Thanks, I wanted to ask anyway. I have a couple of biting comments to make about Barbara Olson's quote on Hillary:
She wrote: "His [Alinsky's] new aspect, national planning, derives from the necessity of entrusting social change to institutions, specifically the United States government."
First of all, Friedrich Hayek's Road to Serfdom discusses the planners:
From an online version of TRTS
There's more on The Planners there, and it's not all just about the press by any means. But when we think of the uniformity of our press today, this does ring a bell.
Second, I've argued with "libertarians" and Democrats about the marriage issue, and what often arises from the discussion is that the government has an obligation to extend new moralities to our people via fiat. This is just another form of planning, and of course it grants untold powers to government. The issue of slavery is often mentioned in comparison to marriage "rights." Unlike slavery, which violated an individual's right to be free, the concept of correct and acceptable marriage is an arbitrary value imposed by the majority on its participants. This is true by definition. Marriage seeks civic approval for a particular union. To change a definition accepted by all to one only accepted by the few -- yet using government power to do it -- is right on the roadmap to serfdom. It's only too ironic that issues with slavery and racial civil rights are cited as justification for imposing these forms of "thought control" on the majority.
As a few clear-headed thinkers have observed, marriage is not a right, and collective (non-individual) rights do not exist at all. But collectivizing rights assures the government of increasing powers over the individual. Knowingly or not, marriage activists are pushing for changes that will provide many new powers for enforcing cultural changes.
Alinsky would be proud. And Hillary, with her Village, would make Stalin proud, too. It's too bad plane crashes have taken Olson and Congressman Lawrence P. McDonald, Republican Representative from Georgia's 7th District. And their deaths are all too ironic on a number of levels.