Showing posts with label Reagan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Reagan. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Bonfire of the Insanities


A photographer caught some wannabe jihadi jackwagon throwing rocks at the police and vandalizing property in Oakland while wearing a Palestinian-style keffiyeh.





Idiot's Intifada 

This just reinforces the stereotype of the "We are the World" American wacktivist wankers, imitating what they see on CNN, too lazy and too cowardly to put it on the line like Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell and others on the left did back in the 1930's.

The Socialists of the 1930's went to Spain and fought the fascists; today's leftists bleat on about the Palestinians, Colombian campesinos and oppressive Middle Eastern regimes, but they don't do anything about them.

Like a twisted Civil War reenactment club, they instead dress up as hippies and don costumes of their favorite radicals, and assault their urban environs with fantasies of Latin American Revolutions and Arab Springs dancing through their fluffy little brains.  Until the dingbat in the Palestinian headscarf heads to Gaza and starts throwing rocks at Israeli tanks, he's just another pantywaist playing dress up.

Latte Leftists

Our pampered populists are latte leftists playing dress-up, too scared to go fight any real oppression. So instead, they attack the America that swaddles them in comfort and modern bounty.  They trash the municipalities that host cell phone towers and free WiFi for their iPhones and laptops.  The disciplined and humane police forces provide additional incentive to protest here instead of abroad. Instead of being thrown head first into a fetid, dank gulag bloody and broken, they are escorted into a bright clean cell where they can sip publicly funded hot coco until a communist party lawyer, pockets stuffed with wealthy liberals' guilt money, comes down to bail them out.

Rage Against the Reagan Revolution


This is not about fighting oppression. This is the left's poop throwing primal scream against the greatest president of the 20th century and his lifting half a billion people out of poverty.

Three decades later, the triumph of Reaganism is remarkable. In the United States and Britain taxes shrank, regulation, especially of the financial sector, was pruned back, and state companies were sold off. Even Brussels was nudged toward liberalization.
The impact on the rest of the world was even more profound. Soviet Communism collapsed, China converted to capitalism and entered the world economy, India dismantled its protectionist License Raj, and many emerging market economies in Latin America and Africa embraced liberalization as the path to growth.
One result has been an unprecedented global economic boom. Its biggest beneficiaries have been some of the world’s poorest people, particularly in China and India: Shaohua Chen and Martin Ravallion of the World Bank have found that between 1981 and 2005, the number of people living in poverty in the developing world fell by 500 million. (Chrystia Freeland)
The screaming OWS drum beaters are frustrated because the tea parties already have the anti-crony crapitalism turf staked out...
Palin’s remedy to crony capitalism is to double down on the Reagan Revolution — lower taxes and shrink government further. Progressives have not yet come up with a solution of such seductive simplicity. Their standard prescription — higher taxes, more regulation, a stronger social welfare net, and more investment in education — may be sensible. But it lacks the rallying power of Palin’s call to smash crony capitalism by depriving the elites of their political tool — big government.  (Chrystia Freeland)
Freeland sneeringly calls the separation of Wall Street and State "seductive simplicity," but that is the key to pulling our economy and our federal budget out of the crony crapitalist quagmire.  The "standard prescription" of the progressives will only exacerbate our economic misery by encouraging even more state-sponsored crony crapitalism.

Monday, October 24, 2011

Mr Obama, You're No Reagan!


Deroy Murdoch, a most astute man, does us a favor by assembling a concise catalog of Obama's economic blunders...
"Under Obama, federal spending has risen from 20.7 percent of gross domestic product to 25.3 percent, Washington’s largest slice of apple pie since 1945."

"Obama’s spend-o-rama includes federally funded green jobs that Boskin dismisses as “the leprechaun economy.” The apotheosis of this blarney was last month’s $1.2 billion Energy Department loan guarantee to SunPower Corporation of Richmond, California. Its solar-equipment project promises 15 permanent positions. Cost per job-created: a staggering $80 million." (NRO-Deroy Murdock)
Reagan's Recovery vs. Obama's Sagging Non-Recovery
Boskin compared snapshots of Obama’s and Pres. Ronald Reagan’s post-recession recoveries, 27 months after each downturn hit bottom.

