreme, excessive degree.  It’s as if by adopting a dancer or choreographer they’ve purchased a diamond necklace and I’ve gone into the vault and scratched it.  It simply is beyond them, apparently, to comprehend that I am a professional writer and critic–not a water carrier.  And certainly, if I criticize someone, I tell you why–I don’t just simply toss epithets around.  And, I don’t mind saying, I do it sincerely.

I like Arlene Cooper, though.  Two years ago she came up to me, said she had me on google alert, and that she’d completely disagreed with the pan I’d given in City Arts of the opening night of New York City Ballet’s American Music Festival.  This wasn’t the first time I’ve talked to her, but even if I had never spoken to her, I would been happy to converse.  She expressed her opinion with a smile–none of that weird, surly glare you get with some of her brethren.  Although Arlene had probably contributed some funding, it didn’t seem as though she were simply protecting an investment.

of the way that the “alternate” media is able to anatomize the alternate reality fabricated in the “mainstream.”  William Rivers Pitt describes the real debate debacle—not that  Obama’s performance wasn’t bad.

“The real losers and failures last Wednesday were the denizens of the ‘news’ media, and because of them, the American people at large lost big as well. In the week after that debate, the entire ‘news’ media infrastructure unplugged its collective intelligence, sent the fact-checkers off on an extended lunch break, and extolled the virtues of Mr. Romney’s ‘strong’ performance without bothering to mention the degree to which he had lied, reversed himself and completely mischaracterized virtually every aspect of his campaign to date.”

Via Color of Change, Dean Baker drives home the reality that “tweak is a code word used by people who want to cut Social Security but lack the courage to say it explicitly.”  And unfortunately that includes the President and far too many other Democrats (some in name only, I’d have to say), as well as, the overwhelming majorty of Republicans at this parlous moment in our nation’s history.

at Consortiumnews.com

If this guy doesn’t demonstrate why people are going to “alternate” on-line sources for their news and news analysis, I don’t know who could.

Here he rebuts conventional wisdom concerning last night’s debate, and–interesting to a kineticist like me–deconstructs telltale body language on view.

were the figures cited by David Carr in the Times courtesy the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press 

“digital news has surpassed radio and newspapers and is quickly catching up to television. Social networks are soaring as a source of news, and since 2010, the report said, ‘there has been a sharp decline in the proportion of Americans who got news yesterday only from a traditional news platform — from 40 percent then to 33 percent currently.’

What’s sad and even bewildering is how much of the traditional media’s decline was and even continues to be avoidable, preventable.  But often it seems to me that much of the “mainstream” commercial media neither knows how to save itself nor has the will, or even the interest in doing so.

Our endlessly appeasing and conciliatory—to the right wing, that is–President could very well still grand-bargain-ize the Democratic Party right off a cliff.

Sam Stein reports for the Huffington Post, via commondreams.org

Bruce D. Baker and Sean P. Corcoran’s report for the Center for American Progress, “The Stealth Inequities of School Funding.” :

 “The sad reality is that gross funding inequities continue to exist in this country, and too often the schools serving students with the greatest needs receive the fewest resources.”

 And here in New YorkState, we’ve got one of the biggest disparities in funding between wealthy and poor districts.  And what exactly is Governor Cuomo doing about it?

Via Truthout.com, David Swanson of Warisnotheanswer.com pays tribute to those somewhat-more halcyon days of old in the United States–I miss them too–when

“strikes were not so rare, unions were not so threatened, taxes were not so heavily piled onto actual workers, military funding hadn’t swallowed the Congressional office buildings, and wealth had not become so concentrated that six people with the brains and diligence to get born into the Wal-Mart fortune, profiting from birth from the replacement of our downtowns, our businesses, our jobs, and our natural environment with an almost limitless supply of fourth-rate crap, possessed among the six of them as much money as 40% of the whole damn country and took a fancy to spending a bit of it creating a ‘movement’ to destroy our schools in order to suck down more of what we annually pass through the large intestine formerly known as our government — to be followed in short order by our health and retirement funds.”

that Rahm Emanuel received 12 MILLION in campaign contributions from charter-school advocacy groups.   I wonder how many “mainstream” news oulets have mentioned that fact?

But Paul Street of Z Communications does via truthout.com.  It’s a great piece, extremely informative.

He rightly decries “The sadistic game of blaming and shaming teachers for poor kids’ test scores,” which is of course “very useful for the politics and public relations of de-unionization and privatization, masquerading as ‘school reform.'”