No apology, please! That’s important information you’ve got there, stuff I probably never would have stumbled over on my own. And you are quite right, we need to understand how all this came about in order to best demolish it.

Thank you!

Haven’t read the book yet. While Reagan and Goldwater get all the glory about “turning” the country into a “Centrist” “Conservative” country, you have to keep in mind that the Republicans needed a blueprint – and that blueprint was

The Powell Manifesto

The Greatest Power Grab

Beginning in the early 1970s, a new conservative establishment set a counter-movement in motion to replace the institutions and expunge the ideas of American liberalism, which had dominated public thought and social policy since the New Deal. A new breed of conservatives sought to roll back a set of social gains going back to FDR, Truman, Johnson, and Kennedy.

They shifted the nation rightward; tilted the distribution of the nation’s assets away from the middle class and the poor, the elderly, and the young; they red-penciled laws and legal precedents at the heart of American justice. They aimed to corporatize Medicare and Social Security. They marketed class values while accusing their opponents of “class warfare.” They loosened or repealed the rights and protections of organized labor and the poor, voters, and minorities. They slashed the taxes of corporations and the rich, and rolled back the economic gains of the rest. They came to dominate or heavily influence centers of scholarship, law, and politics, education, and governance – or put new ones in their place. Their litigation teams nearly overthrew an elected President. And, to maintain power, proclaimed Constitutionalists on the right, to this day, wage a concerted counter- revolution against such Constitutional guarantees as free speech and separation of church and state. …

Enter Lewis Powell

Few are aware of the critical role played in the political power shift rightward by a prominent Richmond attorney andLewis Powell community leader, Lewis F. Powell, Jr., at the very threshold of a distinguished career on the U.S. Supreme Court. Powell was to be a leading catalyst in politicizing key sectors of the business establishment; and, he would make a major, if perhaps inadvertent, contribution to the strategy and tactics of the emerging new right.

Powell, a prominent corporation lawyer, had found the social turmoil and anti-business mood of the country abhorrent and alarming. He had achieved national prominence as president of the American Bar Association. A Democrat of southern conservative stripe, he was a member of the boards of 11 corporations, and clearly viewed the world as that culture did.

On September 13, 1971, a month before President Nixon was to nominate him to the Supreme Court to fill the seat vacated by Hugo Black, Powell wrote a letter to a law-school friend, Ross L. Malone, general counsel of the General Motors Corporation. Powell wanted Malone’s help — to alert “top management” of the company to the “contentious time in which we live” and the “plight of the [free] enterprise system.” A massive propaganda campaign, he wrote, was being waged against business. “[M]anagement has been unwilling to make a massive effort to protect itself and the system it represents.” Unless the business community acted, Powell warned, the capitalist system was “not likely to survive.”

Powell’s blueprint focused on four broad targets of attack:

institutions of higher education, especially students and faculties in the social sciences; the media; the political establishment — centers where public opinion, legislation and government policies and agendas were shaped — and the court system, which codifed and interpreted American law.

Sorry, this post is kinda longish but important if you want to understand how to beat them

Two weeks after winning reelection as an independent due to losing Connecticut’s Democratic primary, Joe Lieberman has hired a former spokesman for the Christian Coalition as his new communications director, RAW STORY has learned. The new hiree also formerly served as a senior fellow at the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), a legislative director for the conservative Heritage Foundation, and as communications director to Sen. John McCain (R-AZ).

Fifty-two year old political pundit and activist Marshall Wittmann is very popular with Washington journalists because he often “gives good quote,” according to a Washington Post profile from earlier this year.

Yes, globalization is about getting someone else to soak up the risk.

The senator from New York spent $17,000,000 on her recent campaign. More than any other senator. An election she was in no way going to lose. Hillary, a lot of that money could have gone to feed a lot of hungry people in NY this Thursday. Disgusting.

more than that and still disgusting!

You think it’s cheap to run a sure-to-win cakewalk of a campaign? Hardly. Hillary Clinton managed to spend $36 million on her 30-point victory two weeks ago — about $1.2 million per percentage point. Hillary’s never-in-question victory cost her more than twice what New Jersey’s Bob Menendez spent to squeak out a win over Tom Kean Jr. and almost twice what Chuck Schumer spent to win an even bigger victory in 2004.

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2…..xpe_1.html

The senator from New York spent $17,000,000 on her recent campaign. More than any other senator. An election she was in no way going to lose. Hillary, a lot of that money could have gone to feed a lot of hungry people in NY this Thursday. Disgusting.

Or the money could have been used to help put a few more Democrats in the House.