Oh, And He’ll Confiscate All Your Guns While He’s At It
Shorter Verbatim Crazy Stanley Kurtz: “President Obama is not a fan of America’s suburbs. Indeed, he intends to abolish them.”
His “evidence” for this is…Christ, you don’t want to know.
- Dave Brockington
- Paul Campos
- Erik Loomis
- Robert Farley
- SEK
- Scott Lemieux
- Website
- CV
- Wishlist
- Blog Posts
- Blogroll
- Whiskey Fire
- Unqualified Offerings
- Well Timed Period
- The Talking Dog
- The Sideshow
- The Mahablog
- The Comics Curmudgeon
- SCOTUSblog
- Sadly No
- Rob Neyer
- Puck Prospectus
- No More Mr. Nice Blog
- Making Light
- Julian Sanchez
- Hit and Run
- Hendrik Hertzberg
- Glenn Kenny
- Faux Real Tho
- Charles Pierce
- Carrie Brownstein
- Balkinization
- Alicublog
- ACSBlog
- 11D
- My Other Blogs
- B. Spencer
- Dave Noon
- DJW
-
-
-
-
-
Links
Las Vegas Personal Injury Attorney
Sarasota Law Firms
Need Cash? Sky Loans can
help you! quick and easy money loans.
Bridging Loans-
Recent Comments
- Eric on Ray Manzarek, R.I.P.
- Ian on Scabs of the New Gilded Age
- Sherm on Ray Manzarek, R.I.P.
- Chatham on Gate-Rape
- gmack on Gate-Rape
- Linnaeus on Scabs of the New Gilded Age
- Njorl on Ray Manzarek, R.I.P.
- Linnaeus on Scabs of the New Gilded Age
- Uncle Kvetch on Ray Manzarek, R.I.P.
- JenBob on Able Archer
-
Recent Posts
Tags
2008 democratic primary 2012 Republican Primary academia barack obama baseball bloggingheads books china civil liberties constitutional interpretation constitutional law education environment film food football foreign policy free dahlia lithwick gay and lesbian rights hacktacular health care human rights iran i see dead people kentucky labor libya military procurement movies music NCAA football nonsense nukes Obama administration racism reproductive freedom russia Sarah Palin soccer Supreme Court the arbitrary executive The War On (Some Classes of People Who Use Some) Drugs This Day in Labor History wingnuttery Yuck the FankeesMeta
-
Awards
Paul Campos, Above the Law 2011 Lawyer of the Year
Erik Loomis, HNN Cliopatria 2011 Best Series of Posts
-
-
LGM Store
Make Custom Gifts at CafePressWho are We?
For administrative, advertising, or other inquiries, please e-mail here.
-
-
Archives
- May 2013
- April 2013
- March 2013
- February 2013
- January 2013
- December 2012
- November 2012
- October 2012
- September 2012
- August 2012
- July 2012
- June 2012
- May 2012
- April 2012
- March 2012
- February 2012
- January 2012
- December 2011
- November 2011
- October 2011
- September 2011
- August 2011
- July 2011
- June 2011
- May 2011
- April 2011
- March 2011
- February 2011
- January 2011
- December 2010
- November 2010
- October 2010
- September 2010
- August 2010
- July 2010
- June 2010
- May 2010
- April 2010
- March 2010
- February 2010
- January 2010
- December 2009
- November 2009
- October 2009
- September 2009
- August 2009
- July 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- April 2009
- March 2009
- February 2009
- January 2009
- December 2008
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- January 2008
- December 2007
- November 2007
- October 2007
- September 2007
- August 2007
- July 2007
- June 2007
- May 2007
- April 2007
- March 2007
- February 2007
- January 2007
- December 2006
- November 2006
- October 2006
- September 2006
- August 2006
- July 2006
- June 2006
- May 2006
- April 2006
- March 2006
- February 2006
- January 2006
- December 2005
- November 2005
- October 2005
- September 2005
- August 2005
- July 2005
- June 2005
- May 2005
- April 2005
- March 2005
- February 2005
- January 2005
- November 2004
- October 2004
- June 2004
blogroll
-
Kurtz’ piece is perfect Wing Nut Theory. Peak Wing Nut. No proof, little fact but tons of right wing paranoia. How can you argue with such perfect non-logic? It’s brilliant.
