Tag Archives: Ronald Reagan

business news, economic news

Tariff tumult requires testing

Donald Trump’s fixation with tariffs has the markets in an uproar. Hints of Trump blinking send the Dow Jones averages into outer space. Then the numbskull in chief says all the wheeling-and-dealing is a mirage … so the markets tank again.

I believe the Trump skeptics who contend that POTUS 45 & 47 doesn’t have a plan. He doesn’t understand the economics of a tariff, which makes me wonder out loud whether he evrer learned against the Wharton School of Economics, where he says he earned good grades.

I don’t what his grades were. I damn sure don’t care. He isn’t exhibiting a scintilla of knowledge about basic economics with this tariff nonsense.

President Reagan of all people called tariffs a “national sales tax” He was speaking in 1987 when he denigrated the notion of attaching tariffs on goods imported into the country. The Gipper was right then. Trump is wrong today in proclaiming that tariffs on imported goods will “make America great again.”

He is turning a national economy that was held up as the gold standard for the world to emulate into an international laughingstock.

economic news

Trump’s callousness in full view

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You want a measure of the callousness of the Dumbass in Chief, the guy who said he looks out for the “little guy”?

On the second day of Donald Trump’s unprovoked international trade war, a day in which the Dow Jones Industrial Average shed more than 2,000 points , costing total investments to lose trillions of dollars, Trump jets off to Florida to play a few rounds of golf.

Hey, no worries, man. The MAGA Moron in Chief doesn’t give a rat’s red backside about the loss of millions of Americans’ retirement funds. He said he does, but you know how believable anything is that flies out of Trump’s overfed pie hole.

It kind of reminds me of the February 2021 escapade in which Sen. Ted Cruz sought to grab a few rays in Cancun while Texans were freezing to death in the killer winter storm that paralyzed the entire damn state. Cruz got caught escaping, returned to Texas … and then blamed his daughter for talkiing the family into the ill-fated family vacation.

This time, the callousness belongs to the president of the United States of America, who launched an unprovoked international trade war by imposing tariffs on virtually every product imported into this country. Nobel laureates have proclaimed this to be a catastrophe. So have politidians of both parties. Even the great President Reagan beomoaned tariffs in the 1980s, calliing them a national sales tax that falls on every Amerixan to pay.

One of the countless lies that Trump told voters while campaigning for the presidency is that he cares about them, their welfare and their livelihood.

He doesn’t give a sh** about ’em, the folks who followed him all over creation to cheer on the lies he told them.

Here’s a thought: If he truly cared about us, he would keep the golf clubs stashed away and he would rescind the tariffs he knew would cause the havoc they have caused.

crime news

Accountability at the top!

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You want accountability at the top of our personal security chain of command?

Well, we got it this week when the head of the Secret Service, Kimberley Cheatle, resigned after a gunman tried to kill Donald Trump. Calls for her resignation or firing came from both sides of the great congressional chasm.

Let’s say, though, that such demand for immediate action hasn’t always been the case.

In 1901, a gunman shot President William McKinley to death; in 1963, a shooter murdered President Johin F. Kennedy; in 1975, two women — on separate occasions — shot at President Gerald Ford; in 1981, President Ronald Reagan was wounded in an assassination attempt.

What do those instances have in common? The Secret Service directors all kept their jobs, despite the obvious failures to protect our commander in chief.

I am old enough to remember the JFK, Ford and Reagan incidents. I do not recall anyone in authority raising a stink about failures in the security system designed to protect our president from madmen.

Frankly, I am glad we have ratcheted up calls for accountability when these events occur.

national news, political news

Waiting anxiously for debate

For a long time I have been cautious about referring to events when two or more politicians stand on a stage as “debates.”

They aren’t, really. they have allowed the candidates to pontificate and excoriate their foes. But they do occasionally bring moments of excitement. They even have helped turn elections in favor of candidates.

Do you remember the time in 1976 when President Ford said Eastern Europe was “not dominated” by the Soviet Union? Of course it was! He lost the election that year. Or when Ronald Reagan asked us in 1980 whether we were “better off than you were four years ago.” We weren’t. Reagan won in a landslide.

The format for the Thursday appearance with President Joe Biden and Donald J. Trump will be without a studio audience and will have a sound cutoff when the candidates exceed the time limit or when they tell a lie knowingly.

I am one American patriot who will wait anxiously to see how Trump handles the mike sound issue. He and his MAGA cult followers already are saying the debates is rigged. Who knew?

