Posted on By: Fred

Summary of Saul Alinsky’s “Rules For Radicals”

Union organizers are often highly trained. In many unions this training includes indoctrination in Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals.”

Saul Alinsky was a ruthless radical organizer. He would stop at nothing to win. Before he passed away in 1972 he published a book called “Rules for Radicals” in which he outlined his power tactics and questionable ethics.

Anyone interested in staying, or becoming, Union Free, whether in an organizing campaign or in a decertification or deauthorization election, ought to become familiar with these rules.

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Posted on By: Fred

The Winner: Rush Limbaugh

“I hope he fails.” With those famous four words, uttered January 16, 2009 — only days before Barack Obama was to be inaugurated — Rush Limbaugh drew a line in the sand.

And as a result, this morning it is Rush Limbaugh who is the undisputed winner of the 2010 election. The White House is repudiated. The Pelosi-run House of Representatives, supported by the Democrats’ Congressional Campaign Committee, also deliberately targeted Limbaugh. Speaker Pelosi is, abruptly, now history. The Senate is richer by a still-undetermined number of conservatives as this goes to Internet press.

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Posted on By: Fred

Why Marco Rubio’s Win Is the Most Important One for Conservatives

Once you get past the fundamental qualifications of basic honesty and credibility, there are three ingredients, it seems to me, that make for a successful conservative leader.

The first (this should be obvious) is a solid conservative political philosophy. The second is charisma (like it or not, Americans prefer charismatic candidates, and it has become mandatory for the modern era).

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Posted on By: Fred

Dave Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections

Dave Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections was started as a paper hobby after the 1992 Presidential Election. I was 22 and attending graduate school at MIT. I made a photocopy of a U.S. map (with county boundaries) from one of the libraries and filled in counties with colored pen according to the winner. There were only two percentage points – above 45% and below 45%. I used the data for Perot, Clinton, and Bush that was published in the 1993 World Almanac and Book of Facts (there were no minor party data).

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Posted on By: Fred

National Review

There is, we like to think, solid reason for rejoicing. Prodigious efforts, by many people, are responsible for NATIONAL REVIEW. But since it will be the policy of this magazine to reject the hypodermic approach to world affairs, we may as well start out at once, and admit that the joy is not unconfined.

Let’s face it: Unlike Vienna, it seems altogether possible that did NATIONAL REVIEW not exist, no one would have invented it. The launching of a conservative weekly journal of opinion in a country widely assumed to be a bastion of conservatism at first glance looks like a work of supererogation, rather like publishing a royalist weekly within the walls of Buckingham Palace. It is not that, of course; if NATIONAL REVIEW is superfluous, it is so for very different reasons: It stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.

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Posted on By: Fred

Commentary Magazine

Commentary is America’s premier monthly magazine of opinion and a pivotal voice in American intellectual life. Since its inception in 1945, and increasingly after it emerged as the flagship of neoconservatism in the 1970’s, the magazine has been consistently engaged with several large, interrelated questions: the fate of democracy and of democratic ideas in a world threatened by totalitarian ideologies; the state of American and Western security; the future of the Jews, Judaism, and Jewish culture in Israel, the United States, and around the world; and the preservation of high culture in an age of political correctness and the collapse of critical standards.

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Posted on By: Fred

“The Report of our Death was Greatly Exaggerated.”

So whatever happened to the death of conservatism? Wasn’t it supposed to be long gone by now, crumbling within its sarcophagus, a dim memory of a discredited past? Didn’t we start hearing authoritative rumblings about its impending doom around the time of the last set of midterm elections, in 2006, when disillusioned ex-conservatives like Francis Fukuyama and soi-disant types like Andrew Sullivan began tuning their cellos of lamentation and discontent? Wasn’t that also approximately when disaffected conservative writers were proclaiming, in the pages of the Washington Monthly, that “It’s Time for Us to Go”? The talk was so deafening that I was moved to argue with it back in January 2007 in these pages in an article entitled “Is Conservatism Finished?” I concluded with some gingerness that it was not, but my conclusion came nearly two years before the most liberal candidate to run for the presidency in nearly half a century won a resounding victory.

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