Blog entry

Fuel for the Fire

Rick Perlstein — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 13:28:55 -0400

A friend of mine who grew up in Michigan and still has lots of family there pointed me to this New York Times article from a few weeks back about how rising fuel prices have eaten up any savings manufacturers might have realized from offshoring jobs to China.

He made the simple point that this means his many cousins and uncles in Michigan lost their jobs to offshoring for no good reason at all.

Nice job, corporate America.

The Big Con on your Teevee

Rick Perlstein — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 13:18:34 -0400

I did a man-on-the-street interview with the local Fox affiliate this morning in my neighborhood, Hyde Park (where the Obamas live), and after the "What did you think of Michelle's speech" the reporter asked me three questions about the apparent plot to kill Barack Obama, which "authorities" seem alone in not taking seriously. The reporter, of course, did not call the news for what it was, a right-wing terrorist conspiracy, but this correspondent did. Looking straight into the camera, I gave a thumbnail version of the Neiwert-Robinson thesis on eliminationism. And said that the very fact that the Obama family faces this risk to fight for what they believe in attests to their patriotism in a way that should make those criticizing it ashamed. (For the record, John McCain is equally patriotic.)

EMK

Rick Perlstein — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 22:01:24 -0400

Thought I'd do a quick canvas of right-wing reactions to Teddy Kennedy's speech tonight from Denver. Here's wizbang:

Ted Kennedy comes on stage. Everyone's crying. I wonder if they cried like this for Mary Jo Kopeckne.

I'm afraid Kennedy is really muffing the ends of his sentences again.

He says Americans will be committed to Obama's cause. I thought he just said he didn't want Americans to be committed to a mistake?

Haven't heard of these guys:

Did anyone say anything concerning Mary Jo? Nahhhhhh! Fuck it, she’s dead, right Ted?

OH, forgot and you killed Mary Jo, Ted. Got away with it to, you son-of-a-bitch.

Who said there’s no perfect crime?

Here's "NJ Tax Revolution":

Ok. I get that Teddy Kennedy has spent a lot of years in the senate representing his home state. I also respect his families concern over his brain tumor. But I have never been able to get over the fact that he murdered Mary Jo Kopechne's parents daughter...

I've been well-treated by the libertarians at Reason, but this is execrable:

Aha! We hacks were played: The rumor was that Ted Kennedy was so ill that he wouldn't make Denver. And here he is. The comments from the reason gallery are basically unprintable, except for Mike Flynn, who keeps jabbering about what an "unforced error" this is.

Kennedy can turn on the waterworks (in the audience) simply by breathing now. Every reference to "hope" and "health care" comes with a glimmer of "he's going to die of cancer like next month."

"He's almost Monty Pythonesque," says Flynn.

Kennedy closes with some dehydrated Shrumisms ("The dream lives on!") and gets played off by Orleans and "Still the One"--written by a Democratic congressman!

They should bring Carter onstage and refuse to shake hands, for old time's sake.

Class. Sheer class. Some day, hopefully not soon, Ted Kennedy will no longer be with us. And rightbloggers will mourn, because they will have nothing left to talk about.

Ideological Infrastructure Notes

Rick Perlstein — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 10:17:50 -0400

Just got this in my inbox. Wingnutty activists can grab ten grand to go to college:

Ronald Reagan College Leaders Scholarship Program
Program Summary

In the summer of 1999, The Phillips Foundation announced the establishment of its annual Future Leaders Program (renamed the Ronald Reagan College Leaders Program effective academic year 2006-07) featuring renewable scholarships to college undergraduates who demonstrate leadership on behalf of the cause of freedom, American values and constitutional principles. The program pays tribute to President Ronald Reagan in recognition of his achievements on behalf of freedom, American values and constitutional principles, his optimism about America's future, and his faith in America's youth to protect and enhance the legacy of liberty entrusted to them. The Foundation awarded $265,500 in new and renewed scholarships in academic year 2008-2009 in amounts of $7,500, $5,000, $2,500 and $1,000.

The Ronald Reagan College Leaders Scholarship Program seeks to recognize outstanding young people who are promoting American values on college campuses. The scholarships are designed to alleviate the financial burdens associated with higher education, permitting the winners to devote more time both to pursuing their academic goals and advancing their leadership initiatives.

This is because they can't succeed in the marketplace of ideas without welfare.

