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Valid Questions: After Bill Clinton contradicted State Department claims about Hillary's health with news of a six-month rehab, her fitness should be as much of an issue as Sarah Palin's baby and John McCain's age. Karl Rove has taken a lot of heat for raising the issue of age and mental condition of a secretary of state who disappeared from public view as the Benghazi controversy arose. The questions are similar to those asked about President Reagan after his first debate with Vice President Walter Mondale, and those asked about Sen. John McCain and his prisoner of war experiences. So...

There is an internet site called WatchMojo.com. It has numerous top ten videos - top 10 Queen songs, top 10 nominated actors who never won an oscar , top ten Marvel movies, etc. I like going there to see various top 10 lists and such. Yesterday while browsing through it, they had a Top 10 U.S. Presidents. I watched it to see if I would be disappointed and to no surprise, I was. Why? Two things. One - President Reagan was not in their top 10. They had one term James Polk in there - #8 I believe - but...

Because when President Barack Obama was blaming every problem under the sun on his predecessor President George W. Bush, he just wasn’t go back far enough. Via RCP:CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO WARREN: I grew up in an America that was investing in kids. It was investing in public universities. It had a higher minimum wage. It was an America that said every kid would get a fighting chance. And that’s how we built America’s great middle class. Then starting in about the 1980s, we turned in a different direction.COLBERT: You mean when Reagan came in and it...

This past weekend on his HBO show, host Bill Maher suggested that conservatives were fine with the federal government until five years ago after Barack Obama was elected to the presidency. The headline of a video clip on the Real Clear Politics website of Maher's statements stated, "Why Were Conservatives Okay With Government Up Until Five Years Ago?" While Maher never actually posed that question verbatim, some of his other statements and questions lead to the summary contained in the headline. The video clip can be found here. For those who cannot handle the video, here are a couple of...

BJP has reached the half-way mark and it is for the first time since 1984 that a single party seems set to get a simple majority. According to recent trends, NDA is leading in 321 seats while the UPA is leading in only 67 seats. Counting of votes, the grand finale in the nine-phased Lok Sabha elections, began today across the country. Election Commission said the counting exercise to be held at 989 counting centres is likely to be completed by 4 PM. By noon, a final picture should emerge on who would be the major players in the 16th...

Conservative activist Grover Norquist wants to name 3,000 things after Ronald Reagan. His next target is a small mountain in Democratic Sen. Harry Reid's home state. The would-be Mount Reagan, at 3,366 feet, is not nearly the highest peak in Nevada. But it does overlook Las Vegas and, as such, would remind all who visit and live there of the former two-term California governor who went on to become president and lodestar of the Republican Party.

For decades, Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)—an ambitious ground- and space-based “shield” to protect the United States from nuclear ballistic missiles—has been mocked and criticized. First proposed by the president in 1983, it was immediately dubbed “Star Wars” by the mainstream media and dismissed as unscientific, infeasible and even counter-productive. The Union of Concerned Scientists, 100,000 members strong, was fierce in its opposition. The Arms Control Association declared that SDI would end arms control, while some Soviets felt SDI would end the world. Domestic critics became furious, and the Kremlin went ballistic. But while Reagan’s critics might not have...

Is it safe to say that Barack Obama’s presidency will be remembered as the most consequential since Ronald Reagan’s — a presidency that “changed the trajectory of America” and “put us on a fundamentally different path”? That was the audacious goal Obama set for himself during his 2008 campaign. Now is a useful time to assess his progress because the sixth year of any president’s tenure tends to be seen as a low point. Familiarity breeds impatience and frustration — among commentators, at least, whose narrow focus on which party is perceived as “winning” the day or the week misses...

I was just doing a bit of farting around on You Tube and came across this amazing speech by President Reagan regarding KAL Flight 007. This is REAL leadership, something the current occupant of the White House is incapable of. President Reagan's Address to the Nation on the Soviet Attack on a Korean Airliner

Gdansk, Poland If only Ronald Reagan -and Pope John Paul- were here to see what freedom and prosperity their little project has brought the Polish people over the last quarter-century now... but I think they're looking down with a smile. Small wonder the Poles are more than ready to fight in order to defend their hard-won liberty (and booming economy) from the Russians... and why the Ukrainians have now said "Hey!- that's what we should have been doing for the last two lost decades..." Photo presentation at Reaganite Republican-

In a memo to the White House in July 1981, advisers in the Ronald Reagan administration urged opposition to a new pipeline from Russia’s oil- and gas-rich regions to Europe, warning that it would weaken the West’s bargaining hand. “Our strategy is aimed at limiting Soviet economic leverage over the West,” Pentagon aides told the White House in the memo. The Trans-Siberian Pipeline, which crosses modern-day Ukraine, was built nonetheless, and it helped transform Russia into an energy superpower that nurtures the European Union’s dependence on its fossil fuels. Nearly 33 years later, the warning from Reagan’s defense advisers stands...

