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Father’s Day Message

Michael Reagan — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 12:19:37 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

It’s no news to anyone that I disagree strongly with President Obama on just about any issue or policy position you can name.

But I’m not the least bit uncomfortable saying I admire something about the president that transcends politics and makes him a role model for every man in America.

President Obama is a good father.

Nate Beeler / Columbus Dispatch (click to view more cartoons by Beeler)

That’s no small thing in 2013 America. And not too long ago in Dallas I told the president exactly that.

The event was a small “meet-and-greet” coffee for first family members held before the dedication of the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum.

My wife, daughter and I represented the Reagan family at the private event, which included the Johnson daughters, Trish Nixon, Susan Ford, along with presidents Obama, Bush 41 and 43, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.

“I disagree with your policies,” I said, after saying hello and shaking the president’s hand. “But I applaud you for being a good father and a good husband. The world needs more of those.”

President Obama, a father of two daughters who says he still goes on “dates” with his wife, said he appreciated my praise.

I don’t know if the first father is as familiar as I am with the statistics of fatherlessness, but America needs all the good dads it can get.

Fathers are the super glue that keeps families strong and healthy in many important ways. But according to childcare experts and the U.S. Census, about 24 million kids in our country go to bed each night without a father in the house.

You don’t have to be a social scientist from Princeton to know that the absence of a father can do serious damage to a child and, ultimately, society. But the numbers are grim — and they cut across race and class.

Over the years various studies have found that kids in fatherless homes are more likely to be poor and more at risk for drug abuse and suicide, plus more likely to get in trouble with the law.

Fatherless kids are also more likely to be sick or have mental health problems than kids growing up in two-parent households, and less likely to do well in school, graduate from high school and attend college.

Some of the hard numbers from those studies are not pretty: 70 percent of juveniles held in detention facilities come from fatherless homes. So do about 63 percent of teen suicides and 71 percent of high school dropouts.

Boys who grow up in homes without fathers do much worse in school and are twice as likely to end up in jail as those who come from traditional two-parent families — no matter what their race, family incomes or parents’ educations are.

Father’s Day is Sunday. Good fathers like President Obama will get the props and the love they deserve from their families and the rest of society.

But Father’s Day is also a good time to think about how you can become a better father to your children and a better husband to your wife.

And if you don’t have kids of your own, you can celebrate Father’s Day in another important way.

America has more than 400,000 of its children in foster care. Many of those kids are eligible for adoption and need a good father. You can celebrate Sunday by deciding to adopt one of those foster-care kids — and become someone’s father on Father’s Day. A good place to start is the website of Childhelp.org, a key source for information on foster care and child-abuse prevention.

Happy Father’s Day!

Copyright ©2013 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “The New Reagan Revolution” (St. Martin’s Press). He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to Reagan@caglecartoons.com. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Cari Dawson Bartley at cari@cagle.com.

Reform the Tax Code

Michael Reagan — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 13:31:30 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

Jay Leno told his studio audience the other night that President Obama should forget his plans to close the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay and instead close the IRS.

The applause was instantaneous and the laughs were loud and genuine.

Rick McKee / Augusta Chronicle (click to view more cartoons by McKee)

Most ordinary Americans would have whooped and hollered in favor of Leno’s idea long before they learned the IRS has been caught targeting conservative political groups and wasting millions on moronic employee-training conferences.

But the IRS is no joking matter.

The average working American — poor or rich or in-between — hates and fears the IRS for good reason.

Able to seize your bank account or house without a court order, able to shut down your business overnight, the IRS is the closest thing to the Gestapo America has ever had.

But it’s not the current IRS scandals that are the real problem. It’s not the hated tax-collecting bureaucracy itself. It’s not even whether the Obama regime used the dangerous powers of the IRS as a political weapon.

The real problem — the long-term problem and the one Republicans have to find the courage to fix — is the horrible income tax system the IRS is hired to enforce.

The federal income tax code deserves the death penalty for a lot good reasons. It’s unfair, overly complex, horribly politicized, harmful to individuals and the economy, helpful to the forces of Big Government and impossible to understand without a CPA.

It’s also a costly waste of money and time. Just complying with our unnecessarily (but deliberately) complicated federal tax system costs Americans about $430 billion a year, according to economist Arthur Laffer.

The IRS scandals are a golden opportunity for conservatives and Republicans to direct the country’s attention toward the ultimate and long-overdue goal — abolishing the IRS as we know it and drastically reforming our tax code.

We need a strong leader — now — who will stand up and lead the country down the road to radical tax reform.

Maybe it’s going to be Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. Earlier this week he called for abolishing the IRS after instituting a simple flat tax that could be filled out on a postcard. Maybe it’ll be another rookie in Washington, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky.

The biggest problem we have is that our side — the tax-reform side — has no leader and no clear, unified message.

Should we conservatives go for a Flat Tax or a Fair Tax?

A low, simple, flat-tax percentage for all income earners, minus deductions for home mortgages and charitable deductions? Or a national sales tax of about 23 percent that would replace both the federal income tax and the payroll tax?

If my father Ronald Reagan were around today, I know what he’d do.

He’d do exactly what I’d do — get the flat-taxers and the fair-taxers together in a room and have them hash out a single tax reform program to sell to the American people.

So, sure, let’s bring the Obama Gang and its IRS lackeys to justice for their abuses.

But what we need most right now is for someone — Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Donald Trump, even Jay Leno — to convene a national tax convention that would unite our side and lead the fight for a better tax code.

Republicans can’t afford to be split on the important issue of income tax reform or miss this chance to focus on the crimes of the IRS.

The Flat Tax and the Fair Tax each have pluses and minuses that need to be debated. But in the end it really doesn’t matter which idea triumphs.

America and all Americans would be better off with either one. Either would eliminate the progressive tax system and make federal taxes simpler, fairer, smarter and apolitical. And, best of all, either one would kill the IRS as we know it — forever.

Underreporting in Obamaland

Michael Reagan — Thu, 30 May 2013 11:41:25 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

Scandal after Obama scandal.

Outrage upon Obama outrage.

Remember the Benghazi cover-up story? Forget it.

It’s been thrown out like last week’s garbage and is now buried deep in the mainstream media’s landfill with previous underreported Obama scandals such as Solyndra and Fast and Furious.

Eric Allie / Cagle Cartoons (click to view more cartoons by Allie)

The Big Media have fresh Obama outrages to underreport or pooh-pooh at the IRS and the Department of Justice, where Obama apparatchiks harassed and intimidated conservative political groups or troublesome Fox News reporters.

Two weeks ago we complained that the liberals running mainstream journalism, keeping with tradition, have been less than eager to look closely at Obama’s dirty laundry. Little has changed.

Attorney General Eric Holder’s days may be numbered. He already may be cleaning out his desk and working up a resignation speech about how he’s just decided he’d like to spend more time with his family.

But no matter how much he abused his power, or how many times he changes his stories about what he knew about what the DOJ did to Fox News reporter James Rosen and when he knew it, Holder will get every possible benefit of the doubt from MSM reporters and pundits.

Eric’s such a great guy, after all. Just like the president.

Can you imagine what would have happened if my father’s attorney general, Ed Meese, had done what Holder admits he did?

Imagine if Meese had personally signed off on an affidavit okaying the DOJ to bug Sam Donaldson’s phones over at ABC.

The Democrats would have been screaming for my father’s impeachment and Meese would have been driven out of Washington by the nonstop assault of the liberal New York-D.C. media.

But in Obamaland, even using the federal government’s two most-powerful agencies to harass your political enemies apparently is OK with the MSM — as long as the victims are conservatives.

The journalists of the Big Media are allied almost entirely with the left and President Obama. That can’t be changed, only balanced by places like Fox and talk radio.

But CBS, NBC, CNN and the rest of the mainstream crew need to stop thinking in terms of left and right, and do their jobs better. They need to start reporting what’s good for the country, not what’s good for their favorite president.

Five years into the reign of Barack Obama, we have people in the USA who are deathly afraid of what their government will do to them if they join the wrong political group or ask the wrong question.

Thanks in large part to the failings and biases of Big Media, few Americans today actually know what the IRS has been doing to their fellow citizens since 2010. Fewer Americans care — especially those who voted Obama in 2012.

More people are concerned with who’s gay and not gay in the sports world than about winning America’s war against Islamist terrorists, citizens being harassed by the IRS, or the DOJ leaning on reporters who don’t report what Washington wants them to report.

There’s a civil war being fought between the left and the right in Washington — and in the news media — that will affect every American.

I don’t know what it’ll take to get millions of Americans to rise up and scream, “We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it from Obama and his gang anymore.”

But I do know the current administration has been turning America into either a banana republic or a born-again Soviet Union. And the mainstream media have been letting him get away with it for too long.

Weathering the Politicians

Michael Reagan — Thu, 23 May 2013 07:15:42 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

Yesterday I read an interesting article in Newsweek about the connection between tornadoes and climate change.

Newsweek’s story explained how top climate scientists were concerned about several ominous and fundamental changes occurring in Earth’s weather patterns.

David Fitzsimmons / Arizona Daily Star (click to view more cartoons by Fitzsimmons)

Evidence that Earth’s climate was changing in the wrong direction, the article said, included a shorter growing season in England, higher average temperatures at the equator and an increase in tornadoes like the monster than killed at least 24 people in Tornado Alley this week.

“Last April,” wrote Newsweek, “in the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused half a billion dollars’ worth of damage in thirteen U.S. states.”

Newsweek’s article went on to say scientists weren’t sure what was causing the global climate to change and could not predict how it would affect specific local weather conditions.

But the news magazine said top weather scientists were certain of one thing: They were “almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural output for the rest of the century” and result in “a major climatic change that would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale.”

Oh, I forgot to mention a few important facts.

The date on that Newsweek article was April 28, 1975. The headline was “The Cooling World.” And the climate change scientists were almost unanimously worried about was a global cooling trend.

Global cooling, the Big Climate Scare of the 1970s, wasn’t blamed on humans, and weather disasters like Hurricane Sandy and this week’s tragedy in Oklahoma were not politicized by climate illiterates like Babs “The Weather Girl” Boxer and her fellow U.S. Senator from Rhode Island, Sheldon Whitehouse.

Both Boxer and Whitehouse jumped on the Oklahoma City tornado tragedy this week to exploit it for political gain.

While they were still pulling survivors out of the wreckage, Whitehouse gave an idiotic speech on Monday linking “cyclones” and other extreme weather events to climate change.

Then he beat up Republicans for not believing the myth he and his political soul-bothers believe — that climate change is catastrophic, man-made and only fixable by great climatologists like Al Gore and wise Washington politicians.

Whitehouse later apologized, saying he wrote the speech before he knew about the tornadoes striking Oklahoma. But his climatic ignorance and his crass, opportunistic politics were exposed.

Meanwhile, Sen. Boxer had no excuse. She took a break from her gun control crusade to spend time on her other crusade — climate control.

On Monday she expressed her condolences to the tornado victims, then twisted another natural tragedy into a political issue. She blathered that the tornado was “proof” of climate change.

Sorry, Ma’am, but tornados have been around for a long time. That’s why we call it Tornado Alley, not “Global Warming Alley.” In Florida and the Carolinas we have Hurricane Alley. I live in Earthquake Alley.

Next time a natural disaster strikes, I have some advice for all the climate-control freaks in Washington.

Please shut up. Nothing you say or do will change anything. Oklahoma is not going to get safer if Earth gets cooler.

And Boxer, Whitehouse and their ilk are not going to make tornadoes disappear like Newsweek did.

Believe it not, senators, climate is not something that Washington can control.

It’s ultimately affected — and controlled — by Almighty Nature, not humans and their carbon burning. And certainly not by agenda-driven politicians.

Imagine

Michael Reagan — Thu, 16 May 2013 07:20:41 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

Remember the 1996 movie, “A Time to Kill”?

An adaptation of John Grisham’s 1989 legal thriller, it stars Matthew McConaughey as a small-town lawyer in Mississippi who defends a black man who killed the two white racists who had raped his 10-year-old daughter.

Rick McKee / Augusta Chronicle (click to view more cartoons by McKee)

In his closing arguments McConaughey asks the jury to close their eyes and listen to the painful details of a story about the brutal rape of an innocent little girl.

Then he ends his gripping story with a powerful request to the jury — “Now imagine she’s white.”

I was reminded of that powerful scene in “A Time to Kill” as I watched the raggedy parade of scandals coming out of Obama’s Washington last week.

The tragedy in Benghazi and subsequent spinning and covering up. The IRS harassment and abuse of conservative political groups prior to the 2012 election. The Justice Department’s seizure of Associated Press reporters’ phone records.

Now, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, close your eyes and think about the details of these crimes against the people by the Obama administration — and then imagine the president is George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan. `

Do you think the Benghazi, IRS and AP stories might have been covered any differently if the president’s name didn’t start with “O” and his party didn’t start with “D”?

Of course they would have.

Do you think the America people would know a little more about Benghazi today if last fall editors at The Washington Post, The New York Times or “60 Minutes” had issued orders to dig into what really happened there and why Ambassador Stevens was targeted for assassination?

I don’t know all the facts and answers about Benghazi or the IRS. But lots of folks in the Obama government do, and digging them up is supposed to be the job of an honest news media — some members of which are being shamed into finally doing their jobs.

It’s pretty amazing. Thanks to the IRS’ dirty tricks, even liberals are turning on St. Barack.

He now is being compared to Nixon, the only president every American is allowed to hate. Liberal pundits are dusting off the old “W” word — Watergate — and recycling forgotten terms like “enemies list.”

Of course the golfer in chief says he’s shocked — shocked, he tells us — to learn IRS bureaucrats were doing dirty work on his behalf.

Of course the president knew nothing about the IRS’ crimes until last week. It was not his fault. It was those damn underlings again. He can’t help it if they love him so much they break the law.

And when the Justice Department went fishing at the AP last year for information about reporters’ phone calls, it was new news to the Prez. “I must have been golfing with Tiger that weekend,” I think I heard him say, “but I’ll get to the bottom of it and fire a few secretaries.”

Seriously.

Shouldn’t the media be asking if Obama has an enemies list? Or are enemies lists things that are only kept by Republicans and conservatives?

These major scandals rising out of the Obama administration — each pre-dating the 2012 election — are only now starting to attract the mainstream media attention they deserve.

The New York-DC media ignored Benghazi or pooh-poohed its importance until Obama was safely re-elected.

Now it’s beginning to sound like we should have known about those partisan crimes at the IRS last year, too — and we would have if Big Liberal Media had been acting like watchdogs instead of Obama lapdogs.

It’s great to see the shine finally coming off President Obama’s phony halo. But it’s not the result of the “Second Term Curse,” as some of his apologists would like us to believe.

And it’s not because the mainstream media have finally stepped up and done their jobs as fair and honest journalists. It’s simply the result of the president’s character and the character of his sleazy regime.

Learn from History

Michael Reagan — Thu, 09 May 2013 07:20:54 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

History is one of our greatest teachers.

It’s just too bad so many of our young people think history started with the death of Princess Di or the birth of the iPhone.

I was painfully reminded of America’s historical illiteracy and the failure of our educational system last week while golfing with a few strangers in Burbank, Calif.

John Darkow / Columbia Daily Tribune (click to view more cartoons by Darkow)

One of the young men in my foursome was about 30 and ran a restaurant in Los Angeles.

When I told him in passing that I was going to be flying to Normandy, France, the next morning to raise a flag at an American cemetery there, his awful education betrayed him.

“Why would there be an American cemetery at Normandy?” he asked.

I thought he was kidding me, but he wasn’t.

“Why?” I asked. “Did you ever see ‘Saving Private Ryan’?”

“No.”

“Did you ever see ‘The Longest Day’?”

“No.”

“Do you remember the Second World War?”

“I knew there was a war.”

“Do you know anything about D-Day?”

He looked at me like, “Huh?”

I was shocked — and blunt.

“You don’t know why there’d be an American cemetery at Normandy? You’re proof the education system of this country sucks.”

After my golf outing, I flew to Normandy for the weekend. I had the honor of raising the flag over the American cemetery at Normandy on Sunday and visiting the small town of Sainte-Mere-Eglise, which became the first French town liberated from the Germans in World War II.

U.S. airborne troops captured the tiny town before dawn on June 6, 1944, to prevent German troops from using roads to attack Americans landing at Utah and Omaha beaches.

(For those who know their World War II history only from the movies, the airdrop at Sainte-Mere-Eglise is shown in “The Longest Day” and features Red Buttons as paratrooper John Steele, who played dead after his parachute got hung up on the church steeple.)

It was great to visit little Sainte-Mere-Eglise and its 1,600 people. I met some of the few remaining 90-something soldiers who fought at Normandy and I talked to elderly French people who remember when hundreds of brave young Americans dropped from the sky to liberate their town.

But I was disappointed to learn that our government seems to have forgotten about marking the anniversary of D-Day.

In fact, the Obama administration is doing so little this year that the French government is pulling out of the annual event and the American honor guard is being forced to pay its own airfare to Normandy.

As for the 2014 anniversary, the last major 10-year celebration that will include surviving veterans of D-Day, it also is being neglected by the Obama administration.

President Clinton nominated someone to be in charge of the 1994 anniversary two years in advance. But as of this date, no one has been nominated to be in charge of the 70th anniversary of D-Day in 2014.

I’m sure President Obama will eventually find time between his never-ending campaigning and his serial golf outings to choose someone to oversee the 2014 D-Day anniversary events in Normandy.

But it was embarrassing for me to go the Airborne Museum in Sainte-Mere-Eglise and be asked why “my government” doesn’t care about the D-Day anniversaries.

The people of Sainte-Mere-Eglise love Americans because America saved them. They will never forget D-Day. They still have a dummy of an American paratrooper hanging from their church steeple.

What happened at D-Day wasn’t just a movie. It was history.

If we don’t talk about it, if we don’t teach it, if we don’t honor its anniversary, if we don’t tell guys like my young golf buddy why what happened there was so important, it might as well have never happened.

Out of the Closet and into Identity Politics

Michael Reagan — Thu, 02 May 2013 11:29:00 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

I’ve never sought the spotlight.

Though I’m coming out to the world, I intend to guard my privacy.

Bill Day / Cagle Cartoons (click to view more cartoons by Day)

I’m making this blanket statement in part to keep rumors and misunderstandings at bay.

I’m not just a white, Catholic Republican. I’m not just a Reagan conservative. I’m a heterosexual.

Like Jason Collins of the Washington Wizards, I just want everyone in America to know my sexual orientation.

And like Collins — the veteran NBA center who became the first major male professional athlete to announce he was gay and got himself plastered on the cover of Sports Illustrated — I just want to protect my privacy.

I won’t go into any more specifics about my personal life or answer any questions at this press conference.

I’ll only say that I’m happily married and that my partner is not a man. Let’s leave it at that, please, because I deserve my privacy.

With all due apologies to Jason Collins, or whoever actually wrote the words I borrowed from his Sports Illustrated cover story, this whole gay-sports thing is nuts and about to get nuttier.

Collins made headline news by coming out as the first gay NBA player. As I write this, the country’s top sports “journalists” are working overtime to break a story on the first openly gay NFL player.

Then will come the National Hockey League. Then Major League Baseball. Then Major League Paintball…

Not long ago — OK, 50 years ago — Sports Illustrated put athletes on its covers because they did things only Mickey Mantle, Jimmy Brown, Bobby Orr or Wilt Chamberlain could do on the playing field, not in the sack.

Now Jason Collins’s sexual affiliation is the biggest news in sports? Does anyone know, or care, how many points per game he scores or how many shots he blocks?

No. Being gay and his being willing to announce it to the entire sports world is what’s important now.

So let’s get this story straight: Collins is gay — or rather, a gay center. That’s wonderful. I couldn’t be happier for him. Maybe he’ll be able to get a role in a network sitcom when he retires.

So what’s the real issue here? It’s not about discrimination. Being gay is irrelevant. It didn’t hurt or help Collins on or off the court.

No bigoted coach ever said to him, “Jason, I don’t care how many rebounds or blocked shots you have. You’re gay. From now on we’re starting the heterosexual.”

I’m sure most of Collins’ family and teammates have known he was gay for years, but because they’re decent and good people who cared about his privacy, they kept the big sports “news” to themselves.

This isn’t about sports at all. It’s partly a case of identity politics.

That’s why Obama was in such a rush to congratulate Collins on his courage to come out and say he was a proud member of the Democrat Party’s most loyal sex-based constituency.

Collins’ coming out is also the latest example of the overhyphenization of America. We’re no longer male- or female- or black- or white- or Latino- Americans.

Now we’re also gay or straight.

“I’m not a center, I’m a gay-center.”

“I’m not a gay switch-hitting centerfielder, I’m a bisexual-switch-hitting centerfielder.”

Who will be the first openly gay NFL quarterback or long snapper?

The first openly gay left-handed Latino relief pitcher? The first openly gay goalie? The first openly gay goalie from a country other than Canada?

I don’t care. Gays have been playing pro sports forever. Big deal. No one asked and no one told.

Sports should be about winning and teamwork and accomplishment. Owners, coaches and fans don’t care what color their star players’ skin is, what their ethnicities are or who they sleep with — and neither should the rest of us.

Wake me up when this embarrassing gay-pride parade is over, please.

Lessons Learned in Boston

Michael Reagan — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 11:10:26 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

The beautiful Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Center for Public Affairs in Simi Valley, Calif., was the last place I expected to be reminded of the violence that paralyzed the city of Boston last week and turned it into a mini-Baghdad.

Rick McKee / Augusta Chronicle (click to view more cartoons by McKee)

But I was reading my father’s presidential dairies and there it was in his very first entry — the issue of terrorism and how to fight it.

On Jan. 26, 1981, on his first Monday on the job, Ronald Reagan wrote that he called the FBI, the CIA and other intelligence agencies into an Oval Office meeting to find better ways of sharing information with each other on terrorists.

I read my father’s entry Tuesday, the same day Sen. Lindsey Graham was being told in a hearing that the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI had not shared what they knew about dead Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

It’s too early to know the details of who knew what or when, or if the FBI or someone else fumbled the ball. So far it looks like what is to blame is a combination of bureaucracy and the complexities and legalities of compiling and monitoring terrorist watch lists.

But we’ve already learned the FBI interviewed Tamerlan in 2011 after being told by Russian intelligence officials that he had recently changed into a strong believer in radical Islam and was suspected of joining underground groups in Russia.

The FBI ultimately decided Tamerlan was not a terrorist threat and did not know he went to Russia. The DHS knew he went to Russia but apparently didn’t know the FBI had checked him out.

Haven’t we seen this tragic sitcom plot before?

Wasn’t the failure of the CIA and the FBI to share what they knew about the 9/11 terrorists one of the main reasons they were never caught?

To share. Wasn’t that the important kindergarten lesson our overlapping, turf-warring intelligence agencies were supposed to learn from 9/11?

We thought the intelligence-sharing problem was going to be fixed after 9/11. My father thought the same thing after that big meeting in his office. But nothing’s changed after 32 years.

Not that our intelligence agencies could have stopped the Boston Marathon bombers even if they had been sharing information the way they should.

To a large extent the Brothers Tsarnaev were under our anti-terrorist radar screens. We only knew what we knew about them beforehand because the Russians tipped us off.

It’s a pretty sad state of affairs when we have to rely on the Russians for intelligence about terrorists in our own backyards. Who’ll try to help us next time, the North Koreans?

There will be a next time. Everyone knows Boston was not a one-off. Other terror cells we don’t know anything about yet are living among us and they’re radicalized and trained to hurt us — and they will. America has millions of soft targets.

At least the state and local police in Boston did a great job, finding and capturing the bombers in less than four days.

But it was humiliating to watch a proud city be shut down and terrorized for more 24 hours, its people cowering and “sheltering in place” because of two punks with pistols and a couple of homemade pipe bombs.

Paul Revere and his fellow patriots would have been ashamed to see so many Americans afraid to even go outdoors.

It’s doubtful, but maybe some of the die-hard liberals of Boston — and the rest of the country — learned a lesson from what played out so dramatically on their streets and our TVs.

Two weeks ago everyone on TV was talking or crying about the need for tougher gun control because of what happened at Newtown. Now, after Boston, everyone is talking about how we all need a gun at home to protect ourselves.

Gosnell’s Clinic of Horrors

Michael Reagan — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 07:16:21 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

Did you catch The Rev. Jesse Jackson the other night on CNN demanding a Senate hearing into why regulators never cracked down on that gruesome abortion clinic in Philadelphia?

John Cole / Scranton Times-Tribune (click to view more cartoons by Cole)

Did you hear Al Sharpton on MSNBC saying that if Dr. Gosnell had been killing white babies in Bryn Mawr, his women’s clinic would have been shut down 30 years ago?

Did you see the tears in Oprah’s eyes when she read that passage from the grand jury report describing Gosnell’s abortion mill as “a baby charnel house” that “regularly and illegally delivered live, viable, babies in the third trimester of pregnancy — and then murdered these newborns by severing their spinal cords with scissors”?

Didn’t think so.

Where are America’s black leaders? Where are the president and the first lady?

From the pulpits to the Oval Office, black leaders have been shamefully silent on the case of Kermit Gosnell, the so-called doctor who made his fortune killing babies and endangering the health of women — mostly black babies and black women.

Gosnell is now on trial in Philadelphia, charged with the deaths of one woman and seven babies that were older than 24 weeks and had been born alive.

Of course, this modern Joseph is innocent until proven guilty. But the 280-page grand jury report about what went on at his clinic, available online at http://www.phila.gov/districtattorney/pdfs/grandjurywomensmedical.pdf, is a catalogue of horror and criminality.

Quoting many witnesses and former clinic employees, it details the filthy conditions at the clinic, the demeaning way non-white patients were treated, and the incompetent and ill-trained staff.

The grand jury report also shows that for decades several state agencies repeatedly failed to do their oversight — even after being informed by patients, doctors and attorneys that horrible things were going on at the clinic.

Local news outlets in Philadelphia also clearly failed to do their job. Like the pro-choice journalists who run newspapers and TV stations across the country, they apparently had zero interest in scrutinizing the day-to-day operations or conditions of an abortion clinic in their city.

Black leaders have been conspicuously tongue-tied on the Gosnell case, even though minority women were his prime victims and blacks account for a disproportionate percent of the country’s abortions.

But at least some national media giants have been shamed by pro-life politicians and honest pundits into finally giving Gosnell’s case the attention deserved by a story about dead babies, exploited women, racism and government failure.

What happened to those babies and women in Philadelphia is more than a wake-up call for the news media to cover abortion fairly and begin scrutinizing the operations of their local clinics.

Gosnell’s clinic of horrors — and other abortion factories that we’ve yet to hear about — is exactly what we in the pro-life movement have been warning about since the early seventies.

It’s where we always said the slippery slope of Roe v. Wade leads. We’re no longer aborting babies. We’re murdering them after they’re born.

Remembering Margaret Thatcher

Michael Reagan — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 07:15:02 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

Margaret Thatcher, who served as prime minister of Britain from 1979 to 1990, is most famous for teaming up with my father Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II to peacefully end the Cold War and bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union.

But at home, the “Iron Lady’s” intellect, political will and love of freedom and capitalism also saved Britain from its long, slow death by socialism.

Cam Cardow / Ottawa Citizen (click to view more cartoons by Cardow)

Prime Minister Thatcher freed up Britain’s economy by deregulating business, privatizing government-owned industries and breaking the back of the powerful unions that were smothering her country to death.

Not that The New York Times can bring itself to give Lady Thatcher much credit for any of this in its coverage of her death from a stroke on Monday at age 87.

Paul Krugman, the pathetic Times’ in-house apologist for the serial failures of the Obama Economy, dug out some arcane data that he said raises doubts that Thatcher’s pro-capitalist policies actually did anything to turn around Britain’s economy.

Meanwhile, a so-called news article in the Times on Wednesday about the debate over Thatcher’s legacy in the British Parliament is the latest example of how the Paper of Record’s liberal bias is always at work.

Two Times writers — John F. Burns and Alan Cowell — said, “The Thatcher era is generally recalled as a time when a capitalist revolution crushed labor unions, decimated staid industries that had once formed the nation’s economic base, and inaugurated a period of robust economic growth that sanctified a generation’s acquisitiveness.”

No bias there, right?

I think Burns and Cowell spent more time describing what nasty things Thatcher’s left-wing critics in the Labor Party had to say about her than mentioning her triumphs.

But Lady Thatcher doesn’t need the support of The New York Times or Hollywood to make it into the history books. Her accomplishments on the world stage will speak for themselves forever.

I’ll never forget meeting Lady Thatcher several times in London and in the United States. But my greatest memory of her occurred in 2004 when, despite being very ill, she attended my father’s funeral at the Reagan Library.

The morning after the funeral, as I was eating at the hotel with my family, I greeted Lady Thatcher when she came in for breakfast.

“Oh, Michael,” she said in that great accent of hers. “Think of how much we could have accomplished if your father had been elected in 1976, not 1980.”

“Lady Thatcher,” I said with the greatest respect, “I think God chooses the time for many of the things that happen in the world. And 1976 wasn’t that time; 1980 in fact was.”

“Why would you say that?” she said.

“Simply because I look at 1976 and I say, ‘Where was Margaret Thatcher? Where was Pope John Paul II? Where was Lech Walesa and Helmut Kohl and Mikhail Gorbachev?’ In 1976 none of you were in positions of power to do anything.

“But 1980 was the right time,” I said to Lady Thatcher.

“You were prime minister. Pope John Paul was pope. And you had a man in Washington, D.C., who understood freedom. Because you were all in positions of power in 1980 you were all able to work for the betterment of the world.”

“Oh, Michael,” Lady Thatcher said, “I didn’t think of that. You’re right.”

Because Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, his legacy and the legacy of Margaret Thatcher will be tied together forever — thank God. And though the “Iron Lady” and my father have both passed away, their legends — and historic accomplishments — never will.

Provocative? Yes. Hateful? No.

Michael Reagan — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 07:20:27 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

Two weeks ago I wrote a column encouraging churches to take a moral stand and make their voices heard as the Supreme Court deliberates the constitutionality of California’s Proposition 8, which voters in my home state approved in 2008 to ban same-sex marriage.

Monte Wolverton / PoliticalCartoons.com (click to view more cartoons by Wolverton)

I pointed out that the fight over Proposition 8 is not just about the legality of gay marriage; it’s part of a larger effort by some factions to change the culture. In that context I wrote: “There is also a very slippery slope leading to other alternative relationships and the unconstitutionality of any law based on morality. Think about polygamy, bestiality, and perhaps even murder.”

Was that a provocative statement? Yes, but it was designed to provoke thought about worst-case scenarios and the value of morality in our society.

Did I mean to equate same-sex marriage with murder? No, I did not, and anyone who believes that is very mistaken. I believe those who tell me they favor gay marriage out of love, but I also believe they are engaging in behavior that is wrong in God’s eyes, and I believe this out of love for them.

Should I have made myself more clear, by rearranging the sentences and adding more detail? Probably, and I regret that some people misunderstood. The topics do have the common thread of morality, but one does not necessarily follow the other.

I should point out that my concern about the future of morality in the law is well founded. Justice Antonin Scalia, whom I admire for his no-nonsense Supreme Court opinions, expressed similar concerns writing for the dissent in Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 homosexual sodomy case. He noted that “state laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity” are sustainable only if validated by case law “based on moral choices.”

“Every single one of these laws is called into question by today’s ruling,” Scalia wrote.

Scalia, Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justice Clarence Thomas were on the losing side of the Lawrence opinion, but Scalia’s dissent found many logical deficiencies in the majority opinion, which found a protected liberty interest in private and consensual sexual behavior.

Scalia’s opinion goes on to discuss Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion in 1973. The discussion was in a different context, but the topic is appropriate here.

For those of us who believe that abortion is murder, we went far down the slippery slope 40 years ago when the Supreme Court nullified morality-based abortion legislation. Infanticide now happens every day under the guise of privacy rights.

Is it outlandish to suggest that other forms of murder might possibly become legal in the future? Assisted suicide is legal in Oregon, and euthanasia is legal in some foreign countries. Who knows what the future holds; the slope is very slippery indeed when society cuts its ties to morality.

Where do we go from here?

I am hopeful that the Supreme Court will find that Proposition 8 is constitutional after all. Even the majority in Lawrence stated that their decision “does not involve whether the government must give formal recognition to any relationship that homosexual persons seek to enter.”

In the meantime, we are having a great debate, and churches should add their voices.

Renew our Founding Principles

Michael Reagan — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 07:20:32 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

Billions of Christians around the world celebrated Easter last Sunday, but not our media.

Once again the holiest day of the Christian year slipped under their godless radar.

I saw Easter pop up in the news a only few times last weekend, but the stories had nothing to do with God or religion, or the importance to Christianity of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Angel Boligan / Cagle Cartoons (click to view more cartoons by Boligan)

The Easter “news” was Easter egg hunts. ABC and USA Today covered the 135th annual White House Easter Egg Roll like it was a nuclear arms treaty.

An Easter egg hunt in Seattle things turned bloody when two mothers got in a nasty fight after one pushed the other’s child. And the big Easter story out of Minnesota was that an egg hunt had to take place in the snow.

Meanwhile, on Easter Sunday morning, ABC’s “This Week” with George Stephanopoulos did its part to desecrate the holy day.

The show’s panel discussion on religion included an atheist who had complained three months ago that President Obama was wrong to speak of Jesus Christ at the memorial service for those killed in Newtown, Conn.

Marking Easter Day without mentioning its importance to Christians reminded me of something my father Ronald Reagan once said: “If we cease to be one nation under God, we’ll be a nation gone under.”

My father understood that the whole planet closely watches the actions of the United States. We’re seen by the rest of the world as a godly nation.

If we’re not leading the way, if we’re not serving as a good role model for the rest of the countries in the world, then who will? Russia? China?

If you don’t believe the world is watching us, here’s a little story about a man I met on the plains of Kenya.

I was staying at the Mara Safari Club when one of the Maasai warriors who worked there came up to me.

“Are you Ronald Reagan’s son?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“I’ve seen you on TV on Larry King,” he explained.

I looked around me at the empty savannah and thought, “How in the world did he see me on CNN here in the middle of Africa?”

“You’re the Christian,” the Maasai man said.

“Yes.”

“You have a brother, Ron.”

“Yes.”

“He’s an atheist, isn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve seen him too on Larry King.”

Then the Maasai man asked me if I talked to my brother, Ron.

“Not often.” I said.

“The next time you talk to him,” the Maasai said, “tell him that there’s a Maasai warrior that prays for him every single day in Africa.”

As a Christian, and someone who was not praying for my brother and sisters every day at that time, I suddenly felt about an inch tall. Because of that encounter I do pray for them now.

People wonder why the country is in the turmoil it is. Yet our godless media give us no moral principles to live by and nothing of eternal value to hang on to or reach for.

If you do strive for something spiritual or publicly express your faith in God and his power and love, the media are quick to ridicule you or bring in atheists for “balance.”

I don’t care what the media or the atheists think about God or our Founding Fathers. We’re a Christian nation. We were founded on godly principles. Read the Constitution.