Video Killed the Literary Star

Rick Perlstein — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 22:36:56 -0400

The part of Tom Frank's argument in The Wrecking Crew that really sticks to the ribs is geographical: how the wrecking of good government is written on the very face of the Washington D.C. metropolitan area. Here, he makes the argument visually, complete with a nifty Michael Moore moment:

Here's Why We Call Ourselves "Progressives"

Rick Perlstein — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 13:18:20 -0400

One of the most crucial points of my Liberal Shock Doctrine piece is a basic insight into how social change works in America:progressives ram through reforms over the howls of conservatives who claim that the reform will pull down the very pillars supporting civilization. Then, when the reform proves popular and successful, conservatives pretend they were for it all along, and, in fact, you should elect them so they can "preserve" the reform. Been reading Arthur Schlesinger's classic The Age of Roosevelt (specifically Vol. II, The Coming of the New Deal and grooving to a the conservative reaction to one such dangerous innovation.

James L. Donnelly of the Illinois Manufacturers' Association:

...destroying initiative, discouraging thrift, and stifling individual responsibility.

Charles Denby of the (then-conservative) American Bar Association:

soon or later will bring the abandonment of private capitalism.

Charles P. Chandler of the Ohio Chamber of Commerce:

the downfall of Rome started with corn laws, and legisslation of that type.

Congressman Jon Taber:

Never in the history of the world has any measure been brought in her so insidiously designed ass to prevent business recovery to enslave workers, and to prevent any possibility of the employers providing work for the people.

Congressman Daniel Reed:

The lash of the dictator will be felt. And twenty-five million free American citizens will for the first time submit themselves to a finger print test.

Congressman James W. Wadsworth:

This bill opens the door and invites the entrance into the political field of a power so vast, so powerful as to threaten the integrity of our institutions and to pull the pillars of the temple down upon the head of our descendants.

And my personal favorite: Senator Daniel O. Hastings said this montrosity would

end the progress of a great country and bring its people to the level of the average European.

The subject of their diatribes was Social Security. Good thing we have conservatives around now to "save" it for us.

Acts of Creative Destruction: Rebuilding America for the 21st Century

Sara Robinson — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 21:42:31 -0400

This blog has been covering the shameful collapse of America's infrastructure on almost a weekly basis, so it should come as no surprise to even our most casual readers that the physical structures and systems that support our entire way of life are in serious trouble. We all know the litany: the levees of New Orleans, the I-35 bridge in Minneapolis, overtaxed air traffic systems, construction cranes coming down all over, thousands of other structures quivering on their last legs. It's a slow-motion disaster-in-the-making.

And we all know the reason, too. All this stuff takes constant inspection and oversight, along with regular upgrades and maintenance. But for the last 30 years, conservative governments have resolutely cut budgets and driven out the experts whose job it was to keep the country's public works in good working order. They did it on purpose, to prove their ideological argument that putting infrastructure in the hands of government was always a bad idea. And they were also quietly licking their chops, waiting for the day that the people's capital—the stuff built up and bequeathed to us by so many generations of Americans before us—could be declared salvage, and sold off to their cronies for the price of scrap in one last privatizing fit.

Even so: we may actually look back in a decade and realize that the conservatives did us a huge favor. It's an article of Shock Doctrine thinking that every act of destruction makes way for an act of creation (or, at least, conservative perversion). In this case, the conservatives set the destruction process in motion long ago; but it seems pretty clear that they never expected there would be an Obama Moment—a moment of national renewal in which progressives would be able to seize the process and launch some bold, creative acts of our own.

It's not an overstatement to say that we may never have a creative opportunity like this one again. Even as our cities are crumbling around us, we're also finding ourselves in deep trouble on the energy front. Dwindling supplies and increasing demand are working their free-market magic, shrinking our household budgets and destabilizing our oil-based economy. Call it climate change or peak oil or simply the fall of the petrodollar, but there's a growing awareness that there's something deeply amiss -- and completely unsustainable -- about the entire system by which America extracts and consumes energy. And the more forward-thinking among us also realize now that solving this problem is going to require us to dramatically re-order our economy, invest in and invent new technologies, and completely re-think the way we build cities.

Much of our current failing infrastructure was built between the early 1930s and the mid-1960s—an era of vast public works projects that dammed rivers, raised skyscrapers, and laced the nation with interstate highways. The things our parents and grandparents built and the policy choices they made expressed the cultural values, economic and social priorities, and new technologies that dominated their era. Cheap energy allowed them to replace the streetcars and railroads—considered urban wonders by their own grandparents—with the speed and convenience of cars, trucks, and airplanes. It fueled the construction of big single-family houses and vast freeway networks, which in turn encouraged suburban sprawl. In an era when people believed that humans were put on earth to dominate and tame nature, and defined "quality of life" by the quantity of goods consumed, the suggestion that any of this might be permanently damaging the earth—or that it might cause problems down the road that would seriously threaten human existence—was simply absurd.

