The United Nations is such a joke. Always has been ... still is. We are talking about an organization that exists for two principal purposes, weakening America and redistribution of wealth ... particularly America's wealth.
For 60 years we had an essentially useless body called the U.N. Commission on Human Rights. It eventually became so corrupt and lacking in credibility that it was dissolved in 2006. Do you remember when Sudan engaged in a program of ethnic cleansing in its Darfur region? That happened right after Sudan was placed on the Human Rights Council. That should give you an idea of why nobody took this commission seriously. One of the final anchors that sunk the U.N. Commission on Human Rights was nominating ... Libya! ... as the commission's president. So this defunct commission decided to regroup and "tighten" its criteria for membership to create the current Human Rights Council. I'm not entirely sure what criteria they used to elect members, but we have countries like Libya, Cuba, China and others that don't have the greatest track records when it comes to human rights sitting on this council to decide on human rights violations.
But then who are we kidding? This isn't really about human rights, is it? Now up until 2009, the United States refused to be a part of any of this Human Rights Council (we were kicked off of the last commission). But the great Community Organizer thought it would be a wise idea to reserve the Bush boycott and join the new Human Rights Council in 2009, saying the U.S. could most effectively push it to improve by being a member. Yeah ... right. So now we have a chance to test that theory.
So what is the Human Rights Council doing about the fact that one of its member nations, at the direction of a crazy dictator, is killing its citizens in cold blood? They've sent word to Quadaffi that "Killing your people is bad. Stop it. Stern letter to follow." Yup ... the Human Rights Council is going to call a special session to draft a letter. Wow, sounds pretty ruthless, eh? And fear not, my friends! Libya will get to keep its seat on the United Nations Human Right Council as there hasn't been one call for it to be kicked off the council.
Keep in mind that this is the same Human Rights Commission that Barack Obama submitted a report to about Arizona and its efforts to secure the border and enforce federal immigration policy on the state level.
I'm just an individual who hopes to inspire but not impose his views on others. I seek not to convince but only hope that my words are written well enough to get others to delve deeper into their own thoughts and ideas. I am sincere in all that I say but never so serious as to not listen to the ideas of others
Friday, February 25, 2011
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
GROUND HOG DAY....DO YOU KNOW WHERE IT CAME FROM?
Stunning that we’re still actually required to go through this asinine “Groundhog” nonsense. I know it’s just one day out of the year. That’s one day too many.
In the great pantheon of idiotic activities, Groundhog Day has got to occupy a special space – somewhere between cow-tipping and state of the union addresses. And especially the Groundhog Day celebration as observed by the town that spawned the inanity, Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania.
If, like me, you’re looking for where to fix the blame, you have to go back to a group of European immigrants who brought some weird customs with them to the Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania area back in the 1800s…and, apparently, enough alcohol to inebriate everything from Punxsutawney to Pittsburgh. Yes, drink enough and you actually think that you can predict the end of winter weather by brutalizing a woodchuck. Which they did. And still do.
Believe it or not, each year 30,000 people have so little to do of any consequence, that they actually travel to Punxsutawney to freeze to death and watch a half dozen ‘drunk Punxsutawney town fathers in stovepipe hats weave their way onto a raised platform and drag a drug-addled marmot out of a crate to judge whether the thing is able to “see its shadow.” The projected “remaining length of winter weather” is somehow based on the results of this exercise. I know…lunatics. Nevertheless, that’s the deal.
The administrators of Punxsutawney’s Groundhog Day observance would take exception to me suggesting that they’d stuffed a horse tranquilizer down their exploited animal’s throat before displaying it to the television cameras. They deny, vehemently and indignantly, that the abused animal is in any way, well, “abused.” The thing’s not drugged, they insist, to make it compliant nor is it banged over the head Sarah Palin “whack-the-halibut” style just before they yank it out of its cage. That doesn’t square, though, with my admittedly “thin knowledge” of marmot behavior. But if you Google the damn thing you get the idea that if somebody stuck their hand into the cage of a groundhog that had all its faculties they’d draw back a bloody stub. In fact, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg got a little lesson in marmot behavior when “Staten Island Chuck” – that’s New York’s rip-off of “Punxsutawney Phil” – took a chunk out of one of the mayor’s fingers in 2009. Advice to City Hall: Next time, “use the drugs.”
Anyway, a quick definition of Groundhog Day? “A stultifyingly stupid event conducted for, and by, embarrassingly lame losers.”
There are a couple of things I notice that have an annoying way of periodically recurring, and each is about as welcome as the other: Groundhog Day – and herpes. As far as I can see, the only meaningful difference between the two is that the latter doesn’t predict much…with the possible exception of having to compose a really challenging “personals ad.”
In the great pantheon of idiotic activities, Groundhog Day has got to occupy a special space – somewhere between cow-tipping and state of the union addresses. And especially the Groundhog Day celebration as observed by the town that spawned the inanity, Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania.
If, like me, you’re looking for where to fix the blame, you have to go back to a group of European immigrants who brought some weird customs with them to the Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania area back in the 1800s…and, apparently, enough alcohol to inebriate everything from Punxsutawney to Pittsburgh. Yes, drink enough and you actually think that you can predict the end of winter weather by brutalizing a woodchuck. Which they did. And still do.
Believe it or not, each year 30,000 people have so little to do of any consequence, that they actually travel to Punxsutawney to freeze to death and watch a half dozen ‘drunk Punxsutawney town fathers in stovepipe hats weave their way onto a raised platform and drag a drug-addled marmot out of a crate to judge whether the thing is able to “see its shadow.” The projected “remaining length of winter weather” is somehow based on the results of this exercise. I know…lunatics. Nevertheless, that’s the deal.
