Progressive/Conservative Who? What? Red/Blue

shit·storm

ˈSHitˌstôrm/

noun

vulgar slang

noun: shit-storm

a situation marked by violent controversy

Source: The Atlantic March 2017 Issue 


. . .  if liberal advocates are clinging to the hope that federalism will allow them to create progressive havens, they’re overlooking a big problem: Power may be decentralized in the American system, but it devolves to the state, not the city.
Recent events in red states where cities are pockets of liberalism are instructive, and cautionary. Over the past few years, city governments and state legislatures have fought each other in a series of battles involving preemption, the principle that state law trumps local regulation, just as federal law supersedes state law. It hasn’t gone well for the city dwellers.
Alabama and Arizona both passed bills targeting “sanctuary cities”—those that do not cooperate with the enforcement of federal immigration laws.
Even though courts threw out much of that legislation, other states have considered their own versions. Arizona also made sure cities couldn’t ban the gifts in Happy Meals (cities elsewhere had talked about outlawing them, on the theory that they lure kids to McDonald’s), and when some of its cities cracked down on puppy mills, it barred local regulation of pet breeders, too.

Close observers of these clashes expect them to proliferate in the years to come, with similar results. " . . . We are about to see a shit storm of state and federal preemption orders, of a magnitude greater than anything in history,” says Mark Pertschuk of Grassroots Change, ..By the group’s count, at least 36 states introduced laws preempting cities in 2016."
Most of these laws enforce conservative policy preferences.
That’s partly because Republicans enjoy unprecedented control in state capitals—they hold 33 governorships and majorities in 32 state legislatures.
The trend also reflects a broader shift: Americans are in the midst of what’s been called “the Big Sort,” as they flock together with people who share similar socioeconomic profiles and politics. In general, that means rural areas are becoming more conservative, and cities more liberal.
 An important lesson of last year’s presidential election is that American political norms are much weaker than they had appeared, allowing a scandal-plagued, unpopular candidate to triumph—in part because voters outside of cities objected to the pace of cultural change.
Another lesson is that the United States is coming to resemble two separate countries, one rural and one urban.
Only one of them, at present, appears entitled to self-determination.

 

 
 

AFDJ* : Above-Market-Rate Condo Conversion On Main Street/Center

After a backflash by voters in Mesa against the high-cost of city government, both Jeff McVay, the Director of Downtown Transformation, and Bill Jabjiniak, head honcho of the Office for Economic Development, recommended putting City Hall Plaza out for bids to real estate developers to bring in much needed revenues in the faltering FY2017/2018 City Budget.
As Mesa Mayor John Giles likes to say: It's all about location.
Experts in real estate principles have likewise for a long time insisted that markets are guided by the principle of 'highest-and-best use', agreeing that city government office-space can get re-located quickly into other un-used city-owned properties close by and that  this piece of prime city-owned is the most attractive and well-positioned to attract and accelerate private investments in the New Urban Downtown Mesa.
This prime location at the intersection of Main Street and Center Street is in the heart of Mesa's Arts-and-Entertainment district anchored by the International Design award-winning Mesa Arts Center directly across Main Street with a Valley Metro Light Rail platform station just steps away.

* April Fool's Day Joke

Ducey Now The Darling of Old-Guard AZ Goldwater Conservatives

The life of the Grand Old Party
30 March 2017
Going rogue again with John Talton
Source: Rogue Columnist
At least a quarter century past his sell-by date as a credible columnist, George Will is still churning it out for the Washington Post syndicate.
Recently, he looked down from his unchanging tower and pronounced that the savior for conservatism is...Doug Ducey.


With the Republicans facing at least a temporary but stunning Waterloo in their attempt to take health insurance from 24 million Americans, Will sought a quantum of solace in Goldwater country. He wrote, "Today’s governor, Doug Ducey, is demonstrating the continuing pertinence of the limited-government conservatism with which Sen. Goldwater shaped the modern GOP, after himself being shaped by life in the leave-me-alone spirit of the wide open spaces of near-frontier Arizona."
The column is worth reading if for no other reason than the skill with which Will elides over the facts.
Here are a few:
• Arizona is hardly a creation of "the leave-me-alone spirit of the wide open spaces." First was instead, it required the U.S. Army to brutally pacify the Apache, Yavapai, and other Indian tribes.
Second was federal land grants for railroads.
Third was billions of dollars in federal reclamation to turn the Salt River Valley into American Eden and then a place where millions could live in subdivision pods thanks to cheap water and power.
Fourth was the New Deal funding that saved Phoenix, especially, and Arizona more broadly from the Great Depression.
Fifth was the Cold War military spending that created the tech economy in Phoenix and Tucson.
And don't forget federal flood-control money that allowed developers to lay down tract houses in what would otherwise be flood plains.
Oh, and federal home-loan support and the GI Bill, authored by Arizona's Ernest McFarland, were essential for further subsidizing the state's massive post-World War II population influx. 

• Goldwater.