Fast forward 60 years, and we're now in a very different place. It's all too clear that our grandparents' technologies, economic priorities and ideas about what comprises a satisfying way of life are creating serious, planet-wide ecological trouble. These days, we realize that we live on a finite planet, and that we're finally bumping up against its limits. In particular, we don't have the vast reserves of cheap energy that will allow us to sustain the all the power-hungry systems our ancestors bequeathed to us. Those sprawling post-war cities made perfect sense in their time; but increasingly, they don't make sense in ours. But because all this stuff is already built—at a tremendous cost in money and material—it's also daunting to consider just how much of it will have to be rebuilt, refitted, or simply scrapped and replaced (or not) in order adapt to the new realities.

It would be much harder to justify a broad-scale rebuilding effort if everything was still working as it should. But since the conservatives have already done us the favor of letting it all fall apart, we've got a great opportunity to launch the same kind of national overhaul that we saw in the FDR years. This time, though, we have the opportunity to do rebuild the country our own way—a way that expresses 21st-century values, technologies, and economic priorities.

It's not enough to merely restore what's already there. We need to take an entirely fresh look at our assumptions about how cities and towns should be built, and put sustainability at the core of all our planning decisions. We might decide to reclaim what our 19th century ancestors knew about building pedestrian-friendly cities, where families lived above shops on lively neighborhood streets; and cozy small towns where everyone lived just a few blocks from Main Street. We might follow the example of Europe, which has closed most of its historic old downtowns to traffic, increased density, and connected its cities with fast electric trains. (The average European maintains a comfortable middle-class lifestyle with an ecological footprint that's less than half that of the average North American.) And we might rewrite our building and planning codes to encourage the use of green technology, and to reflect the new understandings about sustainable living that our urban planners have been refining over the past 40 years.

(We might also consider the parable of Greenberg, Kan.—the 1,400-person prairie hamlet that was flattened by a tornado in May 2007. Rather than simply rebuild, they invited in the sustainability experts, and decided to use their insurance money to reconstruct Greenberg as "the greenest town in America." Now that's what I'm talking about.)

There's a lot of this already happening at the local and regional level, as cities invest in LEED-certified public buildings, carve out bike trails, contain sprawl and preserve valuable agricultural land, and expand electric rail networks as they upgrade existing streets and bridges. And, for the most part, it will continue to happen just this way—one bridge, one solar or wind farm, and one rail line at a time.

But there's also much a new Obama administration can do at the federal level to greatly accelerate this process—and some initiatives that are simply too big to happen unless the federal government steps in and sets the direction. For example, while we're making solid progress toward carbon-free cars, nobody at the moment has the slightest clue about making a carbon-free airplane. However, much of the world already runs on high-speed electric trains. The technology already exists. And the U.S. is already criss-crossed with enough old railroad right-of-ways that we could create an all-electric semi-high-speed (100-120 mph) national rail network by 2015—for a price tag that's less than we spend in three months in Iraq.

Ultimately, such a network could take most of the truck freight off the interstates, greatly reducing the amount of carbon generated by transportation. The system could also be a competitive option for many air passengers who now take shuttle flights under 1,500 miles, reducing congestion and carbon output in our air traffic system as well. And electric trains can be powered by many different kinds of carbon-free sources, including wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, or nuclear.

This idea was first proposed by Alan Bates at The Oil Drum. I heartily recommend his article, which explores the electric train idea in great economic and technical detail. But my larger point is this: There are plenty of good ideas like this out there. And right now, in the Obama Moment, we have an unprecedented opportunity to seek out the best of them, and start turning them into our children's reality.

Rick Perlstein notes that the Obama Moment will be a short one, and progressives will need to move quickly to get as much done as possible before it closes. But, as we saw in the FDR years, infrastructure renewal moves at a somewhat different pace—and has a sweet way of entrenching itself in a way that makes it very hard to stop the momentum once it gets started. Over the short term, the important goals are:

Restore public confidence in the government's ability to undertake large national infrastructure projects, and re-assert its right to set goals and policies to ensure those projects proceed smoothly.

Define the overarching standards for a reconstructed America. This will include federal review of the building and planning codes now in use, and probably the writing of new mandates that set out 21st-century standards and priorities for energy use, urban and transportation planning, and environmental design. Once these are put into law and accepted into general use, they'll be very hard to change.

Commit funding for a massive 10- or 20-year program that will upgrade or replace failing components of America's infrastructure. The country is broke (as it was in FDR's day); but this kind of spending needs to be seen as the long-term investment in our economic future that it is.

Restore a fair, honest, broad-based system of public contracting that will put large numbers of Americans to work on these new projects. (And write the new rules in a way that ensures that the firms doing the most innovative work don't have to compete with Halliburton and Lockheed for the lion's share of the funding.) Once you've got a healthy, competitive construction industry that knows how to build sustainable projects—and is relying on the government to keep it in business—you've got a political constituency that will fight to ensure that the rebuilding will continue for the next several decades, regardless of who's in power.

