Mainstreaming the Next Repug Insanity

Remember when nobody thought even the repugs would be so insane as to outlaw contraception? Like, you know, last year?

 

They've almost done it.  So what's the next no-they-wouldn't-ever-outlaw-that-omg-what-just-happened issue? Planned development. You know, making sure your accountable elected officials, rather than private developers, get to decide whether that giant industrial hog operation or super walmart goes in next door to your nice suburban neighborhood.

Ed Kilgore at Political Aminal:

Think I’m exaggerating? Check out a brief sample from a long rant (and actually a book excerpt) from Stanley Kurtz at National Review that claims there is a Alinskyite cabal in the White House plotting to loot suburbanites on behalf of Obama’s urban looter friends and abolish suburbs altogether:

Obama is a longtime supporter of “regionalism,” the idea that the suburbs should be folded into the cities, merging schools, housing, transportation, and above all taxation. To this end, the president has already put programs in place designed to push the country toward a sweeping social transformation in a possible second term. The goal: income equalization via a massive redistribution of suburban tax money to the cities.

Believe me, the piece gets crazier and crazier as you go along. And while Kurtz and people like him claim to be defending suburbanites from the socialist predators of the cities, it’s hard to imagine anyone benefitting from their hard-core opposition to any kind of regional planning, land-use regulation, or inter-jurisdictional cooperation other than developers and land speculators. It’s a pretty classic example of the worst kind of greed being promoted via appeals to—no question about it—racial fears and hatred of taxes. But it’s gaining amazing steam in Tea circles around the country, and before very long, it may be hard to find the kind of Republican elected officials who used to quietly sit on regional planning bodies and try to make their communities a bit more—yes—“sustainable.”

 I'm currently reading a book about "development" in South Florida in which government agencies initially seem to be the bad guys in allowing developers to destroy the wetlands that both protect against floods and provide the region's only source of drinking water.

But what's really happening is that private corporate interests - mining, Big Ag, housing, golf courses - have hijacked the system and made it impossible for public servants to do their job of protecting the public interest.

South Florida is precisely the floodwater-everywhere-but-not-a-drop-to-drink libertarian hellhole repugs want to replicate everywhere else in the nation.