Will never mentions how Barry opposed the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act. Barry gets a pass as a simple offspring of the frontier.

In fact, he inherited a department store chain.

He was a rich man, handsome and glamorous, who ran with a fast crowd, including mobsters. He was a prominent attendee at the funeral of Gus Greenbaum, after the latter was whacked by the Chicago Outfit.

Most of Goldwater's time as a senator was spent representing a rapidly urbanizing state. All along the way, he had his hand out, from federal funds to preserve Camelback Mountain to the massive public expenditures necessary for the Central Arizona Project. Barry would be horrified by today's Kookocracy and Donald Trump in the White House, but he let this nihilistic monster loose on America.

• Ducey.

Will roasts the governor's chestnut that "he cheekily calls California’s Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown 'my partner in growing Arizona’s economy,' because California’s business climate is a powerful incentive for firms to relocate in Arizona."

In fact, California's economy is among the strongest in the nation, the home to Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego (see, for example, this).

Arizona is a back-office backwater that underperforms by virtually every measure of economic and social health (see Arizona's Continuing Crisis), especially given its size. This is the consequence of conservatism applied to a state.

• Doug Ducey has helped ensure that Arizona has one of the nation's worst school systems, having difficulty attracting teachers while the Kooks get rich off the charter school racket.
• They also enrich themselves off the private-prison racket.
• He had his hand out for Obamacare, hardly the "conservatism" Will has in mind.
• On the other hand, his presiding over the cruelest public assistance program in the nation has done nothing to help Arizona's large population of working poor "bootstrap themselves" into north Scottsdale affluence.

Meanwhile, climate change is bearing down in the state with catastrophic consequences — and Ducey is doing nothing.

Last year, Will famously left the Republican Party over the Short-Fingered Vulgarian. Few followed him. As Jonathan Chait wrote in New York magazine:

The point is not at all to gloat at the failure of anti-Trump conservatives, but to explain the source of their error. You can’t heal an illness you’ve diagnosed improperly. Anti-Trump conservatives deluded themselves about the source of conservatism’s electoral appeal. Trump’s long list of deviations from party orthodoxy — on health care, abortion, support for the Clintons — would have destroyed a normal candidacy, the way Rick Perry’s support for humane treatment of undocumented immigrants killed his candidacy in 2012.

Why did Republican primary voters forgive Trump’s heresies? Because the power of the charge of un-conservative behavior is the implication that you are not really on our side. Trump proved to the party base he was one of them through his racism, sexism, and blunt nationalism.

Now Will, a snappy dresser at least, is casting about for the True Faith in its birthplace.

The trouble is, the reality of Goldwater conservatism has ruined Arizona. It's a wreck, a model for nobody.

 

FoGetAbowtIt? New Word in Media Lexicon FAUXGRESSIVE > r u 1?

A new Quarterly [thank you Nolan Gray] and a diatribe word-dump
From Counterpunch
Someone once wrote that he cannot stand to tune in the TV news because he always gets the feeling that someone is lying to him. But there are lies of commission and lies of omission—and the latter have even graver implications for the future of our country and planet.
Faux progressives love to work up a good rhetorical lather about Trump’s mental condition, but the sedulous burial of any mention of the environmental/climate crises besieging the planet, much less their imminence and gravity—surely the most important story in the history of humanity—in favor of the standard diversionary drivel bespeaks a sociopathy among the liberal political/media elites every bit as frightening as any impairment imputed to Trump.
These elite fauxgressive opinion leaders (and their millions of followers) relish their occasional robust lap or two of sweaty sanctimony about Republican climate deniers but seem curiously oblivious to the “soft” but no less deadly denialism in force among corporate liberal Democrats: sporadic campaign speechifying and the occasional meaningless, non-binding international declaration salve the conscience of those with no more real seriousness or sense of urgency about this world-historical crisis than Steve Bannon or Rush Limbaugh, whose dismissal of the issue is at least blatant and honest; the denialism of the liberal class is submerged beneath a surface of unctuous pieties and empty token gestures that pass for “concern,” even “action,” among the sharpies of the Democratic Party elites and their brain-fogged captives in the citizenry.

Realion Robotics

EOD/Surveillance Robots

Published on Mar 21, 2017

Views: 136

An in-depth look at the more reliable, capable, cost-effective EOD/surveillance robots from Realion Robotics, a joint venture of Alion and Reamda, Ltd. Visit www.RealionRobotics.com for more info!

The Terror of A 'No'

. . . just ask.Opportunity

Published on Mar 31, 2017

Views: 130,523

We miss out on the finest opportunities of our lives because of an underlying terror of a very short word. We should overcome the fear

Animated Map: Repub AHCA Repercussions

AZ=Big Loser

Published on Mar 31, 2017

Views: 7,280

House Republicans introduced the American Health Care Act (AHCA) to replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Analysts show that each state will be affected differently. Under the AHCA, many states that participate in the federal exchange would see a decrease in premium tax credits available to individuals.