Every prediction of Peak Wing Nut has been quickly falsified. Every one. Learn from history, my man. The indominable human will to surpass every limitation guarantees that humanity will not see Peak Wing Nut until everyone now alive is dead.
That depends on what you mean by “peak.” Wingnuts have already reached 100% certifiable delusion, completely disconnected from reality. They can’t possibly get any crazier. They can, however, continue to get more tribal and violent.
What can be safely said is that we’ve passed the Wingnut Event Horizon, where it’s no longer economically feasible in their own minds for wingnuts to produce anything that isn’t 100% delusional hooey.
I think John Cole, the originator, defined it as the point in time after which wingnuttery begins to decline, either in quantity or intensity, or both.
As long as the “left” can be nudged still further to the right via the operation of wingnuttery, wingnuttery will never peak.
This. Wingtards are the corporatists’ stalking horses.
I do believe the national GOP is Californicating its way to the political margins. However, I also think the party realizes that, too, which makes it far more dangerous, more inclined to strike while the iron is hot, consequences be damned. Constitutional upheaval means nothing to those people, and they will surely make hay while the sun shines. Just look at the havoc they wreaked from 2001-2008.
Yes, and in California, they have managed to completely destroy the state despite not having had a majority in either house of the legislature for not more than 6 years in total since 1959, I think, thanks to Proposition 13 and its progeny.
The Republicans are masters of the structural lock-in. Which is pretty much why the “Democratic demographic destiny” pollyannas should be ignored.
[Sigh]
… not having had a majority in either house of the legislature for
notmore than 6 years in total…My kingdom for an edit feature.
Which is exactly why they’re trying to re-establish the political aspects of Jim Crow, save targeted against Democratic voters and spread beyond the geographic boundaries of the confederacy.
Hikdn …. how big is it? are we talking Belgium, or The Kingdom From That Stone Over To The Big Oak Tree?
Maybe another way to think about it is Theory of Wingnut Relativity, or Quantum Wingnut Mechanics. Personally, I’m looking forward to the moment when Kurtz connects Obama’s drive to eliminate the suburbs with his drive to force all conservatives into arranged same-sex marriages and to pay 100% marginal tax rates. Only then will we see the Grand Unified Wingnut Theory come to fruition. Maybe.
You left out the Mandatory Gay Abortions, Comrade.
I eagerly await mine!
The fiends!
It reads like a hastily written retirement home newsletter:
“One approach is to force suburban residents into densely packed cities by blocking development on the outskirts of metropolitan areas, and by discouraging driving with a blizzard of taxes, fees, and regulations. Step two is to move the poor out of cities by imposing low-income-housing quotas on development in middle-class suburbs.”
From “One approach” to “Step two”, huh? He can’t even remember what he started counting at the beginning of a paragraph.
Also, the second one would seem to expand the suburbs. Unless by definition the suburbs mean places where only affluent white people live. Wait, that is what Kurtz means!
No way! You’re saying Kurtz is just a defender of the white status quo? I don’t believe it
I thought he died in Nam.
That was the sane one….relatively speaking
Kurtz writes ” Beginning in the mid-1990s, Obama’s mentors at the Gamaliel Foundation (a community-organizing network Obama helped found) formally dedicated their efforts to the budding fight against suburban “sprawl.”
Wait! Is the Gamaliel Foundation made of of his mentors or did Obama help found it? I mean, those two things don’t usually go together.
It is really hard to read garbage like this because there are no logical connections between consecutive sentences much less paragraphs.
I also want to point out “What a great way to prevent middle and low income Americans from purchasing their own homes. If President Obama has his way, only the wealthy will be home owners. ” in the comments. Again, wait! I thought the Democrats started the housing crisis by forcing banks to lend to the poor? At least that what my rightwing relatives have been saying since 2009.
The whole thing is like reading about how non Soviet Communist parties would change their doctrine whenever told to by the Comintern.
I’m sure the actual founders of the Gamaliel Foundation would be surprised to know they were Obama’s spawn. It’s well known in Chicago organizing circles that he was a lame-ass orgnizer, was shunted off into get out the vote activities, but in a nice, kind way, because alienating a smart young black man with lots of ambition and the means to achieve isn’t good strategy.