We desperately need to get back to those founding principles, and not just on Easter Sunday.

Churches: Time to Fight!

Michael Reagan — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 07:25:42 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

You can’t win the fight if you don’t put on the gloves.

A punch-drunk, old heavyweight boxer knows that’s a truism, but not the churches of America.

Monte Wolverton / PoliticalCartoons.com (click to view more cartoons by Wolverton)

The Supreme Court heard arguments this week on the constitutionality of California’s Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage in the state by a 52 to 47 margin in 2008 but has since been declared unconstitutional by federal courts.

Fox TV, Rush Limbaugh and other talk-show pundits have weighed in, arguing the conservative — and moral — position that sanctifying gay marriage with the grace of the U.S. Constitution is not only wrong but a serious threat to the culture of this country.

But those media outlets often speak to those who are already in the choir. That leaves a lot of other Americans who aren’t hearing anyone preaching the conservative argument on gay marriage.

I don’t expect the GOP to provide any leadership. Republicans are too busy cat-fighting with each other and making sure their presidential choice will be whooped by Hillary Clinton in 2016.

And where in the heck are the churches on the issue of legalizing gay marriage?

Where are the Protestants, Jews and Catholics? Have they lost their tongues? Their hearts and wills? Their institutional you-know-whats?

Where’s the moral outrage? Why aren’t thousands of our pastors, priests and rabbis shouting from their pulpits? Why aren’t they leading their congregations through the streets in mass protest?

Why aren’t their bishops appearing on the tube with David Gregory and Piers Morgan to defend the institution of marriage as a union of one man and one woman?

Like the bank executives that are too chicken to stand up to the federal bullies in Washington, and like the energy company bosses in California who won’t stand up to the Green Socialists in Sacramento, the churches cower in fear.

Are they afraid to lose their 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status by engaging in political activity? Are they afraid to be derided as religious nuts and cultural Cro-Magnons by the liberal media?

Or are our churches and their comfortable leaders simply no longer willing to fight for what is right?

This fight over Proposition 8 isn’t just about saying it should be legal in the eyes of government for two people of the same sex to get married in California.

It’s ultimately about changing the culture of the entire country; it inevitably will lead to teaching our public school kids that gay marriage is a perfectly fine alternative and no different than traditional marriage. There is also a very slippery slope leading to other alternative relationships and the unconstitutionality of any law based on morality. Think about polygamy, bestiality, and perhaps even murder.

Churches should be in the vanguard of the fight to defend the culture against legalized gay marriage, not hiding in their pews.

Sure, the mainstream liberal media will be against them and will ignore them as much as they can. But if the churches show up en masse — and make sure millions of their members’ voices are heard — the media will be forced to cover them, and even the Supreme Court will feel the political wind.

Meanwhile, as the High Court decides our fate, it’s time for the churches to get engaged and start fighting for America, instead of wimping out. If it takes them giving up their 501(c)(3) status to start fighting for righteousness, then I’m all for it.

New Song, New Singers

Michael Reagan — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 07:20:30 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

I love talk radio; I love Fox News.

If it weren’t for the arrival of their strong conservative voices, Americans would still have nothing to listen to but the one-sided news and opinions of the left-liberals who run the mainstream New York-D.C. media.

Taylor Jones / PoliticalCartoons.com (click to view more cartoons by Jones)

But I’m frustrated.

Talk radio and Fox are getting so boring, so predictable, so shrill, I can barely tune in anymore.

Night after night on Fox, it’s the same issues, the same arguments, the same lame liberal guests showing up to be browbeaten by Hannity and O’Reilly.

How many Juan Williamses does Fox have on its staff anyway? Five? Is my friend Alan Colmes the only liberal in North America who’ll come on and debate Hannity?

Seriously. Is there anything Williams and Colmes — or for that matter, pie-thrower Ann Coulter — will say about Obamacare or the Obama Economy they haven’t said 100 times on TV in the last year?

“The Five” is another example. It gets great ratings, but it’s so stale and predictable.

Can’t Fox find anyone better than Big, Bad Bob Beckel to go 1-on-4 with that show’s conservatives, who, except for funnyman Greg Gutfeld, are like watching Hannity II, III and IV?

And is there some new FCC law against having two liberals on a Fox show once in a while? (Not Juan Williams, thanks.)

Fox needs to get fresh faces and new voices into its regular lineup. Instead of arguing with Williams night after night, what’s wrong with Hannity or O’Reilly talking to ordinary Americans — people who’ve lost their homes or can’t find a job?

I think even loyal viewers are starting to notice that Fox’s slogan should be changed from “Fair and Balanced” to “Stale and Predictable.”

The other day, after seeing conservative guest Dennis Prager waste most of his air-time watching Hannity tangle his liberal guest, I sent out a Tweet saying, “I think sometimes Hannity invites guests on to watch him argue with another guest just to get their approval. It’s frustrating.”

The response from my conservative Republican followers was quick and one-sided; a bunch of Tweeters agreed with me that Fox was losing its steam.

A guy named Tom said nothing interesting ever happens on Hannity’s show. Another guy said he loved Hannity but said he “needs to find new people to interview, too many repeats.” Sharron tweeted she’s stopped watching him altogether.

This is a serious problem for conservatives and Republicans — and the United States of America.

We’re in a serious fight with Obama and his gang, who seem hell-bent on turning us into a socialist country with enough government spending and debt to qualify for membership in the European Union.

For good and bad, talk radio and Fox have become the national voices of conservatism, the places where conservative ideas and arguments can be publicized and debated.

The Republican Party has made the mistake of allowing Fox and talk radio to become its spokesman, in large part because it has no national spokesman of its own. But Fox and talk radio are letting the GOP and the rest of the country down.

People outside the Beltway are desperate for solutions to our economic and social problems, but Fox and talk radio seem more interested in giving them arguments — tired arguments.

People — our people in the conservative choir — are starting to tune out Fox and talk radio. And it’s because their song — our song — is getting stale and predictable.

We need to start hearing a new tune from the conservative media — and new singers.

A Catholic Pope, Revisited

Michael Reagan — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 07:25:15 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

By the time you read this, the world’s billion-plus Roman Catholics may have a new pope. And when the black smoke of Tuesday’s indecisive first vote has turned to the white smoke of final decision, don’t be surprised if the cardinals have chosen… a Catholic pope.

Randall Enos / PoliticalCartoons.com (click to view more cartoons by Enos)

After the election of Benedict XVI in 2005, I wrote that the cardinals had correctly ignored the desires of some people to install a wimpish equivocator willing bend with the winds of compromise. I believe the cardinals will show the same wisdom in 2013.

In other words, the cardinals will choose someone who can remain faithful to his creed and his office, a true Catholic in all respects.

Some dissidents think the Church needs to become relevant by embracing all modern codes of conduct, but the Church will remain relevant where it really counts only if it retains its core principles. When the world is in adrift in turmoil, the answer is not more turmoil.

For example, abortion is no less evil today than it was in 2005; the need to protect life is no less compelling. The world will always need a place for rock-solid affirmation that life matters.

For those Catholics who don’t like the idea of a Catholic pope, there is an answer. It’s called the Episcopal Church, and every Catholic Church in the United States should have a map showing the location of the nearest one.

There, dissident Catholics will find homosexual bishops, lesbian priests, sanction for abortion, the unfettered right to divorce, and all those other practices the Catholic Church forbids under pain of mortal sin. It is the church that can’t say no. Dissidents will be very comfortable there.

Does the Catholic Church have problems to solve? Yes, it does.

The child-abuse scandal must be dealt with unequivocally. The next pope will also have to quell dysfunction within the Vatican’s central bureaucracy, the Curia. Some cardinals are thought to be frontrunners for the papacy based on their management skills, though I believe the Church needs more than a manager — it needs a leader.

There is also the matter of re-energizing the faithful. I won’t deny that a higher level of energy would be a good thing; after all, Pope Benedict did retire because he realized he could no longer serve due to “lack of strength of mind and body.”

I believe the Church will find a pope who can manage its bureaucracy and provide the energy to excel as a transformational world leader, as did John Paul II.

The new pope need not be transformational in the sense that doctrine should change, but transformational in finding new ways to make the wisdom and relevance of Church doctrine understood by all, and attractive to those who have not yet found a home for their innate faith.

Update: Let’s pray that Pope Francis is that leader.

Getting Wise to Government Lies

Michael Reagan — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 08:30:19 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

Take President Obama and his Cabinet of Liars, please.

We all know what dirty tricks they played to try and stop the sequester’s automatic budget cuts from happening.

Nate Beeler / Columbus Dispatch (click to view more cartoons by Beeler)

They spent weeks trying to frighten the America people into believing the country would collapse into chaos and suffering if the federal government’s sequester-forced spending cuts went into effect.

The campaigner in chief and his chorus of toadies did everything they could to make sure the puny spending cuts — which would have merely taken the federal budget back to its 2012 level — would cause the most pain to the most people.

Supposedly the cuts were going to decimate the ranks of our local police forces and firefighters, throw hundreds of teachers into the streets, create long lines at airports and maybe even leave the United States vulnerable to a military invasion by Greece.

Of course, most of Big Media played right along with Obama’s dirty political game. Like the dupes they are, they publicized every sequester scare-story like it was going to mean the end of America as we know it.

(Too bad the MSM don’t devote the same level of hysteria to covering some of our real problems, like Obama’s runaway federal spending and our un-payable future debt load.)

In case you haven’t noticed by now, Armageddon didn’t happen. The sequester came and the sun is still coming up. Planes aren’t falling from the heavens. And I haven’t had to use my guns to defend my home against a single robber or terrorist.

Even the invertebrate Republicans in Congress haven’t caved to pressure from the special interests who oppose the sequester cuts, though perhaps they just need more time.

So fa,r Obama’s cross-country campaign of whoppers hasn’t worked on the American people, who don’t need Karl Rove to tell them that the “Big Bad Wolf” the president was yapping about every day wasn’t really at their doors.

Another hopeful sign that most Americans are not as naive or stupid as the Obama Gang thinks they are came this week when the citizens of Los Angeles went to the polls.

The mayoral primary was the top draw, but also on the ballot on Tuesday was one of California’s infamous ballot measures.

The official title was “Proposition A — Neighborhood Public Safety And Vital City Services Funding And Accountability Measure.” That’s government-speak for a half-cent sales tax hike.

If you’re not familiar with the fiscal condition of my home city of Los Angeles, it’s a depressing microcosm of the federal government and the state of California. Taxing too much and spending even more, the city already has a sales tax of 9 cents and a projected annual budget deficit of $216 million.

To get voters to OK the higher sales tax and add $200 million in annual revenue to City Hall’s $7.2 billion budget, LA’s politicians imitated the president’s tactics.

Just as Obama tried to scare the public into believing that the sequester would hurt our national security, the local pols here tried to scare voters into thinking public safety would be endangered without Proposition A.

Proposition A was backed by the police chief and outgoing Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who used police academy recruits as props and warned of losing 500 city cops if the sales tax hike was defeated.

I’m happy to report that the voters of the City of Los Angeles saw through the sham. Proposition A went down to defeat Tuesday night, crushed by a final margin of 55 percent to 45 percent.

Proposition A’s defeat was a minor victory in the great war against government taxing and spending.

But when voters in a liberal city like Los Angeles can’t be scared into voting for higher taxes, it’s a sign that maybe Americans are getting wise to government lies and the politicians who tell them.

Get Out of the Weeds

Michael Reagan — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 08:20:21 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

America’s got some serious problems to solve.

Our Obama Economy is still stuck in a ditch by the side of the road.

Rick McKee / Augusta Chronicle (click to view more cartoons by McKee)

Our campaigner in chief is running around the country pushing for higher taxes and no spending cuts and crying, “The federal sky will fall!” if Congress doesn’t stop the puny 10 percent sequester from happening.

In Washington the incompetents and cowards in Congress can’t get our fiscal house in order, and they’re too stupid or self-serving to realize they are wrecking the greatest economic machine humans have ever created.

We have a budget to balance and an immigration problem. We’re spending trillions we don’t have and promising tens of trillions more in benefits our grandchildren can never repay.

And what are many of my fellow Republicans and conservatives in Washington — and the media — doing while America is being towed down the road to Greece?

They’re thrashing around in the political weeds, wasting their breath complaining about petty political things that may boost the ratings of talk shows but are otherwise meaningless.

For example, one of the outrages of the week involves the White House being accused of selling access to President Obama in exchange for $500,000 donations to his latest pet advocacy group.

Are these Republican and conservative friends of mine kidding? Were they born yesterday?

The parties in power in Washington have been selling access to their powers and privileges forever.

That’s why libertarians want to keep the federal government as small, weak and limited as possible, so that when Washington politicians are bought off, they can do as little harm to the country as possible.

Another example this week of Republicans making a partisan mountain out of a molehill is their attack on former Obama press mouthpiece Robert Gibbs for not telling reporters what he knew about the administration’s secret drone program.

Conservatives looking for dirt on Obama and liberal commentators like Rachel Maddow and Jon Stewart went to town over Gibbs’ silence.

But it was just another petty complaint du jour. The White House doesn’t tell reporters everything it’s doing or planning. It never did, whether it was the date for D-Day, our U-2 flights over the USSR or the raid to kill Osama.

My father invaded Grenada and didn’t tell Congress in advance. He even forgot to tip off his buddy Margaret Thatcher, whose airspace had to be crossed by our warplanes.

The most ridiculous complaint of the week made by people on our side of the political fence was their reaction to Michelle Obama’s appearance on the Oscars broadcast Sunday night.

They acted like it was an impeachable offense. But the first lady handing out a best-picture award at an Oscar ceremony is not something Republicans should waste a second of their time on.

It’s not new and not a Democrat thing. On Jan. 20, 1985, Ronald Reagan — who, if I recall, was a Republican — performed the opening coin toss for the Super Bowl game via television from the White House.

The first lady’s appearance at the Oscars was something my father and my mother — his first wife, Academy Award-winning actress Jane Wyman — would have applauded, not booed.

It’s time for Republicans and conservatives to get serious. The country is burning down like ancient Rome, but we’re wasting our time and energy attacking Democrats for petty or nonexistent crimes that do nothing but hike TV ratings and give partisan bloggers fresh ammunition to shoot in the air.

It’s time for us to start fighting about the things that really matter. It’s time to come out of the weeds and start concentrating on the stuff that matters to the guy with no job or the business owner with high taxes, not the stupid stuff like Michelle Obama’s “Oscar Moment.”

—–

The Real Answer to the Immigration Question

Michael Reagan — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 13:41:47 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

America has almost 12 million illegal immigrants.

Many of them came here on visas and never left.

But about 60 percent of them walked in from just one country — Mexico.

Nate Beeler / Columbus Dispatch (click to view more cartoons by Beeler)

Though the stalled Obama Economy has caused about 900,000 to go home since 2007, there are still about 6 million Mexicans living in the United States who’ve sneaked across our borders.

Everyone from Marco Rubio to John McCain and our golfer in chief are trying to figure out how to deal with the illegal immigrants we have already and prevent future waves of Mexican migrants.

But no one seems to be talking about why so many Mexicans risk so much — including their lives — to break into America.

What is it that makes so many of them leave their families and children behind and travel — often on foot — to seek economic opportunity in the USA?

I’ve been to Mexico on business and on vacations. It’s a beautiful country, rich with oil, gas and other natural resources. It’s blessed with 114 million good and hardworking people.

Mexico has everything it needs to be a First World country. But it’s cursed.

Its government is corrupt and inept — and always has been. Now its federal government is a running joke. Its unable — and unwilling — to stop illegal drugs or people from crossing into the USA.

Mexico has become one of the most dangerous places in the world. Deadly criminal cartels effectively control the U.S.-Mexican border, trafficking in drugs and humans. Drug violence is so widespread that some cruise ships no longer visit Mexico’s Gold Coast.

No wonder so many Mexicans come north to a country where good jobs are plentiful, the wages are high and the streets are safe. If I were a Mexican, I’d be leaving too.

Yes, as Republicans say, it’s time to protect our borders better. Yes, it’s time to come up with realistic ways to deal with the illegal immigrants we already have living among us.

But it’s also time for one of our so-called political leaders to ratchet up the rhetoric and pull a Ronald Reagan.

When the Soviet Empire still controlled half of the world, my father stood near the Berlin Wall in 1987 and famously told Mr. Gorbachev that if he was really for peace, prosperity and liberalization, he should “Tear down this wall!”

It was a bold and masterful political move that showed the whole world that Ronald Reagan and the United States stood steadfastly on the side of freedom in the waning days of the Cold War.

One of our most important wars today — and one we clearly are not winning — is the drug war on our southern border.

What we need now is for President Obama to skip the back nine at the Floridian, go down to our border with Mexico and deliver a message to Mexican president Enrique Pena Nieto.

“Senor Nieto,” our part-time president should say, “End the corruption. Crush the drug cartels. Make Mexico a peaceful and safe society. Free your economy from the shackles of socialism so your citizens can go back home to prosper.”

President Obama also should declare to the world the United States is ready to do everything it can to help Mexico become a land of freedom and opportunity, not a land of fear and corruption.

Turning Mexico into a better place for its citizens to live and work — a place more like Canada, for example — would also do a lot to solve our future immigration problems.

Mexicans would stay home. And we wouldn’t need an army of border control agents and a 20-foot fence protecting our southern border any more than we need them on our northern border to protect us from illegal Canadians.

State of the Union: Failure

Michael Reagan — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 08:20:41 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

Our failure in chief gave us his annual blurred vision of America again Tuesday night.

Based on his State of the Union message, Barack Obama’s eyesight is as ideologically impaired as ever.

Chris Weyant / The Hill (click to view more cartoons by Weyant)

Despite four years of failure, he still sees only one road America can go down to regain its economic health.

Not down the capitalist road of free enterprise and liberty that made us the richest country in history.

He wants to continue down the socialist road to more federal government — which means more Obama taxes, more Obama spending, more Obama debt and more Obama government programs to fix problems government programs caused in the first place.

The president and his hallucinating idolaters in the mainstream liberal media think his failed policies and bad ideas will work their magic if only we try them for another four years.

But look at reality. Look at the unemployment rates in 2008 and 2012. Despite trillions of federal spending, they’re essentially the same.

Look at the federal debt in 2008 compared to 2012 — it’s much worse today. Look at America’s bungled foreign policy.

Look at the middle class. The president keeps boasting about how he’s going to use the federal government to help them. The reality is that the middle class is being devastated by his administration.

Starting Jan. 1, 2013, Americans with jobs have had their disposable incomes cut 2 percent because Social Security taxes were returned to their normal level.

And because of the rules under Obamacare, millions of employees are going to have their hours cut by employers who can’t afford to pay every full-time worker’s health care.

That speech Tuesday night was a national joke. As usual, it was mostly hot air, bad ideas and tired platitudes. It delivered nothing sensible, newsworthy or brave.

What if Obama had turned to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and said, “Hey Harry, how about passing a federal budget this year? I’m tired of funding the government with continuing resolutions.”

What if he had said, “Sorry, my Green friends, you’re living in a dream world. We need the Keystone Pipeline and I’m going to do everything I can to speed up its construction.”

What if Obama had turned to the survivors of deadly gun violence in the audience and said, “I am not going to push for tougher new gun control laws because I know they would have done nothing to save your loved ones from being murdered.”

No chance. Instead, the president stuck to his socialist script and threatened that if Congress doesn’t cooperate with his latest brainstorms, he will get his way by using executive orders.

The people of this country will soon rue the day they voted to re-elect Obama in 2012. At some point they’ll learn that his “progressive” way, the 1930s taxing-and-spending-and-regulating way, is not the answer.

We’re in for four more years of slow growth, high unemployment rates, higher taxes and rising prices. Not to mention more government meddling in every aspect of our lives.

The impaired vision of Obama and his party is wrecking the economy, crippling the ability of our youth to get jobs and causing a decline in respect for America overseas.

My side — the conservative Republican side — is out of power. We don’t have the White House and the Senate. The courts rule against us most of the time. And the mainstream media are still in the tank for Obama.

All we can do for now is watch Obama’s Humpty Dumpty America as it falls off the wall and breaks into a million pieces.

At the end of the game, it’ll be up to the Republican Party, the conservatives, to put the country back together. I only hope we can live long enough to do it.

Copyright ©2013 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “The New Reagan Revolution” (St. Martin’s Press). He is the founder and chairman of The Reagan Group and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to Reagan@caglecartoons.com. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Cari Dawson Bartley at cari@cagle.com or call 800-696-7561.

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Pedophilia is the Problem

Michael Reagan — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 08:15:22 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

The bosses of the Boy Scouts of America surprised everyone this week by postponing their decision on whether to allow gay leaders and gay Scouts to join their ranks.

If the BSA’s long-standing ban on gays is lifted by national officials in May, the choice to admit gays may be left to local Boy Scout chapters — as it should be.

Nate Beeler / Columbus Dispatch (click to view more cartoons by Beeler)

Churches and civic groups that sponsor Boy Scout troops wouldn’t be forced by the national organization to admit gays. And parents can choose whether they want their child to be in a troop led by a gay man.

If you’re asking me if I’d put my child in a Boy Scout troop with a leader who is a known homosexual, I would answer on the side of caution and say “No.”

But despite what some of my conservative friends think, allowing gays in the Boy Scouts will not be an open invitation to pedophiles to begin preying on children.

Being gay doesn’t mean you are a pedophile. Homosexuality and pedophilia are two completely different issues and studies show that a child is no more at risk of being molested by a gay or bisexual man than a heterosexual one.

As someone who was sexually molested by a camp counselor when I was eight, I know more than I care to about pedophilia and the long-lasting harm it does to children. You can read about my experience and what I learned from it in “Twice Adopted,” my 2004 book.

Pedophilia is the most heinous crime against children. But as the newspaper headlines have been telling us for a long time, some of our most famous institutions have a shameful record of coddling the child molesters who work for them.

Everyone knows by now how the men in power at Penn State chose not to tell the police about the serial pedophilia of former football coach Jerry Sandusky because they were afraid to sully the reputation of their “sacred” athletic program. Meanwhile, for years Sandusky was free to prey on new victims.

Penn State’s decision to protect its institutional reputation was nothing new. According to HBO’s scathing new documentary “Mea Culpa, Mea Maxima Culpa,” the Catholic Church — my church — has implemented a similar policy whenever pedophiles are discovered in its sanctuaries and schools.

From Wisconsin to Ireland to the Vatican, HBO showed that the church’s bishops and cardinals have a long and disgusting history of protecting pedophile priests, ignoring children’s allegations of sexual abuse, paying the parents of victims to keep quiet and keeping the sex crimes of priests secret from law enforcement.

In my hometown, we’ve recently been learning from the Los Angeles Times how for decades the hierarchy of the Los Angeles diocese “plotted to keep law enforcement from learning that children had been molested at the hands of priests.”

The BSA’s similar method of dealing with child molesters in its ranks also has been exposed by the L.A. Times.

The BSA’s own files revealed that between 1970 and 1991 officials chose not to tell police about hundreds of alleged sexual abuses, and in some cases allowed the molesters to continue working or volunteering with the organization.

In one case, the Times reported last fall, a camp director who heard about repeated abuse by a staff member told police he didn’t report them because “his bosses wanted to protect the reputation of the Scouts and the accused staff member.”

The men who run the Boy Scouts have something in common with the men who run the Catholic Church and Penn State. When it comes to dealing with the sexual abuse of children, they’ve always chosen to protect their own institutions instead of protecting children.

Pedophilia can be prevented and guarded against, but it’s impossible to eliminate. But from now on, when it is discovered, the perpetrators — who on average molest about 120 victims during their “career” — should be indicted and punished as criminals.

This should be the case no matter who they are, whether they’re straight or gay, or what institution they work for. Our innocent children deserve no less.

Copyright ©2013 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “The New Reagan Revolution” (St. Martin’s Press). He is the founder and chairman of The Reagan Group and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to Reagan@caglecartoons.com. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Cari Dawson Bartley at cari@cagle.com or call 800-696-7561.

Arrogance isn’t the Answer

Michael Reagan — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 08:20:45 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

I’m getting tired of President Obama blaming Republicans for everything.

This week it was immigration.

In Las Vegas the president called for a policy that would provide a clear path to citizenship for illegal residents who pay their taxes, learn English and abide by the law.

Rick McKee / Augusta Chronicle (click to view more cartoons by McKee)

He warned that if bipartisan talks in Congress break down in bickering, he’ll use his bully pulpit and present an immigration bill based on his ideas — ideas that barely mention the need to secure the border as the first order of business.

The president and his liberal friends in the media like to make everyone think it’s Republicans who’ve been thwarting comprehensive immigration reform all these years.

But the dirty little political secret is that it’s the Democrats who are really the ones who don’t want to see immigration reform happen anytime soon.

As long as immigration policy remains a political football to fight over, Democrats can use the issue as a way to brand Republicans as anti-immigrant and continue to capture the vast majority of Latino voters.

If the GOP wants to have a future, it has to get its act together and get its ideas out to the Hispanic community — 16 percent of Americans. Hispanics are receptive to those ideas when they know the truth.

Right now, Latinos and all immigrants who come to America legally or illegally see Republicans as the party of exclusion, not inclusion.

Except for Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush, the GOP is seen as the party that tells immigrants “We want you out of the country.”

But Republicans should be welcoming and embracing immigrants, not appearing to scare them off. Until the party changes, Democrats will own the Latino vote the way they own the black vote.

The Republican Party also has to prove that Marco Rubio isn’t its only Latino. Rubio is great. I love seeing him in the Senate and I’d love to see him in the White House someday.

But the GOP has some other great Hispanic political leaders out there who need to be seen and heard on immigration. In fact, liberal CNN recently admitted that among statewide officeholders, Republicans are more diverse than Democrats. Gov. Susana Martinez of New Mexico and Gov. Brian Sandoval of Nevada, plus rising Senate star Ted Cruz of Texas are among that group.

We — the Republican Party and the country — need to hear their ideas. Not at the end of the immigration reform argument, but now, at the beginning.

Meanwhile, the country desperately needs a president who knows how to lead.

We need a leader who doesn’t stand up and point fingers at the other side but instead opens the door to the White House, invites both sides in, finds commonality and signs the subsequent legislation.

Unfortunately, we don’t have such a president. We have a leader who is arrogant. We have a leader who never gets off the campaign trail long enough to lead. And who spends most of his time demonizing the opposition.

My mother taught me a basic truth that President Obama should learn — “You can’t listen if your mouth is always open.”

President Obama’s mouth is always open. It’s time for him to shut his mouth, open the White House doors and do what my father Ronald Reagan would have done. It’s time for him to stop talking and start inviting.

—–

Copyright ©2013 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “The New Reagan Revolution” (St. Martin’s Press). He is the founder and chairman of The Reagan Group and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to Reagan@caglecartoons.com. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Cari Dawson Bartley at cari@cagle.com or call 800-696-7561.

Mickelson Chokes

Michael Reagan — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 08:25:26 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

Phil Mickelson choked on a gimme putt this week, but it wasn’t on a golf course.

According to the AP’s golf writer, America’s most popular golfer “put his popularity on the line with polarizing comments about how much he has to pay in state and federal taxes.”

Rick McKee / Augusta Chronicle (click to view more cartoons by McKee)

“Polarizing comments”?

Good grief.

Now it’s “polarizing” for an American to hint that because of the higher federal and state income tax rates on millionaires leveled by Sacramento and Washington, he might have to migrate to Florida or Texas?

Though he had every right to, Mickelson didn’t knock Obama or gripe like a Tea Partier about the federal, state and local tax bite on his estimated $45 million in annual earnings — about 62 percent.

Mickelson spoke the truth. Most pro golfers already live in Florida, and for good reason. It’s not because of the warm weather, it’s because there’s no state income tax.

Tiger Woods, who bravely stuck up for Mickelson, has admitted without shame that he moved to Orlando years ago to escape California’s income tax, which is now set at 13 percent on California’s 35,000 remaining millionaires.

Ditto for Rush Limbaugh, who became a Floridian because of New York’s confiscatory state and local taxes.

It’s outrageous that any American — Mickelson, Woods, Mitt Romney or super-liberals like Babs Streisand or Bobby Redford — is forced to fork over 60 percent of their honest earnings to government.

But it isn’t just wealthy pro golfers who are being driven out of California by high taxes.

Before Jan. 1, an older surgeon I know closed his practice, laid off his four employees, sold his house and moved to Nevada.

He was still a practicing surgeon, not because he needed the money but because he loved being a surgeon.

But the higher income tax rates now in effect under Proposition 30 for those earning more than $250,000 were too much for him and so the Broken State of California lost a good surgeon and four other jobs.

It’s a shame Mickelson turned out to be such a wuss. Wouldn’t it have been great if he had stood tall and become a tax-protesting hero — the Gerard Depardieu of America?

Depardieu, the wealthy and popular French actor, shocked the liberal intelligentsia of Europe with his defiant, politically incorrect and very public stand against France’s confiscatory tax on the rich.

Decrying the 75 percent levy his socialist government is trying to put on millionaires, he moved to Belgium, gave up his French passport, and accepted the grant of citizenship from Russia, where the income tax is a reasonable, flat 13 percent.

Mickelson, meanwhile, chickened out.

He issued a sniveling apology this week, saying, “Finances and taxes are a personal matter, and I should not have made my opinions on them public. I apologize to those I have upset or insulted, and assure you I intend not to let it happen again.”

How pathetic.

Now it’s apparently an insult to the poor — or a thought crime — for a rich and successful American to publicly point out that his taxes are so high he’s thinking of moving to where they’re lower.

It’s too bad about Mickelson. Instead of apologizing and backtracking, he should be telling everyone about how high taxes are driving rich and successful people like him out of the state, demanding serious tax cuts and threatening to run for governor.

California is a state that already has more takers than makers. It can’t afford any more wusses.

—–

Copyright ©2013 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “The New Reagan Revolution” (St. Martin’s Press). He is the founder and chairman of The Reagan Group and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to Reagan@caglecartoons.com. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Cari Dawson Bartley at cari@cagle.com or call 800-696-7561.

Obama Ignores the Rational Answer

Michael Reagan — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 15:11:05 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

What do Al Hunt of Bloomberg News, David Gregory of “Meet the Press” and President Obama have in common — besides their liberal politics?

They all send their kids to Sidwell Friends School.

Rick McKee / Augusta Chronicle (click to view more cartoons by McKee)

With campuses in Washington, D.C. and Bethesda, Md., the highly selective private school is where the Clintons and the Gores sent their kids, along with Joe Biden’s grandchildren.

It’s also where the local 1 Percenters and the government-media elites who can afford to shell out about $32 grand a year to send their children to be indoctrinated — excuse me, educated — and to be safe.

Unlike parents across America who are worrying about how to protect their school kids in the wake of the tragic shootings in Newtown, Conn., Sidwell parents spend their days worry-free.

Their children are better protected than the printing presses at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. And it’s not because of the heavily armed Secret Service detail posted on campus to protect first-kids Sasha and Malia Obama.

It’s because Sidwell Friends — a Quaker school, by the way — is defended by guards with loaded guns. In addition to the Secret Service with its Uzis and large ammo clips, Sidwell has its own security staff of 11.

I didn’t hear President Obama mention Sidwell Friends’ solution to school safety on Wednesday when he announced his sweeping plans to reduce gun violence by banning assault-style weapons and high-capacity magazines, instituting tougher gun-registration laws and taking steps to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill.

None of Obama’s measures would have prevented the slaughter of innocents in Connecticut, but that’s not the point. The point is pure politics and the president and his crew want to take full advantage of the Newtown shootings to advance their anti-gun agenda.

At his White House media extravaganza, the president used lawmakers, law enforcement officials and children as his props. The kids, drawn from across the U.S., had written letters to the president saying they were worried about gun violence and school safety. You can bet there were no Sidwell kids on stage with him.

While Washington’s grandstanders and anti-gun nuts prepare to fire their latest round of ineffective, politically correct, feel-good federal laws at law-abiding gun owners, at least six states are preparing new legislation that will allow teachers to carry guns into schools or require several teachers in the building to be armed.

Putting guards with guns in places that need to be protected from bad guys or crazies is not a radical idea. It’s perfectly sensible.

Politicians and celebrities use armed bodyguards all the time. We have armed guards in banks, jewelry stores and malls. After 9/11 we armed airline pilots and armed federal marshals posing as passengers.

Only politicians and hysterical celebrity dummies like Piers Morgan can’t understand why making schools gun-free zones attracts mass-murders and reduces the chances that anyone with a gun will stop them to zero.

The president never thought of using Sidwell Friends as an example of how armed guards at schools can make them safer.

He was too busy trying to score points by attacking the NRA, dreaming up laws to further oppress law-abiding gun owners and making fun of the people who know the Second Amendment isn’t about protecting duck hunters’ rights, it’s about the right of the people to protect themselves from their government.

Meanwhile, here in Los Angeles, the Catholic grade school where my daughter teaches didn’t wait around for the president or Joe Biden to come up with complicated new laws to allegedly ensure the safety of their children.

The officials at my daughter’s school decided for themselves the best way to make their campus safer. Taking a cue from the smart folks who run the Sidwell Friends School, they did a simple, effective and rational thing. They hired an armed guard.

—–

Copyright ©2013 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “The New Reagan Revolution” (St. Martin’s Press). He is the founder and chairman of The Reagan Group and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to Reagan@caglecartoons.com. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Cari Dawson Bartley at cari@cagle.com or call 800-696-7561.

Junk Laws

Michael Reagan — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 08:20:14 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

We have junk food, junk mail and junk bonds.

Now, thanks to our dysfunctional and devious Congress, we have junk laws like the “Taxpayer Relief Act.”

Junk laws are really nothing new. The people we send to Washington to represent us have been passing legislation larded with pork or special privileges for their friends in business, agriculture and labor since the country was born.

Adam Zyglis / Buffalo News (click to view more cartoons by Zyglis)

Insiders have always known how this cynical bipartisan game is played. But now, thanks to the failure of Congress to deal with the government debt crisis it in large part created, the average American is starting to become aware of these junk bills.

Even the liberal media were outraged by what went on when Congress passed the “American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012″ — which, ironically, raised the taxes of every working American by 2 percent by returning the Social Security tax to its usual 6.2 percent level.

The “Fiscal Cliff Bill” did virtually nothing to solve the federal government’s money problems or create a single job. But it was junked up with nearly $70 billion of pure pork — including tax credits for the owners of NASCAR racetracks, wind turbine makers, Hollywood moviemakers and rum-makers in Puerto Rico.

While President Obama was promising to raise taxes on the rich but really shafting the working poor, congressional folk were so busy loading up the “Fiscal Cliff Bill” with presents for their friends that they forgot to pass the relief bill to benefit victims of Hurricane Sandy.

Members of Congress are grandmasters of deceit and dishonesty. Taking maximum advantage of every crisis or disaster that comes along, they attach their favorite pieces of pork to dishonestly named bills such as the “American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012″ and the “Affordable Healthcare Act.”

Members know these big important super-bills have to pass to avert a crisis, so they junk them up with their $200 million “Bridges to Nowhere” and their $59 million tax credits for the algae-growing industry.

