movement

The Idaho State Journal’s November 13 editorial titled “They Must Not like the Constitution” gave a “thumbs down” to 80 state legislators who attended the annual Assembly of State Legislatures (ASL) conference on November 11–13 in Salt Lake City, Utah. The editorial was not fair to the assembled legislators, nor was it accurate in describing the objectives of the growing Article V movement to amend the U.S. Constitution.

Writing in The Orange County Register, the distinguished urbanologist Joel Kotkin notes that many conservatives are now “waging a war on middle-class America” through their support for trendy progressive “smart growth” policies. Such policies are the stock in trade of an urban planning movement that has been in power for about a quarter-century now, promoted by certain business interests (aka rent-seekers) in a coalition with elitist progressive politicians and upper-class and aspiring-upper-class cultural snobs.

Time Magazine’s Sam Frizell imagines that the American Dream has changed, in an article entitled “The New American Dream is Living in a City, Not Owning a House in the Suburbs.” Frizell further imagines that “Americans are abandoning their white-picket fences, two-car garages, and neighborhood cookouts in favor of a penthouse view downtown and shorter walk to work.” The available population data shows no such trend.