In September 2011, on Obama’s watch, non-farm payrolls had grown 0.6 percent, yielding 841,000 jobs since June 2009.

Under the tax-cutting, business-boosting Reagan, non-agricultural employment swelled 8.7 percent, generating 7.7 million new jobs. (NRO-Deroy Murdock)
How Mr. Volker Would Fix It

Reading that comparison reminded me how Obama, to much fanfare, brought the venerable Paul Volker on-board as a convenient counter-weight to his socialist advisers who were discomfiting those serious people not in a hopium-induced daze those first heady days of the Obama Presidency.

It calmed people down, and then Obama proceeded to completely ignore the former Fed Chair who tamed Carter's dreaded stagflation and ushered in the historically-unprecedented Reagan economic boom. Volker has offered his advice on how to fix this mess. It's too wonky to go into here, but it involved breaking up anyone too big to fail, no more government underwriting Wall Street gamblers, putting the different financial functions into their own boxes and jailing those who stray, among other things. You can read the whole thing here: Volker's Advice.

Free Market Ideas for Increasing Employment

For the libertarians among us, taking advice from a former Fed Chairman just won't do, so Reason Magazine has an article entitled Get a Job! that is chock full of free-market remedies sure to get people back to work.

The ideas are too simple-minded and timeless for the progressive eggheads powering Obama's economic failure: Less regulations, less government intervention in the marketplace, no more government bureaucrats picking winners and losers...

Free marketeers know that government cannot power the recovery.  The path to economic success begins with economic freedom. Bill Frezza explains:
Do you sometimes wonder why economists are accorded such respect and influence given the fact that they claim knowledge over the unknowable, promote theories that are untestable, and make forecasts for which they are never held accountable? Isn’t that the definition of a witch doctor?

If engineers were held to the same standards, bridges would collapse as often as banks, planes would fall from the sky (if they ever got off the ground), and cyclical blackouts would be a permanent feature of our electrical grid. But at least they would get to visit the White House.
This gets to the heart of why we should take all macro economic advice with a grain of salt.  It is a soft science, useful for gaining insight, but incapable of predicting market behavior.  Government-planned economies fail, free markets succeed. 
Have you ever watched engineers from different schools argue on Sunday morning talk shows about the validity of Bernoulli’s Principle or Ohm’s Law? No? Yet economists, like rival witch doctors, get red in the face promoting diametrically opposed economic remedies, sometimes sharing Nobel Prizes in the same year for theories that directly contradict each other. Take $2 trillion and call me in the morning. (Bill Frezza - Fundamental Fallacies of Macro Economics)

Friday, October 14, 2011

There They Go Again…


Desperate democrats have hijacked the legacy of Ronald Reagan in a vain attempt to save their skins

First they ridiculed him. Then he beat Carter and they reviled him. Now they are revising him beyond all historic fact in order to advance their sinking, discredited agenda. At long last, they have no sense of shame.

Any time you see conservatives do something to great effect, you can expect the libs will follow with their own twisted imitation...

Obama talked about “Cleaning up” after Bush because the Bushies talked loudly of fumigating the White House after Clinton’s many misadventures.  The Tea Parties begat the left’s Communist Kook Coffee Klatches (or whatever the failed project was called) and now the Occupy Wall Street human bowel movement is touted as the left’s tea party movement and Arab Spring all rolled into one.

Reagan and Kennedy:  Two Conservative Presidents

The conservative comparison that really burned the liberals' asses was that of Reagan and Kennedy’s tax and economic policies, complete with audio recordings of JFK touting free market principles that are anathema to the modern day democrat party.  Indeed, Kennedy sounds like a small government conservative tea partier.  And the left is struck dumb at the realization that their martyred hero is a Reagan doppelganger.

Finally, they’ve struck back.  They shamelessly ignore recorded history and turn Reagan into a compromising “fair share” taxaholic who enjoyed an era of unprecedented political goodwill.

