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Back to the Future is by far one of my all-time favorites. When I was in college I would play my (newly purchased) DVD's of the trilogy while I worked on my illustration projects. It helped me keep time on how long I was working on something. For a while I had it all practically memorized.

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Our film tour continues in central and west FL this week. I'll be in Winter Garden, Friday, 10/10 at the Garden Theatre, then at Ave Maria University on Saturday. The film is free, so come on out, bring your copies of "Patriot's History of the United States" or your other books and I'll sign them! Next Tues., 10/14, I'll be in Wheeling, WV at Oglebay Towngate Theater for a screening.

Illinois Freepers, I'll be at Eureka College on 10/30 showing our film "Rockin' the Wall," about music's part in bringing down the Iron Curtain. Check with Eureka for the time, but I'm pretty sure the show is free. I'll be there for the Q&A and booksigning. I am scheduled to have the film in Chicago at the Theater for the Arts associated with the Polish American Film Festival on 12/1, but as of now, I'm about two sponsors short of covering all costs there. If you are interested, and can help, let me know. Sponsors get on-screen credit; credit on...

Former President Jimmy Carter had some interesting things to say about his 1980 defeat to Ronald Reagan; he could have won if he was more ‘manly,’ or something. Carter admitted that the Iranian hostage crisis, which lasted 444 days, heavily contributed to his defeat. But added that if he had gone to war with Iran, he would have been re-elected (via Washington Examiner): Former President Jimmy Carter claimed Wednesday that he would have been re-elected and beaten Ronald Reagan in 1980 if had been more “manly” in his dealings with Iran.Interviewed by the show “CNBC Meets,” Carter repeated his...

Our 10th anniversary edition of "A Patriot's History of the United States: from Columbus's Great Discovery to the Age of Entitlement" is now up on Amazon. Hard to believe it's been 10 years and over a quarter of a million sales, but we welcomed the opportunity to update our book. "Patriot's History" now goes through the entire first Obama term and into 2013. In addition, however, we did a thorough revision, adding the latest scholarship and reassessing where appropriate. For example, *We strengthened the sections on the infiltration of the FDR and Truman administrations by communists. *We added new information...

Former President Jimmy Carter claimed Wednesday that he would have been re-elected and beaten Ronald Reagan in 1980 if had been more “manly” in his dealings with Iran. Interviewed by the show "CNBC Meets," Carter repeated his belief that the failed mission to free American hostages held in Tehran killed his chances, but then added that had he gone to war, America would have rewarded him with a second term in 1980. “I could've been re-elected if I'd taken military action against Iran, shown that I was strong and resolute and, um, manly and so forth,” said the former president,...

The rationalizations for Obama’s failures are already beginning, and Tom Friedman employs the laziest of all strategies, tearing down a great man to make a small man look bigger. In his Sunday column in the New York Times, Friedman makes a number of highly dubious points. These days there is a lot of “if-only-Obama-could-lead-like-Reagan” talk by conservatives. I’ll leave it to historians to figure out years from now who was the better president. On the question of the domestic economy, there can be little doubt. Reagan inherited far higher unemployment and high inflation, and within a year or so had...

Conservative scholar and talk radio host Mark Levin said the GOP is "a party in trouble" that must nominate a bold conservative for president in 2016 if they do not want to get walloped yet again. Speaking at Values Voter Summit on Saturday with Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, Levin, who is cementing himself as the intellectual godfather for conservatives in the age of Obama, said moderate candidates favored by the establishment and stand for nothing will never appeal to Americans who are hungry for leadership. "It's very, very, important that we nominate a conservative for the first time...

No U.S. lawmaker has better learned the lessons of both the Obama and Bush failures. Reaganesque? America has been screwing up on the foreign policy front for a long time. George W. Bush's efforts to spread democracy were laudable — but quixotic and ill-fated. And Barack Obama's "leading from behind" and"don't do stupid stuff" strategies, which supposedly learned all the right lessons from Bush-era misadventures? These also did not work. So as we head toward a critical presidential election in 2016, what should we be looking for when it comes to foreign policy? The answer is Ted Cruz. Don't laugh...