The administrators of Punxsutawney’s Groundhog Day observance would take exception to me suggesting that they’d stuffed a horse tranquilizer down their exploited animal’s throat before displaying it to the television cameras. They deny, vehemently and indignantly, that the abused animal is in any way, well, “abused.” The thing’s not drugged, they insist, to make it compliant nor is it banged over the head Sarah Palin “whack-the-halibut” style just before they yank it out of its cage. That doesn’t square, though, with my admittedly “thin knowledge” of marmot behavior. But if you Google the damn thing you get the idea that if somebody stuck their hand into the cage of a groundhog that had all its faculties they’d draw back a bloody stub. In fact, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg got a little lesson in marmot behavior when “Staten Island Chuck” – that’s New York’s rip-off of “Punxsutawney Phil” – took a chunk out of one of the mayor’s fingers in 2009. Advice to City Hall: Next time, “use the drugs.”
Anyway, a quick definition of Groundhog Day? “A stultifyingly stupid event conducted for, and by, embarrassingly lame losers.”
There are a couple of things I notice that have an annoying way of periodically recurring, and each is about as welcome as the other: Groundhog Day – and herpes. As far as I can see, the only meaningful difference between the two is that the latter doesn’t predict much…with the possible exception of having to compose a really challenging “personals ad.”
MOOCHERS AND THE GOVERNMENT
We are well on our way to becoming a majority moocher society. That is a society where the majority of people rely in some form on the government to survive. On the other side remains the shrinking pool of producers who will continue to be looted in order to support the moochers and their addictive government habit. If you are a producer, these numbers will be particularly hard for you to stomach:
The trend is only getting larger - the moochers are multiplying while the producers are dwindling, thanks to our asinine government that seeks to punish wealth and success.In 2011, we will pay out $385 billion in food stamps, $365 billion for the federal portion of Medicaid (with an almost equal amount due from the states), $200 billion in unemployment benefits and over $100 billion in aid to education. The total cost of these payments will exceed $1 trillion, but the cost of administering these programs will add approximately $300 billion in expenditures to the federal budget.
UNIONS AND THE ECONOMY
While unions continue to dominate the news, I figured I would give you a few little facts I found from the Heritage Foundation. Take these facts, absorb them and continue to ask yourself .... are unions making a positive impact on our economy? I'll bet you can already answer that question. But here are some specifics to fill in the blanks.
- Unions function as labor cartels. A labor cartel restricts the number of workers in a company or industry to drive up the remaining workers' wages, just as the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) attempts to cut the supply of oil to raise its price. Companies pass on those higher wages to consumers through higher prices, and often they also earn lower profits. Economic research finds that unions benefit their members but hurt consumers generally, and especially workers who are denied job opportunities.
- Economists consistently find that unions decrease the number of jobs available in the economy. The vast majority of manufacturing jobs lost over the past three decades have been among union members--non-union manufacturing employment has risen. Research also shows that widespread unionization delays recovery from economic downturns.
- Some unions win higher wages for their members, though many do not. But with these higher wages, unions bring less investment, fewer jobs, higher prices, and smaller 401(k) plans for everyone else. On balance, labor cartels harm the economy, and enacting policies designed to force workers into unions will only prolong the recession.
- Studies typically find that unionized companies earn profits between 10 percent and 15 percent lower than those of comparable non-union firms. Unlike the findings with respect to wage effects, the research shows unambiguously that unions directly cause lower profits. Profits drop at companies whose unions win certification elections but remain at normal levels for non-union firms. One recent study found that shareholder returns fall by 10 percent over two years at companies where unions win certification.
- In essence, unions "tax" investments that corporations make, redistributing part of the return from these investments to their members. This makes undertaking a new investment less worthwhile. Companies respond to the union tax in the same way they respond to government taxes on investment--by investing less. By cutting profits, unions also reduce the money that firms have available for new investments, so they also indirectly reduce investment.
- Research shows that unions directly cause firms to reduce their investments. In fact, investment drops sharply after unions organize a company. One study found that unionizing reduces capital investment by 30 percent--the same effect as a 33 percentage point increase in the corporate tax rate.
- Economists have found that unions delay economic recoveries. States with more union members took considerably longer than those with fewer union members to recover from the 1982 and 1991 recessions.
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
UNIONS RUNNING THE SHOW....
Throughout these last few days of teachers protesting in Wisconsin, what seems to be missing in the discussion? The children. Education. It seems as though we have lost sight of one fundamental fact: we pay teachers to educate our students. I will spare you of the rant explaining that these government teachers are only doing what is required of them ... teaching students to know and love government. But the fact is that when you get unions involved, the job at hand becomes secondary to being a member of a union. As a member of that union, you will work to get more for less. And in the case of government workers, you will work to get more taxpayer money while sacrificing nothing. Students have become secondary. Is it any wonder why our education system can't keep up with other nations?
Just how secondary are the students? Let me remind you of the words of the late Albert Shanker. Shanker was the president of the American Federation of Teachers from 1964 to 1984. A reporter approached Shanker at a union convention to ask about the nature of the resolutions being presented for consideration by the teachers. The reporter wanted to know why the bulk of the deliberations at the convention were about fighting school choice and more benefits and pay for teachers, while very little was being said about the actual students. Shanker's response? "I will worry about the children when they can vote in union elections." That pretty much says it all, doesn't it?
Take this quick example of how collective bargaining has affected the DC school system. Remember Michelle Rhee? She did wonders to improve education levels in the DC school system while she was the commissioner there. That included firing ineffective teachers. The teacher's unions didn't like her .. and they didn't like the Mayor who hired her ... so they campaigned against him and defeated him at the polls. Now, thanks to collective bargaining agreements, DC is having to hire back many of those teachers because of what the union claims is a failure to comply with proper union dismissal procedures. These were ineffective teachers who were fired because of tardiness, unprofessional behavior, "rude and aggressive" demeanor, and so forth. But now they are being forced to be hired back, and D.C. taxpayers will also be required to pay two years in back wages, costing the city approximately $7.5 million. As Michelle Rhee points out, a recent study "concluded the United States would rise to the top among nations in student achievement if the lowest performing 5 percent to 8 percent of teachers were replaced with those who are average." But instead, we are forced to keep lousy teachers in the system, all thanks to unions and their collective bargaining agreements with the government.