A perfect example of how Congress gets its junk bills passed has to with the way it funds FEMA. Congress always underfunds the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Why?

Because Congress knows each year there will always be a natural disaster like Hurricane Sandy that FEMA will need billions of federal dollars to address.

And when FEMA comes asking for emergency funding, members of Congress will clean out their closets and throw every piece of junk legislation they have into the relief bill, which they know will automatically pass without scrutiny.

Another reason we get junk laws is that few members of Congress actually read these monster bills before they vote for them. Nancy Pelosi’s career quote is going to be her comment on the healthcare bill, “But we have to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it.”

Law-making is not supposed to work that way. There’s a rule in Congress that a bill has to be posted for 48 hours before it can be voted on. But that rule has become a joke.

Just watch C-SPAN the next time a vote is being taken in the House. You’ll probably hear someone say something like, “Under suspension of the rule, we’ll now vote.”

What arcane parliamentary rule are they talking about? The 48-hour rule. No wonder Congress is always finding out after they vote what they just voted for. If members of Congress don’t read the damn bill, they shouldn’t vote on it.

I’m getting real tired of people saying, “My guy’s a good guy and your guy’s a bad guy.” They’re all acting like bad guys.

We need to start holding every member of Congress accountable. And we need more up-and-down votes in Congress, so that the next important piece of legislation doesn’t become another “Fiscal Cliff Junk Bill.”

—–

Copyright ©2013 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “The New Reagan Revolution” (St. Martin’s Press). He is the founder and chairman of The Reagan Group and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to Reagan@caglecartoons.com. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Cari Dawson Bartley at cari@cagle.com or call 800-696-7561.

Waiting for the Sequel

Michael Reagan — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 13:20:44 +0000

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

The latest horror movie from Washington — “The Fiscal Cliff” — finally came to an exciting end in the early hours of 2013.

But after two years did its climax — more taxes, more spending and more chicken-livered can-kicking by our politicians — really shock any of you over the age of six?

Jeff Parker / Florida Today (click to view more cartoons by Parker)

Didn’t think so.

Spinning the budget deal as a last-minute victory for the American people, the White House and Congress are saying that all the actors knuckled down, did the right thing and created a compromise budget deal that kept the country from going over the fiscal cliff.

Bull. As usual.

The Washington In-Crowd didn’t save the country from going over the fiscal cliff, which of course they created in the first place. They just shoved the edge of the cliff a couple of months down the road.

After two years of arguing over taxes, the federal debt, government spending and how to fix the ticking fiscal time bombs of Social Security and Medicare, the professional politicians solved nothing.

They merely did the easy, politically painless stuff.

They raised tax rates from 35 percent to 39.6 on the so-called rich who make more than $400,000 individually or $450,000 as a couple. They extended unemployment benefits for a year.

They extended the Bush-era tax cuts and made them permanent, something even President Obama secretly favored because he knows that ending them would throw the economy into another recession.

But the Washington In-Crowd failed the American people yet again. They didn’t reduce the deficit by a single dollar. They didn’t create a single job. They didn’t cut or cap federal spending. They did nothing about Social Security or Medicare.

The revenues they’ll bring into federal coffers with their higher taxes on the rich will be spent by the end of the week. They were so busy doing the easy stuff they never even got around to passing a bill to help the victims of Hurricane Sandy.

Meanwhile, while everyone was watching the chessboard to see how high taxes were going to be jacked up on the rich and successful, Congress shafted the middle class and the working poor by voting to let President Obama’s two-year-old, 2 percent payroll-tax cut expire.

The Obamamedia won’t be making a big deal out of it, of course, but nearly everyone who earns a paycheck was given a tax hike. According to the Tax Policy Center, about 77 percent of households making between $50,000 and $200,000 will be paying higher FICA taxes in 2013.

On average, starting this week, about $1,600 of an individual’s income will again be taken from his or her paycheck annually and sent directly to the bankrupt coffers of Social Security.

President Obama and the advocates of Bigger Government were the winners in our latest fiscal melodrama. Obama set the agenda and he got what he wanted. Republicans who wanted real spending cuts or some semblance of fiscal responsibility got rolled.

In two months, it’ll be time for Congress to vote on raising the federal debt ceiling. We’ll hear the same arguments and scare stories from the White House and the media about what will happen if we don’t allow the Washington In-Crowd to borrow a few more trillion dollars to keep their borrowing-and-spending racket going.

America will find itself being forced to watch another Washington horror flick. And unless voters wake up and the GOP gets its act together, “Fiscal Cliff, Part 2″ is going to have the same unhappy ending for conservatives as the original.

—–

Copyright ©2013 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “The New Reagan Revolution” (St. Martin’s Press). He is the founder and chairman of The Reagan Group and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to Reagan@caglecartoons.com. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Cari Dawson Bartley at cari@cagle.com or call 800-696-7561.

Gun Control Won’t Prevent Tragedy

Michael Reagan — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 14:21:24 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

It’s not tougher gun control, stupid.

No matter how much tougher we make our gun laws we’ll never prevent future tragedies like last week’s murder of those innocents in Newtown, Conn.

We won’t stop future Newtowns if we outlaw every military-style assault weapon in America.

Rick McKee / Augusta Chronicle (click to view more cartoons by McKee)

We won’t stop future Auroras if we outlaw semi-automatic pistols or rifles, or mandate that no magazine clip can ever hold more than 10 rounds.

We won’t stop future Virginia Techs if we make it tougher to buy a gun legally or if we shut down all gun shows on the continent for the rest of time.

Let’s get real. America has an estimated 300 million guns. We could make owning a gun a capital crime today and by tomorrow 100 million guns would be hidden in our closets and buried in our backyards.

Good people, bad people and crazy people would still have access to tens of millions of guns and the ammunition they need. All the strict laws Mayor Bloomberg or Sen. Feinstein can dream up won’t change that.

Some of the strictest gun laws in the country don’t stop the gang-bangers of Chicago from slaughtering each other by the hundreds each year over drug turf.

Connecticut already had tough gun laws. So did Norway, where last year an evil extremist used guns and bombs to randomly kill 77 people — mostly teenagers.

To politicians, banning all semi-automatic weapons or large magazines in guns sounds like a good solution to stop mass murders, but it isn’t.

Those laws might keep the death toll in the single digits, but they won’t stop another killing spree like the one at Sandy Hook Elementary from occurring in the first place.

I want to prevent mass murders from happening in schools, not merely reduce their number of victims. I’m not willing to accept six dead first-graders instead of 20. I’m not willing to accept a single dead teacher or principal or schoolchild.

And the only way to bring the death toll down to zero in our schools is to put trained armed guards in every one of them.

Not a retired policeman or a fat guy in a cheap uniform who sits in a chair all day. A real guard with a real loaded gun that he or she knows how to use and is authorized to shoot.

It could be a local police officer or a private security guard. And taxpayers would be willing to pay the price for knowing their kids were being protected by more than security cameras and locked doors.

Security is never foolproof. When my father was shot in 1981, he was the most protected person in America, surrounded by heavily armed and trained bodyguards.

The disturbed man who tried to kill him didn’t use an assault rifle or a semi-automatic to carry out his plan. Before he was wrestled to the ground, he got off six shots in 1.7 seconds — with a revolver.

I’ll never forget what Mike Luty, the head of the Secret Service detail who was with me the day my father was shot, said to me when I asked, “How can you allow this to happen?” Luty said, “We train 24/7, but we can’t stop the crazies.”

We can’t stop every crazy in America who is intent on committing mass murder, either, but we can try. We need to fix our mental health system so it’s better able to identify potential killers before they kill, and we need to find ways parents can provide help to their kids over 18 without needing a court order.

But no matter what we do, evil people, crazy people and troubled suicidal young white males will always have access to guns and they’ll plan their lethal attacks in secret and carry them out.

More gun control and gun-free zones won’t stop them, but guns will. Putting armed guards — with loaded weapons — in our schools is the only sure way we can keep our future mass murderers from hurting any more of our innocent children.

Copyright ©2012 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “The New Reagan Revolution” (St. Martin’s Press). He is the founder and chairman of The Reagan Group and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to Reagan@caglecartoons.com. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Cari Dawson Bartley at cari@cagle.com or call 800-696-7561.

Misdirected Anger

Michael Reagan — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 13:23:53 +0000

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

All those union thugs who were rioting in Michigan Tuesday were angry about the wrong thing.

They were demonstrating — which in union-speak means breaking things and punching people — against Michigan’s decision to become a right-to-work state.

Larry Wright / PoliticalCartoons.com (click to view more cartoons by Wright)

If you believe the union spin, or the mainstream liberal media’s spin, or the Obama spin, which all come from the same propaganda factory, that means Michigan no longer cares about workers, the right to organize, living wages, etc., etc.

But what Michigan’s new law really means is that the voters and a majority of the politicians in the state have miraculously decided that a citizen’s freedom of choice should extend to the freedom to be able to choose not to join a union.

What a concept.

It’s a great step forward for a troubled state that has seen its signature industry crippled to the point of near extinction by unions that had too much power over the lives of workers, American carmakers, politicians and the economy.

If those union thugs and their allies in the Democrat Party really had a clue, they would have been demonstrating — peacefully, if that’s possible — against what has happened to the once-great, but now pathetic, city of Detroit.

The statistics are staggering. Detroit — a union town if America ever made one — is a socialist hell on wheels.

Its city government is broke and nearly $50 million in the red, in part because it pays $1.08 in benefits to municipal workers and retirees for every $1 it pays in salaries.

Its population has fallen from 1.8 million in 1950 to about 700,000 as of 2011, and too many of the Detroiters who are left don’t pay taxes, don’t form traditional two-parent families, don’t have jobs and aren’t interested in having one.

Of the roughly 224,000 residents who actually have a job, only 190,000 work in the private sector. A third of the populace is on food stamps. Oh, and 99,000 of Detroit’s 363,000 housing units are vacant.

Welcome to Obamaville — and the future Obama America.

If Michigan’s union thugs want to demonstrate about something beyond their own economic interests as seen through the lens of union fundraising, they might try raising a fist to the sorry state of education in Detroit.

Among students in city schools recently exiting eighth grade, only 7 percent are “proficient” in reading and only 4 percent are “proficient” in math.

Maybe the unions are happy with those shameful numbers, because they will be guaranteed a steady supply of uneducated kids who are only qualified to join a union.

But what were all those parents doing, supporting the union thugs and excusing thousands of schoolteachers who took the day off in solidarity? Those parents, if they had a common-sense proficiency in double digits, would be protesting the lousy education their kids are getting.

It’s interesting to see the left go wild in the streets to protest Michigan’s giant step for greater worker freedom.

It seems the left only wants you to have freedom of choice when you’re pregnant. After you give birth to the child, it’s those on the left — not the right — that want to deny your freedom to choose, whether it’s a school for your kid, the size of your soft drink, or to be in a union.

Michigan is going the right way — the opposite of the Obama Way that has doubled America’s homeless population to 636,000 and jacked up our food stamp population to 47 million.

Detroit has been destroyed by its own bad governments and the kind of federal policies Obama wants to expand. It may be beyond saving, except for growing crops where neighborhoods once were.

But Michigan has taken a dramatic step toward resurrecting its industrial economy. It’s no longer a union-made state.

It’s a state where freedom of choice extends to people who will no longer be forced to join a union or pay dues to a bunch of thugs who’ll spend it to elect more presidents like the one we’re stuck with now.

—–

Restoring Confidence

Michael Reagan — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 18:08:02 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

Help us, we’re falling and we can’t get up again.

Once upon a time — in 1988 and 1998 to be exact — the United States was the best country for a baby to be born and raised in, at least according to The Economist magazine.

Eric Allie / PoliticalCartoons.com (click to view more cartoons by Allie)

But the 2013 edition of the magazine’s “where-to-be-born” index has us down at No. 16 — tied with Germany and one spot ahead of the United Arab Emirates.

Switzerland, Australia, Norway, Sweden and Denmark — nice countries but not exactly world famous as destinations for millions of people seeking opportunity — are ranked 1 through 5.

The Economist’s annual ranking tries to quantify what country “will provide the best opportunities for a healthy, safe and prosperous life in the years ahead.”

It crunches and weighs the numbers for 11 indicators — everything from geography and demography to GDP per capita, the cost of living and future economic growth prospects. And, unfortunately for the United States, it weighs government debt.

The Economist doesn’t factor a debt-related reason America will likely continue to slide in these rankings — no one today has any confidence in our political leaders to solve our economic problems.

Our economy is stuck on a reef. Growth is too low. The prospects of a real recovery coming anytime soon are dim and getting dimmer, not brighter.

It’s so bad, even illegal aliens are losing confidence in America and leaving the country. And Citigroup just announced it is laying off 11,000 employees. Obviously, its bosses don’t have much hope for a better future, either.

Back in the 1980s, we had more confidence in our political leaders because they actually earned it from time to time.

When my father was in the White House and Democrats controlled Congress, both parties fought bitterly with each other.

But when it came time to work out a solution to get the economy moving forward, they sat down and cut deals to lower or simplify taxes and to ease or eliminate onerous regulations.

In the 1990s, the roles were reversed. Clinton was president, Republicans ran Congress and partisanship was fierce. But when they had to do it, the leaders of both parties worked out a way to balance the budget and reform welfare.

In the old days, conservatives and liberals — loyal R’s and die-hard D’s — buried their hatchets and ultimately found a way to work together.

Today, we don’t seem to even want both parties to cooperate. We demonize the other side so much we can’t imagine ever working with them to fix the Capitol Building’s roof, much less the economy.

Fast-forward to 2012. Does anyone have confidence in our leaders to work together to pull the Supertanker of State off the reef, much less turn it around?

We know what makes America work better for everyone today and in the future — or we used to. It’s when government is smaller and the private sector is bigger, not vice versa.

The American people have lost confidence in their leaders for good reasons. Politicians from both parties in Washington have to join to clean up the economic mess they created or that confidence will never be restored.

If they don’t do it soon, being ranked No. 16 on The Economist’s “best place to be born” index will look pretty good to our grandkids.

—–

Republican Suckers

Michael Reagan — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 21:07:44 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

Republicans had better learn from history — and from Ronald Reagan’s mistake.

President Obama and his fellow big-spenders in Congress are promising if they get higher tax rates today they’ll make even higher spending cuts tomorrow.

Nate Beeler / Columbus Dispatch (click to view more cartoons by Beeler)

It’s an old sucker’s game. Republicans — and the rest of the country — should know it by now, because for three decades we’ve all been suckers.

If history is our guide, and Republicans in Congress don’t grow a spine, by this time next year we’ll have higher taxes, higher spending, more debt and a bigger government.

Twice before, Republicans have been fooled into playing the Democrats’ con game.

It happened to my father early in his first term when he sought to close a growing federal deficit caused by the deep economic recession. He believed Democrats in Congress would keep their pledge to make $3 in future spending cuts for every $1 in immediate tax increases.

In 1982 he signed a compromise tax bill with the horrible name of TEFRA — the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act. And, when those promised spending cuts never materialized in Congress, TEFRA became one of the biggest regrets of my father’s presidency.

My father was duped by the duplicity of Democrats. And so was George H.W. Bush less than a decade later, when he foolishly allowed himself to be taken for the same ride.

In 1990′s budget wrangling, which was aimed at reducing the federal budget deficit by $500 billion over five years, Bush 41 was seduced by the Democrats’ promise of making $2 in spending cuts for every $1 in tax hikes.

The first Bush fell for it completely, reneging on his “Read my lips, no new taxes” pledge, opening the door for “tax-cutter” Ross Perot and losing in 1992 to Bill Clinton.

Even before he was de-elected, Bush 41 regretted the “bargain” he had made with Democrats. In March of 1992, the sucker in chief said, “I thought this one compromise — and it was a compromise — would result in no more tax increases.

“I thought it would result in total control of domestic discretionary spending. And now we see Congress talking about raising taxes again. So, I’m disappointed, and given all of that, yes, (it was) a mistake.”

Fast-forward to “Nightmare on Obama Street, Part II.” We have trillion-dollar federal deficits as far as our children’s eyes can see. We have an economy that’s looking at four more years of low growth and higher taxes.

And now some Republicans in Congress — who apparently don’t have a piece of conservative cartilage left in their bodies — are getting ready to be duped again.

What’s that old saying? “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” Well, Republicans look like they are about to be fooled for the third time, which is so stupid there’s no adage to describe it.

While my father was bargaining with Democrats in 1982 over spending and tax cuts, he spoke over the heads of Congress to the American people.

“In a few days the Congress will stand at the fork of two roads,” he said. “One road is all too familiar to us. It leads ultimately to higher taxes. It merely brings us full circle back to the source of our economic problems, where the government decides that it knows better than you what should be done with your earnings and, in fact, how you should conduct your life. The other road promises to renew the American spirit. It’s a road of hope and opportunity. It places the direction of your life back in your hands where it belongs.”

America is at that same fork in the road today. Twice in 30 years Republicans have let Democrat promises lead them and the country down a one-way road to bigger and bigger government.

Double shame on us. And if the GOP allows itself to be suckered again, it won’t be just another disaster for conservatism, it’ll be a tragedy for the whole country.

Reaching Out

Michael Reagan — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 14:31:12 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

Forget Republican comebacks in 2014 or 2016.

Unless it gets its head and its heart straight, the party might never win the popular vote or the White House again.

The GOP today is not my father’s party.

David Fitzsimmons / Arizona Daily Star (click to view more cartoons by Fitzsimmons)

And until the hierarchy of the GOP stops talking about how great Ronald Reagan was and starts embracing what he really stood for, the party of conservatism is destined for the ash heap of history.

Ronald Reagan was somebody who believed in inclusion, not exclusion. He found a way to reach out to all voting groups, which is why he was the last Republican presidential candidate to win the Hispanic vote.

The GOP in 2012 reminds me of the state of disarray it was in during the mid-1960s.

It was so bad for Republicans in California then that they held a special convention and invited the state’s Democratic Speaker of the Assembly, Jesse Unruh, to come and tell them what was wrong with them.

Unruh came and was blunt: The GOP had no vision and no message for voters, because they didn’t know who they were or what they stood for.

Those pre-Ronald Reagan Republicans got the message. They left that convention, turned their fortunes around, and ended up with Ronald Reagan in the governor’s chair.

Today’s national GOP needs the same kind of turnaround, and the process starts with fixing the party’s inclusion problem with Hispanic, black and Asian voters.

Last week I spoke to a room of 400 conservatives. The only blacks in the room were serving us breakfast. There were only a couple Hispanics — in Florida.

That’s not inclusive. Republicans have got to find a way to reach out to these communities.

I told those conservatives in Florida a story about a young man who as a child came to the United States illegally with his parents in the early 1980s.

He became an American citizen in 1986 when my father signed into law the Simpson-Mazzoli Act, which granted amnesty to 3 million illegal residents and made them citizens.

When he turned 18, to thank the United Stares for allowing him to become a citizen, he joined the Navy to serve his new country.

When the USS Ronald Reagan was home porting in San Diego, he volunteered to serve on the ship named after the president who allowed him to become a citizen. Now he mentors 275 sailors on that aircraft carrier and is working on his master’s degree.

There are a thousand stories like that that nobody wants to tell when Republicans talk about immigration.

The GOP has got to find a message of inclusion instead of “Get the hell out of my country.” That’s what Hispanics and other immigrants hear from the Republican Party — “Get out.”

We have to attract immigrants to the GOP, not repel them. We have to do it with more than words every two or four years. And we can’t do what Mitt Romney did.

He came to California, held a fundraiser, grabbed his money and left. He did nothing to get out the vote or reach out to the Hispanic community.

Romney wasn’t going to carry California. But we lost three good incumbents in close congressional races in the state on Nov. 6 — Mary Bono Mack, Dan Lundgren and Brian Bilbray.

Why did we lose those seats? Because only 29 percent of registered voters in California are Republican. And why is that? Because the GOP lacks a vision. Because it lacks a message.

If the GOP is to survive and get this country back on track, it has to regain its Reaganesque vision and make its message more caring and welcoming to immigrants.

The Republican Party has to reach out to the Hispanic, black, Asian and other communities and become involved with them — and do it every day from now on.

Until that happens, the GOP is going to have lots more Thanksgivings with less and less to give thanks for.

—–

George W. Bush Was MIA

Michael Reagan — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 14:39:44 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

Democrats have been blaming George W. Bush for the last four years.

Now I think it’s time for Republicans to start blaming George W. for the next four years.

For a week we’ve been pinning last week’s debacle on everything from Mitt Romney’s moderation to low Republican turnout.

Manny Francisco / PoliticalCartoons.com (click to view more cartoons by Francisco)

But the most important Republican who didn’t turn out to support Romney this fall was George W. Bush.

You can make an honest argument that G.W. was as much to blame as anyone else for our being unable to defeat an incompetent incumbent of historic proportions.

For four years Barack Obama has blamed the Great Recession on G.W. and used his presidency as his excuse for why the economy is taking so long to get fixed.

And where’s G.W. been? MIA or AWOL, take your pick.

He didn’t show up at the GOP convention. He didn’t become an enthusiastic surrogate for Romney in a handful of swing states where a few hundred thousand more Republican voters could have changed history. He didn’t stump for senatorial candidates in contested states such as Virginia and Montana.

G.W., the ex-cheerleader, was nowhere to be seen or heard during Romney’s campaign. What’s worse, he didn’t even defend his own economic record. He let the conservatives on talk radio and at Fox News do it.

The trouble is talk radio and Fox only reach about 20 million people during a week — and most of them are already in the conservative Republican choir.

Last I checked, 121 million Americans voted on Election Day. That left us Republicans with 101 million people who still needed to hear our message about who’s really to blame for the broken economy of 2008 to 2012.

We griped and moaned and pointed to Obama, but the mainstream liberal media were too busy protecting their hero to fairly tell our side of the story.

The only way conservatives can get the national news media to deliver our message to the American people is to go over the media’s heads. And the only people who can do that consistently are ex-presidents of the USA.

Bill Clinton became Obama’s best propaganda weapon. When Clinton claimed that no one, not even a super-genius like him, could have solved the economic problem G.W. Bush left Obama within four years, every voter in America heard it.

Even Jimmy Carter was hauled out of mothballs to help the Democrat cause.

The 2012 campaign was all about “the economy, stupid.” Obama blamed G.W. and Republicans. Plus, he had Clinton and Carter bashing G.W.’s record with their bully sticks every day and countering Romney’s arguments that Obama was to blame.

We should have had G.W. standing up and saying, “This is bull. I’m tired of this. This is what I did or did not do with the economy as president. The real culprits are Dodd & Frank and four years of Obama’s failed policies.”

Instead G.W. stayed quiet, even on the issue of Benghazi. Because he refused to show up and defend himself and his record, the Republican Party had to take arrows for him and we lost our second presidential election in a row.

The question I’d like to ask my fellow conservative Republicans is, if G.W. isn’t willing to stand up for his own presidency, why the heck should we?

—–

GOP Turns Sure Victory into Defeat

Michael Reagan — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 08:25:55 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

Wait until next year — 2016, that is.

That’s what disappointed Republican spinners kept saying Tuesday night as they watched Mitt Romney’s hopes crash and burn in swing state after swing state.

Rick McKee / Augusta Chronicle (click to view more cartoons by McKee)

How many times did I hear a Republican talk about how their party’s deep bench of future all-stars will return it to power in Washington in four years?

But all the Ryans, Rubios, Bushes, Haleys and Christies in America can’t put the GOP — or the country — back together again.

The GOP is a wreck — and not just in California, where the party’s registration is now below 30 percent.

Look how easily the Republican Party managed to turn what should have been a sure victory over an incompetent and dangerous incumbent into an embarrassing defeat.

First they tore each other to shreds in a bitter primary, smearing their eventual nominee in debates as a rich, uncaring profiteer who put working people out on the street and shipped their jobs overseas.

Then, while Obama’s ads in the battleground states reinforced the Republican-made caricature of Mitt, the Romney campaign did just about everything wrong.

It squandered the GOP convention and tried to make their candidate into “Mitt the Moderate.” Team Romney also shunned their natural allies in talk radio and didn’t reach out for help from conservatives like me.

I would have been glad to help the Romney campaign in Ohio or Pennsylvania, where I worked for my father in 1980. I offered, but the phone never rang. It didn’t ring for Bill O’Reilly or for the other major radio and TV talk shows, either.

But Team Romney’s biggest mistake was playing prevent defense after his big victory in the first debate. It was a terrible, fatal blunder.

Instead of hammering away at the horror of Obamacare, the cover-up in Benghazi and President Eye-Candy’s four years of failure, Romney ran the last five weeks hoping the clock would run out before Obama could recover.

But you don’t play prevent defense when you are running in second place in Ohio, Virginia, Florida — and Tuesday’s results proved it.

Hurricane Sandy struck Mitt a final blow, giving Obama the chance to look presidential and making Mitt disappear from the media for four days.

But give credit to Obama’s Chicago Gang. They ran a much better campaign — on the ground and in the air. They got out the vote and Obama got out his message of class envy and federal entitlements for all, without any trouble from his toadies in the media.

Now bigger deficits, higher taxes and a stagnant economy lie ahead for as far as the eye can see. And socialized medicine — which my father warned was coming to America 50 years ago — is going to soon become a reality via Obamacare.

Team Romney blew an easy win because it had a poor game plan. But it also lost because the Republican Party is all talk and no guts when it comes to fighting for real conservatism — Ronald Reagan conservatism.

GOP bigwigs constantly praise my father. For years they’ve used him to suck true conservatives into the party, but they’ve never really embraced Reaganism or its ideals.

They didn’t in the 1980s and they still don’t today. They only talk about him. The party bosses don’t really think like him.

Most of those Republican candidates who lost Tuesday played the same game of pretend. “I’m like Ronald Reagan!” “No, I’m like Ronald Reagan!”

But most of them aren’t like my father. They weren’t waving the “bold colors” of real conservatism he talked about in 1975. The banners of the losers — like Mitt’s — were colored in “pale pastels.”

The GOP needs a new playbook. Unless it starts embracing my father’s conservative ideals instead of just paying lip service to them, the so-called “Party of Ronald Reagan” may never win another national election.

—–

A Tale of Two Presidents

Michael Reagan — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 18:06:36 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

This is the story of two very different American presidents and how they each answered their emergency Libyan phone calls.

First, the story of Ronald Reagan. When he got a call about trouble with Libya it was in August of 1981 and I happened to be having dinner with him and Nancy in Los Angeles.

Rick McKee / Augusta Chronicle (click to view more cartoons by McKee)

We had just finished eating and were having coffee when Ed Meese phoned. Meese was my father’s top policy adviser, and there was a serious military crisis brewing in the Mediterranean.

At the time, the United States Navy was conducting war exercises in international waters in the Gulf of Sidra off the Libyan coast.

Since 1973 Moammar Gadhafi had claimed the gulf was part of Libya’s territorial waters and had “drawn a line” in the water that no one could cross.

The United States ignored the claim, which clearly violated international law, and during naval maneuvers in 1973 and again in the fall of 1980 our reconnaissance planes were fired on by Libyan fighter planes.

Jimmy Carter had cancelled American war games in the Gulf of Sidra because he didn’t want to upset Gadhafi. But when my father took office he ordered them to be resumed.

Ed Meese told my father over the phone that Gadhafi was sending out fighters that were locking onto our planes with their radar. There was worry that one of the Libyan jets would fire on one of our airplanes.

Meese asked my father what we should do if our planes were fired upon.

“Ed, fire back,” he said.

“What if they fire at our planes and run?”

“Chase them,” my father said.

“What happens if they fire on our boys and not only fire and run, they fly back into their own airspace?”

“Ed, if they fire on our boys, you chase them all the way back to their hangars if necessary, but you shoot them down.”

“Fine, Mr. President. Should I call you and wake you if necessary?”

“No,” my father said. “Only call me if our boys are shot down.”

The next morning we woke up to find two Libyan Su-22 fighter planes destroyed because a missile had been fired at one of our F-14 Tomcats. Meese never called my father to tell him because our boys were not shot down.

When his emergency phone call came in, Ronald Reagan answered it like a commander in chief.

When President Obama’s call came in telling him our consulate in Benghazi was under attack by terrorists, he put American lives on hold.

He didn’t send in the Marines or scramble jets. He was too busy trying to be eye-candy on “The View” or making his appointment for his fund-raiser in Vegas.

That’s the difference between two presidents — one strong, one weak. One who answered the call, one who did not.

And you can add a third president to this story. As weak as he was, Jimmy Carter at least tried to rescue the hostages in Tehran. Barack Obama did not even try to save our brave men in Benghazi.

I tell that story about how my father dealt with his Libyan crisis to show you the stark difference between him and our sorry excuse for a commander in chief who wants four more years in office.

We all understand that next week’s election will come down to “the economy, stupid” for many people. But we should never forget how a president should answer the call when American lives are on the line.

—–

The Me-Me President

Michael Reagan — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 14:51:19 +0000

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

During Monday night’s debate nearly 60 million of us got a good look at why Barack Obama has not been able to accomplish anything in four years.

It’s his patronizing, me-me personality.

Did you see how condescending he was toward Mitt Romney, not to mention downright rude at times?

Nate Beeler / Columbus Dispatch (click to view more cartoons by Beeler)

Obama’s more-presidential-than-thou attitude, which he did little to hide or dial back at the debate, should have reminded us of what happened in the first two weeks of his administration.

Remember when he met with congressional leaders and said he wanted to come up with a bipartisan solution for the country’s economic mess?

It began with a spirit of compromise and mutual respect. But at one point, when Obama became displeased at the Republicans’ ideas for a recovery plan, he turned to House Minority Whip Eric Cantor and arrogantly said, “Elections have consequences and Eric, I won.”

The president spoke condescendingly to Cantor, and guess what? Nothing got accomplished in Washington. For nearly four years.

But Obama’s arrogant, condescending attitude to those mere mortals who are not rock-star politicians (or “eye-candy” for the women who watch “The View”) didn’t start with his presidency. It’s how he acted when he was a community organizer and it’s how he’s acted at every stage of his political life since then.

He doesn’t look at people and speak with people. He speaks down to people. And when you do that, you rarely succeed in getting anything done in politics or anywhere else.

Even Obama’s friends in Congress won’t cooperate with him. They’re tired of being talked down to, too. Democrats have not given him one positive vote for any budget he has put forward.

Compare Barack Obama to Mitt Romney’s way of working with people. Mitt’s been successful at everything he’s tried. It’s because he speaks with people. He embraces people. He works with people. He doesn’t patronize or speak down to them.

Ronald Reagan, in order to get all the things done in Washington that he did, also knew how to treat people. He embraced people — both his friends and his enemies. He never talked down to anyone in his life.

My father also knew something about sharing credit that our Me-Me President clearly doesn’t understand.

My father had a plaque on his desk that read, “There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he doesn’t mind who gets the credit.”

Ronald Reagan knew that when you’re in Washington everyone wants to take credit for anything and everything that gets done. Not being willing to share the credit is another reason you won’t be able to accomplish anything.

But this president has a real problem with giving credit. If he had a plaque on his desk, it’d read, “The credit begins and stops here — with me.”

Did you hear how many times the president said “I” or “me” during the last debate? Did anyone hear a single “we”?

I don’t know if anyone counted on Monday, but during a 25-minute stump speech in Ohio in July Obama said the “I” word 98 times and the “me” word 19 times. (A few weeks later first lady Michelle’s total was 83 times in 25 minutes, so maybe it runs in the family.)

As long as the president is going to use the words “I” and “me,” “we” are never going to accomplish anything in Washington if he’s in charge.

All I can say, America, is that “I” can’t vote Obama out of office on Nov. 6. But “we” sure can.

Choose Success

Michael Reagan — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 12:04:22 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

Everybody talks about the middle class being hurt in the Obama economy, but it’s really the working poor who are getting crushed.

The president boasts that he and four more years of his trickle-down government policies are going to save the middle class’ bacon, eggs and jobs.

Eric Allie / PoliticalCartoons.com (click to view more cartoons by Allie)

And at the Tuesday night cockfight on Long Island, our presumptive ex-commander in chief accused Mitt Romney of being hypocrite and a liar who wants to help the rich at the expense of the middle class.

The middle class has become an important political football this fall, but no one knows what the middle class actually is.

There’s no official definition based on household income. It ranges between $42,000 and $60,000 a year and it’s different by state.

Earn $45k in Utah or Mississippi and you’re solidly middle class. Earn that much in Manhattan or the Great Train Wreck State of California, where Obama Gas can cost $5 a gallon, and you’re really hurting.

It’s certainly true the middle class has been hurt by the Great Recession. But the biggest losers are the working poor.

When the economy goes south, they are the first to lose their jobs or see their paychecks shrink.

The president doesn’t talk about helping them. But the working poor are people like my daughter, a schoolteacher in Southern California. And Victor, my barber. And Jenny, who does my nails. And the waiter at the local restaurant.

When the middle class feels the pinch, what’s the first thing they do to make ends meet? They drop their hair colorists and gardeners, who often end up becoming part of the 23 million Americans looking for jobs.

President Obama wants to encourage high-skilled immigrants to stay in America. That’s fine. But it’s the low-skilled immigrants and the working poor who I’m worried about.

They’re the ones who do America’s hardest, dirtiest jobs, and it’s their kids who are hoping to join the middle class of tomorrow.

When I was growing up in Los Angeles the low-paid workers of the day were the Japanese, many of whom were gardeners.

But the Japanese worked hard, educated their kids and became one of our most successful ethnic groups, even after the prejudice of World War II. That’s the way it’s always worked in this country — until Barack Obama came along.

The American people have two clear choices three Tuesdays from now. They can choose between a successful businessman and a failed president.

Obama wants to take wealth from the rich and give it to the poor so everyone in America can live on an equal scale.

But Americans have never been economically equal and don’t want to be. The president wants to create something that’s never existed in the history of the world; the economies that tried are on “the ash heap of history.”

Obama’s been a total disaster. The economy is tanking, 23 million are out of work, 47 million are getting food stamps, and he has no clue what to do for the next four years.

And since he can’t defend his own record, all Obama’s been doing is attacking Mitt Romney for his wealth and success.

Mitt has nothing to be ashamed of. In fact, he needs to stop being so shy about his record of success. He needs to do a little bragging to the American people — especially to the poor and working classes.

He needs to say, “When I ran Bain Capital I was asked to come in, save a lot of jobs, and make other people rich. I did a great job at that.

“I was brought in to save the Winter Olympics when it was being destroyed by corruption and financial problems. I succeeded at that.

“Now my job is to bring the American economy back to health and create jobs. I’ll be successful at that, too. And I’ll make it possible for the working poor, the middle class — all of us — to live better.”

Come on, all you undecideds, step up. It’s time to vote for Mitt and put America’s workers back to work.

—–

Romney Can Close the Deal

Michael Reagan — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 07:35:49 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

Those were my cheers you heard coming from the Left Coast last Wednesday night.

I watched the Romney-Obama debate at my home in L.A., where I could hear the gasps and sobs of the creative community get louder and louder as Mitt came out swinging and never let up.