Ramesh and Reason’s Nick Gillespie have been going back and forth over Rand Paul’s claim (from a number of years ago) that Jimmy Carter was a more fiscally conservative president than Ronald Reagan. Mother Jones collected a series of appearances over the years in which the Kentuckian argues that Reagan’s budget performance, compared with Carter’s, is evidence Republicans don’t really mean it when they claim the mantle of fiscal conservatism. Gillespie argues that Reagan’s deficits means he wasn’t a fiscal conservative, while Ramesh argues (and Nick seems to agree to some extent) that probably a better measure is rate of increases in spending...

Mother Jones does love found footage, doesn't it? The progressive mag's airing of Mitt Romney's "47 percent" comments at a fundraiser definitely hurt the former Massachusetts governor in his attempt to boot President Obama in 2012. Now Mojo is back with the vid above, which the mag must hope will discombobulate Republicans and help put the brakes on a libertarian-leaning senator whose anti-war and anti-NSA stances draw long looks from disaffected liberals and lefties."Rand Paul: Jimmy Carter was better on the budget than Ronald Reagan" is how the vid begins. It shows the Kentucky senator in a variety of settings...

Consider sharing with your Facebook friends. Taxes Are Too Damn High! April 23, 2014 by Free The Future Taxes collected this year hit a new all-time record! This means that Americans pay more in taxes than food, housing, and clothing combined! Lower taxes means you get to keep more of your hard-earned money. Lower taxes mean the economy can grow. Lower taxes are better for everyone. Sign the petition if you agree “Taxes Are Too Damn High!” Click on the bottom of each page to link through to the following page up until you get to the Facebook sign...

The recent Soviet-er, um, Russian annexation of the Crimea got me reflecting back on my youth. I'm a child of the 1970s and 80s. I'm not ashamed of that either. As I have grown older, I feel that the younger generations have grown soft, complacent, lazy, and unworthy of our 1980s legacy. Ironically our parents felt the same way about us (of course, we proved them wrong.) We had vinyl albums, not because they sounded retro but because that was all we had. Not to brag, but those of us alive in that period - we rocked. Literally. Our music...

India, the world’s largest democracy, is in the midst of a marathon five-week election that will result in the selection of its next prime minister. Although Nate Silver has yet to make it official, most pundits and prognosticators predict that Narendra Modi will be India’s next leader. Modi bears striking similarities to a celebrated American president: one Ronald Wilson Reagan. Both men rose from humble origins. Modi, in particular, worked from childhood hawking tea in railway stations. Both were popular and successful state governors: Modi is the chief minister (equivalent to a governor) of Gujarat, an Indian state whose gift...

The Tea Party zealots who haven’t learned from their mistakes in 2010 and 2012 are trying their best to screw up the GOP’s chances to win the Senate this fall. Where does the Tea Party find these people to run in primaries? Most important, why do they offer them up as legitimate Republican candidates? The Tea Party bosses have been listening to too much talk radio. They seem to think that what makes a good Republican candidate is someone who sounds like a talk radio host. But talk radio is all about bombast and attracting callers, not about winning elections....

I'm getting old and my memory is failing so please correct me where my memory is wrong or if I'm making up memories. Also, please expand where I fall miserably short. It's my recollection that Reagan was so successful because he was a leader with a vision who promoted strength, freedom, optimism, patriotism and righteousness. And he could communicate his vision with commonsense, humility and good humor. He did not succeed by pandering, evolving and adapting. He brought various factions together by promoting the ideas that freedom was much better than socialism, strength better than weakness, fiscal restraint better than...

One of the best ways to survive the grotesque and empty power pageantry of Washington's annual State of the Union extravaganza is by visiting the University of California, Santa Barbara's online archive of past addresses and looking up the speeches that corresponded to where the current POTUS sits in his term. Barack Obama took the podium during a midterm election year in his second term, corresponding to the addresses of George W. Bush in 2006, Bill Clinton in 1998 all the way back to George Washington in 1794.