Rick Perlstein

Ever since Sara Palin's speech to the Republican National Convention, I've been struggling to express something that Nate Silver gets to with conciseness and aplomb.

Turns out the president-elect has been reading Jean Edward Smith's fine biography FDR. An excellent choice—and a strong suggestion that maybe Obama is thinking about this.

Last week I shared with you the post-election reflections of a listserv I follow of conservative "scholars." I think I'll keep 'em coming. This stuff is too good not to share:

The forces of workplace authoritarianism have gotten far too far with their propaganda that the Employee Free Choice Act, designed to make it easier for workers who want to join a union to do so, only oppose this common-sense reform because it is un-American: that it eliminates the "secret ballot" in unio

My fine colleague Terrence Heath has been riffing out a new concept to explain the latest turn of our right-wing friends: "drop dead conservatism." As in the infamous 1975 New York Post headline, "Ford To City: Drop Dead," reporting on the 38th president's avowal that he would rather see New York City go bankrupt than approve a bailout

I haven't done much blogging here this week and last, partly because I'm still cogitating upon what the hell really happened to conservatism on November 4, and partly because I've been doing much of that cogitating aloud, on the road, in speeches and panel discussions that obliging souls booked me for long ago on the presumption that I would have something wise and useful to say about "Nixonland"

One of the jobs we'll be taking on here at the Big Con will be to monitor the Obama Hate. Please do send in your ripest examples to me at rperlstein@ourfuture.org. Forthwith, our first plunge.

Ever since Sara Palin's speech to the Republican National Convention, I've been struggling to express something that Nate Silver gets to with conciseness and aplomb.

Turns out the president-elect has been reading Jean Edward Smith's fine biography FDR. An excellent choice—and a strong suggestion that maybe Obama is thinking about this.

Last week I shared with you the post-election reflections of a listserv I follow of conservative "scholars." I think I'll keep 'em coming. This stuff is too good not to share:

The forces of workplace authoritarianism have gotten far too far with their propaganda that the Employee Free Choice Act, designed to make it easier for workers who want to join a union to do so, only oppose this common-sense reform because it is un-American: that it eliminates the "secret ballot" in unio

My fine colleague Terrence Heath has been riffing out a new concept to explain the latest turn of our right-wing friends: "drop dead conservatism." As in the infamous 1975 New York Post headline, "Ford To City: Drop Dead," reporting on the 38th president's avowal that he would rather see New York City go bankrupt than approve a bailout

I haven't done much blogging here this week and last, partly because I'm still cogitating upon what the hell really happened to conservatism on November 4, and partly because I've been doing much of that cogitating aloud, on the road, in speeches and panel discussions that obliging souls booked me for long ago on the presumption that I would have something wise and useful to say about "Nixonland"

One of the jobs we'll be taking on here at the Big Con will be to monitor the Obama Hate. Please do send in your ripest examples to me at rperlstein@ourfuture.org. Forthwith, our first plunge.

Blogging on conservatism used to be easy. I'd just link to some Third World-like example of infrastructure failure in an American city, often involving a bursting one-hundred-year-old water main like this one yesterday in Staten Island...