Tag Archives: Ronald Reagan

Meritocracy

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

In the deep dark days of 1994, I was out of politics. I was actually running the Middle East for the company then known as EDS out of Dallas.

In the Fall of that year, I got a call from my good friend Joe Gaylord – Newt Gingrich’s political guru – asking me to fly into Atlanta for election night because they were certain they were going to take control of the U.S. House for the first time in 40 years and Newt wanted me to come in and help oversee the press operation.

I was in Abu Dhabi or Qatar or somewhere, but flew in and, indeed, I was there for election night. Continue reading →

Are You Better Off…

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

As the Democratic Party gathers in Charlotte, North Carolina this week to re-nominate Barack Obama, the big question Republicans are asking Americans to answer this week is: Are you better off now than you were four years ago?

There is almost no metric that would allow a segment of the population to answer, “Yes.” But, before we get into the wrangling of the coming three days, let’s step back a bit.

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State of the Union: Did you know?

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

One of the big things about the State of the Union address is talking about which Cabinet Secretary has been sent to an undisclosed location in case the Capitol Building goes up in a cloud of neutrons and there is no one left to run the government.

Last night that honor went to the Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack who was a former Governor of Iowa.

According to the Presidential Succession Act of 1947, after the Vice President, Speaker of the House, and President Pro Tempore of the Senate, the order of succession to the Presidency is: Secretary of State, Secretary of the Treasury, Secretary of Defense, Attorney General, Secretary of the Interior, Secretary of Agriculture, Secretary of Commerce, Secretary of Labor, Secretary of Health and Human Services, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Secretary of Transportation, Secretary of Energy, Secretary of Education, Secretary of Veterans Affairs, Secretary of Homeland Security.

Which are more-or-less in the order the Cabinet Department was created. Continue reading →

Shining City on the Hill

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

Twenty-three years ago today, Ronald Reagan gave his exit address where he spoke eloquently about John Winthrop’s famed “Shining City Upon a Hill.” I only know this because I was listening to Tim Farley’s most excellent summation of this day in history on the POTUS station on XM/Sirius satellite radio, and I heard the audio of Reagan’s address.

In many ways, the Reagan address was kind of hokey.

He imagined the city upon a hill as a “tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace.”

Why does it have to be windswept? Chicago, for example, is windswept, or at least, it is pretty darn windy. Is Chicago the shining city on the Hill? Before he got to the windswept part though, he talked of a new nationalism, and he warned that most Americans didn’t know enough about their history.https://civicstateofmind.org/wp-includes/js/tinymce/plugins/wordpress/img/trans.gif Continue reading →

End of World Is Not Nigh

BY TONY BLANKLEY-

REPRINTED FROM THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Except according to the Lord’s plans – which are not known to man – the “end of the world” is not nigh, although to listen to politicians and pundits, we should be packed and ready to go by next Thursday.

The headlines recently have read like Woody Allen’s 1979 “My Speech to the Graduates”: “More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly. I speak, by the way, not with any sense of futility, but with a panicky conviction.”

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Congress:History is Calling, Please Answer

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

In the spring of 1981 Office of Management and Budget Director David Stockman sat for weeks at a long table in room H-228 of the Capitol, his beady eyes peering over stacks of thick, black 3-ring binders containing the detail on most every federal program.

Stockman was holding over budget negotiations with his former colleagues in the House of Representatives. His mission was to cut spending, cut taxes, increase defense, and help his President, Ronald Reagan, usher in a new era of smaller, limited government, entrepreneurial innovation, individual freedom, and global prestige.

Piece of cake.

Few if any at the table, maybe with the exception of Jack Kemp, knew they were making history at the time. But they were, in the same way congressional leaders did for Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and Roosevelt’s New Deal and McKinley’s and Teddy Roosevelt’s regimes of political and regulatory reforms.

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Governors, Congress: A Critical Alliance

BY GARY ANDRES

Reprinted from weeklystandard.com

Last week, Congressional Republican wrote a new chapter in government reform, convening a meeting in Washington with 16 newly elected GOP governors. To some, the confab looked like just another photo-op celebrating the party’s historic gains in last month’s midterm elections.
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Litmus Test for Committee Chairmen?

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

 Reprinted from The Hill.

The Washington Examiner on Nov. 8th, joined the lobbying campaign to prevent Michigan Congressman Fred Upton from becoming the new Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. 
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The Politics of Purification Not New

BY MICKEY EDWARDS

Reprinted from Atlantic.com 

            The purification process — hard-core and uncompromising partisans driving heretics from their ranks — has been going on for a long time. 

            The recent Republican convention in Utah, the one in which conservative Senator Robert Bennett was defeated for being not conservative enough (despite an 84 percent approval rating from the American Conservative Union), is just one more step in a decades-long effort to drive independent thought from the political decision making process.

            This year, of course, attention has been focused primarily on Marco Rubio’s success in driving Florida Governor Charlie Crist out of the Republican Party (he’s now running for the Senate as an Independent) and former Congressman Pat Toomey’s success in converting Republican Senator Arlen Specter into a Democrat.  But in both of those cases one can argue that the targeted incumbent was simply too far out of step with his own party. 

            The same ACU ratings index on which Bennett scored an 84 gave Specter a 40.  The ratings only measure members of Congress but Crist had more than once angered party members with his support of initiatives that were fiercely opposed by most Republicans.  But given Bennett’s long embrace of conservative positions, with relatively few departures from the party-line script over a period of nearly two decades, what happened in Utah was something of a very different and disturbing nature.  It was checklist politics, a demand for suspension of judgment and lockstep adherence to an ideological instruction manual that would brook no deviation.
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Doing the Dance of the Double-Standard

BY BILL GREENER

 Something that frustrates me most as a conservative and a Republican is my inability to ever, and I mean ever, “win” an argument with a liberal.  Just when I think they are ready to cry “Uncle,” the rules always seem to change.

 Want some examples?  Go to a recent “dateline” in the Sunday Washington Post magazine.  Two young Capitol Hill staffers are put together.  Both happen to be Jewish.  They each say their faith is important to them and that they want to focus their dating among only Jews inasmuch as they have already decided whoever they eventually marry will be of their faith.  The young man also says he is a liberal so it would be difficult for him to marry a “right winger.”  As a person of faith myself, I actually very much respect them making this as important as they seemingly have.  However, I ask you what sort of reaction we might anticipate if all that changed was that the youngsters were Evangelical Christians and that the man indicated only a person of a conservative political ideology would be a candidate for marriage?  Do we think these two might be portrayed as and/or perceived to be “intolerant and close minded?”  How can it be just fine for those of one faith to be “exclusive” and wrong for another faith?

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You Say You Want A Devolution

BY GARY ANDRES

From the Weekly Standard

Public opinion about the appropriate role of the federal government moves like the moon cycle, causing tidal shifts in citizen attitudes and election outcomes. After watching Barack Obama and Democrats in Congress over the past year and a half, attitudes about Washington are changing again, possibly giving those who advocate devolving power to the states a political advantage in the midterm elections.

Political scientist James A. Stimson nailed the ocean metaphor in his insightful book, Tides of Consent: How Public Opinion Shapes American Politics. Stimson demonstrates that the overall public mood about government starts to run counter to victorious political parties soon after they win.  For example, voters typically elect  Democrats when a more liberal, pro-activist federal government sentiment hits an apex.  But for the big government crowd, Election Day is about as good as it gets.  Going forward, sentiment soon starts to shift in a more conservative direction.
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