I mean, building a coalition of political subdivisions to better the standing and bargaining position of said political subdivisions is beyond the pale, and is probably unconstitutional. Imagine the furor if, for example, outlying suburbs banded together to make it vastly easier to zip in and out of the city and take advantage of the city’s employment and cultural opportunities without the residents of said suburbs having to pay the taxes to support the city.
building a coalition of political subdivisions to better the standing and bargaining position of said political subdivisions is beyond the pale, and is probably unconstitutional.
Technically!
Further evidence! Obama’s friends from Cambridge still celebrate their victory from 40 years ago, when they prevented a highway from going through.
Of bloody course there are regional issues, and you don’t have to be Jim Kunstler to recognize the downside of sprawl. But somehow even considering development policy is heresy against the Holy Invisible Hand.
Jeebus, there’s a hole in the national head.
Bunch of parasites in my view….
Only if the inhabitants of those subdivisions include substantial numbers of persons or dusky hues. Perfectly right and proper for lily-white political subdivisions.
Oooh, “inner-ring suburban” is a nice hedge. No middle-class (white) suburbanites in the inner-ring suburbs, nosiree. Otherwise, the counterexamples of suburbanites getting shafted by exurbanites would be too easy to come by.
Meanwhile, in the portion of upstate NY with which I am familiar, certain wealthy “outer-ring” suburbs don’t even have their own police, because they can simply sponge off the county sheriff’s office, aka “indulge in regional tax-base sharing.” See also other emergency services, snowplowing, etc, etc, etc. But hey, if that’s a bad thing, the city and inner-ring suburbs can simply keep all their county tax money … Yeah, that’s what I thought.
Opening my property tax bills from the City of Albany briefly makes me understand what it feels like to be a Republican. Then I remember why they’re so high, and it passes quickly.
In Pennsylvania, many suburbs mooch off the state police and complain about slow service. Every so often, someone starts yelling they should pay their fair share, but nothing much has happened yet.
I would point them to Oak Park and Skokie, Illinois.
The best approach to community organising, of course, is to just get every down to Chick-Fil-A.
The community organizers who trained him in the mid-1980s blamed the plight of cities on taxpayer “flight” to suburbia.
Once you equate taxpayers with white people as openly as this, can it still be called a dog whistle?
I’ve never seen anyone trying harder to look like Steven Colbert.
Give Stanley a break. It’s not easy to come up with new ways to be racist.
While I hope this is true, he has a very positive view of Obama’s political ambition. I don’t see him being able to push through a huge social movement on a whim like this.
Also, he forgot to mention Obama is coming for our guns. How did he leave that out!?
Because what wingnuts really needed was another codeword signifying nothing but their own bizarre paranoia.
The comments are a hoot.
Yeah, the comments read just like the column itself. My favorite comment so far:
Obama is so bad that the redistribution of wealth isn’t actually going to happen. Or something.
Redistributing money benefits no one!
Wait, does this mean that Rush is no longer one of the great conservative bands of all time? Has Rand Paul been notified?
Conform or be cast out, Mal.
Okay, “Subdivisions” bad, “The Trees” good, “By-Tor and the Snow Dog” is, well, shit, my aesthetic stalinism is not refined enough to know what to make of By-Tor. Can some Comrade help a brother out?
So are you choosing free will?
I believe technically I chose not to decide, which I have on good authority means I still have made a choice.
“Working Man,” clearly bad. “Red Barchetta” – dude, that so fucking rocks. “2112″ is too stoner to be genuinely conservative. “Witch Hunt” is just plain mean to good folks who love the Bible, so bad. In the end, I think it is clear that “Cygnus X-1 Book II” is what tips the balance.
Okay, but if someone’s mind was for rent, would that make you more or less likely to put him down as arrogant?
Show your work.
Dear God, not after reading the titles of the various parts of “By-Tor.” You can’t make me.
And God forgive me, I’m certain I owned Fly By Night as a teenager. What the hell was I thinking? I mean, I know I did a lot of drugs back then (cheap and plentiful in Reagan’s America!) but damn.
Rush is gonna playing Brooklyn, which is just weird.
I had the album, too, but I didn’t understand the lyrics, I swear.
