Why do supposedly serious people embrace such ideas?

These folks (and this organization appears to be Hillary's baby) clearly have an agenda of their own, but the criticism of Florida is not without some merit, even if they have oversimplified his thesis.

Blarg. This article is pure political garbage from start to finish. The reason that he can't understand why supposedly serious people would embrace "such ideas" is because they don't. He is buring a straw man. The path to building one of Florida's cool havens isn't by attracting tolerant people as a starting point. You do it by building intellectual property and employment laws that prevent incumbent companies from squashing startups, cultivating local universities and allowing work done there to flow into the economy, promoting local angel and venture capital investor groups, making it easy for people to form businesses, and creating a community thats attractive in terms of providing a safe, secure urban environment with decent public services. However, if you do all of this and you still have the local police performing raids on gay bars you can assume that the kind of people you are interested in attracting to your city aren't going to want to live there.

People aren't flowing out of places like San Francisco because they don't like San Franciso and they think Des Moines is where the economic future lies. They are moving because they don't have a choice because the tech economy contracted. Taking the fact that the "dot com" economy contracted as a general indictment of an innovation driven economy, as it appears Congress did with their idiotic options expensing change, is the fast path to irrelevancy, a.k.a throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

The purpose of this article is to reach out to conservative, red state voters by showing that good "centrist" democrats don't like gay people either, and think young, urban, tolerant people are silly and irrelevant. Des Moines is where its at, baby. The swipe at teachers unions is particularly entertaining. Are we supposed to beleive that these people are now also economic conservatives?

This is why I don't support Hillary Clinton or Joe Liberman. They pander to the fucking authoritarian people in this country. Moderate Republicans are greatly preferable in that they don't have to seek out some scape goat to punish in order to demonstrate their social conservativeness.

Too Much Froth