Jonathan Raban, writing in the London Review of Books, gives us a keen insight into what happens when you let conservatives build cities:

Conservatives are twisting the facts beyond the breaking point to support their revisionist history about a law that encourages lending in low-income communities. But don’t be fooled: the financial crisis was caused by conservative financial follies and bankers run amok and nothing more. Here's how you can fire back at 11 basic myths about the Community Reinvestment Act and the role of government regulation in this Wall Street mess.

We cannot word it too strongly now. Free-market economics is one of history's great failures—like monarchy and slavery and torture were failures. Countries that embrace it have invariably degraded themselves, and forfeited their own hopes for peace, democracy, and prosperity.

In the seven years since the U.S. was hit by a terrorist attack, a few of the myths promulgated in those first few years have hardened firmly into a new conventional wisdom—some so stubbornly that you often won't even find progressives questioning them any more. The time has come to call out a few of these persistent myths that are still being taken as fact and start firing back on them.

Conservatives are twisting the facts beyond the breaking point to support their revisionist history about a law that encourages lending in low-income communities. But don’t be fooled: the financial crisis was caused by conservative financial follies and bankers run amok and nothing more. Here's how you can fire back at 11 basic myths about the Community Reinvestment Act and the role of government regulation in this Wall Street mess.

We cannot word it too strongly now. Free-market economics is one of history's great failures—like monarchy and slavery and torture were failures. Countries that embrace it have invariably degraded themselves, and forfeited their own hopes for peace, democracy, and prosperity.

In the seven years since the U.S. was hit by a terrorist attack, a few of the myths promulgated in those first few years have hardened firmly into a new conventional wisdom—some so stubbornly that you often won't even find progressives questioning them any more. The time has come to call out a few of these persistent myths that are still being taken as fact and start firing back on them.

In the current issue of The Nation (which also featured a cover story co-authored by our own Bob Borosage), Chris Bowers pointed out a structural truth that lies at the heart of both American political parties. In the Age of Reagan, it came to pass that the GOP consolidated itself as the party of people who are white and Christian.

What we're seeing in Minneapolis (and did not see in Denver) is incitement to riot on a grand scale—planned and executed by law enforcement agencies themselves. There's plenty of evidence that the orders are coming from the federal level—and a credible suggestion that local law enforcement has been promised some sweet favors if they deliver.

This was the Campaign for America's Future's Big Afternoon at the Big Tent. CAF took over the Digg Stage (the entire upstairs floor of The Big Tent) for a series of four panels addressing some of the Big Questions we wrestle with here.

Conservative governments have resolutely cut budgets and driven out the experts whose job it was to keep the country's public works in good working order. But they never expected there would be an Obama Moment—a moment of national renewal in which progressives would be able to seize the process and launch some bold, creative acts of our own. It's not an overstatement to say that we may never have a creative opportunity like this one again.

Progressives have been picking at the whys and wherefores of liberal presidential candidates being brought down by withering attacks from the right ever since Adlai Stevenson lost to Eisenhower. But there's one fairly simple and glaring factor that I'm increasingly convinced plays at least some role in this—the different cultural roots of conservatism and liberalism. Seen this way, some solutions become obvious.