Jesus, now that I think about it, “Subdivisions” might be the only Rush song I’ve ever actually liked.
“By-Tor and the Snow Dog” is, well, shit, my aesthetic stalinism is not refined enough to know what to make of By-Tor.
I’m fairly certain that “By-Tor and the Snow Dog” is the result of Geddy Lee constantly telling Neal Peart that he had no interest in playing D&D on the tour bus. I’ll bet that By-Tor was a type VI demon or something originally.
From (and the fact that this even exists is proof our culture is degraded) the Rusk wiki:
Dear Cthulhu below, that song runs 8 and a half minutes long? What the hell is wrong with those people? Once you are in as far as “Part 3: Of the Battle iv: Hymn of Triumph” can you possibly still think this is not silly?
The primary ability of being a singer in a metal band is to keep a straight face when reciting the lyrics (Frey knows its not singing)
Pshaw. You’re thinking of balors, the type VI demons that started out as balrogs before TSR’s encounter with the type IX lawyers of the Tolkien estate. Balor became the name of a particular type VI who lent his name to the entire category. By-Tor was originally a German Shepard with a penchant for being a biter.. Snow-Dog was a tiny white dog of unspecified breed. Hey, would I lie to you?
… Beaten to the punch about the dogs, I see. May the tanar’ri make flutes from your bones, Malaclypse.
Those who wish to be
Must put aside the alienation
Get on with the fascination
The real relation, the underlying theme
Thanks for the ear worm dickhead. That shit will loop forever now.
Aaaaaaaaagh! I’m ready to go full Egon if it doesn’t stop!
I swear those guys make The Moody Blues look unpretentious
All earworms can be cured by listening to “She’s Lost Control” by Joy Division.
I’m not making that up. It will work.
Abolish, in this case, means “make them socially and economically more integrated with cities.”
Stanley Kurtz is arguing that if suburbanites cannot define themselves in terms of their separation from and opposition to their urban brethren, then they literally cease to have an identity or being at all.
But not in a racist way or anything; he made sure.
I, too, am distressed by the Obama plan to forcibly remake suburbanites into a slave labor force for our cities’ collective farms.
These kulaks will support the cause of socialist progress or face revolutionary justice.
I’m not. It is as it should be.
I thought he was going to turn them into sugar mines for our new insect overlords…
Mistah Kurtz is almost as outraged by the desire of “urbanites” to stick their hand into the pockets of suburbanites, as he by their refusal to convert large amounts of their tax-paying land area to highways for suburbanites.
+1
I would just like to point out that what Mr. Anti-Government-Social-Experimentation is denouncing here is limitation on the regulations that suburban governments can put on their residents’ ability to build what they want on their own land. He dislikes repealing those restrictions because of the social – yeah, let’s say “social” – effects of allowing development to occur in a less-regulated manner.
You know, because he doesn’t like government activism aimed at social engineering.
This is somewhat unfair to Kurtz. There are areas where increasing low-income housing is not about eliminating regulations that prevent low-income housing from being built but by creating new regulations that force a certain amount of low-income housing (the Mount Laurel decision in NJ, for instance.)
So, while it’s fair to say that Kurtz is a racist moron, I don’t think it’s really fair to call him a hypocrite, too.
Force, how?
Why, by forbidding the municipality from enforcing its zoning code against certain projects.
I know exactly how this works: if a community doesn’t have x% affordable housing, then developers are allowed to pull permits for projects that violate the town’s zoning, as long as they are building affordable units.
These “new regulations” you’re talking about are deregulation; they are limits on the regulatory authority of suburban governments.
To quote wikipedia, the Mount Laurel decision in NJ “requires that municipalities use their zoning powers in an affirmative manner to provide a realistic opportunity for the production of housing affordable to low and moderate income households.”
This isn’t completely true. If municipalities don’t provide enough affordable housing and are sued, one outcome can be that builders are allowed to do whatever they damn well please despite zoning regulations (as you say.)
But NJ also passed the Fair Housing Act as a reaction to Mount Laurel and to avoid such “builder’s remedies.” Under the FHA, mucipalities can go to a state agency which will tell them how much affordable housing they need and then will clear their plan, which often includes new zoning regulations creating high-density and other affordable housing zones. If the municipality follows through on this pre-cleared plan, they’re immune from builders’ lawsuits. If they don’t follow through, they’re penalized (either by losing said immunity or by the withholding of state money.)