Ronald Reagan showed why he was legendary on the campaign trail with a humdinger he told before the Republican Governors Club Dinner on October 4, 1988. “Former Congressman Prentiss Walker dropped in on a farm and introduced himself as a Republican candidate,” Reagan began his joke...

In 1988, the typical American adult was 40 years old, white and married, with a high school diploma. If he was a man, he probably worked full time. If she was a woman, she probably didn’t.Twenty-five years later, Americans are older, more diverse and more educated. We are less likely to be married and more likely to live alone. Work is divided more evenly between the sexes. One thing that hasn’t changed? The income of the median U.S. household is still just under $52,000.The government’s release last week of income and poverty data for 2013 brought renewed attention to the...

President Barack Obama, stumping for the Democrats ahead of November's congressional elections, has twice invoked Ronald Reagan's seminal campaign question: "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" Framing the debate like that helped Reagan twice - in 1980 when he beat incumbent Jimmy Carter, and then again in 1984 when he won re-election during an economic upswing.

Southern Freepers My film "Rockin' the Wall" is on tour in conjunction with the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Here are the Georgia and North Carolina tour dates; Monday, 9/22, we'll be in Atlanta/Marietta at the Earl Smith Strand Theatre in Marietta, 7:00. Tues., 9/23, Asheville, NC, Montreat College, Gaither Chapel, 7:00 Wed., 9/24, Greensboro, NC, Carousel Theatre, 7:00 (free), courtesy of the John Locke Foundation Thurs., 9/25, Raleigh, NC, North Carolina Museum of Natural History, 7:00, (free) courtesy of the John Locke Foundation, and Saturday, 9/27, 2:00 p.m., Western Carolina University, (free) courtesy of the...

”President Reagan has long been considered the best modern economic President. So we compared his performance dealing with the oil-induced recession of the 1980s with that of President Obama and his performance during this ‘Great Recession.’

Back in May 2013 the Dow was out of its recession doldrums and hitting new highs. I asked readers if Obama could, economically, be the best modern President? The #1 issue raised by readers was whether the stock market was a good economic barometer for judging “best.” Many complained that the measure they were watching was jobs – and that too many people were still looking for work. To put this week’s jobs report in economic perspective I reached out to Bob Deitrick, CEO of Polaris Financial Partners and author of “Bulls, Bears and the Ballot Box” for some explanation....

If you've been in the media for a long time, chances are good you may have in your archives a lot of treasures you don't realize you have. That was the case for Ben Cagle and Earl Freudenberg, longtime broadcasters in the Chattanooga area. Ben and Earl were going through old boxes of cassette tapes, and stumbled upon a recording that likely hasn't been heard for almost four decades: the complete speech of former California Governor and future president, Ronald Reagan. The speech was given at Tennessee Temple University in Chattanooga on May 21st, 1976. "This particular old tape was...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK) On his Monday show, commentator Glenn Beck made the extraordinary prediction that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would be elected president in the 2016 election. According to Beck, that prediction is based upon a conversation a “friend” of his had with so-called “Hillary people” about the strategy she will employ in the 2016 campaign. “They said, ‘The right is so stupid. They just don’t get it. You guys are going to all be fighting on Benghazi and everything else, and here’s what Hillary is going to do: ‘Do you remember when America was good? Do you remember when...

Some time ago I contrasted the reaction a conservative would get if he were in the same room with the two most consequential politicians of the 1990s, Bill Clinton and Rudy Giuliani. If you were in a room with Bill Clinton, he would discover the one issue out of 100 on which you agreed; he would probe you with questions, comments, suggestions; and he would tell you that you enabled him to understand it far better than he ever had before. If you were in a room with Rudy Giuliani, he would discover the one issue out of 100 on...

If you knew nothing else about President Obama other than looking at the data, you might conclude that he was insensitive to blacks, given that they have done far worse economically under his administration than Hispanics or whites. What is striking is that the president and his advisers still seem to be clueless about which economic policies work and which don’t work. Despite his (at least for this week) emphasis on the economy, he persists in being the anti-Reagan, with anti-growth policies. In his speech Wednesday in Illinois, the president came up with no new pro-growth proposals, just more of...