Free Republic

(Aug 2, 2012) POLISH officials have unveiled a statue of former President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II, honouring two men widely credited in this Eastern European country with helping to topple communism 23 years ago. The statue was unveiled in Gdansk, the birthplace of Lech Walesa's Solidarity movement, in the presence of about 120 former Solidarity activists, many of whom were imprisoned in the 1980s for their roles in organising or taking part in strikes against the communist regime. The bronze statue, erected in the lush seaside President Ronald Reagan Park, is a slightly larger-than-life rendering of the...

Either Ted Cruz is hip or rap is dead. I am not sure which. It has to be one of the two. A group called We Are Watchmen, a Christian rap group from the Chicago suburb of Westchester, has made what can be loosely described as a “rap paean” to Ted Cruz. It is entitled “Set It On Fire.” It is about four minutes long, and if you listen to it enough times, every ounce of hipness drains from your body and you become Donny Osmond. (VIDEO-AT-LINK)The title is misleading. The gist of the song is that you should vote...

Former Texas governor Rick Perry is gearing up for another presidential run and recently fired a shot across the bow of some of his competitors. In an interview with The Weekly Standard, Perry said that while he had “great respect” for senators Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Rand Paul, they were not ready to be president: I’ve had more than one individual say, “You know what, if you want to be the president of the United States, you ought to go back to your home state and be the governor and get that executive experience before you go lead this...

Senator Ted Cruz, who appeared in Georgia over the weekend at the Republican state convention in Athens, sees his candidacy for President of the United States as Reaganesque. Comparing the 1980 and 2016 election cycles, he noted the similarity between incumbent Democratic presidents Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama. And in an interview late Friday afternoon, he told me how he hopes to win the presidency in 2016. Cruz noted that since World War II, the GOP has only won the presidency when they ran on all three legs of the proverbial Republican Stool. The winning candidate has been a fiscal...

Ted Cruz is intellectually arrogant, like Ronald Reagan. The difference is that Reagan masked his arrogance with self-deprecating humor. Sen. Cruz does a Reagan impression that would do a nightclub comedian proud, but he doesn’t have Reagan’s easy and spontaneous humor. One doesn’t think of Reagan as arrogant, but he was in fact the most arrogant leader we have had since Lincoln. He ignored the whole of the foreign policy establishment in his conviction that America stood to win the Cold War and bring down Communism. Then as now, the foreign policy establishment resembled Jonathan Swift’s scientists on the floating...

Actress and liberal activist Susan Sarandon is still blaming America’s homeless problem on Ronald Reagan. The actress, probably best known for her role in the 1988 baseball hit movie Bull Durham, was invited on the May 13 edition of PBS’s Tavis Smiley to plug her son’s 2014 documentary, Storied Streets, that is now available on AMC’s streaming service. When Smiley asked Sarandon why the issue of homelessness was no longer on the “radar for discussion” she blamed former President Ronald Reagan, as seen in the following exchange: TAVIS SMILEY: There was a time that I recall where the issue of...

Well folks, for about four years I haven't written anything, except a few movie reviews and some scripts. I had a strong calling to give up (I thought permanently) writing books. All that time, however, it kept nagging at me that the biography treatments of Ronald Reagan just were not satisfying. So, I feel "released" now to begin a new book project, perhaps my final book: a biography of our greatest 20th century president. I have already written a script that Arc Entertainment/Victory Pictures (who did the Palin movie) have agreed to produce called "The Lifeguard: Ronald Reagan and his...

Hard-core Communists in Hollywood, and by that I mean those with party cards and whose allegiance was to Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union, not the United States, made a major effort to take over the movie industry and nearly succeeded. The much-maligned House Un-American Activities Committee, as even liberal Hollywood historians Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund acknowledge, uncovered over 200 party members in Hollywood. My dad, Morrie Ryskind, one of the few outspoken anti-Communist screenwriters in Hollywood, said the number was closer to 300. They were part of a broad conspiracy of subversives who had penetrated America’s most critical...

I just thought this was beautiful and thought it would do us good to remember what a good man Reagan was.

One of the most difficult games to play in politics is the notion of what might have been… How might things have been different had JFK not been shot? How might have things have been different had Al Gore won in 2000? How might things have been different had Mitt Romney or John McCain not run inept campaigns against Barack Obama? We’ll never know what the outcomes might have been because there really is no way to objectively measure that when it comes to policy. Would JFK have scaled up Vietnam the way LBJ did or, if he did, would...

