What Good Can Come from Minneapolis?

Sure we've fretted about wanton, poorly timed lobbyist parties and the targeted attacks on community service by the Republicans, but if a liberal looks hard enough a few otherwise eclipsed positives occurred at the Convention last week.

The American Prospect turns over a stone and finds "the conservative case for urbanism":

Tom Darden, a developer of urban and close-in suburban properties, said Wednesday, "I'm a Republican and have been my whole life. I consider myself a very conservative person. But it never made sense to me why we would tax ordinary people in order to subsidize this form of development, sprawl." Darden told the story of a road-paving project approved by North Carolina when he served on the state's transportation board. A dirt road that handled just five trips per day was paved at taxpayer expense, with money that could have gone toward mass transit benefiting millions of people.

"Those were driveways, in my view, not roads," Darden said.

The GOP necktie party wasn't all just faked patriotism and vitriol. There was some progress toward bipartisanship made.