That wasn’t a debate. It was “The Great Debacle” — and everyone who watched it for three minutes knew Kid Romney was winning every round on substance and style.

Rick McKee / Augusta Chronicle (click to view more cartoons by McKee)

I kept waiting for David Axelrod to throw a towel in the ring or referee Jim Lehrer to step in, wave his arms over his head and stop the fight on a technical knockout.

I’ve always said it’d be nice if we could have Newt Gingrich debate President Obama and then get Mitt Romney to run the country. But last week Romney proved to conservatives that he could do both.

Conservatives needed to see that Mitt, unlike John McCain, was going to take the fight to Barack Obama. Mitt didn’t let them down.

Long before the mugging of the president ended, across the twittersphere conservatives were already calling it the best debate performance by Republican since Ronald Reagan whipped Jimmy Carter in 1980.

But that was a no-brainer. I tweeted that it was the GOP’s best debate since Lincoln whipped Douglas.

I did that because I wanted to give Mitt his own moment of triumph, not to have to share it with Ronald Reagan.

Mitt’s performance reminded me of the time my father went to audition for a broadcasting job at radio station WOC in Quad Cities, Ill. The station owner told my father to go into a sound booth and recreate a football game.

Luckily, my father had done the play-by-play for a Eureka College game the week before. He recreated that game colorfully, using the players’ names and describing the crowd reactions.

After five minutes, the station owner came in and stopped my father, slapping him on the back and saying, “You done good, you son of a bitch.” My dad got the job and the rest was history.

Well, last week I wanted to say to Mitt, “You done good” — without adding the last part.

After the debate I had people call me and ask if there had been a Ronald Reagan moment.

“No,” I said. “The reality is, the whole debate was Romneyesque. Let Mitt stand alone. He took it to the president from the opening statement to the closing statement. He didn’t have just one moment in time, he had many moments in time.”

Conservatives for the first time are now able to feel comfortable supporting Mitt. The polls taken by Rasmussen and Pew in the last week showing significant gains by Romney in swing states and elsewhere are proof of that.

We’re seeing the solidifying of conservatives and some movement by independents. But in order to keep the independents and Reagan Democrats on board, Mitt has to double down and outbox Obama in the next two debates.

It will be tough. You can count on President Obama being better in the second debate. He won’t be sullen and playing rope-a-dope like Muhammad Ali, he’ll be throwing left hooks and rabbit punches.

But I think Mitt can rise to the challenge and improve in the next debate too. People have to understand, Mitt is no featherweight.

You do not get to the top in the business world and run companies like Bain Capital if you are a pushover or an idiot.

You have to know how to fight for what you want but also know how to negotiate. You have to know how to close the deal. Mitt closed the deal when he saved the Winter Olympics.

Now he needs to close the deal on winning the presidency so he can save the United States of America from four more years of Obama.

The First Debate

Michael Reagan — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 12:46:59 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

As I write this column, I’m waiting impatiently for the first debate between Mitt Romney and President Obama.

More than 50 million Americans were expected to watch the debate in Denver on Wednesday night, and you have probably seen it by the time you read this.

Rick McKee / Augusta Chronicle (click to view more cartoons by McKee)

I don’t know how it turned out, though The New York Times headline on Thursday probably read something like “St. Barack Slays Rich, Out-of-Touch Mormon Profiteer.”

But it’s not too important that the mainstream liberal media have tried to pre-ordain their guy as the winner. And what Romney specifically said or didn’t say on any given subject won’t matter that much either.

It was much more important that Mitt looked and acted presidential and showed us that he can be the leader we need to replace the incompetent we have in the Oval Office.

I expected Romney to do that in Denver, and pray that he did. I hope also that he came out swinging and never let up. I hope he went on the offensive. Because it’s not his economic policies that are destroying America. It’s Barack Obama’s.

In 1980 Ronald Reagan had a similar challenge when he set out to unseat an incompetent incumbent. My father proved during his first debate with Jimmy Carter that he was capable of leading the country out of the foreign and domestic wasteland Carter had created.

And then, at the end of the second debate, just a week before Election Day, my father may have won his ticket to the White House when he urged Americans to ask themselves a simple question before they voted:

“Are you better off than you were four years ago?”

My father went on to ask a series of questions:

“Is it easier for you to go and buy things in the stores than it was four years ago? Is there more or less unemployment in the country than there was four years ago? Is America as respected throughout the world as it was? Do you feel that our security is as safe, that we’re as strong as we were four years ago?”

Mitt Romney could ask the American people the same questions today.

“Are you safer than you were four years ago? Do you feel safer about your job? Safer about your mortgage? Safer about the economy? Safer about your retirement or health care?

“And based on what we’ve just witnessed in the Middle East, where one of our ambassadors was killed by terrorists and Obama’s foreign policies continue to fail, do you feel safer today against international terrorism?”

The honest answer to all of the above would be “No.”

America, it’s time to wake up. It’s time to get a new leader. Four more years of Barack Obama’s failures will not make us or our country better off or safer, no matter what first lady Michelle Obama thinks.

The other day in Ohio she was telling a crowd of Democrats that they have to fight to keep the country going in the direction it’s going.

“Are you with me?” she asked her husband’s mindless idolaters.

Was she kidding? Why in the world would you fight to keep the country going in the direction we are going when the direction we are going is downhill?

We can’t afford to wait another four years and hope that things get better. As I said last week, it’s time to get mad.

It’s time to move forward and upward — not backward. America needs to come together Nov. 6 and make the right choice — for our own good and the good of the world.

Time to Get Mad

Michael Reagan — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 13:08:09 +0000

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

Why aren’t you mad as hell yet, America?

What will it take?

At home, unemployment is stuck above 8 percent. Twenty-three million are out of work. Millions of others have given up looking for jobs.

One American in six is on food stamps. Small businesses are terrified of Obamacare.

Nate Beeler / Columbus Dispatch (click to view more cartoons by Beeler)

The economy ran out of gas four years ago and the president still thinks the only way to get it going again is to fill up the tank with trillions of dollars of debt and make successful people pay for the tow truck.

Overseas, we have a dead ambassador and three other dead Americans in Libya. Dozens of our embassies are being threatened by mobs.

Iran is building a nuke. Syria is mired in a bloody civil war. Egypt’s new democracy is turning against us. And our Middle East policy — if that’s what it can be called — is based on apologies and weakness.

Meanwhile, what does President “Eye Candy” do this week? He goes before the United Nations and can’t bring himself to even mention the words “Islamic extremists.” He’s still blaming the attack on our Libyan embassy on a stupid film.

As the Middle East burns, Obama says he didn’t have time to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu or other world leaders in New York City. Yet he had plenty of time to do the Letterman show and drop in to see Whoopi and the gals at “The View.”

How much worse does it have to get before a majority of the American people wake up, throw open their windows and scream, “We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take this crap anymore?”

In the movie “Network,” news anchor Howard Beale said people first had to get mad before things would change.

So let’s get mad, America, and change presidents. There are fewer than 1,000 hours between now and the election that can save us from four more years of Obamamisery.

Mitt Romney is the change we need — and the only chance we have. But in their perverse way of thinking, the Obama Gang wants the American people to believe Romney is a bad guy for creating wealth and being a successful businessman.

Americans are supposed to be angry with Romney for paying “only” 14 percent in taxes or reducing his federal tax bite by giving $4 million to charity in 2011.

But there’s no reason for the American people to be mad at Mitt. He’s a good guy, a great American, and he’s eminently qualified to repair the damage Obama has done to the country.

But if Mitt’s going to win, he’s got to have a Ronald Reagan moment.

My father turned his fortunes around in the 1980 New Hampshire primary after the moderator of a scheduled debate in Nashua ordered his microphone to be turned off.

My father’s angry response — “I’m paying for this microphone, Mr. Green” — became a symbolic act that established his image, showed his strong character and led to a landslide win that knocked George H.W. Bush out of the presidential race.

Mitt Romney needs to have his own “Nashua Moment” — and have it soon. A perfect time for it to happen would be next week (Wednesday, Oct. 3) in front of 50 or 60 million people during the first presidential debate.

Mitt needs to show us how angry he is at what Obama has done to America. He needs to show us he’s as “mad as hell” and can’t take it for another four years.

Come on, Mitt — get as mad as the rest of us.

—–

The Blamer in Chief

Michael Reagan — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 07:30:29 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

Barack Obama has become America’s blamer in chief.

He and his administration spent last weekend blaming the explosion of violence against America in the Middle East on a moronic anti-Muhammad video that’s been on YouTube for months.

His United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice made the rounds of the Sunday morning news shows, where she made an absolute idiot of herself.

Eric Allie / PoliticalCartoons.com (click to view more cartoons by Allie)

Apparently auditioning for the secretary of state job in — God forbid — a second Obama administration, Rice insisted that the “spontaneous” Islamic rage that killed our ambassador in Libya and three other Americans was caused not by the failures of her boss but by an amateur movie made by some nut in California.

This tragic episode once again proves that the incompetence of this president is not limited to the home front, where the economy stagnates and deficits and gas prices soar.

In the Middle East, Obama and his Chicago Gang have confused our friends and emboldened our enemies with a foreign policy that has been a mix of ineptness, appeasement and naivete.

Remember when Obama boasted in Cairo that the Muslim world was going to fall in love with the USA because it had just elected a president who had generations of Muslims in his ancestry?

Boy, the Muslims in Libya and Egypt sure have a strange way of showing their love for America.

Obama’s cowering reaction to the Middle East crisis — and his refusal to man-up and act like the president of the United States — begs the question: “What would Ronald Reagan do?”

My dad knew how good the nuts in California were at making bad movies. But he certainly would never have blamed a motion picture or a trailer on YouTube for what’s going on in the Middle East.

When the Marine barracks were blown up in Lebanon in 1983, Ronald Reagan didn’t blame it on anyone else.

He accepted responsibility for the Marines dying. But he also used the event to come on TV and talk to the American people and explain why it was so important for us to be in the Middle East.

What did this president do when our invaluable Libyan ambassador Chris Stevens was assassinated in a well-planned attack by Muslim extremists? He went to Vegas for a fundraiser event and made another political speech.

Being president of the United States is not about being a good guy to play hoops with, or to have a cold beer with — it’s about being able to take a position of leadership when trouble comes.

It means standing up for American values like freedom of speech, not apologizing for them. And it means standing up for our policies in the Middle East, not throwing them overboard whenever they are challenged.

President Obama is a glaring sign of the absolute weakening of America. You might call what he has been doing “The Wussification of the White House.”

But blaming what happened in Libya and Egypt on a YouTube trailer is not just cowardly, it’s absurd. Next week Obama will be blaming the 1992 Disney movie “Aladdin” for inciting Muslim mobs to burn down KFC stores or kill Americans.

Mr. President, when trouble came our way my father manned up. It’s time for you to do the same. “Let’s roll.”

—–

Chevy Volt : Solyndra on Wheels

Michael Reagan — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 13:37:27 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

“I absolutely love my Chevy Volt.”

That’s what the smug guy in the TV commercial says when he’s praising the virtues of his plug-in hybrid and boasting that he hasn’t seen a gas pump in months.

You might love your Chevy Volt, too — if you could afford to buy one.

Mike Keefe / PoliticalCartoons.com (click to view more cartoons by Keefe)

The GM Volt, aka the Green Edsel, is not just an overly engineered, overly expensive, overweight and impractical car than runs on electricity and gasoline.

It’s a Solyndra on Wheels. The Volt only exists because it’s been so heavily discounted by GM and subsidized by the federal government.

So far the Volt has cost Government Motors about twice as much per car to develop and make than its sticker price, which is $40,000. On top of that savings, the consumer gets a $7,500 federal tax credit for being so green — or maybe so naive.

Yet the Volt’s ultimate price — $32,500 for what is essentially an electrified and souped-up $17,000 Chevy Cruze — is still so high that only those in the top 7 percent of all income earners will buy it.

The average per capita income of Volt buyers is $172,000 — the income bracket that usually drives a BMW or a Mercedes.

In other words, the average American — who makes less than $40,000 a year — is subsidizing a bunch of rich people so they can hug themselves for saving the planet (by buying a car that runs for about 35 miles on electricity generated by coal-fired power plants before Exxon premium gas has to take over).

Despite these subsidies and low-cost lease deals, Volt sales so far in 2012 are 13,500, far below the 45,000 cars GM hoped to sell this year in America alone.

Experts say GM will have to sell about 120,000 Volts in five years to begin covering its development costs. Good luck, GM. I don’t think there are that many celebrities in Hollywood who need a third car.

After Romney replaces Obama this fall, let’s hope he’ll pull the government plug on the Volt and concentrate on making us energy independent.

Killing the Volt and any other electric-car boondoggles would be a good thing, and not just because it’d save money the federal government doesn’t have. The popularity of electric-propelled cars that raise miles-per-gallon averages has given some of our more “progressive” governments some dangerous ideas.

State and local governments worry that if gasoline sales decline they’ll be deprived of billions of dollars in revenue from gas taxes that now are used to maintain roads or subsidize mass transit.

To make up for lost revenues from hybrids and electric cars in the future, Oregon and San Francisco already have been looking into the idea of charging drivers a tax per each mile driven.

Cars would be fitted with GPS navigation systems that track how far they drive. Then drivers would be billed accordingly — about a penny a mile, depending on where and when you rack up the mileage.

Needless to say, this Orwellian idea came from Europe, and the Obama administration has been exploring it too.

So let’s see what’s going on here. The government greenies want you to pay extra to drive an electric car that’s more fuel efficient, then they charge you for the miles you drive anyway?

What red-blooded, road-loving American driver wants a government GPS implanted in his car with some bureaucrat looking at it to see how many miles he’s driving?

Not me. I own a Ford Expedition. I get 12.5 miles per gallon. I love it. When it gets too old, I’ll buy a new one.

The government is going to get us one way or the other. I say, go out and buy the biggest damn SUV you want. Enjoy your life. Light a cigar. Step on the gas. And don’t waste a watt on a Volt.

—–

Four More Years of Failure?

Michael Reagan — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 13:13:59 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

It’s not Obama vs. Romney in 2012.

It’s really Obama vs. Obama.

The president has to run against himself. His own record on the economy has been so pitiful he can’t defend it or run on it. He has to run away from it.

Instead of comparing his performance as president to what Romney-Ryan might do, Obama has to pretend like it’s been someone else who’s been mismanaging the economic recovery for the last 3 1/2 years.

Nate Beeler / Columbus Dispatch (click to view more cartoons by Beeler)

He has to pretend that it’s not his policies that have kept unemployment above 8 percent for 43 straight months and racked up too many trillions of new debt to count.

And this week, when the incompetent-in-chief was asked to give himself a grade for his own performance, his answer was not an “F” or “F-minus.” It was “incomplete.”

President Obama said he needed more time. For what?

To hope that Obamanomics can work, if we just wait until the USA becomes Greece or California?

To prove that obscene deficits, wasteful government spending, overregulation and higher taxes on the successful can put the greatest economy in the history of the world in a coma for another four years?

Compare what Obama is doing in this election to what Ronald Reagan did when he ran for re-election in 1984 against Walter Mondale.

My father didn’t have to hide from his own record, he ran on it. Proudly. Unlike Obama, he was able to show that his economic policies had pulled the wrecked Jimmy Carter economy out of the ditch and turned it around.

Ronald Reagan could point to real progress — real hope and change. He had cut the unemployment rate from double digits to 7.2 percent, adding almost 8 million jobs. The inflation rate had dropped from 10.3 percent to 3.3 percent. Interest rates were on their way down from 20 percent. Gasoline prices were not going up, but down.

By 1983, the country was already clearly headed down the road to recovery, fueled by lower tax rates, simpler tax codes, less regulation and tighter monetary policy.

Reaganomics — which got government out of the way of the private sector — was working. The severe recession of ’82 — when unemployment hit 10.8 percent, still the highest since the Great Depression, was shrinking in the rear-view mirror.

When my father’s re-election campaign ran that famous optimistic ad that said, “It’s morning again in America,” people believed it. It was already coming true. That’s why he was re-elected in a landslide.

After 44 months in office, Obama is still trying to blame George W. Bush for the problems he inherited and hasn’t been able to solve.

My father didn’t spend his first three years whining about the mess Jimmy Carter left him. He rolled up his sleeves and went to work. He didn’t roll up his sleeves and put on a golf glove or practice his bowling skills.

Being president of the United States in a time of economic crisis means you don’t get to play golf more than 100 times. Being president means you have to go to work to fix the economy, not destroy it further.

Obama is a true disaster — a failure, a flop. Saying his grade is “incomplete” implies that he’s got a good plan for the economy, but that he just needs four more years to put the finishing touches on it.

He doesn’t. He has no plan but the same old economic plan — the one that hasn’t worked and never will.

Obama won’t change. And unless the American people follow Clint Eastwood’s advice and “let him go,” we may have no hope.

In the fall we’ll have a clear choice. Do we want to rehire an ex-community organizer with a record of failure? Or do we hire a businessman with a record of success? It’s a question we shouldn’t even have to ask.

—–

Let’s Agree to Win

Michael Reagan — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 05:42:18 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

We can win in November with ease.

All Mitt Romney and Republicans need to do is follow the GOP’s script from the historic midterm elections of 2010.

Eric Allie / PoliticalCartoons.com (click to view more cartoons by Allie)

In case you’ve forgotten, 2010 wasn’t just a Republican wave. It was a tsunami. The GOP gained 63 seats in the House and six in the Senate, plus they picked up five governorships and a record 680 seats in state legislatures.

Republicans won in every corner of America for one important reason — the election was about the economy, not social issues.

Independents and Democrats swung to the GOP because they had lost their jobs, lost their houses and had already lost hope in President Obama’s ability to fix anything bigger than a parking ticket in Chicago.

The tea party deserves most of the credit for the conservative counterrevolution of 2010. It was their principles, passion and energy that rejuvenated the Republican Party, dethroned so many Democrats and scared the liberal media.

But it may surprise you that it was the tea party’s use of Reaganesque campaign tactics that made so many Republican wins possible.

Despite its reputation, the tea party is not as ideologically stubborn or politically suicidal as the mainstream media like to think and pray it is. It knows that what unites Americans is the economy and what divides us are issues such as abortion.

Two years ago, the tea party realized that stressing economic issues was the key to uniting Republicans and attracting independent voters.

It also knew it was important for Republicans to downplay divisive social issues like abortion, gay marriage and contraception. (Everyone knows where the party stands on those issues. It’s time to win the General Election the primaries are over.)

For example, I give a lot of speeches around the country on behalf of the tea party. One of the unwritten directives from the tea party’s bosses to me and other speakers is this line: “Please don’t talk about social issues.”

That’s smart politics. We were speaking to fiscal conservatives, social conservatives, libertarian conservatives. When we spoke, we spoke only about things that brought everyone in the room together — and that was the economy.

That’s the way my father Ronald Reagan thought. He always looked for areas of agreement. He’d ask, “Where do we agree? How can I bring people together in that agreement and move the ball forward? Let’s not try to find the areas where we disagree.”

We can’t risk getting ourselves tied up in debates over social issues. Look at what happened when one obscure congressman from Missouri said something insensitive and stupid about rape or pregnancy.

The Democrats and their soul mates in the liberal media feasted on it and the Romney campaign had to spend a week denouncing Todd Akin instead of Obama’s failed economic policies. That’s exactly what Democrats and Obama want Republicans to talk about — social issues.

I am pro-life. But when the GOP insists on putting a hard-line position on abortion into its party platform, all it does is force Republicans to spend time in the media defending the platform instead of debating the economy.

If we wanted to be truly Reaganesque this year, we should have used the wording that prefaced the abortion plank in 1980. It recognized that the Republican Party was a big tent, saying that “we recognize differing views on this question among Americans in general — and in our own party.”

The 2012 platform’s abortion plank brooks no dissent and leaves no room in the tent for pro-choice Republicans like Condoleezza Rice. It takes the position that “the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed.”

We should let the Catholic Church debate the social issues while Republicans concentrate on debating the economy and jobs. Because that’s where we all agree — and that’s where we win.

—–

Paul Ryan: A Bold Smart Choice

Michael Reagan — Thu, 16 Aug 2012 07:30:05 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

Choosing Paul Ryan is a game-changer.

Ask the Chicago Gang and its publicists in the mainstream media. They’re terrified.

They know that when Mitt Romney chose Ryan for his vice president, it re-defined the Romney campaign overnight.

Rick McKee / Augusta Chronicle (click to view more cartoons by McKee)

It proved Mitt was not as boring, cautious and moderate as conservative Republicans feared and the Obama Left hoped.

In one bold, smart move, Romney’s VP choice makes it clear that this election is about one thing — the economy.

And there is no better person on the planet to discuss that issue than Ryan, the young, articulate, spirited, openly Reaganesque conservative who heads up the House Budget Committee and is the leading Republican deficit hawk in Congress.

With Ryan as his VP choice, Romney also took a huge step in redefining what the Republican Party is and reminding everyone what it’s supposed to stand for.

For decades Reagan conservatives have been wondering what has happened to the GOP my father loved. He worked hard to shape it into a party that clearly and proudly stood for smaller government, more freedom, free enterprise and a strong military.

But for two decades Republican politicians have been trying to out-Democrat the Democrats. The GOP my father left behind lost its way, lost its nerve and chose to betray many of its core principles to win elections.

By choosing Ryan, Romney has ended the era of Republicrat fuzziness overnight. It makes me think Mitt and his advisers have decided that the way to defeat Obama was to heed the advice my father gave to the GOP in 1975 at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

Republicans, disheartened by the post-Watergate thrashing they got at the polls in 1974, were being urged by moderates to water down (i.e., liberal-up) their party’s principles to broaden its appeal to voters.

My father told them not to further “blur” the distinctions between the two parties but to “revitalize” the GOP by reasserting its conservative principles and raising them “to full view.”

He challenged Republicans to raise “a banner of no pale pastels, but bold colors which make it unmistakably clear” that their party believed in “a free market as the greatest provider for the people,” not socialism.

The conservative conventioneers took my father’s wise message to heart, but the nation’s voters didn’t. Jimmy Carter was elected in 1976 and the country got four years of economic malaise and folly in the Middle East that did not end until my father was elected in 1980 — as an unabashed conservative.

America today is truly at a crossroads. This election is going to decide the direction we take for the next 50 years. For the first time in a while, the American people will have a clear choice.

Do you want the USA to go down the Obama Expressway to Greece or, God forbid, California? Or do you want to go down the Romney-Ryan-Reagan Freeway to freedom, growth and prosperity for all people?

It’s up to the American people to decide where they want to go. It’s up to Romney and Ryan — R & R, two letters that look pretty good together, I’d say — to sell their message of conservatism.

Americans can’t afford to wait for someone to come along four years from now and fix the damage Obama has already done.

—–

Copyright ©2012 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “The New Reagan Revolution” (St. Martin’s Press). He is the founder and chairman of The Reagan Group and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.michaelereagan.com and www.reagan.com. Send comments to Reagan@caglecartoons.com. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Cari Dawson Bartley at cari@cagle.com or call 800-696-7561.

God Save Us from King Obama

Michael Reagan — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 07:35:29 +0000

Making Sense, By Michael Reagan

It’s taken more than 200 years, two world wars, an industrial revolution, and the dawn of the Internet, but the United States once again finds itself at the mercy of an intolerant king.

Instead of a tax on tea, King Barack Obama and his Democrat Knights of the Fast Food Table seem intent on imposing a penalty on chicken — but not all chicken.

Rick McKee / Augusta Chronicle (click to view more cartoons by McKee)

They are only targeting poultry prepared by Chick-fil-A.

And it’s not because King Obama has decreed that Chick-fil-A makes a product that is any way unsuitable for the American people. It’s because Chick-fil-A President Dan Cathy had the audacity to make comments supporting families and the “biblical definition of the family unit” — comments that apparently conflict with the king’s recent pronouncement on gay marriage, even though a careful review of Cathy’s comments will show that he said nothing about gay marriage; the inference seems to have been started by liberal reporters and headline writers trying to stir the pot.

Nonetheless, Cathy’s comments have infuriated the petulant king and his court, so much so that King Obama’s mayors in Boston and Chicago issued proclamations of their own aimed at stopping further expansion of Chick-fil-A restaurants in their cities.

This is nothing short of outrageous behavior by a king who is obviously out of touch with the rest of us.

King Obama’s rule is so egregious, in fact, that the traditionally left ACLU has weighed in on the side of Chick-fil-A. A senior attorney for the ACLU of Illinois reportedly told an interviewer that any government that can exclude a business for being against same-sex marriage can also exclude a business for being in support of same-sex marriage.

It shows you how far to the left that the Democrat Party has gotten when the ACLU can’t support its positions.

Unfortunately, the king’s bad behavior doesn’t stop with the food we eat. Part of King Obama’s health care law also took effect recently. It will essentially force most employer-based insurance systems to provide free contraceptive services, including the morning-after pill.

The implementation of the health care mandate comes less than a week after a federal judge in Colorado temporarily blocked the government from enforcing its contraception requirement on Denver-based Hercules Industries, a private manufacturer of heating, ventilation, and air conditioning equipment, which happens to be run by a Catholic family.

This is a case where King Obama’s Justice Department offered the head of Hercules a choice: Either give your employees free contraception or surrender your company to the crown.

Put another way: Give up your company or give up your religion.

Not only is my father probably rolling over in his grave right now, but I would be so bold to say that FDR and John F. Kennedy are too.

We have a president who thinks he’s a king. And America cannot afford four more years of a king who can so cavalierly discard the U.S. Constitution when it doesn’t suit his political agenda.

I find it somewhat ironic that while the Justice Department is asking people to surrender their religion and their companies, some wealthy Democrats are giving up their passports to escape the tyranny of King Obama.

—–

Copyright ©2012 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “The New Reagan Revolution” (St. Martin’s Press). He is the founder and chairman of The Reagan Group and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his website at www.reagan.com. Send comments to Reagan@caglecartoons.com. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Cari Dawson Bartley at cari@cagle.com or call 800-696-7561.

Want Hope? Make a Change

Michael Reagan — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 12:36:33 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

President Obama was supposed to be all about hope and change.

But after almost four years he’s squeezed the hope out of most of us.

A new Rasmussen poll is the latest proof that the only hope of getting out of our economic ditch is to fire the hopeless guy in the White House who keeps digging it deeper.

Rick McKee / Augusta Chronicle (click to view more cartoons by McKee)

Since early 2009 Rasmussen has been asking two questions that serve as a good barometer of what people think about both our present and our future.

The first question is: “Will today’s children be better off than their parents?”

The answers from late July are as depressing as the latest GDP numbers. Only 14 percent of adults told Rasmussen they expect today’s children to be better off than their parents. Meanwhile, 65 percent said they think our children will be worse off.

In 2009 those numbers already were nothing to brag about — 27 percent and 47 percent. But the trend under Obama is clear and grim. The only bright spot is that the poll numbers are so bad they can’t get much worse.

The other question Rasmussen asked is: “Is it still possible for just about anyone in America to work hard and get rich?”

Amazingly, given the Obama administration’s relentless propaganda assault on the rich and successful, 28 percent of Americans told Rasmussen they still believe it can be done.

Working hard and creating wealth by providing things or services people want or need is as American as Steve Jobs, Bruce Springsteen and Mitt Romney.

Millions have done it. It’s part of the American Dream. It’s something the president should be publicly encouraging and cheering, not punishing and scolding or demeaning.

Unlike Barack Obama, my father knew this. Speaking to the 1984 Republican National Convention, Ronald Reagan said that what had made America the greatest country in the world was still true:

“The poet called Miss Liberty’s torch the ‘lamp beside the golden door.’ Well, that was the entrance to America, and it still is. And now you really know why we’re here tonight.

“The glistening hope of that lamp is still ours. Every promise, every opportunity is still golden in this land. And through that golden door our children can walk into tomorrow with the knowledge that no one can be denied the promise that is America.

“Her heart is full; her door is still golden, her future bright. She has arms big enough to comfort and strong enough to support, for the strength in her arms is the strength of her people. She will carry on in the ’80s unafraid, unashamed, and unsurpassed.

“In this springtime of hope, some lights seem eternal; America’s is.”

My father did his best to make sure that America’s lamp of hope and promise burned brightly. He knew America’s strength was in its founding principles and its people, not its government.

He knew if he kept taxes low, regulations rare and America strong, the future would be even brighter for future generations.

Four years ago no one expected Barack Obama — a community organizer with no understanding or appreciation of what it takes to succeed in the private sector — to think or act like Ronald Reagan.

But it’s too bad for the country that Mr. Obama didn’t behave more like one of his favorite rich men, John F. Kennedy. Kennedy, for all his faults, knew that the best way to assure a better future for our children was by lowering taxes, making the country strong and believing in the greatness and goodness of America.

Hope and change had little to do with it.

—–

Copyright ©2012 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “The New Reagan Revolution” (St. Martin’s Press). He is the founder and chairman of The Reagan Group and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his website at www.reagan.com. Send comments to Reagan@caglecartoons.com. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Cari Dawson Bartley at cari@cagle.com or call 800-696-7561.

Don’t Eat Campaign Dirt

Michael Reagan — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 07:40:43 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

Dirty political campaigns are as old as the Founding Fathers.

Thomas Jefferson and John Adams are said to have thrown the first mud at each other in the presidential election of 1800.

Jefferson accused his old pal — who was then president — of being a fool, a hypocrite, a criminal and a tyrant.

Rick McKee / Augusta Chronicle (click to view more cartoons by McKee)

Adams returned fire, calling his vice president and challenger Jefferson “a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father.”

I don’t know what the average citizen of 1800 thought about those lies and name-calling, which have been an ugly fixture of our politics ever since.

But I do remember how California voters and the media reacted to a dirty TV ad that Pat Brown ran against my father in 1966, when Brown was running for an unprecedented third term as governor.

I don’t recall the exact words, but the ad featured Gov. Brown talking to a black child in his early teens. Brown tells the kid he’s running for governor and the kid asks whom he’s running against.

“I’m glad you asked,” Gov. Jerry Brown’s father replied, “I’m running against an actor. And did you know it was an actor that shot Abraham Lincoln?”

Few people actually saw the ad, because it only ran for a brief time on a small station in Northern California. But the news media got hold of it and, though it’s hard to believe today, they were appalled that Gov. Brown would stoop so low in a campaign ad.

The voting public was equally appalled, which is equally hard to believe today. Within 72 hours Ronald Reagan went from being behind in the polls to being ahead. He won 57 percent of the vote and the rest is world history.

The scary thing is, President Obama or Mitt Romney or one of their political action committees could run a sleazy ad like Pat Brown’s today and the media wouldn’t criticize it, they would defend it.

“Well, it’s true he was an actor,” the media would rationalize. “John Wilkes Booth was an actor, too. What are you bitching about?” Voters would accept the ad, too.

That’s how much we’ve changed in less than 50 years. The slime-ball politics that used to appall everyone in the 1960s is the norm today.

We accept the negative ads, name-calling and lies as part of the way the political game is played, then we sit back and gripe about how our politics have gone into the dumpster.

But we can’t have it both ways. It’s like going to the Indianapolis 500 hoping to see the accidents — and then complaining about the accidents. It’s like going to a cage fight — and complaining about the violence.

Today we no longer have political ads that tell the truth about a candidate or the issues. We have negative ads that spin, distort and take words out of context.

We can complain about the news media. But Fox News, MSNBC, what’s left of CNN and the others feast on dirty politics. They don’t want their banquet to end.

It’s up to us the public to clean things up. But first we have to change. The politicians are giving us exactly what we want.

If we really want more truth in politics, if we really want less negativity and fewer lies, we have to make it clear to the politicians that we no longer want to watch their grubby cage fight.

Until we do, we’ll be fed the same old dirt.

—–

Copyright ©2012 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “The New Reagan Revolution” (St. Martin’s Press). He is the founder and chairman of The Reagan Group and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his website at www.reagan.com. Send comments to Reagan@caglecartoons.com. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Cari Dawson Bartley at cari@cagle.com or call 800-696-7561.

Class Warfare: There You Go Again

Michael Reagan — Thu, 12 Jul 2012 13:35:05 +0000

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

There you go again, Mr. Obama — again and again and again, engaging in class warfare.

Trying to make voters think Mitt Romney cares more about the offshore bank accounts of the wealthy than the pocketbooks of the middle class.

Proving for the umpteenth time that you know nothing about economics, how wealth and jobs are created or why businesses and rich people are moving themselves or their money overseas to escape the taxes you think aren’t high enough.

Rick McKee / Augusta Chronicle (click to view more cartoons by McKee)

“There you go again, Mr. Obama.”

That’s what my father would have said to the president’s latest dumb idea to punish rich and successful Americans by raising their taxes.

President Obama challenged Mitt Romney this week to join him in asking Congress to extend the Bush tax cuts only for households earning less than $250,000.

Everyone above that figure — about 2 percent of Americans — would lose the Bush tax cuts, which covered all taxpayers and expire at the end of the year.

President Obama, I feel your pain. You were in way over your head when you essentially became the CEO of the largest economy in the world.

You had less business experience than a seven-year-old girl running a front-yard lemonade stand. But by now I thought you would have learned that it is high corporate tax rates, over-regulation and finance laws like the Dodd-Frank Act that are chasing industry and jobs and capital out of the country.

Apparently not. You and your fellow taxoholics in Washington still don’t understand how much damage you’re doing.

It’s gotten so bad that one of your party’s biggest campaign contributors, socialite and ex-songwriter Denise Rich, renounced her citizenship last year in part because Austria’s tax policies will let her keep more of her wealth.

Rich, in case you’ve forgotten, Mr. President, is the ex-wife of Marc Rich, the zillionaire Wall Street trader and tax evader who received a controversial pardon from Bill Clinton.

She’s been living large in a $65 million Manhattan penthouse, but she’s what you’d call “a good rich person,” Mr. President. Like George Clooney, Bill Maher, George Soros, the Kennedys and others, she’s a Democrat.

Unfortunately, Mr. President, Denise Rich is not alone. According to your friends at the IRS, nearly 1,800 American citizens and green card holders officially severed ties with the United States in 2011.

That includes Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, who decided that when he became a Facebook billionaire he’d rather be a resident of Singapore.

The weather down there is a little sticky, and the laws against the import and sale of chewing gum are a little severe, but Singapore just happens to have no capital gains tax.

Mr. President, I realize all those people didn’t renounce their citizenship for tax reasons. But you should be embracing policies that will encourage rich and successful folks like your celebrity friends in Hollywood to keep their multimillions working here at home to grow our economy.

My father only had an economics degree from little Eureka College, but he knew government doesn’t create wealth or prosperity by raising taxes, over-regulating the economy or punishing success.

Mitt Romney already knows those principles. He got very rich — in the private sector — because he’s really smart about financial matters, which, with all due respect, Mr. President, is something you have spent more than three years proving you are really dumb about.

Yes, Mr. President, Mitt Romney is a very successful businessman. You can beat him up for that. But I’m hoping and praying that this fall the American people will give him a chance to clean up the mess you’ve made.