Despite threatening language, Vladimir Putin is not going to start a nuclear war, according to Yuri Shvets, who studied along with him at the KGB’s Andropov Institute. Putin’s only desire is to remain in power for life, he says, and he knows Russia’s nuclear weapon delivery systems aren’t accurate enough for a first strike that would not result in national suicide. “Do you seriously think, that a man who annually disappears from public view for seven to ten days in order to have a facelift and to fill himself up with Botox is capable of unleashing a nuclear war?”

Do you know how to get lots of people to hate you in America? In the age when people seem to bend over backwards to let you know that they’re offended, it’s actually pretty easy. You just need to be successful at anything or you can try to be successful at anything or you can even tell OTHER PEOPLE that they CAN BE successful. Having money will also definitely do it. So will being white, male, Christian, conservative or Republican. For that matter, all you really need to do is have an opinion of some sort and somebody who holds...

Obama’s just like Reagan… Except when he isn’t. Trickle Down Economics versus Trickle Down Socialism Ronald Reagan’s economic plan saw GDP surge at a 3.5% clip – 4.9% after the recession. That’s a 32% bump. During the Obama years, thanks to his big government policies, the US economy has stalled. Today the quarterly GDP was announced. The GDP for the first quarter of 2015 braked more sharply than expected at only a .2% pace. The US economy has grown an anemic 9.6% during the Obama years (excluding today’s dismal number). Of course, Obama’s record on job growth is also much...

LAS VEGAS — Ted Cruz wants you to know that he isn’t a Rand Paul on foreign policy – but he isn’t a John McCain either. The Texas senator and Republican presidential contender outlined his foreign policy worldview Friday in an in-depth interview with The Daily Caller from the lobby of the Mandarin Oriental in Sin City, where he was in town to attend both the Republican Jewish Coalition’s Spring Meeting and a convention of evangelical pastors. “The touchstone of foreign policy should be the vital national security interest of America,” Cruz said, arguing his foreign policy was neither “full...

Link only due to copyright issues: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-04-28/gop-can-stop-being-nice-to-ted-cruz

10. He wants to rebuild the old Reagan Coalitions Cruz without argument is a constitutional conservative, unwilling to compromise with progressives if it means government grows even an inch bigger. His plan to win the presidency won’t involve shifting towards the mushy middle like previous GOP candidates, but instead reforming the old Reagan Coalition of Evangelicals, Conservatives, Reagan Democrats, and Libertarians to help him get to the White House. 9. He shut down the government and beat Rand Paul’s filibuster record During the fight to defund Obamacare, Cruz pushed his filibuster past the deadline for the government shutdown; while in...

President Obama has reached Reagan-like levels of popularity in the twilight of his tenure, but analysts say his bounce can be attributed largely to the fact that he is fading into the political background as the next presidential race kicks into high gear and as Congress claims a surprising number of concrete legislative accomplishments. Mr. Obama’s job approval rating stands at 46.4 percent, his highest mark in nearly two years, according to a recent Gallup survey. The figure puts him in the company of President Reagan, whose approval rating also hovered around 46 percent at the same point in his...

Today’s official announcement that Senator Ted Cruz of Texas is running for president changes everything in the 2016 presidential campaign. Ted Cruz isn’t running for Vice President or Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Jeb Bush administration. Every Republican candidate for president will have to move to significantly to the right, starting with Jeb Bush and Scott Walker, and define their position on amnesty for illegal aliens, on fighting and winning the war radical Islam has declared on America, on spending, the deficit and the debt, and on repealing Obamacare, against the positions Ted Cruz will talk about...

WILLIAMSBURG, Va. (AP) — The last man to shoot an American president now spends most of the year in a house overlooking the 13th hole of a golf course in a gated community. He takes long walks along tree-lined paths, plays guitar and paints, grabs fast food at Wendy's. He drives around town in a silver Toyota Avalon, a car that wouldn't attract a second glance. Often, as if to avoid detection, he puts on a hat or visor before going out.

Today, the faculty of my university told my class we had to view a movie in order to observe Sexual Assault Awareness Month, shown by our school's counselor. The film was a social documentary by a guy that was showing his opinions about changing mens' perception of their masculinity. As the film progressed, he started to blame the white male status quo for imposing media messages on vulnerable minds. He even compared John Wayne and Ronald Reagan in the film, portraying their respective appeals as white mens' desire to return to a past accepting of gender and racial discrimination (one...