(Michelle Rhee is now working for Florida's new Governor Rick Scott! And the voters of Washington DC have shown why we are all better off if they can't elect representatives to Congress.)
The idea that Governor Scott Walker actions in stripping union employees of certain collective bargaining rights violates a basic human right is absurd. They had the opportunity to vote in the last election - the opportunity to elect their union-friendly candidates, and they failed. First, let's remember that in the case of Wisconsin the unions would still have collective bargaining rights over wages ... we are only talking about stripping collective bargaining rights for benefits. Second, it is not as if this country was founded on the notion of collective bargaining as an inalienable right. Collective bargaining with the government did not occur until the 1960s, when both entities realized that they could use each other to their own advantage. Think about it ... both government and unions have the same goals in mind: to grow in size and in power. Meanwhile, they have somebody else's money with which to negotiate: taxpayer dollars. So there is literally nobody to stop them in their perpetual cycle, which enables each other to grow in power and size. Until now. Now we have to put a stop to it, otherwise we are all going to crumble. Our states cannot sustain the level of spending without imploding, leaving us with nothing. So somebody had to be the first one to put a stop to it. In this case, it was the government - a Republican governor. And the unions cannot understand, for the life of them, why someone in government would want to put an end to this cycle.
Just how secondary are the students? Let me remind you of the words of the late Albert Shanker. Shanker was the president of the American Federation of Teachers from 1964 to 1984. A reporter approached Shanker at a union convention to ask about the nature of the resolutions being presented for consideration by the teachers. The reporter wanted to know why the bulk of the deliberations at the convention were about fighting school choice and more benefits and pay for teachers, while very little was being said about the actual students. Shanker's response? "I will worry about the children when they can vote in union elections." That pretty much says it all, doesn't it?
Take this quick example of how collective bargaining has affected the DC school system. Remember Michelle Rhee? She did wonders to improve education levels in the DC school system while she was the commissioner there. That included firing ineffective teachers. The teacher's unions didn't like her .. and they didn't like the Mayor who hired her ... so they campaigned against him and defeated him at the polls. Now, thanks to collective bargaining agreements, DC is having to hire back many of those teachers because of what the union claims is a failure to comply with proper union dismissal procedures. These were ineffective teachers who were fired because of tardiness, unprofessional behavior, "rude and aggressive" demeanor, and so forth. But now they are being forced to be hired back, and D.C. taxpayers will also be required to pay two years in back wages, costing the city approximately $7.5 million. As Michelle Rhee points out, a recent study "concluded the United States would rise to the top among nations in student achievement if the lowest performing 5 percent to 8 percent of teachers were replaced with those who are average." But instead, we are forced to keep lousy teachers in the system, all thanks to unions and their collective bargaining agreements with the government.
(Michelle Rhee is now working for Florida's new Governor Rick Scott! And the voters of Washington DC have shown why we are all better off if they can't elect representatives to Congress.)
The idea that Governor Scott Walker actions in stripping union employees of certain collective bargaining rights violates a basic human right is absurd. They had the opportunity to vote in the last election - the opportunity to elect their union-friendly candidates, and they failed. First, let's remember that in the case of Wisconsin the unions would still have collective bargaining rights over wages ... we are only talking about stripping collective bargaining rights for benefits. Second, it is not as if this country was founded on the notion of collective bargaining as an inalienable right. Collective bargaining with the government did not occur until the 1960s, when both entities realized that they could use each other to their own advantage. Think about it ... both government and unions have the same goals in mind: to grow in size and in power. Meanwhile, they have somebody else's money with which to negotiate: taxpayer dollars. So there is literally nobody to stop them in their perpetual cycle, which enables each other to grow in power and size. Until now. Now we have to put a stop to it, otherwise we are all going to crumble. Our states cannot sustain the level of spending without imploding, leaving us with nothing. So somebody had to be the first one to put a stop to it. In this case, it was the government - a Republican governor. And the unions cannot understand, for the life of them, why someone in government would want to put an end to this cycle.
Monday, February 14, 2011
$1,600,000,000,000.00
There you go. And no ... that's not Obama's new budget. That's Obama's projection for the budget DEFICIT this year! That's money we don't have. That's money we're going to have to borrow. That's money our children and grandchildren are going to have to pay back. Or ... .that's debt our country will eventually try to discharge in bankruptcy.
Let me try to put that $1.6 trillion in perspective. We're going on a spending spree. Let's see ..... how much do we want to spend an hour? Does $100,000 an hour work for you? $100,000 an hour 24 hours a day 365 days a year ... and we're going to keep on spending at $100K an hour until we've spent the entire $1.6 trillion.
The first day goes by. How much have we spent? That one's easy. We've spent $2,400,000. We now have the house of our dreams, a few tremendous cars and some nice bling.
The first year goes by. How much have we spent? Try $876,000,000. That's $876 million dollars. Is there anything else you could possibly want? I'm thinking you're starting to give money away to complete strangers by now.
You're well on your way to spending $1,600,000,000. But wait! Look at that figure above! There's some extra zeros there. That $1,600,000,000 you're edging up on is in billions, not trillions. You will reach that spending level in 564 days. That's 564 days of spending $100,000 an hour 24/7.
So ... let's move in on that $1.6 trillion dollar figure. It took you 564 days to knock off your first $1.6 billion ... so how much to spend this year's deficit? How about 666,490? Yup ... that's the figure. That's how long it takes you to spend this year's deficit at $100,000 an hour. If you want that figure to sound a bit more reasonable ... try 1,826 years.