Steven Hayward has written a comprehensive article debunking this Democrat party myth-making surrounding President Reagan.  They hated him worse than they did Bush, and Hayward puts the tax raising issue in its proper context, reminding us that the net tax cuts under Reagan were gargantuan, he doubled GDP and he saved Social Security for the next generation.

Go here to read the excellent article, The Liberal Misappropriation of a Conservative President.

See also: 
Reagan vs. Obama
Obama Compares Himself to Reagan...  Again

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

2012 = 1980?

Could Rick Perry vs. Barack Obama be the Reagan vs. Carter match-up of the new millennium?

Peter Wehner answered  Jonathan Alter's ridiculously easy challenge to prove Obama has been a bad president.  Wehner's fact-based piece is shooting fish in a barrel.  Unemployment, anemic economic growth, unprecedented deficit spending, worsening housing crisis, international enemies licking their chops...  Wehner wraps it all up in a handy, user-friendly bulleted list.

Obama had a chance to be the next Reagan, but instead became a more flamboyantly inept Carter

Obama is not Carter, he's worse.  Stephen Moore compares Obamanomics to Reaganomics, and it's not pretty for the Hope and Change crowd:
The two presidents have a lot in common. Both inherited an American economy in collapse. And both applied daring, expensive remedies. Mr. Reagan passed the biggest tax cut ever, combined with an agenda of deregulation, monetary restraint and spending controls. Mr. Obama, of course, has given us a $1 trillion spending stimulus.

By the end of the summer of Reagan's third year in office, the economy was soaring. The GDP growth rate was 5% and racing toward 7%, even 8% growth. In 1983 and '84 output was growing so fast the biggest worry was that the economy would "overheat." In the summer of 2011 we have an economy limping along at barely 1% growth and by some indications headed toward a "double-dip" recession. By the end of Reagan's first term, it was Morning in America. Today there is gloomy talk of America in its twilight.
Is Perry the next Reagan?

I don't think so.  Like FDR, Churchill or any other historical figure, there's only one, and the tales of crony crapitalism emanating from Austin give me pause.  Still, Perry poses a credible challenge to both the Democratic and GOP establishments not seen since the rise of the Gipper.

The Republican establishment can't stand the guy because like Reagan, he's an outsider not beholden to the K Street Gucci contingent.  And the Obama mouthpieces blabbing on about how they welcome a Perry challenge while feigning fear of a Romney or a Huntsman smacks a little too much of Brer Rabbit's "Please don't throw me in that briar patch!"

He's got Kinky Friedman's vote!

Here's what the singing humorist had to say...
I have been quoted as saying that when I die, I am to be cremated, and the ashes are to be thrown in Rick Perry’s hair. Yet, simply put, Rick Perry and I are incapable of resisting each other’s charm. He is not only a good sport, he is a good, kindhearted man, and he once sat in on drums with ZZ Top. A guy like that can’t be all bad. (Kinky Friedman - Rick Perry's got my vote)
He closes with a hearty endorsement:
So would I support Rick Perry for president? Hell, yes! As the last nail that hasn’t been hammered down in this country, I agree with Rick that there are already too damn many laws, taxes, regulations, panels, committees, and bureaucrats. While Obama is busy putting the hyphen between “anal” and “retentive” Rick will be rolling up his sleeves and getting to work. (Kinky Friedman - Rick Perry's got my vote)
President Obama is playing Jimmy Carter to a T, even besting that lugubrious president's dismal record.  Can Rick Perry step in and fill Reagan's boots?

Thursday, May 26, 2011

Barf Alert! Obama Compares Himself to Reagan, Again


I apologize to my fellow bloggers for employing such a trite phrase as “Barf Alert,” but British PM Cameron and US President Obama comparing themselves to Thatcher and Reagan pushed me over the edge.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again:  Mr. Obama, you're no Ronald Reagan!





In a sternly worded column in The Times of London, the two leaders liken the effort to free Arab people from authoritarianism to the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall in the 1980s.

They liken their personal efforts to two leaders who came before them: Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. (USA Today)

Not even close! 
Reagan did not dither and stumble, pander and bumble as President Obumbles has done on his staggering, jagged path of narcissistic self aggrandizement. Reagan would have shined a light on the plight of the Iranian freedom protesters being slaughtered by that bloody regime, not turn his back on them as Obama did.