—–

Copyright 2012 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “The New Reagan Revolution” (St. Martin’s Press). He is the founder and chairman of The Reagan Group and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his website at www.reagan.com. Send comments to Reagan@caglecartoons.com. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Cari Dawson Bartley at cari@cagle.com or call 800-696-7561.

Where Will Washington Stop?

Michael Reagan — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 15:58:25 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

When Chief Justice John Roberts upheld the constitutionality of Obamacare, he didn’t just betray conservatives.

His twisted legal logic also betrayed the American people by opening the door to the largest expansion of federal power since Social Security was enacted.

Roberts and his new liberal soul-mates decided it’s OK for the federal government to tax us if we don’t do what Washington’s bullies and nannies want us to do — or think is good for us.

Eric Allie / Cagle Cartoons (click to view more cartoons by Allie)

Lord knows, the feds have already taxed us to death — and after death, too — on everything from capital gains to booze. If they can “penalize” us for not buying health care insurance, what’s next?

Tax us if we don’t buy a smaller house? If we don’t buy an electric car? How about if we don’t buy exercise equipment? Or eat broccoli? Or wear Earth Shoes or condoms? There’ll be no end to it.

The principle of limited government — now there’s a quaint 18th-century idea — in Washington has been passe since Calvin Coolidge left town. But as my libertarian friend, Judge Andrew Napolitano of Fox News said this week, the Obamacare decision has created a new opportunity for unlimited government.

You don’t have to be a constitutional scholar like the judge to know that the Supreme Court has set a horrible precedent. But that judicial train wreck has left Union Station. It’s time to stop whining and get to work.

The only way we can derail Obamacare and the Even Bigger Government Express is by firing the engineer in chief and electing a Congress that will legislatively undo the damage the Supreme Court has done to individual liberty.

It won’t be easy. But the Fourth of July holiday is the perfect time for voters to start another revolution to win back the freedoms our Founding Fathers fought for 236 years ago.

They risked their lives and fortunes to secure liberty for the individual and put government in its place. They knew the only way people can be free is when their government is kept small, weak and fragmented. And when it takes orders from the people instead of the other way around.

We hear precious little praise for the principle of limited government in 2012 America. I’m sorry to say that the last president who had a deep understanding of the proper relationship between government and a free people was my father, Ronald Reagan.

He knew the spirit of freedom had to be kept alive by the people. In a 1961, when his earliest political speeches were arguing against the legislation that eventually created Medicare, he warned us that freedom is not in the DNA of Americans, it is in our hearts and minds.

“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”

On this Independence Day we need to get fired up about freedom and start fighting for it — at home. Every single American who’s outraged by the Obamacare decision should be energized to show up and vote this fall. And the next dozen falls. If we don’t starting fighting for our freedom now, we deserve to lose it.

©2012 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “The New Reagan Revolution” (St. Martin’s Press). He is the founder and chairman of The Reagan Group and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his website at www.reagan.com. Send comments to Reagan@caglecartoons.com. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Cari Dawson Bartley at cari@cagle.com or call 800-696-7561.

Rubio’s Time Will Come

Michael Reagan — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 08:00:28 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

“Rubio, Rubio, Rubio.”

You hear the chants all across the country. On talk shows, on cable TV, on blogs and in op-ed columns, everyone with a conservative bone in his body is urging presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney to choose the smart and dashing Marco Rubio as his vice president.

Jeff Parker / Florida Today (click to view more images by Jeff Parker)

The conservative crowd’s clamor for Rubio is beginning to worry me. It could backfire. For one thing, it’s setting up Romney for a disaster.

If he doesn’t choose Rubio — and I would agree with that decision — it’s going to disappoint a lot of Republican voters who think Rubio is the key to de-electing President Obama. And when voters are disappointed, they don’t show up to vote.

Don’t get me wrong. Rubio is great, maybe the best young talent in the Republican draft pool. The first-term Florida senator is already a superstar and ready for the big leagues — and that’s the biggest problem I have with picking him.

When you’re trying to get elected president, you don’t pick a superstar for your running mate. You pick someone boring, someone who is not going to eclipse you the way Sarah Palin outshined John McCain just four years ago.

I admit it wasn’t hard to outshine McCain. But if he hadn’t been so desperate to put some life into his lackluster campaign, he would have done the wiser thing and chosen someone even more boring than himself.

It was Reagan and Bush I. Bush I and Quayle. Clinton and Gore. Gore and ????? Whoever it was, he or she was so boring I can’t remember their name. Was it Kerry? Biden?

Just joking, but you get the point. In 2000, the Bush II-Cheney ticket turned out to be a mini-mistake. Dick Cheney was so experienced and such a strong personality that he acted like a co-president for eight years, which only caused trouble for George W. Bush.

There’s only room for one star on the ticket. Romney doesn’t need Rubio or Chris Christie or Condi Rice, or even Paul Ryan. He needs a Tim Pawlenty, a Rob Portman or a Bob McDonnell — a non-star.

He needs someone who’s a virtual unknown to the voting masses, but nonetheless experienced in governing and ready to do the VP’s thankless jobs of attending funerals and waiting for the chance to break a tie vote in the Senate.

Nobody ever votes for a president because they like the VP. Romney has to be the only star. Period. He has to be the focus of the Republican ticket.

Unlike McCain, who had to appear with Palin most of the time just to draw a crowd, Romney needs to have a VP who can campaign for him elsewhere without attracting all the media attention or showing him up.

That might be hard. Mitt is not exactly known for his star power. But he doesn’t need to be exciting to win the White House. He needs to show voters that he has the ideas and the governing skills to pull the economy out of the deep ditch Mr. Obama’s got us stuck in.

Rubio will have his day. So will future Republican all-stars like Christie, Ryan and Bobby Jindal. The GOP has a deep bench.

But Mitt’s the GOP’s QB now. He’s got to ignore the crowd of conservatives who want him to throw the long bomb to Rubio. He’s got to call his own play for VP — and make it good but boring.

—–

©2012 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “The New Reagan Revolution” (St. Martin’s Press). He is the founder and chairman of The Reagan Group and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his website at www.michaelreagan.com. Send comments to Reagan@caglecartoons.com. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Cari Dawson Bartley at cari@cagle.com or call 800-696-7561.

It’s Nice to be Emperor

Michael Reagan — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 07:30:07 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

If you don’t like something or want to get something done, you don’t let little things like the Constitution get in your way.

For more than three years Emperor Obama has been behaving as if the separation of powers is a pesky fly to be swatted away whenever it becomes too annoying.

Eric Allie / Cagle Cartoons (click to view more cartoons by Allie)

If Congress doesn’t pass the legislation he desires, he uses his executive powers and regulatory agencies to get his way. If he doesn’t like a law or thinks it’s unconstitutional, he tells his minions and bureaucrats not to enforce it.

In the past Emperor Obama used the EPA to create new cap-and-trade laws and the Department of Health and Human Services to force Catholics and other religious groups to go against their own consciences and provide their employees with abortion and birth-control coverage in their health care packages.

His latest edict came last week when he decided it would be nice to give about 1.4 million undocumented young immigrants temporary relief from deportation.

It didn’t matter to Emperor Obama what the legislative branch thought about the “DREAM Act,” which would provide conditional permanent residency to the well-behaved children of parents who came to the U.S. illegally.

It also didn’t matter to him that various versions of the act had failed to get through Congress for 10 years. He signed an imperial order and pronounced that his administration would stop deporting young illegal immigrants who meet the requirements of the DREAM Act.

In other words, once again our imperial president told Congress to buzz off. Saving his royal butt from being tossed out of the White House was more important than the rule of law and constitutional niceties.

This latest presidential power grab really wasn’t about helping young Latinos or working toward a long-run solution to a tricky immigration problem. It was about getting more Latinos to reward him with their votes in November.

Senator Marco Rubio had put forth an immigration plan that sought a long-term solution, but now it’s been shelved. Instead of doing the right thing and reaching across the aisle to Rubio and working with him, our imperious president played his usual cynical game of political solitaire.

Have you noticed how he never wants to solve anything in the long run? Whether it’s the payroll tax extension, the Keystone Pipeline or immigration, he wants it to remain an issue until December so he can use it as a ploy to get re-elected.

Emperor Obama obviously could not care less about helping the Latino population. When Democrats had control of both houses of Congress he did absolutely nothing for them.

Now he’s doing to Latinos what Penn State coach Jerry Sandusky allegedly did to the children of Pennsylvania — using and abusing them. With his short-sighted politicking, Emperor Obama has hurt the Latino cause in the long run.

More important is his disrespect for the U.S. Constitution. When he was elected president, not emperor, he raised his hand and swore to uphold the Constitution — the whole Constitution.

But like so-called “Cafeteria Catholics,” who pick and choose which rules of the Church they’ll abide by, or like those who pick and choose which of the Ten Commandments to follow, Barack Obama has become a Cafeteria Constitutionalist.

People on the right and many on the left are seriously concerned that we have an imperial president in the White House. Let’s hope the America people will be made aware of it, too, because they’re the only ones who can dethrone Emperor Obama.

—–

Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “The New Reagan Revolution” (St. Martin’s Press, 2011). He is the founder and chairman of The Reagan Group and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his website at www.reagan.com, or e-mail comments to Reagan@caglecartoons.com.

The Designated Leaker

Michael Reagan — Thu, 14 Jun 2012 07:25:54 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

Glory be to the commander in chief.

Everyone in the Washington-New York Axis of Evil knows that’s why there has been a string of White House national security leaks.

Each of the leaks has been a transparent attempt to pump up President Obama as a tough warrior who deserves re-election because he’s been intimately involved in the killing of Osama bin Laden, the cyber-sabotage of Iran’s nuclear program, and choosing which specific terrorist gets blasted to heaven by a U.S. drone.

Daryl Cagle / msnbc.com (click to view more cartoons by Cagle)

Everyone also knows the leaks have damaged our ability to operate our future military and counter-terror operations, and they put our intelligence agents and commandos at risk. And everyone but Obama press spokesman Jay Carney knows exactly where the leaks were authorized — the White House.

The only big mystery left to solve is who the happy leaker is.

The Re-Elect Obama team has two Justice Department lawyers looking into the leaks, which is a joke. Republicans in the Senate including Lindsey Graham want a special prosecutor to mount a much wider and deeper investigation, which if it happens would bring the president deserved political troubles but would most likely only catch a few little fish who work for the big fish.

The list of White House leak suspects is long. The media accounts of the president’s brave foreign-policy exploits in The New York Times and elsewhere have included quotes from Leon Panetta, Jim Jones, Gen. Doug Lute and Gen. David Petraeus.

But I don’t think those gents are up to doing such partisan press work. I have a hunch the Obama administration’s leaker is someone else. Before I say who I think he or she is, I have a little story about my father Ronald Reagan and his problem with a leaker.

When my father would hold discussions with his security advisers about possible covert military operations against the Soviet Union or Libya, there was always a certain U.S. senator in the room representing the Senate leadership. Even if everyone else agreed with a decision except the senator, the senator would often threaten to leak the plans to the press if the president authorized the operation.

It got so bad that when my father was planning to invade Grenada, he told no one in advance because he feared that the senator would blab to the media and cost American lives. That senator who caused my father so much trouble was none other than Joe Biden.

I have no proof, of course, but I think the Obama administration’s leaker is Joe Biden.

Every White House has a designated leaker who tells their friends in the media what the administration wants it to know in hopes of getting politically favorable coverage. My father’s was David Gergen.

Biden is perfect for the job of designated leaker. He works in an administration that spends half its time patting itself on the back and the other half trying to get the media to do it. Plus Biden, unlike the other suspects, has a vested interest in pumping up Obama’s reputation as a strong leader because it’ll keep him in the vice president’s mansion for another four years.

One more thing. Remember when spokesman Jay Carney misspoke the other day? First he said “the Obama administration” wasn’t responsible for the leak. Then he caught himself and said “the White House” wasn’t responsible.

Though it’s only my opinion, I bet Jay was actually telling the truth. It’s not the White House that’s been leaking. But if I were doing the investigating, I’d have someone take a very strong look at the plumbing in the vice president’s house.

ï¿½2012 Mike Reagan. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc., newspaper syndicate. For info contact Cari Dawson Bartley. E-mail Cari@cagle.com, (800) 696-7561.

GOP Has Latino Options

Michael Reagan — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 13:38:08 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

No wonder Republicans can’t even get 40 percent of Latino votes in a presidential election.

When Mitt Romney made his first big push to appeal to Latinos earlier this week in Texas, he hammered the “Obama economy” for being “particularly hard on Hispanic businesses and Hispanic Americans.”

Eric Allie / PoliticalCartoons.com (click to view more cartoons by Allie)

He pointed out the grim statistics — an unemployment rate for Latinos of 11 percent and a poverty rate of 30 percent. And he stressed that the Obama regime’s economic policies are hostile to the small businesses and entrepreneurs that traditionally provide many of the jobs in the Hispanic community.

Everything Romney said was true. But he delivered the wrong message in the wrong place. Texas is a Republican stronghold. Romney couldn’t lose the Lone Star State this fall if he promised on Day One of his presidency to outlaw cattle, oil and gas.

Where Mitt should be stumping for Latino votes is in the contested states of Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Florida. That’s where the election is going to be won or lost. That’s where the Latinos he needs to persuade are concentrated.

Unfortunately for Romney, he’s in serious trouble with Latinos. According to a poll last month, he trails Obama 61 to 27 percent among Latinos. It’s nothing new. Latinos generally vote 2-1 Democrat.

In 2004, Republicans thought they went to heaven when President Bush got 44 percent of the Latino vote. But in 2008 it was back to the usual slaughter. Obama and Biden out-pointed McCain and Palin among Latinos by a margin of 67-31.

It’s hard to blame Latinos for not liking Republicans. The GOP only pays attention to them in election years. And when it courts the Latino community, the GOP doesn’t shape its message to fit their needs or appeal to their conservative family values; it delivers tired economic boilerplate about the benefits of lower taxes.

Romney needs to customize and personalize his message to Latinos voters. He also badly needs someone in his party to help him deliver it. If that sounds like a job for Super Marco Rubio, it’s not. Everyone’s favorite VP pick isn’t the only Latino kid on the Republican block.

Have you heard of Gov. Susana Martinez of New Mexico and Gov. Brian Sandoval of Nevada? Didn’t think so. Don’t feel bad. Apparently no one in the GOP has either.

In 2010 Martinez and Sandoval — young, smart, popular and Latino — won easily in heavily Latino states. As Republicans. Both obviously figured out how to appeal to the independent and Democrat voters.

Sandoval beat Harry Reid’s son in a state that’s 26 percent Latino. Martinez was elected in a state that’s half Latino and has three times as many Democrats as Republicans. How did she win the New Mexico governor’s office?

Not by talking about the differences between Democrats and Republicans. Not about talking about taxes. She won by appealing to the values that Republicans and Latinos share: Who are we as a country? Where are we going?

Today Martinez has a 70 percent approval rating and is the unsung hero of the Republican Party. She’s the first elected Latina governor in the history of the United States, and the GOP can’t seem to find her even though she is right there in plain view.

Romney shouldn’t necessarily pick Martinez as his VP, as some have suggested. But he should pick her brain. And when Mitt goes courting Latino votes in tough toss-up states like Colorado or Florida, the GOP should make sure Martinez or Sandoval is attached to his hip.

—–

The Great Obama Blunder

Michael Reagan — Thu, 31 May 2012 07:25:49 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

President Obama and his wife, the health nanny in chief, obviously don’t know when they’ve gone too far in their crusade to socialize and Obamatize America.

They couldn’t stop pushing for the Obamacare mandate that would force religious organizations to pay for coverage of abortion-inducing drugs, contraception and sterilization for their employees regardless of the institution’s moral or religious objections.

Now the Obamas are sorry. They’ve awakened the sleeping giant — the Catholic Church. And they’re going to pay the political price.

Nate Beeler / Columbus Dispatch (click to view more cartoons by Beeler)

Last week the University of Notre Dame and 42 other Catholic institutions sued the administration to overturn the mandate, which would also apply to all employees of a church’s social services, such as schools, hospitals and food banks.

It’s not just a bureaucratic fight over who Barack and Michelle think should be forced to provide contraception for their employees — without fees or co-pays.

The mandate is an attack on the First Amendment’s protection against federal meddling in religion. As Notre Dame President Father John Jenkins wrote, what’s at issue is the freedom of a religious organization to “live its mission.”

In addition to the lawsuits, U.S. bishops have called for all Catholics to engage in 14 days of “prayer, study, catechesis and public action” on religious liberty from June 21 to the Fourth of July.

The Obama campaign, which didn’t count on such a forceful response by the Catholic Church, has managed to give Republicans a huge gift in the middle of a presidential campaign.

By standing up to the Obama administration on moral grounds and engaging it on an important social issue, the church has in effect joined forces with Romney. It keeps him from being distracted by issues designed to make him look anti-women and allows him to concentrate on what ultimately will make or break his campaign — economic issues.

The Obama Blunder is also going to hurt him with Democrat voters. It’ll only make it harder for him to recapture the votes of all those working-class Catholics in Ohio and western Pennsylvania, where the Obama thrill is already gone.

Meanwhile, the blunder also greatly helps Romney with Hispanics, who are predominately Democrats and virtually all socially conservative Catholics.

Hispanic voters usually focus on a single issue — immigration reform — and that is never good for Republicans. But the church’s revolt against one of Obamacare’s most oppressive rules has taken immigration off the table and given Hispanics a principled reason to vote for a Republican president.

Mr. and Mrs. Obama still don’t get it. Only hours after the Catholic bishops announced their legal challenge, the first nanny was stumping in Cleveland and talking tough about Obamacare.

“You can tell people how, because we passed health reform, insurance companies will now have to cover preventive care — have to. Things like contraception, cancer screenings, prenatal care — and they have to do it at no extra cost. People have to understand that’s what that fight was for.”

That’s what the Obamacare fight was all about — promising voters that companies and organizations will “have to” provide health care to their employees “at no extra cost.” The Catholic Church, which hasn’t exactly been a good ally in the war against big government liberalism, has learned that Obamacare’s rules about employees being provided with “free” contraceptives apply to them too, and they don’t like it.

All I can say is, “Go, bishops. Give the Obamas hell.”

—–

White House Website Gone Wild

Michael Reagan — Thu, 24 May 2012 12:11:08 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

We’ll never know what Ronald Reagan would have done with WhiteHouse.gov, the official website of the White House

But I know my father wouldn’t be abusing it the way Barack Obama is.

WhiteHouse.gov is owned and operated by the federal government, but the incumbent gets to run it and design it to his own political tastes.

Eric Allie / Cagle Cartoons (click to view more cartoons by Allie)

Like nearly anything the federal government touches, the White House website is a decent idea gone bad.

It should be a handy place where the average over-taxed citizen or liberal newsman can find the latest news and information about the outrageous doings of the current president and his administration. But it’s become just another political tool — a permanent campaign ad for the incumbent.

You know how newly elected mayors rush out and get their names painted on all the city benches and trashcans? WhiteHouse.gov is the same principle on a federal level, done virtually.

The Obama regime’s WhiteHouse.gov contains all the basic stuff — the president’s schedule, recent photo ops, proclamations, executive orders, his latest appearance on “The View,” plus his detailed positions on dozens of domestic and international issues.

Give it credit. The site is a slick, partisan and effective propaganda weapon. President Obama’s name and photo are plastered on every page.

And it’s riddled with Obama-aggrandizing whoppers like “The President overcame furious lobbying by big banks to pass the most far reaching reform of Wall Street in history, which will prevent the excessive risk-taking that led to the financial crisis….”

Though it’s all politics and spin, WhiteHouse.gov is impressively comprehensive. The only thing missing, besides the transcripts of what the president whispers to his donors on Wall Street, is his list of favorite golf courses. It must be somewhere. Maybe under “Lavish Vacations.”

But let’s get serious. Presidents have had their own White House websites to puff themselves up since 1994. But under the stewardship of the Narcissist in Chief, WhiteHouse.gov has reached a new low.

It has stooped to misrepresenting history to make it look like some previous presidents, including Ronald Reagan, would support President Obama’s big-government ideas or policies.

On the website, under “The White House” menu, are brief, non-partisan biographies of every president. Tagged on to the end of almost every bio since Coolidge is a little feature called “Did you know?”

For instance, the tag for FDR reads, “Did you know? On August 14, 1935, President Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act. Today the Obama Administration continues to protect seniors and ensure Social Security will be there for future generations.”

Fair enough, considering Obama’s New New Deal policies.

But here’s part of the “Did you know?” at the end of my father’s bio: “In a June 28, 1985 speech Reagan called for a fairer tax code, one where a multi-millionaire did not have a lower tax rate than his secretary. Today, President Obama is calling for the same with the Buffet Rule.”

Is Obama kidding? The Buffet Rule is an act of class warfare designed to punish successful people with higher taxes in the name of fairness.

My father’s tax policy — which simplified the tax code and lowered top marginal rates from 70 percent to 28 percent — had nothing in common with the Buffet Rule. It was about lowering everyone’s taxes and providing incentives for all, not punishing the already successful few.

Ronald Reagan wouldn’t agree with any part of Obamanomics. The Obama regime has already proved it can’t be trusted with the economy. By trying to make it seem that my father was the founding father of the Buffet Rule, it proves it can’t even be trusted with history.

Mr. Obama, if you would like to debate this I am available 24/7.

—–

Businesses Must Fight

Michael Reagan — Thu, 17 May 2012 12:27:33 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

Sheep and chickens.

That’s what America’s greatest corporations have become.

Whether it’s in California or nationally, it’s the same sad story.

America’s best and biggest companies — the banks, the energy corporations, the computer giants — are refusing to stand up to the bully governments in Sacramento and D.C.

The men and women who run California’s corporations know that high taxes, over-spending, excessive regulations and foolish energy policies have turned the state from one of the best states to do business in to one of the worst.

Daryl Cagle / msnbc.com (click to view more cartoons by Cagle)

But when bad law after bad law is passed in California, the corporations don’t fight back, they cower or run.

Their executives are afraid to speak up, or buy ad time, or join with those of us who are trying to reverse the death spiral of a state that’s been wrecked by four decades of Democrat misrule in Sacramento.

For example, I know that many business leaders support the “Citizen Legislature Act.” That’s the ballot initiative that, if it gets on the fall ballot, will give voters in California the chance to turn the state legislature into a part-time wrecking crew instead of a year-round one.

But many of the corporate execs in California are afraid to join the ballot initiative drive, which I chair, because they fear retaliation from Sacramento.

They have good cause to fear retaliation from the Democrats. But that’s no excuse not to fight for what they know is right. Fighting is the only way they’ll ultimately strip the Democrats of their power to retaliate.

We have the same problem nationally — a flock of corporate chickens.

Why is it that the only voices we hear fighting against Washington are talk radio and Fox News?

Where are Exxon and Apple and Ford and Wells Fargo? Why aren’t they standing up for what’s left of free enterprise in America?

Imagine if Microsoft or Verizon or even Facebook spent just a pittance of their profits to fight against those who are slowly strangling the system that made their financial success possible.

Why aren’t their CEOs pointing the finger of blame for our economic miseries where it belongs — at the Obama administration?

Why aren’t they blasting away at the liberals in Washington for their constant business bashing and attacks on the rich? They’re afraid of retaliation from Washington. But again, the solution isn’t to cower or run, it’s to fight.

Unfortunately, California’s sheepish companies would rather move to Nevada than stay and fight the Democrats in Sacramento. America’s chicken companies would rather move their operations overseas than stay and fight Washington.

It’s time corporations start standing up for themselves. Talk radio and Fox News’ 4 million viewers can’t save a bunch of sheep and chickens. No one can.

There’s a scene in the “Avengers” movie where the people are told to kneel down to show their subservience to their ruler. But one brave man stood up and said he refused to kneel any longer.

That’s what our businesses have to do if they are to survive. Get off their knees. Fight for what’s right. They’re not going to be saved by Captain America or Captain Romney or anyone else. They have to stand up and save themselves.

—–

Only Obama is Better Off

Michael Reagan — Thu, 10 May 2012 12:11:18 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

The only person I know who is better off today than he was four years ago is President Obama.

He’s making more money, living in a bigger house and playing more golf. And when his wife goes on a shopping spree with her girlfriends, it’s to Spain on the taxpayer’s dime.

If you asked President Obama if he’s better off today, he’d say, “Hell, yeah! And we don’t want it to stop!”

Rick McKee / Augusta Chronicle (click to view more cartoons by McKee)

Meanwhile, as the president skates through the Great Recession, his failure to get the economy back on track has turned a country known for its optimism and belief in a better future into a nation of pessimists.

According to a recent opinion poll by Scott Rasmussen’s company, 63 percent of voters — liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans — do not think today’s children will be better off than their parents.

That’s unbelievable. But what’s even more discouraging is that only 16 percent — 1 in 6 — do think the next generation will be better off.

The percentage believing the next generation will live better than their parents is a record low. As Scott Rasmussen said, people think something is going terribly wrong in America. They’re not sure what it is, he said, but they sure don’t like it.

I know what’s gone wrong with America — we’ve had four years of President Obama’s bad ideas and hot air. That’s why the 1,000 voters Rasmussen polled see a gloomy future everywhere they look — the economy, stocks, housing, you name it.

And remember the American Dream? Forget it. Only 32 percent think it’s still possible for “just about anyone in America to work hard and get rich.”

About the only silver lining to be found in the Rasmussen poll is that 53 percent think it’s still possible for anyone in America to work themselves out of poverty.

That’s a good thing to believe in, because by the time the Obama administration and his wrecking crew finish turning America into Greece, 53 percent of the country is going to be poor.

This week the Obama reelection campaign released an ad called “We’re Coming Back.” It’s a blatant rip-off of Ronald Reagan’s 1984 “Morning in America” ad that pointed out how much stronger, prouder and better America had become during my father’s first four years.

The Obama ad claims that we’re on the road to recovery and says the president is working hard to finish the job he started. It’s not supposed to be funny.

But there’s one serious problem with the Obama ad — after four years of his reign of errors things are not getting better. And he has no new ideas, just the same bad Big Government ones he’s been pushing — more taxes, more spending and more regulation.

When “Morning in America” ran in 1984, inflation and interest rates were half what they had been in 1980 and were going down. There were no more lines at the gas pumps and no more gloomy talk from the Oval Office about a national “malaise.”

Ronald Reagan turned the country around the right way. He lowered taxes, cut regulations and got the government off the back of businesses and out of the way of the American people.

After four years of my father’s administration, Americans could see real signs of improvement and a hopeful future for the country. That’s why RR was re-hired. After four years of President Obama, our only hope is that in November he is fired.

—–

Destroying the California Dream

Michael Reagan — Thu, 03 May 2012 07:10:21 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

Cuba is a one-party state. North Korea is a one-party state. California is a one-party state.

I’m not trying to draw any false parallels.

But I’ve noticed bad things happen when one political party has complete control of a government for too long, whether it’s the Communist Party that’s wrecked Cuba for 50 years or the Democrat Party that’s wrecked California for 40.

So far, the Democrat monopoly in Sacramento has done nothing to cause Californians who seek greater freedom, lower taxes and a better business climate to begin taking rafts to Oregon or Mexico. But give the Democrats time.

Daryl Cagle / msnbc.com (click to view more cartoons by Cagle)

They’ve already bankrupted the state and strangled its economy with high taxes, expensive green-energy policies and “progressive” regulations that scare off businesses, jack up housing prices or inhibit growth.

The other day the California Assembly proved once more that there is no bill too crazy or trivial for it to pass.

By a vote of 47-24, the Assembly passed AB 1960. The bill, almost certain to be approved by the state Senate, would allow owners of businesses that contract with the state to voluntarily identify themselves as gay, lesbian, transgender or bisexual.

The Democrat who sponsored the bill says it’ll let state officials and gay or lesbian groups pin down how much LGBT-owned businesses are helping the state’s economy. Republicans said it digs too far into private lives and is the first step in a quota system that would benefit the LGBT business community, which, the way things are going, probably already accounts for half of the state’s GDP.

Assembly Bill 1960 is likely inconsequential — just another government joke no one thinks is funny. But its passage is also a sign of a larger and very important long-term problem — there are too many Democrats in power in Sacramento and too few Republicans there to stop them.

Forget which party has held the governor’s office. It’s the Assembly and the Senate — Democrat-controlled playpens since my father was governor — that have turned the Golden State into the Great Train Wreck State.

Joel Kotkin probably knows more than anyone about the paradise California once was and the dysfunctional place it has become. Kotkin, one of the country’s top demographers, pointed out the other day that almost 4 million people have left California in the last 20 years. That’s 4 million above and beyond the people who have moved in from other states.

He says most of those fleeing are young, middle-class families seeking lower taxes and affordable living costs. Apparently, the chance to ride a bazillion-dollar bullet train from Los Angeles to San Francisco with their grandchildren is not worth 20 years of pain and suffering.

Kotkin, who calls himself a “Truman Democrat,” says the regime in Sacramento and its “progressive war on the middle-class lifestyle” is responsible for the destruction of the California dream. It’ll only get worse, he says, what with Gov. Brown proposing new taxes this year that are ostensibly aimed at “millionaires” but will hurt small businesses and young families.

I’m no demographer. But as far as I can tell, there’s only one sure way to reverse California’s death spiral — vote the Democrats out of power in Sacramento.

That means Republicans — conservative Republicans allied with sensible Truman Democrats — need to stand up and take back their state from the crazies.

The trouble is, the Republican Party of California is almost as much of a mess as the state. It has no leadership, no heroes, little money and no clear message. The state GOP has another big problem — Republicans have run out of courage. While the Democrats have been going nuts, Republicans have lost theirs.

—–

Backward Banking

Michael Reagan — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 13:24:32 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

I don’t know if it’s Dodd-Frank. Or if it’s Barney Frank and Christopher Dodd themselves. Or if it’s just the big bankers.

But the reality is, our banking system is completely screwed up when it comes to getting a home loan.

The problem used to be that the banks, in collusion with a federal government, made bad loans to bad people. That’s what helped bring us the housing bubble and the inevitable bust that followed.

Eric Allie / Cagle Cartoons (click to view more cartoons by Allie)

Today the problem is reversed. The banking system is so nuts it won’t even allow banks to make good loans to good people. An example of our new backward banking system in action is what’s happened to the daughter of a friend of mine.

She’s a 29-year-old schoolteacher. When she was 24 she went out and bought herself a townhome that a bank had ended up owning after a foreclosure.

The bank was buried in the townhome for $560,000. The schoolteacher got the house for $360,000 and put $110,000 down. Her interest rate five years ago was 6Â¾ percent.

Today the townhome is worth more than what the teacher paid for it and now she wants to refinance and get a low-interest loan. But she’s just been told by Big Bank that she doesn’t qualify for a 3 or 4 percent loan. They’ve even told her she shouldn’t have been able to qualify for her original loan.

Think about this: Here is a teacher who has never missed a house payment. She has her monthly mortgage payment taken out of her bank account automatically. She’s never missed paying her taxes. She’s never missed paying her homeowner’s dues.

Yet she is treated as though somehow she’d suddenly stop making her mortgage payments if the bank gave her a new loan at 3 or 4 percent. The schoolteacher is looked at by the bank as if she was a future criminal.

I come from a generation where people were allowed to have a personal relationship with their bank. I used to be able to go down and talk to my local banker about a loan.

I’d tell him what I wanted to do and how much money I needed. The banker would say, “Mike, I’ve known you for 30 years. I know you’re good for it.”

Now there’s no such thing as a personal relationship with your banker. The “local” bank is owned by a bunch of international mega-corporations and the management changes every 3 minutes.

Dodd-Frank has created a situation where only the large banks will survive. Small banks are essentially being outlawed. That means our ability to ever have a personal relationship with a banker is also being outlawed. And one bad result of that will be to create more people who become upside-down on their mortgages.

If we want to bring the U.S. economy back to life we have to do it through the housing industry. But there’s no way in hell housing is going to recover if banks are no longer even giving good loans to good and rightful people.

The big bankers and politicians co-produced the meltdown of the economy. They’re the criminals, not the honest schoolteacher looking for a better interest rate on her mortgage.

If we’re going to bring this country back, the Dodds and Franks of Washington are going to have to rewrite the laws so we can have personal relationships with local banks again.

Blame Congress for the GSA Scandal

Michael Reagan — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 07:30:02 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

Who should we tar and feather for the scandalous spending spree at that General Services Administration “conference” in Nevada two years ago?

Whose fault is it that a bunch of GSA bureaucrats wasted money on $44 breakfasts, a clown and a $75,000 bicycle-building exercise?

Rick McKee / Augusta Chronicle (click to view more cartoons by McKee)

Not the GSA’s bosses. Not the Obama administration. I pin the blame on Watergate and Congress.

This week Congressional hearings all over Washington have been grilling past and current GSA officials about a $850,000 conference that blew thousands of dollars on things like a mind-reader and “yearbooks” and commemorative coins for the 300 participants.

Everyone from the president to Republican Congressman Darrell Issa of California has expressed outrage at the GSA, which manages the federal government’s property and purchases goods and services for other agencies.

But the source of this scandal isn’t the GSA or its inattentive bosses. They were behaving badly, but they were only doing what they were supposed to — spend every dime Congress gave their agency to spend.

The deeper problem is the way budget money has been allocated and spent by the federal government since the Watergate era. And it’s a problem only Congress can fix.

You’ve probably never heard of the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974. Don’t feel bad. Apparently, neither have the members of the 112th Congress.

The Impoundment Control Act was passed by Congress to punish Richard Nixon for Watergate. It effectively took away the long-standing power of the president to impound federal dollars even though they had been allocated by Congress.

Presidents since Jefferson had used their power to impound money, put it in a fund and spend it in a future fiscal year. Forty-three governors today have the same power to impound money their state legislatures allocate.

For about 170 years the president’s impoundment power was an effective way to keep federal budgets balanced or to prevent Congress from spending money on dumb or unnecessary projects.

Then came Watergate and the Impoundment Control Act. Since then Congress has given itself a blank check to spend money the government didn’t have. Did it matter? Are you kidding?

In 1974, the federal budget deficit was $6.1 billion. One year after the Impoundment Control Act was made law, the deficit was $53 billion. By the time my father Ronald Reagan became president, it was $79 billion.

There’s only one way to prevent future GSA scandals and end our massive budget deficits. Cut back the total amount of money the federal government spends.

Paul Ryan is right. When government agencies have enough money to spend on $850,000 junkets, we’re putting too much money in their checkbooks.

So don’t put the biggest blame on the GSA bureaucrats. Put it on Congress. It’s Congress’ job to slash the budget money the GSA and other bloated, over-funded and unnecessary federal agencies get in the first place.

Instead of holding hearings to see who can express the most outrage at the GSA’s waste, Congress’ spendthrifts should go back and read the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974. Then they should repeal it.

Not So Fast There, Mr. Obama

Michael Reagan — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 07:15:12 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

You told some newspapers editors last week that if Ronald Reagan were running for president today “he could not get through the Republican primary.”