This means “up-zone.” That is, reduce the zoning regulations. Where a district might have allowed only single family homes, change the zoning to allow multifamilies. Where it used to have a two-acre minimum per unit, allow 1/5 of a acre.
The difference between a “high-density zone” and a “low-density zone” is that some of the regulations in the high-density zone are absent, while others are loosened. You are allowed to build a single family home on an acre of land in both a high-density zone and a low-density zone. The difference is, there are a lot of regulations in the low-density zone that do not exist in the high-density zone.
No, my understanding is that the NJ regulations often state that certain areas must be high-density. Builders cannot build low-density. I know that you do this for a living and are probably right in general. All I know is NJ where I grew up and used to work in a town that struggled to meet its Mount Laurel requirements. I suppose it’s equally plausible that the planners in that town had no idea what they were doing and were screwing everything up, I guess.
Mistah Kurtz, he daft.
Sprawl now, sprawl tomorrow, sprawl forever.
There are times when I think that suburbinzation was encouraged to cultivate the wing-nut mindset. Conservative ideologists certainly defend suburbia with enough fervor to give this some credence.
Arthur Levitt once said that putting working-class people into single-family homes benefited society because the elimination of common areas reduced their ability to get together and promote subversive activity.
Holy shit, the man read his Communist Menifesto! I at least give him points for that.
Worse still – that idea is a lot more present in The Eighteenth Brumaire
of Louis Bonaparte than in the Manifesto.
Communist Menifesto
Oops. I guess homocommunism was really on the brain…
at least you didn’t get to The Communist Walrusifesto on the brain
Do you have a specific source for this?
Mark Taper, the developer who pioneered a lot of the suburbinization in the Los Angeles area, expressed the same idea as well.
Earlier in the 20th century, the businessmen behind the IRT thought that by lowering NYC’s density, they could get working class New Yorkers to go conservative. They had the right idea but miscalculated how low density needs to go for this to happen.
I made a comment describing how white flight was subsidized by the federal government through the FHA and some genius responded to me with this:
I’m off to legally change my name to “The Reparation Type.”
You have to love how they make shitty logic seem witty.
It will forever be a mystery why the Republican party is unable to make inroads with the black community. That’s like asking the square root of a million. No one will ever know.
Tides go in, tides go out. You can’t explain that.
In the words of Shaq, “Our offense is like the Pythagorean theorem. You can’t solve it.”
F’ing magnets, how do they work?
I just had to check and he actually said that! (Or, rather, according to http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/basketball/nba/recaps/1999/11/26/lal_njn/ he said “My game is like the Pythagorean theorem, no one has an answer.”)
Maybe he was thinking of Fermat’s Last theorem?
That would actually be kinda respectable, even though he messed it up.
You forgot to mention that the FHA was invented by Barney Frank in order to crash the economy and usher in homocommunism.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/86684500/Insuring-Inequality-The-Role-of-the-Federal-Housing-Administration-in-the-Urban-Ghettoization-of-African-Americans
The cruelty of right-wing myths is that they aren’t merely founded on lies, they’re based on the complete opposite of the truth.
usher in homocommunism
Awesome, then we can scream “this is Sparta!” without irony.
FTW!
I love he went from 0 to racist in less than two sentences? That’s quite an accomplishment
The Derb could have beat that with one hand tied behind his copy of The Bell Curve.
The Derb went “pro” in this competition about 25-30 years ago. This random, sputtering, frothing racist addict of resentment is presumably an amateur.
Hell, could be Derbyshire for all I know, but I would like to imagine he’s camped outside of the Olympic village trying to score an autofraph from that Greek girl and ogling all the East Asians, who find him very creepy
The Derb could have beat that with one hand tied behind his copy of
The Bell Curve10 Best Sex Tours Of Asia.Clearly Obama is not going to get rid of the suburbs. He’s going to do a massive wealth transfer of suburban property to married gay and lesbian couples. Each couple will be granted extra land on which to farm children who can be recruited to the gay lifestyle.
Forty Fabulous Acres and a Mule.