Reagan and Thatcher marshaled morally righteous global forces in opposition to the dictatorial slave masters in Eastern Europe and Latin America. Obama thinks he's Caesar, but he acts like Nero.

The Arab Spring Could Yet Bear Rotten Fruit
Eastern Europeans instinctively rushed towards liberal democracy once the wall fell. We do not yet know what direction the North Africa and Middle East uprisings will take. And regardless of the outcomes, Cameron and Obama didn’t have a damned thing to do with them. We were actually on the side of the dictators, and the Arab street hates us for it.

If these two men really believe themselves to be the avatars of Reagan and Thatcher, they are seriously delusional,  and we are in big trouble. Our leaders are unhinged from reality and ready for the nut house.  Do they really believe us to be so dumbed down that we would believe such tripe?  Even worse, our intellectually vapid and historically-challenged press, in the thrall of His O-ness, doesn’t even challenge such absurdities.

Saturday, February 19, 2011

It's Saturday...

Reagan’s Legacy

Robert Samuelson  explains Reagan’s true concrete accomplishment:  Snuffing inflation.  Yes, Fed Chairman Paul Volker did the heavy lifting, but President Reagan kept a steady hand at the wheel and resisted politically-smart but economically-stupid advice to lower interest rates sent through the roof by Jimmy Carter's disastrous policies.

The lesson liberals draw (and urge Obama to imitate) is that Reagan's political success reflected his optimistic presidential stagecraft. It wasn't policy, it was presentation. Wrong.
Reagan earned his success the hard way - by backing policies that, though initially unpopular, served the nation's long-term interests. That's called leadership, a quality Obama has yet to demonstrate. (Samuelson)
Who’s Afraid of E-Verify?
The US Chamber of Commerce.  Wouldn't want to hurt the bottom line by hiring Americans and paying them a decent wage, would we? 

Only in America could we be talking about "jobs Americans just won't do" while we have 10% unemployment.

Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Mr Obama, You’re No Ronald Reagan

Liberals spewed hatred on Ronald Reagan for thirty years, now they are attempting to co-opt him 

I know, the Reagan Centennial was last Sunday, but I’m left with that feeling you get after attending a really good concert. Still basking in the sights and sounds, you’re left wanting more, so you pop in a CD or DVD to make the feeling last.

What spurred me to this latest outburst was all the stupid blather comparing Obama to Reagan. It’s another foolish indulgence of the Washington press corps, for really, there is no comparison.

Ronald Reagan’s communications were symphonic masterpieces...

...crafted and delivered from a deep and thoughtful well of study and experience. His rock solid words now resonate through the ages. “Tear down this wall!” …and the wall came tumbling down.

He backed up his words with action. He told the air traffic controllers to go back to work. They didn’t. He fired them. This put the world on notice that the American president meant what he said. Communists really were trying to make inroads into Central America, and Reagan defeated them by keeping our military profile low and helping freedom-loving Central Americans help themselves. The region in now freer and more prosperous as a result.

Obama’s speeches are cotton candy…

…top 40 bubblegum pop songs that catch the listeners’ ears with a cheap lyrical hook or a catchy tune, but are forgotten the next week. His award of an anticipatory Nobel Prize was a farce, and it was the apotheosis of Obama. All flowery words and billowy hope, but no substance, no action.

Reagan made history by collapsing communism and freeing tens of millions of people.  Obama made history by being the first Nobel Peace Prize winner to host and toast a tyrannical regime that imprisoned a  fellow Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Reagan Encouraged Us, Obama Scolds Us...

Reagan believed in the American people and uplifted us; President Obama is perpetually disappointed in us. He, his wife and his cabinet scold us on eating habits, going green, police who act stupidly, people too cowardly to talk about race, and even how to sneeze properly.

President Reagan shrugged off criticism with a smile and a joke, President Obama encourages his fervid worshipers to punish their enemies.

Reagan believed in American exceptionalism. Obama compared us to Greece, and leads us there with his disastrous policies.

