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Within the handful of swing states, the presidential election will come down to a handful of swing counties: namely the suburban voters who reside in about the last contested places in American politics. Even in solid-red states, big cities tilt overwhelmingly toward President Obama and the Democrats, and even in solid-blue ones, the countryside tends to be solidly Republican. What remains contested are the suburbs, which—despite the breathless talk in recent years of an urban revival—have accounted for 90 percent of metropolitan growth over the past decade. But as the suburbs have grown—in large part by collecting families priced out...

Wake up California. You are perilously close to ratifying Proposition 31, a sweepingly redistributionist and profoundly undemocratic transformation of your way of life, and you don’t even know what’s at stake. Suburbanites of California, you are the special targets of Prop. 31. Act now, or be turned into second-class citizens in your own state. Wake up America. Look toward the regionalist revolution on California’s horizon. In an era of looming municipal bankruptcies, this could be your fate: robbing the suburbs to pay for the cities. The regionalist transformation now being quietly pressed on California is exactly the sort of change...

High fuel prices... redistributive taxes... electric cars with a 30 mi range It should come to no surprise to any casual observer of US politcs that Barack Obama and his 'progressive' ilk hate suburbanites almost as much as they do clingers, save some residual hope-n-changey soccer moms out there in the greenbelt, maybe. But if a new book by Stanley Kurtz has any truth to it, the Obama Administration abhors the actual, physical suburbs that produce these irritatingly self-confident types, too- and have already actively targeted the suburban lifestyle -glittering icon of the American standard-of-living the world over- for destruction.  Typical of this despicable regime's m.o....

August 12, 2012SCRUBBED : PHOTO OF PRESIDENT OBAMA REMOVED JUST DAYS AFTER BOOK EXPOSES AGENDA TO ELIMINATE SUBURBS by Lee Stranahan A photo of President Obama was suddenly pulled from the website of the group Building One America, whose goals were documented extensively in Stanley Kurtz’s book Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities. The book, which was released ten days ago, reveals what Kurtz refers to as Obama’s plan to undercut the political and economic independence of America's suburbs. Kurtz connects current Obama administration policy with his personal history, and with groups...

Burn Down the Suburbs? Not exactly, but Obama is already working to get rid of them. By Stanley KurtzEditor’s Note: This article is adapted from Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities, by Stanley Kurtz, from Sentinel HC. President Obama is not a fan of America’s suburbs. Indeed, he intends to abolish them. With suburban voters set to be the swing constituency of the 2012 election, the administration’s plans for this segment of the electorate deserve scrutiny. Obama is a longtime supporter of “regionalism,” the idea that the suburbs should be folded into the cities, merging schools,...

NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE www.nationalreview.com Burn Down the Suburbs? By Stanley Kurtz August 1, 2012 4:00 A.M. Editor’s Note: This article is adapted from Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities, by Stanley Kurtz, from Sentinel HC. President Obama is not a fan of America’s suburbs. Indeed, he intends to abolish them. With suburban voters set to be the swing constituency of the 2012 election, the administration’s plans for this segment of the electorate deserve scrutiny. Obama is a longtime supporter of “regionalism,” the idea that the suburbs should be folded into the cities,...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Stanley Kurtz has an article adapted from Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities. And he's very blunt about this. I have the book as a powerful, influential member of the media. My book is right over there, Spreading the Wealth. I have a copy. "President Obama is not a fan of America’s suburbs. Indeed, he intends to abolish them." Now, Kurtz believes that this is an excellent way to campaign against Obama, that you don't need to be Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative. You just need to tell...

Roll back the clock to 1980 and Greater Houston looks quite a bit different.Some of the tall buildings, meandering toll roads and shiny professional sports venues aren't there, of course, but of more significance is the absence of many places that Houstonians now call home. As the metro area's population doubled over the past three decades, extensive developments and master-planned communities popped up or expanded to serve those with the means to buy spanking new homes on the suburban fringe. As for those of little means - many of them immigrants, legal and otherwise - they increasingly crowded into older,...

For years, the food pantry in Crystal Lake, Ill., a bedroom community 50 miles west of Chicago, has catered to the suburban areas’ poor, homeless and unemployed. But Cate Williams, the head of the pantry, has noticed a striking change in the makeup of the needy in the past year or two. Some families that once pulled down six-figure incomes and drove flashy cars are now turning to the pantry for help. A few of them donated food and money to the pantry before their luck soured, according to Williams. “People will shyly say to me, ‘You know, I used...

The laziest lighting job in Christmas history. Sometimes extreme apathy can lead to extreme ingenuity. With one simple word and a miniscule fraction of the effort, the guy on the right is expressing the exact same level of Christmas spirit as his show-offy, bigger-budgeted neighbor. Plus that guy borrowed a rake from him like three years ago, so it all evens out.