I know what you were up to. You were trying to enlist Ronald Reagan in your tireless effort to get the GOP’s presidential candidates to violate their principles. You want them to defect to your side and come out in favor of raising taxes to reduce the record budget deficits you’ve created for our grandchildren with your reckless spending.

Rick McKee / Augusta Chronicle (click to view more cartoons by McKee)

You were hoping to make Romney and company look like conservative fanatics who’d never do what my father was forced to do when faced with a growing federal deficit — compromise and propose spending cuts and higher taxes at the same time.

To some extent, Mr. President, what you said about Ronald Reagan not being able to win his party’s nomination in 2012 is true. It would indeed be almost impossible if he was running only as the former governor of California or as an actor and not on his record as president.

Would the Republican Party of today nominate a union member or the president of an actors union? Would it nominate someone who raised taxes as governor of California? Who signed a no-fault divorce bill? Who signed an abortion bill?

A former Gov. Ronald Reagan would win some primaries in 2012. But it would be a hell of a fight for someone like him to get through today’s Republican nomination process. Based on his record in Sacramento, in 2012 Ronald Reagan would be painted as insufficiently conservative and too willing to compromise with the tax-and-spenders.

But President Obama, you sly dog. You were also trying to make it seem that Ronald Reagan would support your socialist dream for America. That he would support hiking taxes to cover the deficit. That he would even support higher corporate tax rates and more government regulations on business.

That, Mr. President, is absolutely untrue. So is your insinuation that Ronald Reagan would not have supported Congressman Paul Ryan’s budget plan, which passed 228-191 while your budget plan was being laughed out of the House by a 419-0 vote.

Ronald Reagan would have been a staunch supporter of the Ryan budget. His plan slows the rates of growth in Social Security and Medicare spending. In upside-down Washington, that’s considered a spending cut. But in the real world it isn’t.

President Obama, I have a suggestion. If you really want to find the cause of your budget problems, don’t blame anti-tax Republicans. Look in the mirror. Then give Harry Reid a call over at the Senate and ask him why he hasn’t put up a budget in 1,000 days.

And, please, don’t try to make people believe Ronald Reagan would support you or any part of your failed plan to return the United States to economic health by higher taxes and more spending. He wouldn’t.

Mr. President, I knew Ronald Reagan. He was not only a friend of mine, he was my father. And trust me, he’d never be a political friend of yours.

—–

Isn’t That Nice?

Michael Reagan — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 15:06:07 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

President Obama wants his dear friend Vlad the Russian not to worry about the details of how the American missile defense system in Europe will be designed and implemented.

Once he gets re-elected, the president said, he’ll have more “flexibility” to deal with Moscow’s concern that the missile system, which is intended to guard Europe from attack by rogue nations like Iran, is a threat to Russia’s strategic security.

Nate Beeler / Washington Examiner (click to view more cartoons by Beeler)

Obama obviously didn’t want the American people or the rest of the world to hear what he said.

He was caught red-handed, as it were, when a private conversation with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in Seoul was accidentally picked up by an open microphone.

Vladimir Putin, the president-elect of Russia (and the outoing prime minister), must be relieved and pulling for a big Obama win this fall. He also must be having a good laugh at the KGB’s favorite bar.

I hate to think what my father Ronald Reagan would think of Obama’s conversion with Medvedev and his Chicago-style negotiating technique, if that’s what it is.

In 1976, I asked my father why he wanted to be president of the United States. His answer was that for too long he had watched American presidents sit down with the general secretaries of the Soviet Union and give up something vital to our national interests just to get along with them.

My father said he was tired of it. He told me he wanted to be the first American president to say “nyet!” to a general secretary of the U.S.S.R.

Little did he know that in 1986 he’d be the president of the United States and be traveling to Reykjavik, Iceland, to meet with Mikhail Gorbachev, the last general secretary of the Soviet Union.

At that summit, which included a series of one-on-one meetings between Ronald Reagan and Gorbachev, the major issue was reducing the superpowers’ nuclear stockpiles.

When Gorbachev said he would not sign on to my father’s Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) unless the United States mothballed the Strategic Defense Initiative missile defense shield, my father had his chance to say “nyet.” He said it and abruptly ended the meeting.

Ronald Reagan’s decision at Reykjavik initially was seen as a failure by all the experts, but it turned out to be a breakthrough. Gorbachev knew my father would never yield on SDI, which critics derided as “Star Wars.”

Three years later the Berlin Wall came down. In 1991 Gorbachev came to Washington and signed Ronald Reagan’s START agreement. And soon after, the Soviet Union was history.

Now it’s 2012 and we have a president of the United States thinking, once again, that if he gives Russia what its wants, it’ll be our friend.

But Putin is our enemy and the enemy of freedom. Anyone in his right mind can see that Russia is reconstituting its evil self and is a silent partner with Iran and the other terrorist operations in the world.

Yet our president is ready to kowtow to Putin and his government and give up a missile defense system that’ll benefit the rest of the world?

This kind of “thinking” is exactly what worried Ronald Reagan back in the 1970s and made him want to be president.

Our current commander in chief has everything backwards. Not only is he supporting our enemies and dissing our friends. Unlike Ronald Reagan, who always knew the Soviet Bloc was our enemy, Barack Obama believes the United States is the evil empire.

Gong, Gong, Gong!

Michael Reagan — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 16:16:39 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

Gong, Gong, Gong!

I don’t know about you, but watching the Republican primary season is making me feel like a judge on the “The Gong Show.”

I watched or listened to all three candidates after Tuesday night’s Illinois primary. I’m still crying.

Rick McKee / Augusta Chronicle (click to view more cartoons by McKee)

If Mitt, Newt and Rick had given those uninspiring speeches on Chuck Barris’ twisted 1970s amateur talent show, the celebrity panelists would have gang-gonged them in 30 seconds.

The speeches Romney, Santorum and Gingrich gave were the least inspiring of this trying campaign season. Each one was too long, lacking in vision and boring as hell. I think Santorum is still delivering his Gettysburg Address.

Hasn’t anyone on his staff ever heard the advice “less is more”? Don’t any of these guys realize that their rambling, dull speeches are carried live on the cable channels?

Win or lose, here’s a free idea for one of them to try after the Louisiana primary on Saturday (March 24):

First give a quick, sharp, inspiring, enthusiastic, Obama-bashing speech for the TV cameras. Use a teleprompter if you must or, if you want to look Reaganesque, write a few notes on some index cards.

Then, after three minutes, say “God bless America!” or “On to the White House!” and exit stage right.

Save the rehashes of your positions on healthcare or family values for your supporters in the room. Ditto for your sincere thanks to your loyal cousin Shirley and the assistant precinct captain of Peoria.

I have a more strategic suggestion for our three contestants before “The Republican Gong Show” gets to Tampa.

If they are truly serious about wanting to beat Obama in the fall, they’d better dump all their advisers now. They each need to find someone like a Michael Deaver or a Lyn Nofziger, the media geniuses who ran my father’s campaigns, and listen carefully.

The cold truth is that at this point there is only one professional campaign team in this never-ending primary and, like it or not, it’s Romney’s. The Santorum and Gingrich teams may be more conservative, but they are not well funded and they’re amateur league.

Newt says Mitt can’t beat Obama, but he can’t beat Romney or Santorum, and even Ron Paul beat him in Illinois. And Rick says Mitt will say whatever he needs to say to win. Welcome to hardball politics, Rick.

Let’s face it. There is no road for Santorum or Gingrich to the White House, not even a dirt road. That is unfortunate. But now the primary has turned into a “Stop Romney” campaign and that’s much more than unfortunate. It’s destructive. And it only helps Obama.

Here’s a suggestion for Newt and Rick if they insist on going one-on-one against Romney. Since primary loss after primary loss clearly isn’t working, how about a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors and the loser goes home?

Seriously, it’s time for Mitt to get some of his own ideas and not take them from Newt (energy) and from Rick (freedom). Without his own “big ideas” and own “vision thing,” he will lose. Trust me.

Most importantly, it’s time for Mitt to reach out to the conservatives. If he doesn’t, he won’t ever be president, either, and Obama will get four more years to continue his deconstruction of America.

—–

Saving California

Michael Reagan — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 13:03:10 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

In less than 50 years they ruined my home state.

They over-taxed it, over-regulated it and bankrupted it. They strangled its vibrant economy, destroyed its education system and let its infrastructure crumble.

Who are these people who’ve turned the Golden State into Greece?

Daryl Cagle / msnbc.com (click to view more cartoons by Cagle)

Not Big Business. Not the rich. Not the poor. Not millions of immigrants from Des Moines or Juarez.

“They” are the career politicians in Sacramento. Their excessive lawmaking, taxing and spending have transformed California into a European welfare state with a grim future.

It’s hard for me to believe how things have deteriorated in California since the late 1960s. I can remember when Ronald Reagan was governor. We had a surplus. He actually gave money back to the people of California.

The state once was famous for having the best education system, the best business climate, the best roads and infrastructure in America. It was a growing, dynamic paradise where people came to pursue their dreams and hopes.

Now California’s a wreck that people and businesses are leaving in droves. And Gov. Brown and his gang are offering us more of the same this fall — higher income and sales taxes and a bullet train no one wants but them.

To reverse its death spiral, California needs to return to a part-time legislature and turn its career politicians into part-time citizen politicians — which is what they are in 41 other states and what they were in California until 1967.

Today the state’s 120 legislators work year-round and their $95,000 salaries are sweetened by as much as $50,000 in tax-free per diem allowances. They are the highest-paid lawmakers in the country.

Compare California to Texas and Florida. In Texas they pay legislators $600 a month and the legislature meets 140 days a year. In Florida lawmakers get $30,000 a year and meet just 60 days.

The politicians in Texas and Florida do not make politics their careers. They have to have real jobs in the real world. When they’re not in Austin or Tallahassee, they must live and do business under the same laws they have written.

Part-time legislators are what the founding fathers wanted lawmakers to be. My father Ronald Reagan was a citizen politician. Politics was not a career for him. It was a service. He gave of himself.

People have repeatedly asked me to run for the U.S. Senate against Dianne Feinstein. But I think that a new job I have — chairing the “Citizen Legislature Act” — is better for me and the state.

California citizens are in the streets collecting signatures now to put the initiative on the fall ballot. The act would return the state to a part-time legislature. Lawmaking sessions would be cut from 230 days to 90 days. And legislators would be forced to produce on-time, balanced budgets or not get paid. What a concept.

The act also would end politics as a full-time career in California. Legislators would be paid $1,500 a month. At $18,000 a year, they’d have to find real jobs and see what it’s like to live under the dumb and/or bad laws they write by the thousands in Sacramento.

The “Citizen Legislature Act,” which I will work hard to see become law, would shock the systems of the politicians. They’d have to start serving the people of California, not themselves. And I bet they wouldn’t be passing any new bullet train legislation.

—–

Cool It, America

Michael Reagan — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 14:10:19 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

We all need to calm down and watch our mouths.

Last week Rush Limbaugh referred to a Georgetown University law student who had testified to Congress about contraception as a slut. Rush did the right thing. He apologized.

Rick McKee / Augusta Chronicle (click to view more cartoons by McKee)

Last year Ed Schultz referred to talk-show host Laura Ingraham as a slut. Ed also did the right thing. He apologized.

Last year political “funnyman” Bill Maher of HBO referred to Sara Palin as a “c….” Maher, of course, didn’t do the right thing. He didn’t apologize then — and he swears he never will.

I know there will be those who say the mainstream media only report when conservatives call people names, and never seem to report when liberals do it.

I say you’re right. It’s a double-standard. What else is new? And what’s the point? That it’s OK to talk mean and dirty as long as both sides get shamed for it equally by the media?

I don’t buy that bad logic. I expect my side of the political spectrum to behave better than the left side, and our side to be led by better angels. So did my father, Ronald Reagan.

My father was able to accomplish so much with Democrats in Congress and Communists in Moscow (or was it the other way around?) because he always looked for the good in everyone.

Inscribed on his gravesite in Simi Valley, Calif., are these words: “I know in my heart that man is good. That what is right will always eventually triumph. And there’s purpose and worth to each and every life.”

So should we — conservatives, that is — act like Bill Maher or Ronald Reagan?

My father wasn’t afraid to apologize. He apologized for Iran-Contra. He apologized to the Poles and Italians in 1980 after the media made a big stink out of a harmless joke he told on the campaign bus.

Apologizing is the responsible thing to do when you call someone a slut or worse. Yet it seems that when we in broadcasting, myself included, are caught with our big mouths open, we often don’t do the right thing.

Instead of manning up and saying we’re sorry, we hide behind the freedom-of-speech argument. Or we hide behind the lame argument that “I’m just an entertainer. I shouldn’t be taken seriously when I say something dumb or ugly.”

Yes, we have our First Amendment rights. But you might remember that more than one person has said over the course of history — Pope John Paul II being a notable one — that “with rights come great responsibilities.”

And just because we have the freedom to say the raunchy stuff that Maher thinks is intellectual political comedy, it doesn’t mean it’s right to say it.

It’s time we start acting more responsibly with our God-given rights. We need to remember our children are listening to our rhetoric. We harm them and society at our peril.

Rush acted responsibly. He acted like my father. The right needs to learn a simple lesson. When we act like Ronald Reagan, we win. When we act like Bill Maher, we lose. One thing I’ve learned is liberals very rarely apologize and never want to accept an apology.

—–

When Will it Stop?

Michael Reagan — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 14:46:40 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

When will they stop asking Republicans like me about our party’s choice for vice president?

In every presidential election I’ve been involved in, the press and ordinary people are always asking, “Who will it be? Who will the presidential nominee choose for VP?”

Brian Fairrington / Cagle Cartoons (click to view more Mitt Romney cartoons)

It happened again Tuesday when I appeared on CNN’s “Piers Morgan Tonight” with Morgan and Andrew Breitbart, the commentator and boss of the news aggregator Breitbart.com.

News flash to all commentators, news reporters and worried citizens: We haven’t chosen the Republican Party nominee yet and he is the person who’ll pick his running mate.

All the agony and strategizing over the VP choice is a waste of time. The truth is, no one ever votes for the vice president. If you do, you must be planning on something happening to the president.

I know, I know, you think if Marco Rubio is the VP choice it will guarantee Florida will go Republican and might even swing a majority of Latino and Hispanic votes to the GOP.

But the truth is, up until Dick Cheney came along and became an active player in the Bush II administration, VPs were as invisible as they were powerless. They usually spent their time hanging around the Senate office building smoking cigars and waiting to break a tie vote.

Nowadays, the VP’s major duty is going to the state funerals of world leaders who happen to pass away or, in Joe Biden’s case, making a fool of yourself and giving pundits and talk radio hosts a fresh load of fodder.

Back in 1976, everyone wanted Gerald Ford to choose my father for the VP slot. Ford never asked my father. If he had, I don’t know how my father would have responded.

But even if my father had accepted, a Ford/Reagan team still would have lost to Jimmy Carter. Why? Because it was Ford who had to debate Carter, not Reagan, and Ford still would not have known where Poland was.

If my father had been the ’76 VP choice, he would have given a different speech at the convention in Kansas City that August and he most likely never would have had a chance to run for president again.

Why? Because we don’t nominate someone for president who just lost in the last go-around. Ask Sarah Palin.

So be careful whom you wish for as VP. You might end up ruining the political career of your favorite future presidential candidate. And don’t you think we need to find a nominee first before we start choosing the VP?

When our nominee does choose a running mate, he should remember this advice from Hollywood: Don’t choose someone who outshines you.

Sarah Palin was, by far, a bigger draw than John McCain. But you just can’t have that destructive dynamic when you are trying to win the presidency. It’s a no-no in politics. In Hollywood, they call it “upstaging.”

Marco Rubio is a rising Republican superstar. He’ll get his own shot at the White House. He doesn’t need to risk his political future by possibly being on a losing ticket this year. And he doesn’t need to waste four years of his life as VP if Obama is dethroned.

And anyway, where do you think Marco Rubio would do the most good during the next four years? Attending funerals for the ex-presidents of Paraguay or Ukraine, or helping a Republican Senate vote down Obamacare?

I choose voting down Obamacare.

—–

Whitney’s Death Should be a Lesson

Michael Reagan — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 14:11:51 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

Another tremendously talented American who had riches and fame beyond most people’s dreams has killed herself with drugs. Whitney Houston’s life was wrecked and cut tragically short at 48 because she became mired in the self-destructive hell of drug use.

In the late 1970s my birth brother was living in L.A. and working as a writer on “Laverne & Shirley,” the number one-rated TV show in the country. It was pretty heady stuff for a 21-year-old kid from Ohio.

Adam Zyglis / Buffalo News (click to view more Whitney Houston cartoons)

I remember him telling me how cocaine and other drugs were becoming increasingly popular with the creative crowd in Hollywood at the time.

He had more money than God and he found himself facing a tough choice: Put his money up his nose like everyone else or leave town.

He chose to leave. Many other young people we know never made the right choice with drugs and their lives ended like Houston’s.

Sunday night at the Academy Awards, Hollywood will be handing out Oscars to its brightest stars. At some point, tears will be shed for Whitney Houston.

She will be remembered, as she should be, for her great singing. But you can bet your favorite movie star’s Malibu beach house that the drug lifestyle that sent Houston to an early grave will be conveniently forgotten.

Instead of pretending its chronic drug problem doesn’t exist, or acting like choosing drugs is simply another lifestyle choice, Hollywood needs to take a strong stand against drug use. Illegal and legal.

The Academy Awards this weekend would be a good place to start doing the right thing. As an industry, Hollywood needs to start saying “No” to drugs.

Baseball is saying “No.” Pro football is saying “No.” Cycling, for Pete’s sake, is saying “No.” In the ’80s my stepmother Nancy was saying “No.” In the ’70s my 21-year-old birth brother had the sense to say “No.”

Isn’t it time for Hollywood and the rest of the entertainment industry to clean itself up? Dr. Drew does what he can, but he can save only one celebrity drug addict at a time.

Hollywood needs to do more than cry at funerals. It could do so much more in the fight against drugs if its grownups had the guts to use Hollywood’s enormous cultural influence for good (for a change).

Where are the Public Service Announcements, Mr. Spielberg or Ms. Jolie? Why aren’t Hollywood’s best and brightest cranking out anti-drug PSAs?

Why do we only hear people like Tony Bennett calling for the legalization of drugs? The answer is not to legalize drugs, it’s to get people to stop using them.

Come on, Hollywood, come together. For all of us, help “Stop the Madness” now. Speak as an industry with one voice: “No more drugs.”

I grew up in Hollywood as the son of an Academy Award-winning actress. My mother Jane Wyman lived to be 90, dammit.

I want all the young talent to have the same opportunity my mother and so many others have had. I’m tired of watching our Michael Jacksons, Heath Ledgers and Whitney Houstons die young because of drugs. The list goes on: Elvis, Chris Farley, John Belushi, and so many more.

As a country we must stop glossing over the tragedy of drug abuse. We should learn a lesson and work on the solution.

—–

Make a Difference for Foster Children

Michael Reagan — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 16:08:24 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

I am an adopted son. I am a very lucky adopted son. And as an adopted son I want all adoptees like me to have the same wonderful adoptive parents I was lucky enough to have.

My biological mother was an unmarried young woman from Ohio who had an affair with a married man. It was 1945 — my biological father was in the Army and was shipped off to France to fight in the war while my mother went to California to give birth to me.

Bill Day / Cagle Cartoons (click to view more cartoons by Day)

My mother made the painful decision to put me up for adoption. Thankfully, I was adopted by none other than the actor Ronald Reagan and his then-wife Jane Wyman. No youngster ever had more loving parents, despite their divorce.

Unlike me, however, many never find a loving permanent home. They grow up in a group home, or are shuffled from foster home to foster home. Tragically the majority of children who “age out” of foster care are not equipped to live as productive adults. Statistics show that they are less likely to graduate from high school. They are less likely to be employed and, even when they are employed, are more likely to have jobs that do not pay a living wage.

Moreover, they are more likely to experience violence, homelessness and mental illness. And they are more likely to fall victim to substance abuse and to be incarcerated. Females are more likely to have unwanted pregnancies. Our nation’s foster children deserve better. They deserve the chance to be properly prepared for adulthood.

Jimmy Wayne — country music singer, child advocate and my friend — brought to my attention two bills now before the Tennessee Legislature — HB 2337 in the House and SB 2199 in the Senate, which will allow youth in Tennessee to stay in foster care until the age of 21. As a national advocate for children, I strongly support this legislation and encourage all members of the Tennessee General Assembly to vote in support of it.

Children are often the real victims of divorce when parents, once apparently devoted to each other, suddenly become enemy camps with fathers on one side and mothers on the other. Tragically the children are sometimes forced to take sides in the marital combat, estranging themselves from one of their parents, perhaps forever.

In such an atmosphere, what should have been a loving home can be transformed into a field of strife. Children deserve better. Even foster children in good situations need more time to get their lives on track.

Join me in supporting an effort that will help make a difference.

—–

A Little More Heat

Michael Reagan — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 08:20:02 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

It seems to me that what is missing in the top two contenders for the Republican presidential nomination is passion.

While Ron Paul speaks with passion of the Federal Reserve and Rick Santorum speaks with passion about life, Newt Gingrich speaks passionately mostly about Mitt Romney; and Mitt, it seems, merely speaks in sound bites.

Mike Keefe / Cagle Cartoons (click to view more cartoons by Keefe)

I don’t know about you, but I want to see them seek to build their own shining city on a hill such as that my dad envisioned, and not simply attempt to recreate that vision and make it their own..

I want them to stop speaking merely in sound bites, but rather to speak to me in parables to which I can relate. I want to feel their speeches, not just hear them. It needs to be more than “I’m not Mitt,” or “I can beat Obama.” I want them to convince me they really mean what they say, not what they think I want to hear.

If indeed Newt and Mitt can find the passion of Rick Santorum, and even that of my dad, they will go a long way towards winning not only the Republican nomination, but also the presidency itself. As many readers know, I have endorsed Newt and traveled with him on the campaign trail as a private citizen, but he can do better in this respect.

We Americans prefer to hear the real truth, not what politicians want us to hear. In the era of Barack Obama the message we hear from Washington is, “Trust me, we know what is good for you.”

That’s the message of tyrants, as many who lived under Hitler and Mussolini discovered as they were herded into concentration camps.

In those dreadful times, Germans, Italians and others under their rule were fed slogans such as those seen on signs above the entrances of concentration camps: “Arbeit Makt Frei — Work Makes Freedom.” To the Nazis and Fascists, freedom and death and work and slavery were conflated with respect to individuals; all that mattered was the state.

One of the early signs of an incoming dictatorship is a government’s attack on the Christian church. Tragically, we are beginning to see something like that now, in the Army’s attempt to censor chaplains — to tell them what they can or cannot say in their sermons.

The government in this case appears to believe that it is superior to any religion — that it is entitled to overrule the doctrines of faith by which all legitimate religious organizations live. We must, in their view, submit our articles of faith for government review and tolerance.

Accept this and bid freedom of religion farewell. Let’s find the passion to make Obama a one-term president.

—–

Savaging Newt

Michael Reagan — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 08:10:34 +0000

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

I am somewhat mystified — and dismayed — by the spectacle of a lot of so-called conservatives who weren’t around in the 1980s dropping Ronald Reagan’s name to promote themselves while they go about slandering Newt Gingrich who, like my dad, was there in the ’80s and ’90s and also helped him elect more Republicans than anyone else in recent memory.

John Darkow / Columbia Daily Tribune (click to view more cartoons by Darkow)

It’s long been an unfortunate characteristic of too many Republicans to engage in internecine warfare — standing in a circle as they fire volleys at each other. The current fashion of the day is to take aim and fire at one of the GOP’s most storied and valuable members, doing Obama’s work towards destroying Newt Gingrich in advance of the 2012 presidential election.

They seem to forget — or simply ignore — my dad’s 11th Commandment, that Republicans must refrain from publicly speaking ill of one another. After all, the other party sufficiently fulfills that function without any help from Republicans.

As leader of GOP forces in the House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich was the party’s leading warrior — a politician who never feared to speak his mind. Naturally he made enemies, some within his own party. And it is those enemies and their successors who are out to get Newt’s scalp today. Moreover, it is important to remember that Newt was Ronald Reagan’s champion on Capitol Hill. My father knew and appreciated that fact.

Look, I know that Newt has rubbed a lot of his fellow Republicans the wrong way, but that is the inevitable result when a leader does his job. He simply can’t satisfy everybody, and those who attempt to do so comprise the GOP’s wobbly liberal wing.

Leading the charge against Newt are supporters of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. They do the governor no favors by linking him to the GOP’s small but vociferous liberal wing, which doesn’t like warriors. Newt is a warrior who cherishes any opportunity to go into battle, flags flying.

This being an election year, we can expect various factions of the GOP to seek to modify the tenets of traditional Republicanism. They prefer to shrink away from any hard fighting. Newt is the exact opposite; he relishes the joys of hard combat on behalf of conservative American principles. That upsets some of his fellow Republicans, who are more like the mother who asks what her children are doing upstairs, and when told they are engaging in some horrible behavior says, “That’s nice, don’t fight.”

Newt fights. Real Republicans need fighters, not mealy-mouthed compromisers who shrink away from any form of combat. He may stray away from what many of his GOP colleagues consider proper Republican behavior. But Newt is ready and able to take the fight to Obama, and he will win that fight unless the compromisers have their way.

They Pick and Choose Which Ox to Gore

Michael Reagan — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 08:30:11 +0000

Making Sense, By Michael Reagan

He had a mistress who was pregnant and his wife had terminal cancer; he was running for president and the press knew all about it.

But there was no firestorm in the media about this juicy scandal until after the election of 2008 because John Edwards is a Democrat!

Brian Fairrington / Cagle Cartoons (click to view more cartoons by Fairrington)

Too bad Newt Gingrich is a Republican — otherwise the media would see to it that he’d be home free, warts and all, just like John Edwards.

But he is a Republican and he’s running for the presidency, so members of the liberal media feel free to apply their traditional double standard, which always seems to come into play when the target is a member of the GOP.

Now we have ABC — with absolutely no corroboration — putting Gingrich’s ex-wife on the air to boost ratings and help keep their guy in the White House.

How things have changed in America since my mother and father divorced. My mother, the sainted Jane Wyman, was offered hundreds of thousands of dollars to write books and do interviews or anything else that could help undermine Ronald Reagan, her ex-husband and 40th president of the United States.

In fact she told producers of her hit TV series “Falcon Crest” — for which she won a Golden Globe award — that any interviews she granted to promote the show would end the very moment a single question was asked about my father.

My mother remained quiet about their marriage — which ended in 1948 — until my father’s funeral in 2004, and then she merely remarked that the world had lost a wonderful man. I wish more people would follow my mother’s lead instead of following the ratings and the money.

Shame on you ABC and ex-wife Marianne!

—–

The Emperor Barack

Michael Reagan — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 14:57:37 +0000

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

Much like one of his predecessors, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Barack Obama has all but declared war on the United States Supreme Court.

It will be remembered that in 1937 FDR was angry over the high court’s refusal to put a stamp of approval on much of his New Deal agenda, and sought to bend the court to his will by adding new members to the existing court membership.

Eric Allie / Cagle Cartoons (click to view more cartoons by Allie)

Contemptuously calling the court’s members a collection of “nine old men,” FDR sought to “pack” the high court with up to six additional members more likely to do his bidding. The proposal lost steam and, thankfully, failed.

Mr. Obama has not gone quite that far — yet. But he’s getting close. Like most U.S. presidents who chafe under the high court’s authority to rule on the constitutionality of aspects of their agendas, Obama is unhappy with the court’s failure to recognize the divinity of his proposals, if not that of his personhood.

Too bad. As we are often reminded, “Into each life some rain must fall.”

Thanks to the high court, Mr. Obama has been much in need of an umbrella of late. The president’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was correctly overruled in a case involving religious freedom. The court clearly stated that the First Amendment protects churches in their decisions regarding workers with religious duties, a “ministerial exception” to employment-discrimination laws. This exception had already been supported by lower courts and many states.

Tragically for Mr. Obama and his vastly elevated ego, choirs of angels singing of the glories of his agenda cannot be heard. Despite the frantic efforts of his captive media to tune them in, the president remains a mere mortal, subject to all the slings and arrows that always target any holder of high office.

Soon the issue before the court will be Mr. Obama’s health care program, rammed through Congress despite the widespread opinion that it was, and remains, nothing short of an opening to national socialized medicine. A ruling is expected by early July.

The question is whether the Constitution’s Commerce Clause can be stretched beyond recognition to reach into everyone’s pocketbook with the Obamacare mandate. We pray that the Supreme Court will put the question to rest with an emphatic rejection.

The notorious failings of Britain’s socialized medicine have not failed to diminish the hopes and plans of our own fans of socialized everything — of a government so big and so powerful that nothing can resist its meddlesome reach.

That is a lesson Barack Hussein Obama has yet to learn. If he doesn’t learn his lesson by July, he will certainly learn it in November.

—–

Some Inconvenient Facts

Michael Reagan — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 16:20:56 +0000

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

Mr. President: Do you really think you are riding high with the rate of unemployment standing at a whopping 8.5 percent?

8.5 percent! Wow!!

Perhaps we should take a real good look at the real numbers.

Eric Allie / Cagle Cartoons (click to view more cartoons by Allie)

The rate of unemployment was 7.8 percent when you took office, and look how much money you have spent since then trying to improve it. Remember that before you took office our deficit was about $400 billion. Now it’s well over a trillion — $1.5 trillion, more or less, and the national debt totals $15 trillion. Can you even begin to count to 15 trillion, much less deal with that number?

Moreover, as of December there were 6 million fewer jobs than there were in December 2007. You know, when the younger George Bush was president. Oh, and by the way, using the best-case scenario, Mr. Obama, you will end up 4 million short at the end of this year.

By the way, let’s not forget that the Congress was controlled by your party from January 2007 to January 2011. And they held the purse strings!

There are also 170,000 fewer people looking for jobs now, and 42,000 of the new jobs end up being temporary jobs during the Christmas season only.

Also while you are touting the unemployment numbers remember that they are national numbers and elections, even though they are national, really take place at the state level; there, Mr. President, it doesn’t look so good.

Let’s look at the unemployment numbers in some key states:

Florida: 10 percent

Ohio: 8.5 percent

Pennsylvania: 7.9 percent

Michigan: 9.85 percent

Do those numbers worry you, Mr.President? They should. Let’s look at some more, shall we?

In Illinois, your home state, the unemployment rate stands at 10 percent. In Nevada, it is 13 percent. And California, the Bluest of the Blue, it is at 11.3 percent. Do you really think you can’t be beaten with numbers like that?

Even Ron Paul’s chances of winning the White House look good against these numbers!

Republicans need to take a good look at these numbers and run against them, not against each other, and if they do they will win.

Remember, it really is the economy, stupid, and when that’s faltering nothing else matters.

Oh! And let’s not forget that unemployment in the black community is at a whopping 15.8 percent — that is a full point higher than when you took office. Do you expect that black voters will ignore the damage you’ve done to the economy and to them?

Fat chance.

Examining Iowa

Michael Reagan — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 15:30:02 +0000

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

Iowa caucus results show it’s still early in the game and nothing’s certain.

So what happened on the way to the Republican presidential nomination?

Well, even with a slim official win, Mitt Romney did no better in practical terms this year than he did four years ago in 2008 because of the level of competition. This proves that the road to the 2012 nomination will be anything but smooth, and that he has a tough road ahead if he is to win the Republican presidential nomination.

Adam Zyglis / Buffalo News (click to view more cartoons by Adam)

Mitt has a big problem in his seeming inability to relate to the average working man or woman. He’s a bit too self-assured. As for Rick Santorum, he threw a monkey wrench into Ron Paul’s meteoric rise by almost winning, and proved that Romney is not as unbeatable as his worshippers in the media would like us to believe.

Rick gave an off-the-cuff, Reaganesque speech that marked him as a staunch conservative in the style of my late Dad, Ronald Reagan. He leaves no doubt that his love for America is genuine and deep-rooted.

Ron Paul proved that his supporters are in there for the long haul. Moreover he proved that the GOP needs to pay attention to his message of fiscal sanity and restraint in federal spending or the average Republican, fed up with the witless squandering of our tax dollars, might bolt in November.

Newt Gingrich managed to live to see another day, and he’ll do battle in both New Hampshire and South Carolina — not with Romney, who he’s out to destroy, but with Rick Santorum. Newt needs to be more passionate and less professorial and, for heaven’s sake, Newt, put on a damned tie.

Perry needs to retool his message and overcome the gaffes for which he has become so infamous. He says he’s going home to reconsider his candidacy, but if he stays in the race he will meet Santorum and Gingrich in South Carolina and that will be the end for him. The conservative winner there will then go on, and the others will need to go home.

As for Michele Bachmann, she made the right decision to go back to Minnesota and run for re-election and not be like California’s Bob Dornan, who stayed too long in running for president and as a result lost his House seat to Loretta Sanchez.

The Iowa caucuses are over but the fun has just begun. Fasten your seatbelts, America, the ride ahead may get bumpy. There might now be room for another candidate to emerge and sweep the field.

Stay tuned.

—–

Americans Angry at Senate Sycophants

Michael Reagan — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 22:42:01 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

For the past three years the United States Senate, under the leadership of Obama toady Harry Reid, has been an embarrassment for the United States. Now the so-called “Upper Body” has merely kicked the can down the road for two months on an extension of the payroll tax cut, and the House has rightly rejected the Senate’s maneuver.

Americans need to kick the Harry Reid Senate down the road not for a period of months, but for a lifetime. We have a clear message for Harry Reid and his utter failure to lead the Senate: The nation is angry and our anger is directed at a legislative body that under Reid’s leadership can’t do its job.

Nate Beeler / Washington Examiner (click to view more cartoons by Beeler)

Reid seems to think that his job is to force the Senate to follow Barack Obama’s agenda. That would mean the Senate is obliged to put a rubber stamp on the president’s destructive fiscal policies.

He’s wrong. The U.S. Senate is not Obama’s footstool. The Upper Body needs to do what the late Bill Buckley once counseled the nation — put up a red flag and yell “Stop!”

The United States is so drowning in red ink that the monstrous debt this administration and our spendthrift Congress have amassed cannot be repaid even if America survives another century. Washington has saddled not only our children with a horrific debt, they have put it on the shoulders of several generations yet to be born.

As we have just witnessed in Greece, the days of reckoning inevitably arrive for all spendthrifts. The piper must be paid, and he won’t wait forever to collect his monetary due.

Not long ago somebody asked a group of female Obama supporters how they think the United States can run up huge debts without going bankrupt. They replied that President Obama would see to it that the debts would be paid. Asked where the money would come from, they replied that Obama would come up with the money. Asked where he would find the money they replied that he would pay out of his “stash.”

They don’t seem to understand that Obama hasn’t got a “stash.” What money he controls is our money — our tax dollars — and that kitty, thanks to Washington’s squandermania, is just about empty.

