THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER

This site is no longer being updated. As mentioned below, I am now spending my time contributing to the Center for Cooperative Research. Until something changes, this site is maintained on a strictly archival basis, with no new entries planned for the near future. Please read the rest of this page with this in mind.

The purpose of this site is to provide a compendium of information about the radical right's century-long attempt to replace American democracy with some form of oligarchical tyranny. This is not a conspiracy theory site -- I don't believe that there's been some orchestrated, hundred-year scheme generated by the Illuminati or the Bilderbergers or the Girl Scouts or whoever to Take! Over! The! World! However, it is my contention that the radical right in this country -- not Republicans in general, but the extremist fringe, as assisted by various conservatives (and sometimes "liberals" and moderates as well) -- has a visceral hatred of true democracy and wants to install some form of despotism -- whether it be corporate-based or some form of religious theocracy. Label it as you will. The information in this site is selected to give factual weight to this contention.

This site is organized in the form of a timeline, from the Spanish-American War of 1897 to the present day. It is searchable by using the Google search engine for this site, available on every page. The individual items on each page have "tags" which identify the subject of each item, and these tags can be searched. More information about these tags can be found on the Site Map page of this site. As of yet, these tags have not been attached to every single item. That process continues. Visitors may begin reading straight through, year by year and month by month, they may search the site for specific information, or they can just poke around as the mood takes them. The idea is to make the site and its information as accessible and easily used as possible.

The earlier information is organized by year, sometimes by a large expanse of years, for example the single set of pages that spans from 1897 through 1960. As the site moves closer to the present, the pages are broken down by months. Those month pages are broken down into individual weeks, in the interest of keeping the size of the individual page smaller. This, too, is an ongoing and incomplete process.

Visiting one of the "entry" pages gives you a submenu for each page: for example, visiting the March 2007 page gives you a menu of four pages, for Week One, Week Two, and so forth. Visiting the 1897 page, for example, gives you a submenu of individual years. The driving rationale behind these subdivisions is twofold: to keep individual pages relatively small, and to keep the information organized with some sense of chronology.

There are inherent problems with a site of this breadth, and the ever-increasing amount of content it contains. Many people have suggested that instead of relying on static HTML pages, I shift this site to a database-driven system, using a content management system such as Drupal or something similar. It is a good idea, and in the future I may do just that. But my resources are strictly limited, financially, time-wise, and in the computing and design skills I would need.

I have no connections to any organization or group. This is a one-man project, done as a hobby; one day I hope to transform it into a book or two. I welcome any assistance I can get -- for ways to help, see the Call for Assistance page. (See below for credits to those who have extended a tremendous amount of assistance in redesigning this site.) If there is any way I can make this site more useful for you, or if you have any comments or critiques, you can drop me an e-mail at purplesage23 @ yahoo.com (e-mail broken apart to foil the spammers).

Because of circumstances beyond my control, mostly involving sometimes-70 hour work weeks, this site has a huge gap from September 2004 through September 2006, and is rarely up-to-date (as I write this, in mid-May 2007, the site is mired in late March 2007).

Hopefully the events and opinion documented in this site will provide, not so much a call to arms, but the information necessary to develop and strengthen the opinions and understanding of the readers and their friends, family members, and colleagues. The idea of this site is to provide the information needed to prove that the conservative movement that has held sway over this country since the 19th century (and long before, if truth be told) is not only morally and ethically reprehensible, but dangerous to American ideals, to civil liberties, to the fundamental tenets of democracy, and even to the survival of millions -- perhaps billions -- of citizens in America and around the world.

If you're not sure why things are so bad in this country, or why this particular crop of conservatives pose such a threat to everything we as Americans hold dear, read on. Start with today and work your way backwards. Start with 1897 -- the first year covered in this site, though certainly not the first year of American radical conservatism -- and work forward. Or use the Google Search function to find instances of particular interest to you -- a name, a date, an event, a piece of legislation, a concept. If you're absolutely confused, try some of the more general, topically-indexed material from the They Said It page. However the site works best for you is how you should use it. (Note to conservatives: I know you're not all bad, and that many of you are fine, upstanding Americans. I'm married to a conservative; she's very proud of who she is, and I'm very proud of her. though she and I don't always agree. We're talking about the radical fringe, the extreme rightists, who should no more be in power than the extreme leftists.)

Thanks for using my site.

Note on Site Design Coding: Until early May 2007, this site was written and designed largely with the use of antiquated HTML tables, with only limited CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) used for some text formatting. That has changed. The site has moved to a tableless, CSS-driven design, with far fewer graphics and few, if any, HTML tables. The site's pages now load much faster and more accurately, and cost the user fewer computer resources. I have done my best, considering my limited HTML/CSS skill set, to pull this off with as little change as possible in the appearance of the site -- almost all the changes are "under the hood," so to speak. Now that this site in in archive status, it may seem to have been a waste of time to spend months recoding and updating the framework of this site, but I don't see it that way at all -- I learned a tremendous amount in the process, and any future sites I design will be the better for it.

I owe a large debt of gratitude to the gurus of the CSS and JavaScript forums at Sitepoint, a fabulous Web design resource, as well as a number of CSS sites throughout the Web. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to the ever-gracious and ever-helpful Dan Schulz. The tableless structure itself is from code originally written by Dynamic Drive. The basis of the small CSS-based navigational buttons on the various pages comes from code originally written by Dynamic Site Solutions, and tweaked by some helpful folks at SitePoint. The elegant JavaScript for equalizing the two vertical columns on the pages that need it (i.e. the home page, and this one) also comes from Dynamic Drive. A List Apart is another priceless CSS and HTML layout reference source that I have found very helpful. And Listamatic provided the venerable code that I modified for the navigation lists on the various entry pages. The lovely Javascript code used to collapse and reveal the text blocks on the home page comes from Online Tools. The CSS for aiding in printing the pages comes from Kenji Ross and Eric Meyer

Web design gurus, I know the code isn't perfectly valid. And I've made a few choices (such as the scrollbar CSS for IE users) knowing they are not strictly valid. You do what you can.

The new tableless design has not been tested on Mac Safari, Mac IE, or any of the Linux browsers such as Konqueror. If anyone has any input on how these pages appear in those browsers -- or on the little ittlies such as your Blackberry or PDA -- let me know. I am also quite sure the site doesn't look too hot in old browsers -- perhaps you folks should consider updating? (I have become painfully aware, even more so than I was before, of the horrendous limitations and flaws in Microsoft's Internet Explorer. I would strongly suggest you IE users out there try Mozilla Firefox or Opera's browsers.) And if you're using IE 5x or, heaven forbid, Netscape 4x in any platform -- Windows, Mac, Linux -- I suggest upgrading to something more modern. You're behind the curve, and I know that a lot of sites besides mine must look odd in your browser. Again, let me know how I can make this site more useful to you.

The more things change, the more they...change. The host of this site, Marc Perkel, has generously set up a Wordpress-based blog for me. Unfortunately, since I have transferred my efforts to the Center for Cooperative Research site, this blog is now inactive.