Gerri Field stood with hundreds of protesters in front of Tiffany's in Walnut Creek this week, railing against economic injustice at the top of her lungs and drawing approving honks from passing cars with her sign, "Heal America, Tax Wall Street." For two sunny midday hours, the crowd did its best to "occupy" the busiest intersection in town, Mount Diablo Boulevard and North Main Street, singing "This Land Is Your Land" and denouncing corporate greed and the ultrarich 1 percent. [...] And there is, unbeknownst to many, a lot of occupying being done beyond big city borders. At least 30...

The assumption? Young adults are moving away from the region in large numbers due to the high cost of living, particularly housing prices. So, the story goes, the suburban pattern must be broken, and small, high density housing units must replace detached, single-family homes as the dominant urban form if young adults are to be retained.

"The suburban dream house is the idealization of every immigrant's Dream -- the vassal's dream of his own castle," wrote Italian-born immigrant Edgardo Contini. "Europeans who come here are delighted by our suburbs. Not to live in an apartment! It is a universal aspiration to own your own home." Today, those aspirations have become extremely difficult for vast numbers of young people and newcomers to fulfill.

For well over a decade urban boosters have heralded the shift among young Americans from suburban living and toward dense cities. As one Wall Street Journal report suggests, young people will abandon their parents’ McMansions for urban settings, bringing about the high-density city revival so fervently prayed for by urban developers, architects and planners. Some demographers claim that “white flight” from the city is declining, replaced by a “bright flight” to the urban core from the suburbs. “Suburbs lose young whites to cities,” crowed one Associated Press headline last year. Yet evidence from the last Census show the opposite: a...

For Kearsley Higgins, raising a baby in San Francisco was idyllic. She and her husband owned a small two-bedroom house in the Castro, she found plenty of activities for her daughter, Maya, and made friends through an 11-member mothers' group. Now as the mother of an almost 4-year-old, with a baby boy due in September, Higgins has left. A year ago, she and her husband, a digital artist, bought a four-bedroom home with a large backyard in San Rafael. Maya easily got into a popular preschool and will be enrolled in a good public elementary school when the time comes....

Census: More Blacks in South Moving to Suburbs, GOP Regions to Become DemocraticBy Paul Shepard on Mar 18th 2011 10:50AM Politically speaking, America's Republican stronghold is the deep South, where vast suburbs surrounding cities like Atlanta, Dallas, Richmond and Charlotte are decidedly white and often politically conservative. But population trends -- revealed in the last U.S. census -- show blacks and Latinos moving in to southern suburbs in high numbers, which threaten the notion of Republicans enjoying a safe harbor in southern states for much longer. Census estimates show a 58 percent increase in the number of blacks who moved...

Metropolitan area results are beginning to trickle in from the 2010 census. They reveal that, at least for the major metropolitan areas so far, there is little evidence to support the often repeated claim by think tanks and the media that people are moving from suburbs to the historical core municipalities. This was effectively brought to light in a detailed analysis of Chicago metropolitan area

Green River Killer Gary Ridgway is facing his 49th murder charge for the death of a woman whose skull was found by teenagers in a ravine, 28 years after she went missing. Ridgway, 61, is already serving 48 consecutive life sentences after being jailed in 2003 for a strangling spree which terrorised Seattle and its northern suburbs in the early 1980s. He once said he killed so many women he could not keep track of them all. He had previously confessed to killing Rebecca 'Becky' Marrero, a 20-year-old mother and prostitute last seen when she left a motel in 1982.

WASHINGTON — The American suburb is no longer a refuge from poverty in cities. A pair of analyses by the nonprofit Brookings Institution paints a bleak economic picture for the 100 largest metropolitan areas over the past decade and in coming years, and finds that suburbs now are home to one-third of the nation's poor, and rising. The study of census data finds that since 2000, the number of poor people in the suburbs jumped by 37.4 percent to 13.7 million. The growth rate of suburban poverty is more than double that of cities and higher than the national rate...

-- In this comfortable white-collar suburb southeast of Denver, the struggling economy is like a storm cloud on the horizon: menacing but still distant. A few miles away, in blue-collar Littleton, the downturn is more like a gale at the door. Yet both places share a volatile anxiety over the nation's direction that looms over the November election. On July 4, 2008, I visited these two communities and found them starkly divided over the presidential race. White working-class voters in Littleton expressed doubts about Barack Obama's priorities, experience, and even loyalty, while Centennial's college-educated professionals were enthusiastic about his candidacy.