Such widespread ignorance of the facts of financial life seems to be widespread. Americans appear to have bought into the idea that Uncle Sam merely has to print more and more money to keep us afloat on the financial seas. It has not seemed to have occurred to such people that the government printing presses cannot keep turning out paper money with nothing like silver or gold behind it without participating in a Ponzi scheme to end all Ponzi schemes. Paper money is exactly that: paper. And that’s how the world sees it even if Americans don’t.

In the past our excursions into fiscal insanity have survived became Washington kept kicking the can down the road. That’s over. We’re reaching the end of that road. Our sole hope of survival is to deny Obama and his toadies in the Congress another four years; otherwise we’ll make Greece look like the world’s most fiscally solvent nation.

It’s time to wave the red flag and yell “stop” as loudly as we can.

Has the Right Gone Mad?

Michael Reagan — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 08:14:05 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

They say they are all Reaganites and that they want my father to return — my father, who lived by his so-called 11th Commandment that no Republican should speak ill of another Republican.

John Cole / Scranton Times-Tribune (click to view more cartoons by Cole)

What makes them think he would want to return to any party whose members use hatchets on their fellow Republicans? And do it in public? Ronald Reagan didn’t pick up his toys and go home like a spoiled brat when things didn’t go his way, even after a hard-fought loss in 1976. He supported the winning candidate as he would support today’s nominee, no matter who might be chosen.

He understood that Republicans can always win when they are united. They have a message the voters understand and support. We can beat Barack Hussein Obama and his socialist message if we are unified, but if we are divided and broadcasting a confusing message — which is what Obama craves — it will help him win another four years in the White House.

He’ll get it, and America will suffer if Republicans spend their time attacking each other. Republicans must understand that the American people are tired of all the intraparty bickering. They want a party that offers solutions, not cat fights.

The don’t need a conservative voice such as that of Michael Savage, attacking a top conservative such as Newt Gingrich by offering him $1 million to bow out of the race. Or conservative hero Glenn Beck publicly announcing he’ll back a third-party candidate such as Ron Paul if Newt is the GOP candidate. That’s called political suicide.

Like it or not, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is the overwhelming favorite among Republican voters, and among many Democrat voters as well. They like the cut of his jib. He leaves no doubt where he stands on the issues, and he’ll fight like the dickens to defend his stands.

Sure, in the past he’s done a lot of stupid things, But just who hasn’t? He willingly admits he’s often been wrong. At the moment, however, he’s right as rain.

The GOP establishment doesn’t like Newt. He’s too outspoken. They like wishy-washy candidates. Their problem is that the majority of Republicans in the real world prefer candidates who hold strong convictions and speak out forcefully and clearly. Every time the GOP picks a candidate with weak Republican convictions, the Republican party loses. And lose they should. A party that will not defend its principles doesn’t deserve to win.

If Republicans turn their guns on Newt instead of on Obama, Obama will be our president for another four years. Is that what they want?

Newt is Right

Michael Reagan — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 13:21:21 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

Tom Brokaw has written a book about the Greatest Generation, a generation that grew up with fathers in the home who saw it as their duty to instill in their sons a work ethic. The Greatest Generation went on to win World War II. Newt Gingrich is right when he warns that the newest generation does not understand or appreciate the value of good, hard work.

Gary McCoy / Cagle Cartoons (click to view more cartoons by McCoy)

Tragically, 40 million children will go to bed tonight without a father in the home to teach them the economic facts of life. One wonders how exactly these children will ever learn any kind of work ethic. While in some cases there is a fine mother like mine who can instill it in them, more often than not it’s simply not possible.

When I was 10 years old I wanted an expensive, new 10-speed Schwinn bike. I asked my mother — the late Hollywood actress Jane Wyman, who could easily afford it — if she would simply buy the bike for me.

She said she would loan me the money if I signed a note acknowledging the debt. I said, “Mom, I am only 10 years old. What can I possibly do to make enough money to pay you back?” She told me I could earn money by selling newspapers.

I signed the note, and every Sunday until I fully paid for that bike I sold papers in front of Good Shepherd Catholic Church in Beverly Hills. Later I asked Mom why she made me work for that bike when the other kids’ parents simply gave them their bikes.

I’ll never forget what she told me. She said, “I build men, not boys, and if you don’t learn to work for what you want now, you will end up as a 40-year-old boy.

“I want a man.”

I pray that that’s what she got in her only son. At least that’s what I try to be.

On that issue alone, Mom would have voted for Newt Gingrich, who holds the same convictions she did.

World War II was followed by incredible economic growth, which gave the false impression that prosperity was no longer just around the corner, but guaranteed by the power and majesty of the Federal government as here and forever present.

What we have now is what has been called “the entitlement generation,” Americans who believe that by merely existing they are entitled to a host of unearned benefits paid for by money extracted from their fellow Americans’ tax payments.

That the pockets of those American tax payers are not bottomless — and sooner or later will no longer be available to the tax and spend crowd that infests Washington, D.C. — has not reached into the minds of this spoiled generation. They really believe that money somehow grows on trees, or at least on printing presses.

We are fast approaching the time when the Feds will no longer be able to print enough paper dollars to finance their multiple programs which are designed to buy the votes of the nation’s tax payers.

Hard work gave birth to the Greatest Generation; we are giving birth to the neediest.

—–

Barney Frank: Good Riddance

Michael Reagan — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 22:15:04 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

To listen to the “elite” media you’d think that a renowned statesman was regrettably planning to leave the political scene.

As Jason Mattera of Human Events has noted, “After his announcement that he won’t seek reelection, the Washington Post heralded the disheveled congressman Barney Frank as leaving a ‘legacy that crosses from legislative cornerstones to political confrontations to a historic place as the nation’s most prominent gay lawmaker.’ ”

Eric Allie / Cagle Cartoons (click to view more cartoons by Allie)

Paul Kane of the Post continued to slobber: “On the left, Frank was a hero both for his effort to rein in the nation’s largest banks and for his role in promoting gay rights, having been the first member of Congress to declare his sexual orientation while in office.”

The Post glossed over the fact that Barney Frank’s homosexual roommate and lover had once used the congressman’s residence almost as a brothel. That, I assume, comes under the heading of “promoting gay rights.”

For all his sexual deviancy, Barney Frank’s greatest offense had more to do with his ultra-left wing policies.

During his 16 terms in Congress Barney Frank was ultra-liberalism’s poster boy — witty and quotable, but fundamentally wrong on so many issues.

Called by Britain’s Telegraph newspaper “one of the most strident liberal voices” among the Democrat members of Congress, Frank championed scores of far-left policies over his 30-plus years on Capitol Hill.

Frank said that running for re-election in his newly redrawn Congressional district would prove too strenuous and that he had chosen to step down rather than engage in a tough re-election fight.

The damage Frank caused to the economic health of this nation — especially in the housing scandal, where his meddling with the industry brought the United States to the brink of a national banking disaster — is unforgivable.

The facts are familiar but worth reviewing. Frank worked to expand the reach of the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 and opposed oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for many years during both Democrat and Republican administrations.

In 1991, Frank fought to loosen lending regulations for two- and three-family homes, even though the default rate in that sector was much higher than the single-family sector. He later blocked a Clinton administration plan to pull the reins on Fannie Mae.

During that period, Frank’s sexual partner was a Fannie Mae executive, Herb Moses. Shockingly, the revelation didn’t prevent Frank’s re-election and he went on to do more damage to the economy.

As ranking minority member of the House Financial Services Committee starting in 2003, Frank strenuously opposed tighter regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac even as the warning signs of risky management and impending disaster became strong, and Republicans tried to take action. He accused his opponents of exaggerating the facts, the Republican reforms lost steam, and the result was the great recession we are still trying to shake off.

Not allowing a crisis go to waste, the disingenuous Frank then tried to cover up his mistakes with the Dodd-Frank “reforms” of 2010, which are nothing more than a Democrat wish list of ways to stifle economic recovery. Higher bank fees and layoffs are just a couple of inevitable consequences.

Like a sexually transmitted disease, Barney Frank was the gift that kept on giving. He will not be missed.

—–

Child Rape Deserves the Ultimate Punishment

Michael Reagan — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 23:49:06 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

Child rape is an unforgivable offense and should be severely punished. It should be a capital crime.

Unfortunately and unwisely, the U.S. Supreme Court in 2008 struck down a Louisiana law that provided for the death penalty in cases of child rape. Part of the court’s rationale was that only a few states had such laws at the time, and they saw no national consensus even though there were several proposed laws in additional states and the movement was growing.

Mike Keefe / Denver Post (click to view more Paterno Scandal cartoons)

I am calling on Congress to pass bipartisan legislation against this horrific crime without delay. The Federal Death Penalty Act of 1994 should be updated to include child rape. Perhaps then the Supreme Court will get a clue about how the American people really feel.

I write as a victim of this crime when I was very young, and I can testify that it is an experience that forever scars its victims. We might think of child rape as an “unspeakable” crime, but the fact is we need to speak up for the sake of our children.

The recent scandal at Penn State once again shows that there are adults among us who prey on the very young. As far as I am concerned, such adults should be punished as severely as the law allows. It is an offense against the most vulnerable among us.

That this latest incident occurred at a center of learning, famed among other things for its stellar athletic programs, shows that no place is immune from episodes of sexual abuse of the young. Where there are youngsters in abundance, as at a college campus or a school yard, there is a strong possibility that there will also be predators lurking about and scheming to abuse them sexually.

The thing about the Penn State case that most shocks me is the absolute failure of some of the college’s authorities to deal with a crime on their campus that could not have escaped their notice. Long-famed for winning football teams managed by one of the nation’s top coaches, Penn State will now be remembered as the site of dismal failure in protecting children

Parents need to be aware of this problem and should see to it that their youngsters are given appropriate guidance that they must be careful to avoid situations where they might be victimized by adult child abusers, and that they must promptly report any attempt by adults to abuse them sexually.

As I wrote above, as a youngster I was abused by an adult. Because I was very young and not aware that I was a victim and not a willing participant in this crime, I failed to report this abuse to my parents or to the authorities. I fear that today’s victims might share this fear and unknowingly allow their abusers to avoid the harsh punishments they deserve to experience. That exposes other youngsters to victimization, so our children need encouragement to speak up as well.

Let it never be forgotten that child abuse, especially by sexual predators, is a widespread crime. Let all parents remain alert to any signs that their youngsters are victims of sex abuse by adults. Your children need you.

Don’t Be a Paterno: When a Child is Abused, Here’s What to Do

Michael Reagan — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 22:25:01 +0000

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

Penn State football coach Joe Paterno released a statement on Wednesday in which he said, “With the benefit of hindsight, I wish I had done more.” How lame is that, Coach?

Would you have accepted that excuse from one of your players? “With the benefit of hindsight, Coach, I wish I had run the route we rehearsed a thousand times in practice.” See how stupid that sounds? It doesn’t take “hindsight” to know that when some monster is raping children in your locker room, you call the police.

Taylor Jones / Cagle Cartoons (click to view more Paterno cartoons)

Coach, you knew back in 2002 that Jerry Sandusky had anally raped a ten-year-old boy in the Lasch Football Building. You handled the matter quietly with your athletic director, Tim Curley. You took away the rapist’s keys and barred him from the facility — but you didn’t call the police. You didn’t lift a finger to help the victim. No hindsight needed, Coach. You screwed up.

Yes, we all know about your 61-year career at Penn State. But when you allow children to be victimized right under your nose, you wipe out 61 years of achievement. The Jerry Sandusky scandal is your legacy now.

This scandal has also indelibly stained the reputation of The Second Mile, the charity Jerry Sandusky founded in 1977 as a foster-care program for at-risk kids. Turns out the kids were most at-risk from Sandusky himself.

The Second Mile was one of George Bush Sr.’s Thousand Points of Light and probably did some good work. But the grand jury says Sandusky met his victims through The Second Mile. So even if the program survives this scandal, it will always be remembered as Jerry Sandusky’s private sandbox for recruiting rape victims.

As for the child rapist himself (do I have to say “alleged,” given what we know?), you have to stand amazed at his gall. He actually had the brass to title his autobiography “Touched: The Jerry Sandusky Story.” What is that, the punchline of a sick joke?

I don’t want to hear any more “benefit of hindsight” excuses. So let’s be clear about what you should do if you learn that a child is being sexually abused. Print this out, post it on your bulletin board, and make sure everyone in your family, company, or organization knows how to respond to child sexual abuse.

1. If you see an act of child abuse in progress, step in and STOP IT. I have to wonder why the grad assistant who witnessed the rape felt he only had to report it to someone. Why didn’t he jump in, knock Sandusky on his butt, and protect the child? If you see a child being raped by an adult, please have the guts and good sense to intervene.

2. If a child tells you he or she is being abused, don’t panic, don’t act shocked. Make sure the child feels supported and protected. Say, “You did the right thing in telling me.”

3. Believe the child. Even if the offender is “good old Uncle Charlie,” tell the child, “I believe you.” It takes courage for kids to speak up because they fear they won’t be believed. Kids need to know you’re on their side, and they almost never imagine sex acts unless they’ve experienced them.

4. Tell the child that he or she is not bad. Say, “He knew better; you didn’t know. We’ll make sure he can’t touch you again.”

5. Focus on the child’s needs. Don’t think about the reputation of any individual or organization. The moment you shift your focus off of what’s best for the child, you’re on the wrong side of the issue.

We as a people need to stop protecting our institutions over our children; whether it is the church, the university, or the institution of the family it is time for us to put our children first not last.

6. Don’t confront the offender in front of the child. Keep adult discussions away from the child. Kids need to feel protected. They don’t need to be upset, disturbed, and frightened.

7. Report the crime to the police. Law enforcement agencies in your area have trained investigators who will talk with you and the child, and who know exactly how best to handle the situation.

And don’t you dare tell me that you don’t have the heart to have “good old Uncle Charlie” arrested. If Uncle Charlie is molesting a child, protect that child!

I’ve heard too many horror stories of people who protected “good old Uncle Charlie” or “good old Coach Sandusky” instead of protecting children. You must have absolute moral clarity: Child molesters belong in jail where they can’t hurt children. If you don’t call the police, then you are an accomplice and no better than a molester yourself.

8. If the molester is a member of the clergy, DO NOT report the abuse to church officials. If the molester is a coach or teacher, DO NOT report the abuse to the school authorities. Some churches and organizations worry more about lawsuits and bad publicity than about kids. Just call the police.

9. Don’t call Child Protective Services — investigating crimes is not the function of CPS. If the police determine that CPS should be involved, they will make that decision.

Don’t let the predator talk you out calling the police. Most predators are amazingly persuasive — that’s how they entice their victims, and that’s how they get people to cover for them instead of reporting them. Don’t be taken in by a charming predator.

10. After you call the police, call the ChildHelp National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-4ACHILD (1-800-422-4453). The ChildHelp counselor will listen to your concerns, answer your questions, and direct you to local support services for the child.

Finally, don’t you ever use the “benefit of hindsight” excuse! I’ve armed you with the foresight to do the right thing to protect a child—and that child is counting on you.

—–

Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan. He is a political consultant, the founder and chairman of The Reagan Group, and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his website at www.reagan.com, and visit the Michael Reagan Center at Arrow Child & Family ministries at http://www.arrow.org/mrc/Overview.html. Portions of this column are adapted from his book “Twice Adopted.”

GOP Field in Flux

Michael Reagan — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 02:17:56 +0000

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

My dad would be beaming with pride over the behavior of Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain in Saturday’s debate, where there were polite discussions over the issues that concern us all. Moreover, the candidates offered their genuine solutions to the nation’s problems without the personal attacks that would have violated Dad’s 11th Commandment. The winner in the Gingrich-Cain debate was this nation and its people.

In the campaign itself, Herman Cain’s recently soaring campaign is threatened by charges that he had sexually harassed several women when he was president of the National Restaurant Association. As of now the unproven charges have failed to damage his numbers but that still may happen as a result of the media’s relentless coverage of the charges, which Cain vehemently denies have any merit. Unfortunately for Cain the story has legs, and the media will not let up the pressure.

Daryl Cagle / msnbc.com (click to view Daryl Cagle's blog)

It’s far too early to write Cain off. The charges have failed to dent his high standing in the polls, where he’s been on top in some. He has genuine appeal, a winning sense of humor, and a relentless determination to win. It’s hard to ignore the suspicion that the media attacks on Cain are meant to drive out of the race a black candidate who is a serious threat to Barack Obama’s chances of hanging on to the White House.

Like most of his rivals, Cain has a plan — he calls it the 9-9-9 Plan — to restore our economy. He’s emerging as a tough and determined fighter — qualities the American people admire.

Most dramatic has been the sudden rise in the fortunes of Newt Gingrich, who is cutting into the support of his rivals in the key Iowa primary. One new poll even shows that Newt, who has been around forever, has all of a sudden soared into double digits nationally. Some voters don’t recall his speakership of the House of Representatives, so he almost seems to be a newcomer as a candidate in national politics.

Few would deny that Gingrich, a renowned historian, author and political star, is one of the nation’s most thoughtful and brilliant statesmen.

The fact that Gingrich has published a new Civil War book, “The Crater,” is a real plus because it gives him added opportunities to appear on television to push the book and, by inference, his candidacy. “The Crater” deals with one of the waning Civil War’s more bizarre episodes and is certain to be widely read.

The media have all but anointed Mitt Romney as the certain GOP nominee. He has been the front-runner for the nomination and continues to have that distinction. Romney, however, has a serious problem. He is unacceptable to some GOP voters, many of who say they would not vote for him in the race against President Obama. A large segment of the GOP electorate considers him and his policies as far too liberal.

He is, however, a skilled and cogent candidate and has proven to be a genuine pro during recent debates. He continues to be the front-runner but he is vulnerable because the grass roots and tea party voters view him with suspicion.

Keep in mind that Election Day 2012 is a long way off, and in American politics only one thing is certain — that nothing is certain.

—–

No Shame

Michael Reagan — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 14:06:48 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

Reporter: ‘We’re Not Going To Get Into Details Of Exactly What Happened’…

Rick McKee / Augusta Chronicle (click to view more cartoons by McKee)

Fmr. Secy: Not the Cain I know…

Cain flashback: ‘I’m ready for high-tech lynching’…

Coulter: ‘They Are Terrified Of Strong, Conservative Black Men’…

Rush: ‘Unconscionable Racially Charged Attack’…

‘Occupy Politico’…

The stories behind these headlines illustrate why good people no longer want to run for the presidency of the United States. They immediately become targets of the left, which almost always pulls the race card or the sexual harassment card when they have nothing legitimate to say against the people they fear.

In Herman Cain’s case they use both disgusting smear tactics. They have no shame!

The website Politico has dredged up a couple of items which they claim show that Herman Cain has a background that includes sexual harassment of two former employees of a group he once headed. The exact nature of the alleged offenses is left obscure, filed under the heading of sexual harassment. The women were given financial settlements by the restaurant association on the grounds that the allegations should be settled even if meritless.

The women are left unidentified and Cain heatedly denies both allegations. But the damage is done and regardless of the fact that they are baseless, as he insists, they are out there.

Ask yourself: If similar accusations were aimed at any liberal candidate would the mainstream media, aside from condemning the charges, give them much publicity? Ask Paula Jones, harassed by the media for daring to accuse President Clinton of sexually abusing her. They smeared her mercilessly. Mr. Clinton got off unscathed. Miss Jones is left with Mr. Clinton’s advice to “put some ice” on her lips after he had allegedly bruised them when forcing himself upon her.

Not so with Herman Cain. He’s a conservative Republican who is ahead in the polls for the GOP presidential nomination and enjoys widespread support from the public. As far as the media are concerned, he’s guilty of sexually harassing two unidentified women, known only to Politico, whether or not the accusations are true.

A lot is known about Herman Cain. And what is known is that he has proven himself to be an honest and decent man who is obviously not capable of the behavior with which he is charged. To the left wing-dominated media that’s inconsequential. What matters is that as a conservative Republican leading his rivals in the GOP presidential sweepstakes he is a menace to their socialistic agenda and must be destroyed.

The media’s double standard is once again exposed inasmuch as President Obama’s clouded background is carefully ignored.

Mr. Cain, who is obviously qualified for the office, is challenged on what appear to be the most specious of grounds. Given his superb background as a good, decent and honest man, the accusations ring hollow — except to the Stalinist segment of the media which insists that conservative politicians are always guilty regardless of the merits of the charges.

It’s no wonder decent men and women avoid getting involved in elective politics. It’s not worth the trouble.

—–

Flat Tax or Flat-Out Dead

Michael Reagan — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 01:41:51 +0000

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

Despite the recent chatter about a flat income tax — a tax that every income earner pays regardless of their level of income — the idea is dead unless its supporters figure out a way to get together and support the idea that a flat tax is a fair tax. I believe we can unite.

Rick McKee / Augusta Chronicle (view more cartoons by McKee)

In a system of flat taxation there is only one level of taxation. Everybody pays the same rate no matter how much money they earn. Taxpayers are not punished for having succeeded by being taxed at rates higher than that paid by the lowest earners of income.

It’s not a new idea. My dad was a supporter of the flat tax proposal, but he recognized the problems inherent in passing it into law.

One problem has to do with uncertainty and political opportunism. There’s an old adage that decrees that only two things in life are certain: death and taxes. And just as likely is the fact that any proposal to change the tax code — even change for the better — is bound to create uncertainty as people examine proposals in light of their own finances. This creates a wedge for Democrats to use against us.

Democrats and the liberal media are now trying to turn uncertainty into chaos as they highlight every situation that might affect somebody in some obscure way as the result of the various Republican proposals. But we should not lose sight of the fact that their agenda has nothing to do with fairness, and has everything to do with punishing Americans for the “crimes” of earning money, providing jobs, and not wanting to be dependent on the state.

As my dad saw it, the entire federal tax system needed to be revised. I agree that’s still the case. But there is work to be done, and we must not allow ourselves to feed the liberal narrative that Republicans will be unable to unite behind a candidate or a tax plan.

One place to start is to reconcile the Flat Taxers and the Fair Taxers, those who support some sort of national sales tax as in Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 Plan. If neither side will support the other, we will be exactly where the IRS and the administration want us to be — split on an important issue. If we don’t come together on this issue Washington and the IRS can sit back and laugh, and keep their hands in our pockets. And they’ll be laughing at us.

Just remember that a flat tax is a fair tax. Nobody gets penalized for earning more than the average wage earner. No matter how much money one earns, one pays the same rate of taxation everybody else pays. That doesn’t mean they pay the same amount of taxes everybody else pays — merely that they pay the same percentage of their income everybody else pays. Nobody gets punished for making more than the average wage earner.

Unfortunately, there is a segment of our population that recoils in horror at the sight of somebody who, by dint of their efforts, earns more than the average worker or even aspires to do so. Democrats believe that people must be penalized for their success by being forced to pay ever-increasing taxes. In their eyes, success breeds contempt.

This is the group that opposes a flat tax, and they must be defeated in 2012. I have no doubt that Republicans can unite to make sure that happens.

—–

Are They Crazy?

Michael Reagan — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 14:06:19 +0000

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

In his new book, “Suicide of a Superpower,” Pat Buchanan writes that the politics of race, culture and tribalism will be the largest problem civilization will face.

Arcadio Esquivel / Cagle Cartoons (click to view our Cartoon blog)

This item on foxnews.com proves his point. Here’s where today’s politics of culture are leading this once-great nation.

“A lesbian couple in California who say their 11-year-old son Tommy who wants to be a girl named Tammy are giving their child hormone blockers that delay the onset of puberty — so that he can have more time to decide if he wants to change his gender.

“The couple’s supporters say the Hormone Blocking Therapy has only minor side effects and is appropriate for a child who is unsure of his gender. ‘This is definitely a changing landscape for transgender youth,’ said Joel Baum, director of education and training for Gender Spectrum, a California-based non-profit group. ‘This is about giving kids and their families the opportunity to make the right decision.’”

The right decision? Are they crazy? How can a child born as a male choose to be a female? Who determines if he is “unsure of his gender”? He can determine that simply by taking a quick look at his body. No amount of surgery and training can permit a child to choose to become what he is not. Born male, he’ll always be a male regardless of his weird wishes, those of his “parents,” or the results of a misguided surgeon’s scalpel.

To begin with, Tommy is an adoptee, and I wonder if his real parents had any idea their offspring would become a poster boy for this kind of weirdness.

I also wonder how his so-called “parents” can legally obtain Hormone Blocking Therapy to prevent nature from taking its course. If a child is born male, he’s a male. Period.

The whole affair boggles the mind. How in the world can the state of California justify allowing a so-called “lesbian couple” to adopt a child who will be raised in an unnatural setting by two people who cannot possibly be seen as “parents” — roles for men and women, not for women and women or men and men?

In a saner world, this episode would provoke equal amounts of scorn and hilarity over the extent to which the roles of men and women have become so distorted as to obliterate the differences between males and females in the sovereign state of California.

Finally, gay couples should be outraged by this!! This will bolster the Christian argument against gays adopting and therefore leave more children in a broken foster-care system. Children are children, they are not for experimentation.

Except, of course, in California.

—–

Pampered Protesters

Michael Reagan — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 19:14:47 +0000

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

The hordes of so-called “protesters” now polluting the streets of several U.S. cities, including New York, are sending confused messages about their grievances.

Gary McCoy / Cagle Cartoons (click to view more cartoons by McCoy)

The unemployed among them complain that the jobs available to them are beneath them. I guess that cancels out the old concept of starting in the mailroom and advancing step-by-step to the boardroom. It used to be the norm that one started at the bottom and worked their way up. This bunch seems to be living under the delusion that simply by virtue of having been born they are entitled to immediate arrival at the boardroom level with appropriate compensation.

Viewing these unruly mob scenes, featuring numerous public sexual activities posing as protests, I am reminded of the manner in which my Dad dealt with such malcontents. If they were government employees he simply fired them. It worked. The remaining ones slinked back to work.

And I recall how he dealt with his son (me) back in 1965 when I dropped out of Arizona State University and thought that I was simply going home to live with — and off — either my Mom or Dad, who were then divorced. When I got home I found that their doors were locked to college dropouts.

Nancy, my ever-loving step-mom, was busy calling all branches of the military to let them know I was a college dropout and thus now eligible to be drafted.

When I finally was able to speak to my parents they simply told me to find another place to live and to get a job. I did both. I moved in with some friends and got a job working at Asbury Transportation Company in Los Angeles loading oil-well freight from 5:00 p.m. to 1:30 a.m., Monday through Friday. That’s where I was working when my father was elected governor of California.

Did I complain that my lowly job was beneath my new station in life as the son of the governor of California? How could I? I was the one who set that bar low when I dropped out of college. So to all you spoiled brats marching and wanting better pay or bigger allowances, take a good, long look in the mirror, not at Wall Street, and if you want to blame something blame OBAMACARE! Your employers or parents have to spend the money you might have received in raises to pay for that socialist monstrosity.

I am still amazed that these kids can find time to congregate in city streets, which are in many cases far from their hometowns. Somebody has to be paying their way; in most cases their beleaguered parents are stuck with the bill for their latest adventure, which has nothing to do with education and a lot to do with left-wing politics and public lovemaking, if that’s what it’s called.

And the media willingly — indeed, eagerly — give the protesters lots of free publicity. Media outlets should start ignoring them and we’ll see how fast they disband and slink back home. They thrive on the publicity the media provide.

Finally, the long-suffering parents ought to close their pockets and deny their wayward brats the money that allows them to travel to the big city to make pests of themselves.

Go home. Now. But before you do, clean up the messes you have made.

Amanda Knox: A Cautionary Tale

Michael Reagan — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 16:05:59 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

From now on, parents who plan to send their children abroad to study in a foreign nation should sit them down in front of the TV set and watch replays of the Amanda Knox saga. It has all the elements of a true-to-life lesson in the dangers of turning young men and women barely out of their teens into innocents abroad.

Arcadio Esquivel / Cagle Cartoons (click to view our Cartoon Blog)

Youngsters — and many parents — are clueless when it comes to the customs and laws in other countries that lack many of the safeguards which we Americans take for granted. They should study the Amanda Knox case. It is a clear warning that — unlike here in the United State — in many foreign countries the accused is automatically guilty until proven innocent.

Consider this: Amanda Knox spent four years in prison before being tried in court on charges that ultimately appear to have been baseless. Moreover, her chief accuser himself now faces trial and possible imprisonment for misconduct. She was made hostage to a system of justice where the accused is guilty until proven innocent and she was locked away until a trial in court could take place, which in Amanda’s case took 48 long months behind bars. .

Four years in an Italian slammer — four years of waiting for a trial and a chance to tell her side of the story!

It is said that ignorance of the law is not an excuse for violating the law. That’s true here, but no consideration is given to Americans visiting foreign nations, who cannot be expected to understand all the ins and outs of the laws of those nations.

It is true that foreign travel is broadening. It can also be hazardous for young Americans born and bred in the best and fairest nation in the world, where the court system is designed to protect their rights and freedom of the citizenry — an uncommon idea in many nations abroad.

I can readily understand why some parents believe that study abroad enhances their offspring’s education. But I cannot understand how some parents can send their youngsters off to foreign counties to be on their own in a totally alien environment where many of the safeguards to their freedom, common here in the United States, simply do not exist. Many parents should consider accompanying their children on excursions abroad.

Parents need to wake up to the fact that the United States is the best and fairest country in the world. Our God-given freedom guaranteed by the Constitution is the reason why we have become the wealthiest nation in the word. Parents should educate themselves and their youngsters on the laws and customs of foreign nations before sending them abroad to study; otherwise they run the risk of losing them to an alien system of justice.

Amanda was lucky. You and your family might not be so lucky.

—–

Get Serious!

Michael Reagan — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 13:48:30 +0000

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

There’s an old curse that begs, “O that mine enemy would write a book.” That’s a desire getting a big play in the debates between Mitt Romney and Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who are both trashing my Dad Ronald Reagan’s so-called “11th Commandment,” that Republicans must refrain from attacking each other in public.

Dave Granlund / PoliticalCartoons.com (click to view more Rick Perry cartoons)

Like just about everybody else I’m being wearied by both Mitt Romney and Rick Perry citing passages from each other’s books to prove a point. All they do is prove that they can read and write. We need more than that in a president.

As my Jewish friends in Miami would say, “Enough, already!”

Romney and Perry need to knock it off. What we really want to know is exactly what they, as president, would do to get America back on the right track. We want to know what their visions are for America’s future. Their public spats are simply giving Barack Obama juicy material for his TV ads in the general election in 2012.

Moreover, they have managed to transform a previously politically unknown pizza mogul, Herman Cain, into a real player in the presidential sweepstakes and given a lot of publicity to his so-called 9-9-9 Plan, which lays out his means to get this nation back on track.

Cain’s 9-9-9 Plan is taking hold of the public’s attention because of its simplicity and clarity. It’s easy to understand and you don’t have to read a book to grasp its essentials. Romney and Perry need to adopt the old standard of “keeping it simple, stupid.” The public has neither the time nor the will to wrestle with complex political propositions.

With all the focus on book passages, Perry and Romney have also given Newt Gingrich a new lease on his political life. Newt doesn’t waste his time prattling about literature. He doesn’t direct you to some pages in some book. Instead, he answers questions directly and without waffling. He also has a vision of what America can be under the right leadership. He has something Perry and Romney appear to lack — a vision of an America reborn and the ways to get there; Professor Gingrich provides that without being professorial.

Republicans have certain core values — we believe in small and limited government, legitimate states’ rights, and in adhering to the principles enunciated in the Constitution. Those values enshrouded in the Constitution have transformed what was once a collection of frontier communities into history’s wealthiest and most powerful nation. Candidates for the Republican presidential nomination need to prove they understand exactly what the Constitution demands of them and show they are willing and able to conform to those demands.

Nowadays, politics has come to be seen as just another spectator sport, like football or baseball. We treat candidates as players in a sport, chalking up their hits, runs and errors. Unlike sports, however, politics affects the lives and futures of every single American. Unfortunately, unlike Vegas, what happens in Washington doesn’t stay in Washington — it hits us exactly where we live.

The media are no help in giving us the information we need do to make informed judgments about candidates. Instead, many in the so-called mainstream media have allowed themselves to become cheerleaders for leftist political candidates and causes. They need to be reined in by an alert public and forced to fulfill their responsibilities as news sources, and not as advocates for one side or the other.

These are the sort of solid issues with which the candidates need to be dealing. So far they are not doing so. Until they do it’s hard to take them seriously. And, like it or not, politics is serious business.

—–

Hang Together or Hang Alone

Michael Reagan — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 21:45:18 +0000

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

There’s one sure way for Republicans and conservatives to lose the 2012 presidential election — split over who their presidential nominee will be, and fail to go all-out to support the winner.

Eric Allie / Cagle Cartoons (view more cartoons by Allie)

People keep asking me, “What would your father, Ronald Reagan, do?” The answer is easy. No matter who the nominee is, he or she would get his support. After all, his famous “11th Commandment” demanded that Republicans support their party’s nominee, no matter who he or she might be.

He certainly would have supported John McCain in 2008. Tragically, if the party of Ronald Reagan had followed what would have been his lead, John McCain — not Barack Obama — would the president of these United States today. If Obama is not to be re-elected in 2012, Republicans need to get their act together, decide on a nominee, and back him or her to the hilt.

Let’s look at some flaws of the current frontrunners. Both Romney and Perry, like the rest of us, have their share of flaws — Perry for having signed an executive order to inoculate 12-year-old girls against HPV, and signing a bill to provide in-state tuition to illegal aliens.

As for Mitt Romney, his membership in the Mormon church has earned the hostility of some Christians, and his institution of so-called Romneycare when he was governor of Massachusetts has been questioned by many conservatives.

As things stand now, either Perry or Romney will be the 2012 Republican presidential nominee. Republicans will be obliged to support the winner if we can hope to win the presidential election, no matter the flaws.

It’s important to recall that Ronald Reagan outraged some Republicans when as California’s governor he raised taxes and signed an abortion bill and became the first California governor to sign a no-fault divorce law Despite all this, he still went on to become the greatest U.S. president of our lifetime.

If he were alive today and we were to nominate him in 2012, I wonder which wing of the GOP his opponents would come from.

Regardless of the outcome of such a confrontation, Republicans will have to either hang together or hang alone.

Should either Romney or Perry win the GOP presidential nomination, we are either going to support the winner in the November election or watch Barack Obama win a second term. Republicans simply can’t afford to be bystanders in 2012.

Put it this way: Who do you hope will be the president when 2013 dawns: Barack Obama or a Republican? The answer is clear, whether our nominee is Romney or Perry or even someone else, such as Michele Bachmann.

—–

The Truth Will Out

Michael Reagan — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 12:26:02 +0000

No matter what the record shows, there will always be the nay-sayers who have no trouble ignoring facts as obvious as the noses on their faces.

Nate Beeler / Washington Examiner (click to view our Cartoon Blog)

Sunday was the 10th anniversary of the horror we call simply by the numerals that mark its point in time. Anyone who watched the minute-by-minute film record of the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center buildings broadcast by cable networks such as Fox, MSNBC and CNN — and had any doubts about what happened and who made it happen — has a serious gap in their ability to process information clearly presented.