That's not the worse of it. This is just one year's deficit. The Obama budget projects $8 trillion in deficits over the next ten years. How long would it take for our $100,000/hr spending spree to take care of that? Try 9,132 years.
The cold, hard truth here is that neither the Republicans nor the Democrats have the courage to really address this hideous budget problem right now. On the one hand we have Obama suggesting even MORE spending increases, and on the other hand we have Republicans playing games with the people by floating phony spending-cut numbers out there. Don't tell us how much you're going to cut from the Obama budget proposals for last year! Don't tell us how much you're going to cut from projected future spending increases. Tell us how much you're going to cut from current spending levels! That's the ONLY figure out there that means anything.
And something else ... and this is for both sides. Grow some stones and start to address entitlement spending. Both sides are gutless here. Their inattention to reigning in entitlements is all the proof you need that their main concern is not budget cutting or attaining some sense of economic sanity in this country ... their main concern is getting reelected. They love their positions of power and prestige ... they love these positions of power so much that they will consciously ignore - even jeopardize - the future of this country rather than put those positions in jeopardy.
Let's say something about the Gimme Generation before we move on here. I'm talking about seniors ... the wealthiest segment of our population. These people are consistent voters ... and the politicians realize this. The politicians also realize that, by and large, these seniors are going to vote their pockets and purses. If you dare to take any entitlements away from them - no matter whether they need the money or not - they're going to mobilize against you. If you think that politicians are ignoring future generations, they have nothing on our senior citizens. The loudest "screw you, you're on your own" shout-out to future generations is actually coming from the Social Security and Medicare crowd.
The number one item on the budget agenda? Hands down ... the Department of Education. It accomplishes absolutely nothing while spending nearly $100 billion a year. Get rid of it.
So .... let the games begin. OK, so I'm rambling a bit. This is stream-of-consciousness stuff folks. Bear with me. Some say that Obama's budget is going to be the beginning of an "epic" budget showdown. We can expect to see an estimated deficit cut of $1.1 trillion per year over the next ten years. That gives us our $8 trillion over the next decade. Also, the Obama administration will not reach its self-imposed short-term goal of reducing deficits to 3% of our GDP by 2015. In fact, Republican Chairman of the House Budget Committee Paul Ryan says that Obama's plan would still continue to raise our national debt. This could, again, be one of those scenarios where Obama will make cuts based on future spending and somehow claim this to be a fiscal feat. For example, one report says, "While Obama would save money primarily through a five-year freeze in domestic spending, Republicans are calling for cuts in those programs, starting immediately." So Obama's idea of spending cuts is to freeze spending at the current level and be revered as a deficit hawk for not increasing spending!
So besides freezing spending, how else does Obama plan to cut spending? Apparently other programs will be on the chopping block, including low-income heating assistance programs and community development block grants ... programs that liberals love, so we will see how many Democrats are willing to put up that fight. After all, this is how Democrats continue to get votes - by promising these programs to the moocher class. Are these the types of efforts that will net us some serious savings? Prolly not. Other targets include the Pentagon, which Obama is suggesting $78 billion in savings ... generally a part of the budget that never sees spending cuts from either party.
But the other one-third of these "savings" in Obama's budget will come in the form of tax increases. This is where Republicans in the House slam on the breaks. Tax increases of any form (including closing tax loopholes) is probably going to be dead on arrival. Speaking of Republicans, they unveiled their own measure on Friday that would get rid of $5 billion from the Education Department. While lacking the gonads to get rid of it altogether, it's a start.
But something else you will notice about Obama's budget .... It doesn't tackle any of the big three: Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Until we are willing to address these issues, nobody can claim the title of "deficit hawk" or consider themselves to be concerned about our fiscal situation. I am sick of the concern and ready for action.
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
Thinking About Ronald Reagan: On 100th Birthday, He's Remembered for Good Reason
On the eve of Ronald Reagan's election as president of the United States in 1980, a radio reporter asked him what it was that Americans saw in him. Reagan hesitated and then replied: "Would you laugh if I told you that I think maybe they see themselves and that I'm one of them?"
Forty years and four presidents later, Americans still see themselves in Reagan. In a Gallup poll in 2009 they ranked Reagan as the best president, just ahead of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy.
This highly generous assessment is based on more than likeability. Reagan left the world safer and the United States more prosperous than he found it. Even some liberal scholars who disdained Reagan when he was in the White House now acknowledge his effectiveness as a leader, especially his role in ending the Cold War. Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, his partner in that enterprise, said at Reagan's funeral that the U.S. president was "an extraordinary political leader" who had "decided to be a peacemaker."
Reagan the Negotiator is the president who catches the attention of historians. Conservatives, to whom Reagan is iconic, observe that he was able to negotiate with Gorbachev from a position of strength because of the U.S. arms buildup that Reagan promised as a candidate and delivered as a president. They also note that Reagan was a domestic achiever, reducing the top marginal federal income tax rate from 70 to 28 percent.
This didn't happen in a straight line, as Reagan made numerous compromises along the way to reach this goal, several times agreeing to tax increases. His greatest domestic accomplishment -- breaking the back of inflation that terrified the nation in the late 1970s -- was a product not of "supply side" economics ballyhooed by conservatives but of the drastic tightening of interest rates by Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker. Under the battle cry of "stay the course," Reagan contributed to the process by protecting Volcker from congressional critics, many of them Republican, who wanted the Fed chairman's scalp.
When the economy took off in the second quarter of 1983, with a growth rate that averaged 7 percent for the rest of the year, Reagan's approval ratings soared with it. The "Reagan Recession" lasted 16 months; the Reagan Recovery persisted well into the next presidency. Reagan became popular enough to withstand the Iran-contra scandal, which might have wrecked a lesser president, and he left the White House with the highest job approval rating of any departing president since Franklin D. Roosevelt died in office in 1945.