Progressive fanboys and fangirls love talking about how intelligent Obama is, but when pressed they can produce no evidence besides “he ran a successful presidential campaign,” or that he was titular head of some college newspaper.

“Amiable dunce” Ronald Reagan has left a rich legacy of writings in his own hand that prove beyond a doubt what an intelligent and studied man he was.

Barack Obama is no Ronald Reagan...



Comparisons to the loser that Reagan defeated in 1980 are more appropriate. In fact, Jimmy probably rests a little easier knowing he’s now moved up to the second worst president.

Toby Harnden – You’re No Ronald Reagan
Five Myths about Ronald Reagan
http://americanpowerblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/time-magazine-obama-loves-reagan.html
Time – The Role Model

Sunday, February 6, 2011

Happy 100th President Reagan!

Ronald Reagan:  A Defense and a Criticism

Ronald Reagan was the greatest president of the 20th Century.  He recaptured America's glory and global respect after the ham-handed buffoonery of the Carter years.  Yeah, FDR must be considered great for his fireside chats and WW II leadership, but his statist economic policies increased the country's misery.  Reagan, on the other hand, knew how to jump start an economy left for dead by liberal experimentation.

Nonetheless, liberal gargoyles like Paul Krugman love to blame all our ills on Reagan, the man responsible for the longest economic boom in our nation's history.  He was not perfect, but on balance, Reagan was a great president, but more importantly, he was a great man of rock-solid values who knew why he believed what he believed.  Here I offer a summary of Reagan criticism (some legitimate), and some links that defend his policies.


Paul Krugman is a dishonest, diabolical troll
Instead of using his education to enlighten Americans about the difficult and dismal science of economics, he chops up facts like firewood and serves up selectively sliced statistics in order to score cheap political points in an attempt to smear this great president.  Ignorant liberals lap it all up and regurgitate it on the rest of us, forcing us to do the homework lazy liberals just won't do.

Practitioners like Krugman use little funhouse mirror tricks to stretch and distort our view.  Yes, some conservatives do it too, but I don't listen to them or repeat their BS.

Most liberal writing on our economic mess is a hopeless tangle.  A typical writer will take crony capitalism, spending, deregulation, bubbles, and poverty, wad it all in a big ball and throw it in Ronald Reagan's face.  The logic is terrible and typically lacks cause and effect. 

Tis true, Reagan didn't shrink the government and he grew the national debt
In return, we collapsed the Soviet Union, freeing tens of millions of Eastern Europeans and got a well-respected kick-ass military to boot.

Add to that the regulatory reform that allowed millions of Americans to start their own businesses and brought structural unemployment to below 5%.  The result was the longest economic expansion in American history, thanks to President Clinton continuing Reagan's policies. What have we gotten for the trillions Obama has spent?  At least Reagan's spending produced results.

For a serious libertarian criticism of Reagan, see free-marketer Sheldon L. Richmon's article, or Murray Rothbard's excellent critique, The Myths of Reaganomics. Their main criticism is he did not roll back government and he spend too much.  These are not liberal screeds, but rather cold-eyed analyses of the facts devoid of any personal criticism of the man.

Reagan was a great man and a great president.  If you want to defend him, you must consider his record, warts and all (no one in the public arena is wart-free).  He did the best he could in an America remade by progressives.  FDR build a clanking, soul-destroying bureaucratic machine, and even the great Ronald Reagan couldn't dismantle it. 

The only way progressives can defend Obamanomics is to turn it all upside down, and that involves taking the success that is Reaganomics and convincing enough soft-headed people that the longest economic expansion in our history was really a failure.

For a serious defense of Reaganism, see the following articles.  There's a lot of liberal BS out there, you'll need to refer to them often:

Reaganomics - William N. Niskanen
Thomas Firey - There Krugman Goes Again
Max Barron - Chief Lib Propagandist Krugman
Reagan Did What? Fantasies of Paul Krugman
Donald Luskin - That Old Hack Magic
Robert Scheer - Krugman Ignores the Real Culprits
Stefan Karlsson
Nick Gillespie - Blame Reagan!
Krugman - Enron's Nobel Advisor