Something tells me we might see more than our share of meltdowns as Trump seeks to lie his way past the silent mikes. Will it influence the end of this miserable campaign? I damn sure hope so.

national news

Nothing wrong with note cards

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As Republicans continue to make President Biden’s alleged intellectual slippage an issue, I am intrigued by a recent criticism that has emerged.

The president uses note cards to conduct meetings with public officials. My response? Big fu**ing deal! There is nothing wrong with an individual who happens to be president of the world’s most powerful nation relying on written notes to help guide him through sensitive discussions.

I recall that President Reagan relied on note cards when he met with individuals. I also recall that Democrats took pot shots at Reagan for what they implied was a sign that he had slipped a bit, too.

One of my favorite critics happened to be the congressman who represented me in the House of Representatives, Democrat Jack Brooks of Beaumont, Texas. Brooks routinely would come to visit us at the Beaumont Enterprise and usually took time to swipe at Reagan. He actually once criticized Reagan’s use of note cards as a crutch.

But … guess what! Brooks did the very same thing! He, too, would meet with our editorial board and would glance at note cards to remind him of points he intended to make.

I am not the least bit concerned about President Biden’s mental acuity. He slips up occasionally, misstating people’s names or saying he’s been somewhere when he hasn’t. BFD, man!

As for the note cards, let the man scribble a note or two on them to remind him of the topic at hand. It’s part of doing business in a highly complicated world.

Joe Biden, national news

Good government gone … not forgotten

Do you remember when government at all levels — from Capitol Hill, to state capitols, county courthouses and city halls — worked for the people who pay their bills?

It wasn’t necessarily a government run by liberals. There once was a conservative movement that railed against government, but whose adherents didn’t stand in the way of government seeking common ground.

Those days are gone. I hope, though, that good government as I recall it isn’t extinct, like the dodo bird and the woolly mammoth.

I long for its return.

Even during the Ronald Reagan era, government could rise to the occasion. The 40th president declared at his first inaugural that “government is the problem” and the cause for the nation’s ills in the early 1980s. President Reagan, though, found a way to work with his old nemesis/drinking buddy Speaker Tip O’Neill to find a way into the light.

We have an entirely different climate today in D.C. Those damn MAGA morons have taken obstructionism to a new level, almost turning it into an art form. The progressive caucus on the other side also has dug in deeply, seeking unaffordable government actions, such as Medicare for All and forgiving every former college student’s debt.

For the purposes of this blog, though, I am going to aim my rhetorical fire at the MAGA cultists.

Because of the MAGA crowd’s ignorance, the U.S. House this year required 15 ballots to elect a speaker … and then only after he conceded so much to the MAGA morons that he made himself vulnerable to the ouster vote that booted him out of office.

This Congress has proved to be among the least productive legislative sessions in history. Why? Because the MAGA crowd insists on seeking something on which to impeach President Biden.

This isn’t good government in any possible form.

Just maybe there will be enough Americans who are as fed up as I am to dropkick the MAGA crowd to the sh***er. I don’t have a problem, per se, with conservatives as long as they understand the value of outreach on occasion to the other side of the aisle.

President Reagan understood it clearly. If only he were around today to lecture the MAGA morons on how to govern while standing firm on their principles.

International news

Gipper called for ‘open border’

I came across an astonishing social media video today of Ronald Reagan, the 40th president of the United States and the one-time godfather of American conservatism.

His topic was immigration. President Reagan spoke of the need to buttress U.S.-Mexico relations by maintaining what he called a “two-way open border.” He said the United States should allow Mexicans into our country “legally,” where they would work and “pay taxes” and then return to their homes in Mexico.

He feared that the nations were headed toward a state of hostility. Reagan believed the best way to ensure tranquil relations would be to keep the border between the U.S. and Mexico wide open, enabling citizens of both nations to travel freely — back and forth — across an “open border.”

He also spoke of the dangers of building walls to keep residents of Mexico out of this country.

Hmm. Wow!

The late president’s remarks only heighten the divide that exists between the Republican Party of his era and today’s GOP. The party activists today will have nothing to do with the immigration ideology espoused by Ronald Reagan.

Go … figure.

national news

‘Are you better off … ?’

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If only Ronald Reagan hadn’t used that all-time campaign zinger in 1980 while running for president of the United States.

Joe Biden well could co-opt or repurpose the question today as he seeks re-election to the office. It’s a tough sell, given that millions of Americans recall when Reagan posed the question during a debate with President Carter. The answer then, of course, was “no, we’re not better off!”