FDR, Reagan's first (and enduring) political idol, was a patrician, which Reagan was not. But both of them connected with people at an everyday level. Stuart K. Spencer, the thoughtful California political strategist who helped manage Reagan's 1966 gubernatorial and 1980 presidential campaigns, compared Reagan to "Joe Sixpack," the emblematic guy at the bar who has his fingers on the pulse of the public.
Reagan didn't drink much beer, but he paid such careful attention to his audiences that he sometimes sensed their concerns before they were fully articulated. When Reagan was exploring a run for governor of California in 1965, polls showed that voters were most concerned about taxes and other economic issues. But as Reagan, who had never run for office before, roamed the state he became aware of an issue that had not yet shown up in the public opinion surveys. Demonstrations were then disrupting the University of California, and Reagan's audiences wanted to know what he would do about it as governor. Reagan quickly realized that middle-class and working-class parents who had sons and daughters in college saw these demonstrations as a threat to their children's education. Without prompting, Reagan made the "mess at Berkeley" a signature issue of his campaign.
I met Reagan in the summer of 1965, when I was a Sacramento-based reporter for the San Jose Mercury-News and he was speaking to a luncheon audience of reporters and lobbyists. The speech was part of a series of Reagan talks away from the metropolitan areas of Los Angeles and San Francisco that had been designed by Spencer and his partner Bill Roberts to show that Reagan was something more than an actor reading lines written for him by others. Reagan called the speeches "out-of-town tryouts" and wrote his own script.
On this day, when a questioner wondered how anyone could be governor without public experience, Reagan replied that it would be good to have someone who was inexperienced take a fresh look at government. I was stunned by the answer, but the audience clearly bought it. Reagan was then well known from his films and years as the host of General Electric Theater, and reporters and lobbyists crowded around him after the luncheon, eager to hear Reagan reminisce about Hollywood. At the time, the incumbent Democratic governor, Pat Brown, was hoping the GOP would nominate Reagan on the theory he'd be easier to beat than the putative Republican frontrunner, San Francisco Mayor George Christopher. I wasn't so sure. When my San Jose-based editor asked my opinion of Reagan after this lunch, I said I didn't know why anyone would want to run against someone who was so well known and well liked.
Over the course of the next four-plus decades, I covered Reagan as a political candidate and then, for The Washington Post, for the entire eight years of his presidency. I wrote five books about him, including "President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime," and interviewed him scores of times. He was always courteous, although my edgy coverage apparently tried his patience. He complained about it occasionally to his White House diaries, referring to me as "one of three journalists" at the paper "who regularly beat my brains out." In truth, I was struggling to understand Reagan and to keep my reporting on an even keel.
Reagan made it easier in one important way since he never tried to co-opt reporters as so many politicians do. Although there were occasional personal moments in our relationship -- he once suggested that my interest in him stemmed in part from the alcoholism of our fathers -- he never pretended that we were pals, and rarely commented on anything I wrote.
For me, the big exception regarding Reagan's usual diffidence occurred in 1976 when I wrote in advance of the Republican National Convention that Reagan's bid to wrest the nomination from President Gerald Ford had come up short and that members of his staff were seeking positions in the Ford campaign. The Post bannered the story, and Reagan denounced it on national television. (Concerned that I might be shaken, our great editor Ben Bradlee, always on your side in a storm, walked me through the newsroom with his arm on my shoulder to show he trusted my reporting.) Reagan's campaign manager never forgot this story and wouldn't talk to me again, but Reagan did talk to me and didn't mention it. He put negative stories and other disappointments behind him, and he didn't hold grudges, which made it easy to like him and easy for Reagan to like everyone.
On the other hand, he didn't pay all that much attention to what was happening around him. He had Nancy Reagan for that. Martin Anderson, an economist and political adviser who became White House domestic adviser in the early years of the Reagan presidency, was pushed out of the 1980 campaign in a staff shakeup. Later, Anderson was invited back and welcomed by Reagan after a staff counter-coup, but he suspected that Reagan hadn't even noticed that he had been gone.
Stu Spencer attributed Reagan's distancing to his Hollywood background, where the cast kept changing but the actor always had his job to do. Acting isn't an easy craft, and Reagan worked hard at mastering it. He was also an adept writer -- I learned early on that he wrote most of his own speeches and one-liners -- and an even better editor. The book "Reagan in His Own Hand," by Annelise and Martin Anderson, with Kiron Skinner, reproduces illustrations of presidential speech drafts and the edits Reagan made in them. My favorite, also reproduced in one of my books, is a passage from a historic speech to British parliamentarians in Westminster on June 8, 1982, in which Reagan took some mush that had been written for him about Soviet actions in Europe, crossed it out, and wrote in his distinctive, looping hand: "What I am describing now is a policy and a hope for the long term -- the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history as it has left other totalitarian ideologies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the expression of citizens."
These are strong words from Joe Sixpack, but Reagan was at once a man of conviction who thought seriously about the great issues of his time and an ordinary American, never braggy, who treated his audiences -- all of us, really -- with consideration and respect. His greatest single quality was his self-deprecating humor, which came naturally to him and was honed into an effective political weapon. He made fun of his age, his work habits, his vanities, his ideology, his alleged lack of intelligence, and his supposed domination by his wife. When he was speaking to a political rally in Florida and a wind blew his speaking cards off a podium, Reagan picked them up, shuffled them together, and quipped that it really didn't matter what order they were in. When a reporter during the first gubernatorial campaign brought Reagan a studio picture showing him with the title chimpanzee in the movie "Bedtime for Bonzo," Reagan signed it and wrote, "I'm the one with the watch." On Air Force One he signed a picture of a sleeping Marlin Fitzwater, his press secretary, with the inscription, "Marlin, we're only supposed to do this at cabinet meetings."