Once again, the Roosevelt years offer a guideline for what's possible, and how we might get this done. The conservatives, for their own reasons, have cleared the deck for us to start over. It's up to us to seize the moment, and get it done.

Accusation that Conservatives Harass Critics Brings Harassment to Critic; Film at 11

Rick Perlstein — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 15:54:56 -0400

Criticizing right-wing eliminationism can be hazardous to your health.

Conservatives treat their constituents like suckers (15)

Rick Perlstein — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 15:48:48 -0400

I was just gazing adoringly at the following addition to my inbox:

Dear Fellow Conservative,

Do you know which special interest has given more money to the Obama and Clinton campaigns than any other?

If you guessed "trial lawyers" -- well, okay, that's too easy. But can you guess which special interest came in second?

Labor unions? Nope. The Green Lobby? Nope. AARP? Wrong, again. NEA? Nyet.

Give up? Okay, here's the answer: Wall Street.

That's right. According to CNNMoney.com, Wall Street securities and investment firms have given over $35 million to Democratic candidates this election cycle. And the amount they've given to the Clinton and Obama campaigns is nearly five times the amount they've given to McCain.

If you've been wondering why the financial industry has been in meltdown -- and taking your 401(k) or investment portfolio down with it -- now you know.

Let's face it: The former frat boys who populate Wall Street today understand economics about as well as the pinko professors whose courses they snored through.

That's why betting their entire industry on "subprime" loans to people with no jobs and no collateral made sense to them -- and why betting the entire U.S. economy on the likes of Hillary and Obama makes sense to them now.

These jokers don't even know what's in their own self-interest, much less yours. Trusting them with your money is like trusting Bill Clinton to babysit your underage niece.

But I know someone you can trust to manage your investments -- or rather, to help you do it yourself, without paying a nickel in commissions to some Wall Street frat boy.

His name is Dr. Mark Skousen -- that's "Dr." as in "Ph.D. in Economics and Monetary History," something you don't get by playing Beer Pong with your frat buddies. For the past 28 years, subscribers to his investment newsletter, Forecasts & Strategies, have profited enormously from his uncanny ability to predict major market trends before they happen -- often while the Wall Street establishment is pointing investors the other way. For instance:

In the early '80s, Dr. Skousen predicted that "Reaganomics will work" and said "a long decade of profits is coming."
He issued a "sell everything" recommendation just 41 days before the stock market crash of 1987. Then he told investors to get fully invested again several weeks later, just in time for the recovery.
He called the Gulf War of 1990 "a turning point for U.S. stocks." The Dow subsequently began a bull market that didn't end for nearly ten years.
He told subscribers in 1995 that the NASDAQ would double, and then double again. That's exactly what it did.
Just weeks before the NASDAQ collapsed in 2000, he warned subscribers that tech stocks were dangerously overvalued.
In 2007, he warned subscribers about the coming dollar crisis -- and showed them how to protect themselves.
Personally, Dr. Skousen had me at "Reaganomics will work." But it's nice to
see -- and nicer still for his legions of loyal Forecasts & Strategies subscribers -- that he's continued to call things right ever since.

What's his secret? Well, if I knew, I'd be an investment advisor myself. But I think it begins with grasping the real laws of economics -- not the warmed-over Marxism that today's Wall Street frat boys imbibed with their warmed-over beer on the morning of their Econ 101 finals.

The "bottom line," as they say? Don't let Democrats run the country. And don't let Wall Street frat boys manage your investments. Do it yourself, with the genuinely expert guidance of freedom-loving economist Mark Skousen in Forecasts & Strategies.

Click here to learn more.

Sincerely,

Ann Coulter

P.S. My friend Dr. Mark Skousen has just identified 7 "Obama-Proof" investments to help you survive -- and thrive -- if and when "The One We Have Been Waiting For" ascends to the presidency. It's all part of a FREE Investor's Dossier Dr. Skousen has prepared called "Obamanomics and Your Money."

By the way, one of my conservative readers responded to my last entrant in this series with the comment, "Rick has discovered 'get rich quick schemes.'...HINT: such schemes are exclusive to no Party or ideology, conservative, liberal, or whatever." Well, point of information: I've been on dozens of both right-wing and left-wing mailing lists going back well over a decade. I've never, ever, ever received anything remotely like the snake-oil pitches I receive from Newsmax and Human Events nearly every day.

Pop Quiz: Geography

Rick Perlstein — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 14:59:05 -0400

Take a peek at the map below, and tell me what you think it depicts. I'll post the answer tomorrow. (P.S.: I've erased two comments, and also an accidental hint. Come on, dear readers: no cheating! If you saw the same article I did and recognize the map, hold back.)