Today, were Joe Biden able to pose the question, the answer would be a resounding “yes!” We are better off today because we have gotten through a killer pandemic, we have recovered many millions of jobs lost during that terrible time, our jobless rate has returned to near-historic lows, manufacturing is up.

Yes, we have that nagging inflation issue, but that, too, is getting better.

It does puzzle me that President Biden’s job approval rating remains low, in the low to mid-40% range. Why it remains low is a mystery. I guess it has to do with the effectiveness of the opposition’s messaging machinery.

The MAGA morons have planted seeds of fear in the minds and hearts of voters, many of whom believe the clap-trap swill being offered by the MAGA goons.

I ain’t buying it. Nor should other American patriots.

We are better off today than we were at the start of the Biden term because the president has made good on his pledges to: fix the infrastructure, reduce the cost of drugs, whittle down the annual federal budget deficit; invest in clean energy development … and act like a president who governs all Americans not just those who voted for him.

International news

Architect of Cold War end dies

Americans have spent a lot of emotional capital over the past 30 years congratulating two U.S. presidents over their role in the demise of the Cold War and of the Soviet Union.

Yes, Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush deserve credit for their roles in ending the “original” Cold War.

However, I want to offer a tribute to a third world leader who today passed from the scene. Mikhail Gorbachev, the final premier of what we used to know as the Soviet Union, died at age 91.

He, at least as much as the two U.S. presidents, is responsible for ending the age of duck-and-cover drills and worries about nuclear-missile strikes from the Evil Empire.

Gorbachev surrendered his office when the Soviet Union evaporated. He turned it over the Boris Yeltsin, who then had the unenviable task of trying to turn an ironclad dictatorship into something that resembled a democratic society. It hasn’t worked out … yet!

The United States was able to win the Cold War of attrition by forcing the Soviets to build weapons they couldn’t afford. The Soviets bankrupted their economy by building nukes and all manner of military hardware they still like to put on parade in Red Square.

Gorbachev recognized what so many of his communist predecessors ignored.

So, when President Reagan stood at the Hindenberg Gate in Berlin and declared, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” the Soviet leader well might have actually listened on that day.

The Berlin Wall came down in 1989, thanks to Gorbachev’s acknowledging he was on the wrong side of history. Two years after that? He said goodbye to the Soviet Union.

Hey, don’t misunderstand me. I stand with those who applaud Presidents Reagan and Bush for the strength they showed in waging the Cold War with the Soviet Union. I also want to applaud Gorbachev for acting on the realization that the communist experiment in his country was a monumental failure.

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And I cannot pay tribute to Gorbachev’s wisdom without mentioning one of his descendants’ idiotic view that the Soviet demise was a “dark day” in the history of his country. Vladimir Putin is as wrong to want a return to that hideous system as he was wrong to presume that he could take over Ukraine in a matter of days.

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legal news

Waiting for phony SCOTUS objections

Let the debate begin now that President Biden has presented us with a historic selection for the U.S. Supreme Court. What will intrigue me for certain are the phony objections that U.S. senators are going to present as they argue against the nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to become the latest justice on the nationā€™s highest court.

The trumped-up objections will come from Republicans in the Senate. They will cling to ridiculous notions that Joe Biden engaged in an ā€œaffirmative actionā€ hire in selecting Judge Jackson. Why? Because as a presidential candidate in 2020, Joe Biden promised to nominate a Black woman to the court if he got the chance. Justice Stephen Breyer delivered that chance to President Biden when he declared his intention to retire from the court at the end of its current term.

The president vowed to find a stellar jurist. He found her in the person of Ketanji Brown Jackson. There should be no debate over her qualifications.

I want to make the point that I have sought to make for many years when these nominations come forward.Ā Elections have consequences.Ā I have said so when Republican presidents have made these nominations, as well as when Democrats do so. President Bidenā€™s election in 2020 means that he gets the chance to deliver on his constitutional duty, which he has done.

Judge Jackson by all accounts is a first-rate, top-drawer, stellar jurist. She has a well-rounded background in the law, serving as a public defender as well as a prosecutor.

I am not going to listen to those who gripe about President Bidenā€™s decision to look exclusively for a Black woman to fill this important lifetime post. Ronald Reagan made a similar pledge in in 1980, as did Donald Trump in 2020. They both delivered on their pledges and Republicans said not a single thing to object to their commitments.

Whatever phony excuse they come up with now should be greeted with all the derision they deserve.

Ketanji Brown Jackson deserves to take her seat on the nationā€™s highest court ā€¦ period.

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