Of all the silly things said about Reagan, the silliest (and I probably wrote it myself at some point) is the statement: "What you see is what you get." What people saw, as Reagan suspected, was that he was one of them, but what they got was a lot more than that. Reagan, for all the quips, was a serious person who had read about treaties and economic theories and the Soviet Union along with his share of science fiction and potboiler novels.
Reagan demonstrated his seriousness of purpose and much more in a dramatic speech to the Republican National Convention in 1976 after Ford had been nominated. Although he hadn't even known he would be called upon to speak, Reagan made the most of the moment by telling the delegates that they faced the dual challenge of preserving individual freedom and keeping the world safe from nuclear destruction. "We live in a world in which the great powers have poised and aimed at each other horrible missiles of destruction that can, in a matter of minutes, arrive in each other's country and destroy virtually the civilized world we live in."
Many mistook this speech as Reagan's curtain call. It was, in fact, a clarion declaration that he had no intention of leaving the world stage. After Ford lost to Jimmy Carter in November, Reagan became the Republican front-runner. The Republican establishment tried to stop this man they now idolize; all of the party nabobs lined up against him in 1980 although only George H.W. Bush stuck around as a genuine challenger. After Reagan won the nomination he united the GOP in a stroke by putting Bush on the ticket and then went on to defeat Carter -- "There you go again," Reagan said memorably in their debate -- in November.
When Reagan entered the White House he was convinced from his reading that Central Intelligence Agency estimates of Soviet prowess were exaggerated and that the Soviet Union was too destitute economically to compete with a U.S. military buildup. Even before he was nominated, he said in a meeting with editors and reporters at The Washington Post that a renewed arms race would bring the Soviet Union to the bargaining table. What made Reagan different from many of his fellow conservatives -- and different, too, from liberals who looked upon the Cold War as an eternal condition -- was that he really wanted to negotiate and thought he had learned the art of doing so by bargaining with movie producers when he was president of the Screen Actors Guild.
Soon after Reagan's first meeting with Gorbachev in Geneva in 1985, I interviewed him for a book and asked him what was the most neglected aspect of his biography. Negotiating for the Screen Actors Guild, he replied. What did he learn in these negotiations, I wanted to know. "That the purpose of a negotiation is to get an agreement," Reagan said.
And so it turned out in the fullness of time that this most conservative and anti-communist of all presidents sat down with Gorbachev and, after many ups and downs, on Dec. 8, 1987, signed the first treaty of the Cold War that actually reduced nuclear arsenals instead of stabilizing them at a higher level. It was an agreement by the way -- the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty -- that Reagan's ideological mentor William F. Buckley opposed and that columnist George Will called "moral disarmament."
Henry Kissinger, who retrospectively acclaims Reagan, said at the time that he had "grave reservations" about the INF Treaty, giving aid and comfort to the right in its campaign to prevent ratification. Reagan took his case to the people, and the Senate ratified the treaty.
It was a precursor to other agreements, the most recent signed by Barack Obama, which made deeper reductions in nuclear arsenals. Today, U.S. and Russian specialists inspect nuclear weapons on each other's soil, an action that would have been seen as unbelievably utopian when Reagan became president. Not bad for Joe Sixpack
Forty years and four presidents later, Americans still see themselves in Reagan. In a Gallup poll in 2009 they ranked Reagan as the best president, just ahead of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy.
This highly generous assessment is based on more than likeability. Reagan left the world safer and the United States more prosperous than he found it. Even some liberal scholars who disdained Reagan when he was in the White House now acknowledge his effectiveness as a leader, especially his role in ending the Cold War. Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, his partner in that enterprise, said at Reagan's funeral that the U.S. president was "an extraordinary political leader" who had "decided to be a peacemaker."
Reagan the Negotiator is the president who catches the attention of historians. Conservatives, to whom Reagan is iconic, observe that he was able to negotiate with Gorbachev from a position of strength because of the U.S. arms buildup that Reagan promised as a candidate and delivered as a president. They also note that Reagan was a domestic achiever, reducing the top marginal federal income tax rate from 70 to 28 percent.
This didn't happen in a straight line, as Reagan made numerous compromises along the way to reach this goal, several times agreeing to tax increases. His greatest domestic accomplishment -- breaking the back of inflation that terrified the nation in the late 1970s -- was a product not of "supply side" economics ballyhooed by conservatives but of the drastic tightening of interest rates by Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker. Under the battle cry of "stay the course," Reagan contributed to the process by protecting Volcker from congressional critics, many of them Republican, who wanted the Fed chairman's scalp.
When the economy took off in the second quarter of 1983, with a growth rate that averaged 7 percent for the rest of the year, Reagan's approval ratings soared with it. The "Reagan Recession" lasted 16 months; the Reagan Recovery persisted well into the next presidency. Reagan became popular enough to withstand the Iran-contra scandal, which might have wrecked a lesser president, and he left the White House with the highest job approval rating of any departing president since Franklin D. Roosevelt died in office in 1945.
FDR, Reagan's first (and enduring) political idol, was a patrician, which Reagan was not. But both of them connected with people at an everyday level. Stuart K. Spencer, the thoughtful California political strategist who helped manage Reagan's 1966 gubernatorial and 1980 presidential campaigns, compared Reagan to "Joe Sixpack," the emblematic guy at the bar who has his fingers on the pulse of the public.Reagan didn't drink much beer, but he paid such careful attention to his audiences that he sometimes sensed their concerns before they were fully articulated. When Reagan was exploring a run for governor of California in 1965, polls showed that voters were most concerned about taxes and other economic issues. But as Reagan, who had never run for office before, roamed the state he became aware of an issue that had not yet shown up in the public opinion surveys. Demonstrations were then disrupting the University of California, and Reagan's audiences wanted to know what he would do about it as governor. Reagan quickly realized that middle-class and working-class parents who had sons and daughters in college saw these demonstrations as a threat to their children's education. Without prompting, Reagan made the "mess at Berkeley" a signature issue of his campaign.