They exist, however, laughably calling themselves “truthers” despite their obvious inability to recognize the truth even when it stares them straight in their clouded eyes. How they can look at the films showing such horrors as the suicidal leaps of our fellow human beings trapped in the flames and still convince themselves that the whole thing was a hoax thrust on us by the Bush administration and the federal government is simply an astounding reaction to the plain truth faithfully recorded by plain citizens with cameras.

Those who fail to understand that this was an act of war committed by terrorists fail to understand that there are those who hate us, and hate our way of life, and are willing to go to any lengths to inflict serious harm on this nation and do it for all the world to see.

The idea that recognizing that a state of war exists between the people of the United States and those who would inflict a worldwide Islamic dictatorship on the people of the United States seems to have escaped the notice of the self-described “truthers.”

Prominent among them is an academic, ultra-leftist and somewhat disoriented New York Times columnist, one Professor Paul Krugman, who viewed the ceremonies surrounding the recognition of 9/11 as mere hucksterism. In a column called “repugnant” by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Krugman pilloried as shameful those who want to commemorate this great American tragedy.

I’ll tell you want is really shameful — it’s the vision of this leftist academic dancing on the graves of the victims of 9/11 from the safety of his office. Civilians, firefighters and other first responders willingly went into the jaws of certain death in an attempt to rescue their fellow New Yorkers trapped in the two doomed towers. We all know of their heroism and stand in awe of their willingness to serve in those dark hours. Demeaning those who celebrate the heroism of those who risked their lives — or died trying to rescue their fellow human beings — is simply beneath contempt.

I’m certain that the souls of these heroes of 9/11 willingly forgive the likes of Professor Krugman from their refuge in paradise. Down here in the trenches of the war against terrorism, forgiveness doesn’t come all that easy. We are entreated to pray for our enemies. So mutter a prayer for Professor Krugman. Although he probably doubts the power of prayer, he needs all the prayer he can get.

—–

Professors Don’t Have All the Answers

Michael Reagan — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 13:10:22 +0000

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

President Obama has nominated Princeton University Professor Alan Krueger to be chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisors. Saying that “I have nothing but confidence in Alan as he takes on this important role,” Obama described him as one of the nation’s leading economists.

Eric Allie / Cagle Cartoons (click to view more Allie cartoons)

Nonsense! Washington needs to stop listening to these allegedly high-minded academics who have helped get us into this fouled-up economy.

“Cash for Clunkers”? Please! Enough with academics from Princeton, Harvard, Chicago and Yale who have never run a business nor created a single private sector job, It is long past time for us to put a business person in this post, someone who has actually created jobs .

This has got to stop. NO MORE LIBERAL PROFESSORS getting top administration jobs! If you must have an academic, however, why not try someone on the faculty at Eureka College where my dad Ronald Reagan got his degree in Economics. It worked for him and it worked for the good old USA!

Krueger, 50, described as a “labor specialist” who served in the Treasury Department earlier in the Obama administration, will succeed Austan Goolsbee, who has now returned the University of Chicago. According to Obama, Krueger is “a key voice on a vast array of economic issues for more than two decades. Alan understands the difficult challenges our country faces, and I have confidence that he will help us meet those challenges as one of the leaders on my economic team.”

Fox News reported Monday that, according to one administration official, “Krueger’s job will be to provide policy prescriptions on ways to spur employment… [he] has worked on several analyses at Treasury, including the impact of tax incentives to encourage employers to hire, the ‘cash for clunkers’ program to expand vehicle purchases, the Small Business Lending Fund and Build America taxable municipal bonds.”

He was previously employed as the chief economist at the Labor Department during the Clinton administration, and has published studies on job growth, the minimum wage, and the economic backgrounds of terrorists.

Impressive. But this nation’s phenomenal growth in a mere 200 years from a collection of British colonies to the world’s leading financial colossus was hardly the result of the labors of college economics professors working in government jobs. It was ordinary Americans, most without college degrees or even high school diplomas, who rolled up their sleeves and built the world’s most advanced nation from the plains and forests of a largely undeveloped new world.

Academia was not the engine that created 21st Century America — it was a passenger riding free in the caboose. The salaries and other perks available to members of the professorate are paid with funds resulting from the sweat and grit of ordinary Americans whom the academics routinely demean as being beneath their notice, except when they are reaching for their paychecks or grants.

It is not surprising that former academic Barack Obama should turn to the groves of academia to find appointees to key government jobs. It’s where he hails from; it’s where he was comfortable, free of the cares and competitions of a dog-eat-dog economy.

I don’t have anything against Professor Krueger. As far as I know he is fully qualified for his new job. It’s the job itself that bothers me; the marriage of government and the professional economics community that makes me uncomfortable. The two are not compactible, one being devoted to the commonweal, the other to more esoteric pursuits.

I guess that’s what you end up with when you elect an academic with no real-life experiences in the world of cash and carry, where the majority of us live.

—–

United States Must Lead in Libya

Michael Reagan — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 13:26:00 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

With approximately 135 different tribes within its borders, the hard lifting in Libya now begins. It is incumbent upon the United States to take a lead role in this vital area. No more of the Obama policy of leading from the rear — the U.S. must lead, and must lead from the front.

Daryl Cagle / msnbc.com (click to view more Gadhafi cartoons)

The Libyan people have not breathed freedom since the tyrant Gadhafi took control of their government way back in 1969. It may not be easy for Libyans to learn how to be free after all that time, but we can and must help them.

There are factions in Libya that support terrorism, and we cannot allow them to gain control of a nation with $85 million a day coming from oil sales and with upwards of $150 billion in assets now frozen by international action. We also cannot allow known weapons supplies and raw nuclear material to get into the hands of the enemies of freedom now vying for power.

That lead role will be critical. With Gadhafi’s 42-year-long dictatorship all but over, Libya’s new leaders face what Peter Apps of Reuters called “the daunting task of restoring order, beginning reconstruction and avoiding collapse into conflict and chaos.”

Libya’s now-frozen assets need to be made available to the new government. Providing access to frozen funds and restoring oil exportation should enable the government to build a stable authority and support the change to a market economy.

“What you almost always find in these cases is that postwar planning hasn’t kept pace with the planning for the conflict itself,” according to David Hartwell, a Middle East analyst at IHS Janes, as reported by Reuters. He adds, “There’s going to be a lot to do”

Gadhafi’s corrupt dictatorship spent more than 40 years imposing a socialist framework to put most of the economy into the fumbling hands of the government; perhaps 70 percent of all Libyans are dependent on government employment of some sort. New leaders will inherit an infrastructure damaged by corruption, neglect and war. It might take years to restore oil production and rebuild the economy.

Mohsin Khan, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, told msnbc.com, “It’s going to be a tough economic situation. The new Libyan government will have a choice to make — which way it wants to go. That’s critical in determining how it rebounds.”

This is reminiscent of the choices faced by governments in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union.

In the face of all this chaos, America’s leadership plays golf in Martha’s Vineyard, seemingly oblivious to the perils involved in the political chaos of the Middle East.

In the meantime, the need to unfreeze Libyan assets so that funds can quickly flow back into Libya was addressed by Catherine Ashton, the European Union foreign affairs chief who insists that frozen funds flow freely back into Libyan coffers.

“This is about making sure that people are paid, civil servants police officers, whoever, also making sure that there are supplies in the shops and so on, helping to make the economy function,” Ashton said in a speech Tuesday.

She didn’t add that it’s hard to do all that on the ninth hole of a golf course in Martha’s Vineyard.

Obama Could Learn From Ronald Reagan

Michael Reagan — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 16:58:26 +0000

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

If President Obama really wants to get the U.S. economy going again, he could do worse than to study the results of my Dad’s 1981 Economic Recovery Act, which boosted the economy by leaps and bounds.

Take the matter of jobs, for example. Thanks to the 1981 act, an astounding 20 million new jobs were created. Moreover, inflation dropped from 13.5 percent in 1980 to a mere 4.1 percent by 1988, and unemployment fell from 7.6 percent to 5.5 percent.

Gary McCoy / Cagle Cartoons (click to view more cartoons by McCoy)

Moreover, the net worth of families earning between $20,000 and $50,000 annually grew by 27 percent. At the same time, the real gross national product jumped by 26 percent and the prime interest rate was slashed by half — from 21.5 percent in January 1981 to 10 percent in August 1988.

The amount of individual tax revenues rose from $244 billion in 1980 to $446 billion in 1989. Moreover, total tax revenues jumped grew by almost 100 percent, rising by 99.4 percent during the 1980s. The act produced 92 months of healthy economic growth — the longest period of peacetime in the post WWII period.

Under my Dad, marginal tax rates were cut from a top rate of 70 percent to a mere 28 percent, while revenues to the U.S. government from all taxes nearly doubled – increasing from roughly $500 billion to an astronomical $1.1 TRILLION in 1990.

Such stellar economic growth was the result of my Dad’s economic policies, which were rooted in his belief in the ability of the American people to make the right decisions concerning their nation’s economic activity. Contrast that with the Obama administration’s quasi-Marxist policies, which seek to make Washington the center of the nation’s economic activity.

This results in aberrations, such as non-elected government boards seeking to dictate to corporations and business where they can and cannot locate their various operations, as we’ve seen in the case of Seattle-based Boeing’s decision to open a plant in South Carolina, a right-to-work state. Incredibly, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is trying to block that move, claiming that it is based solely on the status of that state as a right-to-work state, putting the government in league with Big Labor, which hates giving workers their rights to work as they see fit and wants to prevent the move.

Ronald Reagan would have been appalled by that outrage. When faced with a similar attempt by a labor union to twist the rules governing the behavior of air traffic controllers, my Dad simply fired them all and replaced them. He would have defied any attempt to prevent a company from moving some of their operations to a new location because .a labor union opposed the move on the grounds that it freed employees from the grip of Big Labor bosses.

The Obama administration has displayed outright hostility toward Boeing, using the NLRB to harass the company as it attempts to operate free of government interference. Too bad my Dad isn’t around to curb the power of an out-of-control government agency slavishly bowing to the dictates of a powerful labor union, and not the workers it pretends to represent.

Blame Obama

Michael Reagan — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 12:08:04 +0000

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

President Obama, the Democrat party and their members of Congress have spent years blaming former President George W. Bush for the nation’s current economic woes, which is akin to blaming the bank’s tellers for a bank robbery, or for the dishonesty of their bosses, the bank’s executives who were looting the till.

Adam Zyglis / Buffalo News (click to view our Cartoon Blog)

Nobody in the left-dominated media bothers to note that in the last years of the Bush presidency Democrats controlled the Congress and thus had a death grip on the nation’s economy, having complete control over the nation’s purse strings. They spent and spent and spent the yet-uncollected taxes of future generations — as well as our own — as if there were no tomorrow.

It wasn’t a Bush Congress that jammed the incredible costs of Obamacare down the throats of the American people and their children and grandchildren — it was our spendthrift president and his allies on Capitol Hill doing their classic imitation of the legendary drunken sailors on shore leave.

It’s simply common sense to understand that spending money one doesn’t have in the hopes that the future will provide the needed funds is something like believing that some beneficent tooth fairy will come up with the money in the future.

Now the president and the national Democrat party have suddenly discovered a scapegoat for the latest economic mess they have thrust upon the American people. They insist that the credit-rating downgrade was the fault of the tea party trying to control the nation’s purse strings. I’m not kidding. They really expect us to swallow this whopper as the gospel truth.

They expect us to ignore the fact that the millions of tea party members are simply Americans deeply and sincerely concerned about the nation’s economy and the tendency of the government to spend their hard-earned tax money on whatever scam strikes its fancy.

It’s time to place the blame for our economic malaise where it belongs — on the shoulders of the Obama administration and the Democrats in Congress.

Tea party members have been the voice of reason, not the wild-eyed terrorists portrayed by the left’s crazy spin doctors.

What would have averted the credit-rating downgrade and the subsequent turmoil in the markets? Precisely the spending cuts advocated by the tea party.

According to a statement by Jenny Beth Martin, a co-founder and national coordinator of Tea Party Patriots, the debt-ceiling compromise was full of “accounting tricks and minor ‘cuts’ to spending.” She warns that these so-called cuts do not reduce our national debt. They are simply cuts to future deficit spending.

Rather than prevent a crisis, the debt deal has “already cost us our AAA credit rating,” according to Martin.

In addition, she explains that the tea party was the only organization pushing for the passage of the Full Faith and Credit Act, which would remove the threat of a national default.

A couple of hundred years ago a band of American patriots demonstrated their contempt for a distant Parliament that imposed unjust taxation upon citizens, with no say in the matter, by dumping British-taxed tea in Boston Harbor. It was one of the acts of defiance that helped spark the American Revolution and created a new nation.

Unlike the Boston tea party, today’s today’s tea party membership is nationwide and composed of people from every nook and cranny in this vast nation, but they feel the same determination to display their anger at the depredations of an out-of-control national government that the Boston patriots showed toward a distant monarch who legend tells us could not speak a word of English, preferring instead his native German.

It’s past time for a little tea dumping of our own — the bitter tea brewed by Barack Obama.

—–

Obamanomics: The Gift that Keeps on Giving

Michael Reagan — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 21:27:04 +0000

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

Like everybody else, presidents have birthdays and have a right to celebrate them and invite others to join them in the festivities. But taking advantage of the occasion to bash the rich and then charge some of them a whopping $40,000 to be able to sit near him as he observes his birthday is nothing short of outrageous.

Paul Zanetti / PoliticalCartoons.com (click to view our Cartoon Blog)

The only thing President Obama excels in is fundraising — after all, when a president puts the arm on you, you can hardly say no. And the president has been putting the arm on a lot of his rich friends lately and raising big bucks for his upcoming reelection campaign. It’s a shame he can’t create jobs as efficiently as he raises money for himself. If he did I might even vote for him. However, he doesn’t, and so I won’t.
He should quit blaming the rich for being successful and take a look in the mirror. Instead of quoting my father to justify himself and his shocking incompetence he should try to imitate my Dad and try to govern as well as my Dad did.

In just barely two years he has driven the economy into a ditch yet has the gall to blame our economic troubles on President Bush, who has been out of office for two years. Moreover, during the last four years of the Bush presidency, Congress, which controls the purse strings and thus the economy, was controlled by the Democrats. It wasn’t George Bush who overspent; it was the Democrats on Capitol Hill who did their best to imitate the most drunken of the legendary drunken sailors.

“Spend and elect” has long been the policy for the Democratic Party and they have been on a spending spree since taking control of Capitol Hill with nary a word of caution coming from the Obama White House. The nation is already staggering over Washington’s out-of-control spending spree and we have yet to begin to pay the monstrous bills for such costly programs as Obamacare.

It appears that Barack Obama and his toadies on Capitol Hill have no concern over the fact that their overspending is placing a burden on our children and grandchildren, who will be burdened with paying the bill this generation’s overspending is putting on their shoulders. The time-honored American policy of each generation leaving their children a prosperous nation has been reversed by Obama and his Capitol Hill allies. Their heritage will be mountains of debt.

We are now experiencing a monetary crisis thanks to Obamanomics. The savings of the American people have been savaged by the president’s economic policies and the value of the dollar has plummeted, sending the price of gold skyrocketing. Economists are warning that the nation is heading into a double-dip recession.

Incredibly, the president and his toadies in the media and on Capitol Hill are blaming that growing army of Americans in the tea party for the economic problems for which he and he alone are to blame. Decent American citizens who comprise the tea party are labeled terrorists for daring to oppose Obama’s quasi-Marxist policies.

At the heart of Obamanomics is the discredited political movement that has its roots in the political and economic policies of Karl Marx. It is a policy that has wreaked havoc whenever its ugly head is raised.

Even with the debt-ceiling compromise in place, the stock market this week proved that investors are still nervous about the economy’s long-term health.

It may be a happy birthday for the president. It is not, however, a happy occasion for the American people, who are paying for the gifts he’s giving to himself.

—–

Legal Guns Would Make Norway Safer

Michael Reagan — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 09:02:08 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

How long would the Norway gunman have lasted in Texas or any state where concealed-carry laws are on the books? I ran a survey while on a cruise: in Texas, 3 minutes; in Montana, 7 to 8 minutes; in Arizona, 2 minutes; and in Nevada, 3 to 5 minutes.

Had Norway not surrendered to the anti-self-defense nuts, and allowed Norwegians to protect themselves by legally carrying guns, the massacre might well have been prevented. There’s a lot of truth in the old adage that if guns are outlawed only outlaws will carry guns.

Cam Cardow / Ottawa Citizen (click to view more cartoons about Norway)

That was certainly true in Norway where Anders Breivik, a lone gunman, launched his assault on youth campers of Utoya Island. According to press reports he fully expected Norway’s special forces to swoop down and stop him at any minute. It didn’t happen. Faced with unarmed victims he was given plenty of time to kill 68 innocent people who could not defend themselves. Had just one of them been armed, Breivik could have been stopped dead and lives would have been spared.

Moreover, if anyone had paid attention to Breivik’s rants they would not have been surprised when he acted on them, especially since Breivik had preceded his attack by setting off a car bomb in the heart of Oslo.

Tragically, Norway’s anti-gun hysteria resulted in laws restricting gun ownership by law-abiding citizens, leaving them exposed to gun violence at the hands of criminals such as Breivik, who simply ignore anti-gun ownership laws. Despite the Second Amendment, which protects American citizens’ rights to access to guns for self-protection, the Constitutional right of citizens to bear arms is under constant assault.

In his best-selling classic “More Guns, Less Crime,” John R. Lott, Jr. has proven that guns make us safer. And in the book “The Bias against Guns,” he shows how liberals bury pro-gun facts out of sheer bias against the truth.

With irrefutable evidence, Lott shot down gun critics and provided information we need to win arguments with those fanatics who want to ban gun ownership, leaving criminals who ignore anti-gun ownership laws armed.

History teaches us that governments faced with an armed citizenry are restrained from usurping the rights of individuals. It is thus no surprise that governments which seek to exercise dictatorial powers over their citizens inevitably seek to restrict of outlaw gun ownership by their citizenry.

In an interview with the University of Chicago, Lott said that states with the largest increases in gun ownership also have the largest drops in violent crimes. Thirty-one states now have such laws — called “shall-issue” laws. These laws allow adults the right to carry concealed handguns if they do not have a criminal record or a history of significant mental illness.

He noted that criminals are deterred by higher penalties. Just as higher arrest and conviction rates deter crime, so does the risk that someone committing a crime will confront someone able to defend him or herself. He shows that there is a strong negative relationship between the number of law-abiding citizens who have gun permits and the crime rate, noting that as more people obtain permits there is a greater decline in violent crime rates. He adds that for each additional year that a concealed handgun law is in effect the murder rate declines by 3 percent, rape by 2 percent, and robberies by over 2 percent.

Concealed handgun laws reduce violent crime for two reasons. First, they reduce the number of attempted crimes because criminals are uncertain which potential victims can defend themselves. Second, victims who have guns are in a much better position to defend themselves. That’s just common sense.

Our Founding Fathers understood the need for an armed citizenry. Thanks to the colonists who were armed, America triumphed over the strongest army in the world. They insisted that their fellow Americans have a right to bear arms in order to guarantee their liberties and safeguard them from those who would deny them the freedom they won on the battlefields of the American Revolution.

We need to be ever vigilant — there are always those who would trample on our rights as free Americans. As long as we retain the right to self-defense guaranteed by the right to own and bear arms, our freedoms will be secure.

—–

Stop Obama’s Attack on Christianity

Michael Reagan — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 07:00:56 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

President Obama wants Israel to revert to the pre-1967 borders. That would mean handing some of Christianity’s most sacred sites over to the Palestinian government, which for all intents is controlled by one of the world’s most radical terrorist organizations, Hamas.

Eric Allie / Cagle cartoons (click to view more cartoons about Israel)

Do you want them to control some of the most sacred sites of our Christian history?

I didn’t think so.

In a speech May 19, the president endorsed the Palestinians’ demand that their future state be based on the borders that existed before the 1967 Middle East war, a move that has infuriated our ally Israel and is certain to endanger Christians’ free access to holy sites.

In a meeting this week, the so-called “Quartet” — diplomats from the United States, European Union, the United Nations and Russia — apparently reached no agreement on a common set of principles for new peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. But Quartet representative Tony Blair, former prime minister of the United Kingdom, told Bloomberg Television the group wants to “take [Obama's] speech and turn it into a framework of guidance for these negotiations.”

Meanwhile, the Palestinian Authority is moving forward with its proposal for United Nations statehood recognition, which will likely come before the Security Council later this month and the General Assembly in September.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas clearly sees the U.N. proposal as a big bargaining chip, stating that he will have “no choice but the United Nations” unless talks are restarted. The Arab League has now voted to support the Palestinians at the United Nations.

We can only assume that Abbas also wants a framework based on Obama’s speech, if negotiations are advantageous to his cause, but he is clearly determined to pursue his goal by any available method.

Although the United States is seen as promoting the Quartet initiative as an alternative to immediate Palestinian membership in the United Nations, it is hard to believe that the Obama administration will oppose membership if and when a border agreement is reached.

After Obama’s May 19 remarks, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected the president’s proposal and said a return to the pre-1967 borders would be disastrous for his country.

Netanyahu called the pre-1967 lines “indefensible,” saying such a withdrawal would jeopardize Israel’s security and “leave major population centers in Judea and Samaria (West Bank) beyond those lines.”

And although Obama was careful to mention the possibility of “land swaps” in his proposal — presumably to allay the fears of those who are rightly concerned that the pre-1967 borders are his goal — the president seems more concerned with brokering a deal than with Israel’s security.

Mention of East Jerusalem and its holy sites is noticeably absent from the Obama proposal. In a scenario with pre-1967 borders, Israel will lose East Jerusalem.

The president needs to reassure Israelis that the United States stands firmly behind their sovereignty over the border. There can be no wiggle room here. Either we are with the Israelis or against them.

—–

History Books Get Gay Makeover

Michael Reagan — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 12:54:28 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

According to a shocking news report, California legislators have enacted legislation that gives the state the dubious distinction of being the first state in the nation to require public schools to include the contributions of gays and lesbians in their social studies curriculum.

Larry Wright / Cagle Cartoons (click to view our newest cartoons)

We can be certain that one result of this ill-advised move will subject kids to a form of what CIA spooks call “blow back” — an inevitable result of a specific action.

When I was a youngster I was teased and bullied for being an adopted child. In view of my personal experiences, should we add the contributions of adoptees to the legislation? How about adding the contributions of skinny kids, or kids with red hair, or extra-long legs or eyeglasses?

Where does it stop?

Singling out a segment of the population for specific inclusion in school studies programs on the basis of their sexual preferences elevates what — rightly or wrongly — many see as a form of sexual perversion, to a civil right.

The bill, SB 48, passed on a party-line vote, adds lesbian, gay, bisexual and so-called transgendered people as well as those with physical or mental disabilities to the list of groups that schools must include in the lessons. It also would prohibit material that reflects adversely on gays.

Unless I’m badly mistaken, what the legislature has done is to classify sexual preference as a form of disability, meaning that those who adopt the lifestyle are mentally or physically disabled though no fault of their own. Somehow I seriously doubt that gays or cross-dressers will appreciate being classified as disabled as a result of their sexual orientation or preferences.

This is just another example of the tendency of legislators sticking their noses into the personal lives of the citizenry.

It will prove instructive to see how the state’s lawmakers go about the job of implementing this absurd legislation. Will they, for example, rule that textbooks must describe what the state classifies as acceptable behavior? Or exactly how?

Should the state require textbooks used in its schools to provide play-by-play descriptions of the behavior they sanction? Just where does this stop? Should not the “contributions” of convicted thieves be celebrated? Or those of serial killers? Or embezzlers?

The matter of the content of school textbooks has long been a controversial subject, but until now it has never reached the point where specific parts of the population are singled out for preferential treatment, especially when the segment of the population is distinguished solely by their sexual preferences.

School textbooks should never be used to promote anybody’s political positions. They should instruct, not propagandize the publisher’s personal politics.

According to news reports, San Francisco’s Democratic Assemblyman Tom Ammiano insists that SB 48 is crucial because gay students are being bullied. Republicans said the bill had good intentions but was ill-conceived, and raised concerns regarding indoctrination of children.

Assembly Speaker John Perez, the first openly gay speaker of the California Assembly, says, “This bill will require California schools to present a more accurate and nuanced view of American history in our social science curriculum by recognizing the accomplishments of groups that are not often recognized.”

Sorry, Mr. Speaker, but the sexual preferences of groups “that are not often recognized” have no place in deciding the legitimacy of legislation.

California Gov. Jerry Brown has yet to announce if he will sign the bill or follow in the footsteps of former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who vetoed a similar bill on 2006.

One hopes the governor will have his veto pen handy. This bill is a monstrosity.

“Now is Not the Time to Go Wobbly”

Michael Reagan — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 12:31:01 +0000

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

If the GOP is really serious about winning back the presidency they need to win the deficit debate. The government of these United States is broke — flat broke — and if the nation is to survive as the prosperous nation it has long been, Republicans must restore fiscal sanity and call a halt to spending money we don’t have!

John Darkow / Columbia Daily Tribune (click to view our latest cartoons)

That’s what the Republicans promised us they would do last November, and largely on the strength of that pledge we let them take back the House. After all, it’s obvious that we can’t trust the Democrats to spend the public’s money wisely and well.

President Obama is promising to seek $3 in spending cuts for every $1 of new taxes, exactly as my father Ronald Reagan sought to do. When he passed away in 2004 he was still waiting for that $3. Barack Obama can expect the same dismal outcome.

Ask the first President George Bush how it worked out when he cut a deal with the Democrats in 1991 to reduce the deficit by $500 billion. All he had to do was go back a little on his “Read my lips — NO NEW TAXES” pledge and raise taxes just a little bit.

The Democrats promised not to use the tax issue in the 1992 elections. They promptly hung President Bush with it. So I say to the Republican leadership, as Margaret Thatcher once said to GHW Bush, “Now is not the time to go wobbly.” Stick to your guns and call a halt to spending nonexistent dollars.

Unlike the Democrats, who have long been able to win elections by buying votes with lavish government programs paid for with phantom dollars, Republicans have for the most part demanded that fiscal sanity play a large part in determining the wisdom of enacting new programs or financing existing ones.

Democrats have no problem with spending what I like to call “tomorrow money,” big bucks stolen from future generations, who aren’t around to protest having enormous debt loads placed on their shoulders even before many of them have even been born.

Tragically, we have now reached the point where it’s time for Peter –that’s this generation — to pay Paul, yet unborn, by paying for the cost of government programs with today’s dollars. That would require that we stop spending tomorrow’s dollars. Of course, in that case Democrats would start losing elections.

In this era of the Obama recession, Republicans had better stiffen their spines, stand erect and challenge Obamanomics before the president drags us over an economic cliff.

As I said, for the GOP, this is no time to go wobbly.

Jon Who?

Michael Reagan — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 02:16:48 +0000

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

All of a sudden the kept media is all agog over one Jon (not John) Huntsman, recently retired from his Obama administration post as U.S. Ambassador to the People’s Republic of China, provoking the president to joke that he was “sure that him having worked so well for me will be a great asset in any Republican primary.”

A former governor of Utah, Huntsman is a multimillionaire from a very wealthy family who has styled himself as a so-called “moderate,” supporting certain measures considered by conservatives as not in the least acceptable. Notably, he has supported “marriages” between homosexuals, and so-called “cap and trade” legislation designed to deal with so-called (and non-existent) global warming, but in reality shoveling taxpayer funds into the hands of liberal groups and individuals to prevent something that isn’t happening.

David Fitzsimmons / Arizona Daily Star (click to view our latest cartoons)

In announcing his candidacy with the Statue of Liberty in the background, Ambassador Huntsman attempted to associate himself with my late father, President Reagan. It was embarrassing to watch him channel-up my father’s 1981 speech and associate himself with it. As Simon or Randy on “American Idol” might say, if you’re going to sing the song of an icon you had better be as good or better that that icon. In making his announcement he was neither. Jon Huntsman was, instead, the great non-communicator.

To win the GOP nomination a candidate must be able to demonstrate how he has helped the party, has raised considerable amounts of money for it, and has helped Republican candidates win elections over the past two years. Huntsman has done none of that. As a matter of fact it has recently been revealed that his family most recently financially supported none other than Democrat Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Conservatives have long suspected that there exists a GOP establishment, once known as the “Rockefeller wing,” that manipulates the party behind the scenes, putting forth so-called “moderate” candidates for office, providing campaign financing for them and arranging media support for their candidacies.

If that is the case, Jon Huntsman is their boy.

To win elections, Republicans need a ground game, which means you must show how you have helped the party, how much money you have raised for the party and which Republicans you have helped get elected in the past two years. Huntsman’s answers are none, none and none, which means there is no one to help him get voters to the polls and that all he can hope for is the money and votes from family and the support of the liberal media.

He should never have put his hat the ring, at least this time around. Perhaps he should think about 2020.Maybe then he will be ready for prime time and learned that moderation is not the path to success in the GOP.

While no Republican who wins election as governor of Utah can accurately describe himself as a wholesale moderate, Huntsman has taken several high-profile positions out of step with his fellow Republicans. Those positions are not widely supported, and they will permit his opponents to label him as a moderate, a title that comes close to a cuss word in the minds of his fellow Republicans.

His rhetorical style doesn’t help him either He once described himself in a 2009 interview with the Deseret News as a “moderating voice” – not helpful in a party that demands strong positions on the issues. That conciliatory tone might play well in a general election but never among a GOP primary electorate which demands that their party take an aggressive stand on the issues.

The GOP establishment has a long, dreary history of advancing so-called “moderate” candidates, while denouncing those with conservative principles and views. Jon Huntsman fits their idea of what a GOP candidate must look like — a liberal in GOP clothing. In his 11th Commandment, my father declared that a Republican should never speak ill of another Republican. Having known and worked with my dad I know that he never meant that a Republican who seeks to curry favor with the media and the voters by discarding the principles and values should be beyond criticism from his fellow Republicans.

Governor Huntsman, Ronald Reagan was my father; I knew Ronald Reagan, and you are not even close to being anything like Ronald Reagan. By saying this, I know I may have violated my dad’s 11th Commandment, but I’m sure he’ll forgive me.

Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of The New Reagan Revolution (St. Martin’s Press, 2011). He is the founder and chairman of The Reagan Group and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his website at www.reagan.com, or e-mail comments to Reagan@caglecartoons.com.

The 11th Commandment is Alive and Well

Michael Reagan — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 13:13:40 +0000

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

They stood up there on the stage, shoulder to shoulder, and voiced their opinions freely, often disagreeing with each other over the various details, but they did it like the gentlemen and lady that they are; attacking positions on the issues without attacking each other.

Nate Beeler / Washington Examiner (click to view our latest cartoons)

My dad, Ronald Reagan, would have been proud to see them strictly observe his 11th Commandment — that Republicans shall not ever speak ill of their fellow Republicans. They did not go after each other but kept their eyes on the target, Barak Obama, the architect of this double-dip recession he has inflicted on the nation. He can try to blame George W. Bush, but this illegitimate baby is his and it’s time he admits his fatherhood.

Liberals, wake up! Barack Obama is a disaster. He is dragging you and the nation down as he attempts to impose his Euro-Marxist agenda on the United States. Rep. Bachmann was right on when she told him, “You are a one-term president.”

While Obama campaigns for his job, raising huge sums of cash to fund his re-election campaign, tens of thousands of jobless Americans suffer. I can only pray that the 841,000 Puerto Ricans in Florida that Obama was trying to influence by visiting Puerto Rico are smarter than we were in 2008 and vote Republican in 2012.

My father believed in keeping your eye on the big picture, and the candidates truly did that the other evening in New Hampshire. They understood that if we are going to make Michele Bachman’s words come true we are going to have to be united after the primaries and support fully our nominee, whoever that might be. That is what my dad would have done.

To all of you presidential hopefuls, this Reagan says “bravo” and “good job, well done.” Now let’s get together and go out and win one for America.

The future of this great and blessed nation is at stake. America cannot survive another four years of an Obama administration. At this moment he is fighting another undeclared war in a nation few Americans could even locate on a map, and where no real American interests are at stake. Yet he is risking American lives in bombing raids being carried out without a declaration of war or Congressional approval, and spending billions of our tax dollars in a time of recession to pay for this undeclared war.

If we are lucky we’ll get though the remaining year and-a-half of the Obama misadministration without going bankrupt. Hopefully Congress, now under GOP control in the House and close to it in the Senate, will rein in this out-of-control administration before it wrecks America.

And remember, the Gipper is watching. Let’s not disappoint him.

Anthony Weiner, Hypocrite

Michael Reagan — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 21:16:49 +0000

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

As many as 300,000 children are taken from their homes every year from neglect and abuse. In light of that, it is a blight on America even to think or to know that a member of the Congress of the United States has been sending e-mail tweets to young women he doesn’t even know — taking advantage of them for his own apparent sexual pleasure.

Mike Keefe / Denver Post (click to view more Weiner cartoons)

Anthony Weiner, you are a pervert and you should step down NOW!!

Your blatant hypocrisy is never more evident than when your record as a self-proclaimed defender of youth is examined.

You have bragged about your efforts to defend children; for example, writing that in early 2007 your office “did a study that found that over 85% of registered sex offenders in New York City live less than five blocks from schools, and 670 sex offenders live within just two blocks. Some offenders are even closer, permanently residing less than 500 feet away from unwitting parents, educators and children.”

Do those “efforts” include setting an example of moral rectitude by living a life free of sexual episodes? It appears that this is not the case as your e-mail “tweets” laden with sex show.

Nowhere is your hypocrisy more evident than in your recent press release where you bragged that “along with several colleagues in Congress, we introduced & passed the KIDS (Keeping the Internet Devoid of Sexual Predators) Act of 2007, a bill to require sex offenders to register their e-mail and instant message addresses with the National Sex Offender Registry. The ‘Kid’s Act’ implemented one of my six recommendations to keep a closer eye on sex offenders both near school grounds and online. I also proposed stricter GPS tracking of sex offenders, tougher enforcement of registration laws and more public disclosure of sex offender data.”

You go on to say, “Sadly, the Internet is the predator’s venue of choice today. We need to update our strategies and our laws to stop these offenders who are a mere click away from our children. ”

It would seem that the Internet is also your “venue of choice” when you choose to send sexually explicit photos of yourself to women you don’t know and who have never expressed any desire to see you in sexually compromising situations.

In your apologetic press conference you freely admitted your guilt in these matters but you left unsaid the words your actions demanded — namely your intent to resign from the U.S. House of Representatives, which you have disgraced.

Your critics have often characterized you as being arrogant. You have now proven them right. Nothing could be more arrogant that your outright refusal to do the honorable thing and resign from the House of Representatives which you have, by your actions, seriously demeaned.

In your arrogance you have failed to understand that you are now the butt of jokes — not exactly the status a member of Congress seeks.

You owe your constituents an apology; you owe your bride more than that. It’s time to pay your debts to both.

Go home, Rep. Weiner, and contemplate your offense against decency and the people you are obliged to represent.

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