I met Reagan in the summer of 1965, when I was a Sacramento-based reporter for the San Jose Mercury-News and he was speaking to a luncheon audience of reporters and lobbyists. The speech was part of a series of Reagan talks away from the metropolitan areas of Los Angeles and San Francisco that had been designed by Spencer and his partner Bill Roberts to show that Reagan was something more than an actor reading lines written for him by others. Reagan called the speeches "out-of-town tryouts" and wrote his own script.
On this day, when a questioner wondered how anyone could be governor without public experience, Reagan replied that it would be good to have someone who was inexperienced take a fresh look at government. I was stunned by the answer, but the audience clearly bought it. Reagan was then well known from his films and years as the host of General Electric Theater, and reporters and lobbyists crowded around him after the luncheon, eager to hear Reagan reminisce about Hollywood. At the time, the incumbent Democratic governor, Pat Brown, was hoping the GOP would nominate Reagan on the theory he'd be easier to beat than the putative Republican frontrunner, San Francisco Mayor George Christopher. I wasn't so sure. When my San Jose-based editor asked my opinion of Reagan after this lunch, I said I didn't know why anyone would want to run against someone who was so well known and well liked.
Over the course of the next four-plus decades, I covered Reagan as a political candidate and then, for The Washington Post, for the entire eight years of his presidency. I wrote five books about him, including "President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime," and interviewed him scores of times. He was always courteous, although my edgy coverage apparently tried his patience. He complained about it occasionally to his White House diaries, referring to me as "one of three journalists" at the paper "who regularly beat my brains out." In truth, I was struggling to understand Reagan and to keep my reporting on an even keel.
Reagan made it easier in one important way since he never tried to co-opt reporters as so many politicians do. Although there were occasional personal moments in our relationship -- he once suggested that my interest in him stemmed in part from the alcoholism of our fathers -- he never pretended that we were pals, and rarely commented on anything I wrote.
For me, the big exception regarding Reagan's usual diffidence occurred in 1976 when I wrote in advance of the Republican National Convention that Reagan's bid to wrest the nomination from President Gerald Ford had come up short and that members of his staff were seeking positions in the Ford campaign. The Post bannered the story, and Reagan denounced it on national television. (Concerned that I might be shaken, our great editor Ben Bradlee, always on your side in a storm, walked me through the newsroom with his arm on my shoulder to show he trusted my reporting.) Reagan's campaign manager never forgot this story and wouldn't talk to me again, but Reagan did talk to me and didn't mention it. He put negative stories and other disappointments behind him, and he didn't hold grudges, which made it easy to like him and easy for Reagan to like everyone.
On the other hand, he didn't pay all that much attention to what was happening around him. He had Nancy Reagan for that. Martin Anderson, an economist and political adviser who became White House domestic adviser in the early years of the Reagan presidency, was pushed out of the 1980 campaign in a staff shakeup. Later, Anderson was invited back and welcomed by Reagan after a staff counter-coup, but he suspected that Reagan hadn't even noticed that he had been gone.
Stu Spencer attributed Reagan's distancing to his Hollywood background, where the cast kept changing but the actor always had his job to do. Acting isn't an easy craft, and Reagan worked hard at mastering it. He was also an adept writer -- I learned early on that he wrote most of his own speeches and one-liners -- and an even better editor. The book "Reagan in His Own Hand," by Annelise and Martin Anderson, with Kiron Skinner, reproduces illustrations of presidential speech drafts and the edits Reagan made in them. My favorite, also reproduced in one of my books, is a passage from a historic speech to British parliamentarians in Westminster on June 8, 1982, in which Reagan took some mush that had been written for him about Soviet actions in Europe, crossed it out, and wrote in his distinctive, looping hand: "What I am describing now is a policy and a hope for the long term -- the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history as it has left other totalitarian ideologies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the expression of citizens."
These are strong words from Joe Sixpack, but Reagan was at once a man of conviction who thought seriously about the great issues of his time and an ordinary American, never braggy, who treated his audiences -- all of us, really -- with consideration and respect. His greatest single quality was his self-deprecating humor, which came naturally to him and was honed into an effective political weapon. He made fun of his age, his work habits, his vanities, his ideology, his alleged lack of intelligence, and his supposed domination by his wife. When he was speaking to a political rally in Florida and a wind blew his speaking cards off a podium, Reagan picked them up, shuffled them together, and quipped that it really didn't matter what order they were in. When a reporter during the first gubernatorial campaign brought Reagan a studio picture showing him with the title chimpanzee in the movie "Bedtime for Bonzo," Reagan signed it and wrote, "I'm the one with the watch." On Air Force One he signed a picture of a sleeping Marlin Fitzwater, his press secretary, with the inscription, "Marlin, we're only supposed to do this at cabinet meetings."
Of all the silly things said about Reagan, the silliest (and I probably wrote it myself at some point) is the statement: "What you see is what you get." What people saw, as Reagan suspected, was that he was one of them, but what they got was a lot more than that. Reagan, for all the quips, was a serious person who had read about treaties and economic theories and the Soviet Union along with his share of science fiction and potboiler novels.
Reagan demonstrated his seriousness of purpose and much more in a dramatic speech to the Republican National Convention in 1976 after Ford had been nominated. Although he hadn't even known he would be called upon to speak, Reagan made the most of the moment by telling the delegates that they faced the dual challenge of preserving individual freedom and keeping the world safe from nuclear destruction. "We live in a world in which the great powers have poised and aimed at each other horrible missiles of destruction that can, in a matter of minutes, arrive in each other's country and destroy virtually the civilized world we live in."
Many mistook this speech as Reagan's curtain call. It was, in fact, a clarion declaration that he had no intention of leaving the world stage. After Ford lost to Jimmy Carter in November, Reagan became the Republican front-runner. The Republican establishment tried to stop this man they now idolize; all of the party nabobs lined up against him in 1980 although only George H.W. Bush stuck around as a genuine challenger. After Reagan won the nomination he united the GOP in a stroke by putting Bush on the ticket and then went on to defeat Carter -- "There you go again," Reagan said memorably in their debate -- in November.
When Reagan entered the White House he was convinced from his reading that Central Intelligence Agency estimates of Soviet prowess were exaggerated and that the Soviet Union was too destitute economically to compete with a U.S. military buildup. Even before he was nominated, he said in a meeting with editors and reporters at The Washington Post that a renewed arms race would bring the Soviet Union to the bargaining table. What made Reagan different from many of his fellow conservatives -- and different, too, from liberals who looked upon the Cold War as an eternal condition -- was that he really wanted to negotiate and thought he had learned the art of doing so by bargaining with movie producers when he was president of the Screen Actors Guild.
Soon after Reagan's first meeting with Gorbachev in Geneva in 1985, I interviewed him for a book and asked him what was the most neglected aspect of his biography. Negotiating for the Screen Actors Guild, he replied. What did he learn in these negotiations, I wanted to know. "That the purpose of a negotiation is to get an agreement," Reagan said.
And so it turned out in the fullness of time that this most conservative and anti-communist of all presidents sat down with Gorbachev and, after many ups and downs, on Dec. 8, 1987, signed the first treaty of the Cold War that actually reduced nuclear arsenals instead of stabilizing them at a higher level. It was an agreement by the way -- the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty -- that Reagan's ideological mentor William F. Buckley opposed and that columnist George Will called "moral disarmament."
Henry Kissinger, who retrospectively acclaims Reagan, said at the time that he had "grave reservations" about the INF Treaty, giving aid and comfort to the right in its campaign to prevent ratification. Reagan took his case to the people, and the Senate ratified the treaty.
It was a precursor to other agreements, the most recent signed by Barack Obama, which made deeper reductions in nuclear arsenals. Today, U.S. and Russian specialists inspect nuclear weapons on each other's soil, an action that would have been seen as unbelievably utopian when Reagan became president. Not bad for Joe Sixpack
OBAMA CARE D.O.A.
How did Obama ever think that his program would pass constitutional muster? How could he imagine that the Interstate Commerce clause could cover something that wasn’t interstate (health insurance cannot be sold over state lines) and wasn’t commerce (failure to buy insurance is not commerce) would stand up in court? He was so sure that he would win any constitutional challenge that he arrogantly failed to put a severability clause in the bill so that it would survive even if parts were stricken down.
The decision of the Florida District Court may or may not prevail in the Circuit Court. But who can doubt that the Supreme Court, as currently constituted, will strike it down?
So where does this leave President Obama? His stimulus package was a disaster, conceded by all to have failed. Democrats, of course, ascribe its failure to its puny size (only $800 billion)! Republicans understand that when the government spends and borrows it destroys jobs rather than create them. But, obviously, the stimulus bill didn’t work.
And now his health care bill is unconstitutional.
What happens to an arch when it loses its cornerstone? It collapses. The same fate awaits Obama in 2012.
Meanwhile, he continues to peddle the fiction that “we have broken the back of the recession.” His bureaucracy puts out a GDP growth rate of 3.4 percent for the fourth quarter. Baloney. The price deflator he used to discount the impact of inflation on the supposed GDP growth was a ridiculous 0.3 percent for the fourth quarter. But the Consumer Price Index rose by 2.6 percent in the same quarter. Almost all of the GDP growth is just rising prices, not a recovering economy.
And half of the new economic activity is just the build-up of inventories. We are now a nation of inventories. Businesses are sitting on close to a trillion dollars of cash they are afraid to invest. Banks are awash in capital handed out by the Fed as it tries to force-feed the economy by printing money. And consumers have taken the stimulus money and put it into reducing their debt load – good for them but not for the economy. Household debt has dropped by $200 billion in the past two years.
But nobody is spending. Nobody is buying.
Obama’s economic program is in ruins. His healthcare bill is unconstitutional. His financial regulation bill (Dodd-Frank) has so harassed small and community banks that they have stopped lending to small businesses. And, on top of all that, he is losing Egypt to radical Muslim fundamentalists.
What a presidency!
The decision of the Florida District Court may or may not prevail in the Circuit Court. But who can doubt that the Supreme Court, as currently constituted, will strike it down?
So where does this leave President Obama? His stimulus package was a disaster, conceded by all to have failed. Democrats, of course, ascribe its failure to its puny size (only $800 billion)! Republicans understand that when the government spends and borrows it destroys jobs rather than create them. But, obviously, the stimulus bill didn’t work.
And now his health care bill is unconstitutional.
What happens to an arch when it loses its cornerstone? It collapses. The same fate awaits Obama in 2012.
Meanwhile, he continues to peddle the fiction that “we have broken the back of the recession.” His bureaucracy puts out a GDP growth rate of 3.4 percent for the fourth quarter. Baloney. The price deflator he used to discount the impact of inflation on the supposed GDP growth was a ridiculous 0.3 percent for the fourth quarter. But the Consumer Price Index rose by 2.6 percent in the same quarter. Almost all of the GDP growth is just rising prices, not a recovering economy.
And half of the new economic activity is just the build-up of inventories. We are now a nation of inventories. Businesses are sitting on close to a trillion dollars of cash they are afraid to invest. Banks are awash in capital handed out by the Fed as it tries to force-feed the economy by printing money. And consumers have taken the stimulus money and put it into reducing their debt load – good for them but not for the economy. Household debt has dropped by $200 billion in the past two years.
But nobody is spending. Nobody is buying.
Obama’s economic program is in ruins. His healthcare bill is unconstitutional. His financial regulation bill (Dodd-Frank) has so harassed small and community banks that they have stopped lending to small businesses. And, on top of all that, he is losing Egypt to radical Muslim fundamentalists.
What a presidency!
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