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Lights Out, Nobody Home 

 America was awash with InfectiousOptimism®, as an avuncular Ronald Reagan rolled towards 1984’s crushing of Walter Mondale.  Reagan was campaigning in Hammonton New Jersey, when he felt a song coming on…

“America’s future rests in a thousand dreams inside your hearts…It rests in a message of hope in songs of a man so many young Americans admire: New Jersey’s Bruce Springsteen.“

  Bored In The USA

It was the start of a classic GOP trope*,  rope in the youngsters by referencing that rock music.  It was also the beginning of musicians asking the Republicans to please stop.

Reagan labored under the misconception that Springsteen shared his cornball vision, and even better, cultural seer and future enemy of denim-clad youth George Will was the fount of this error.

 Hammonton was apparently so thrilled with Reagan’s visit the town ignored the event’s fallout, and plunked down a monument to the legendary day.

The years have not been kind to the stone.

 A recent visitor writes:

“When I visited this late afternoon, the landscape was kind of dull and the light in front of the rock was broken and off its mount. I found a blog where citizens are debating whether it should be repaired and if so where would the money come from.“

*Attempted again in the 2008 campaign, and for Springsteen, twenty-five years on some of the faithful continue tirelessly beating the same horse.

                                                        

Now Paperless To Serve You Better! 

Faced with demands not to destroy White House emails and account for several million which had gone missing, the Bush Administration ran out the clock. The Bush White House variously claimed there wasn’t a problem, to be working on the problem, and unsure that there was a problem.

Then they all turned into pumpkins and scurried out of town along with the Archivist of the United States, leaving the National Archives and Obama Administration to clean up the mess.

We now learn that some 22 million missing emails have been found, with prospects of more in the woods. But whatever is now found goes into the catacombs of Archives’ Presidential Library system, with all the slow delights that promises. And leaving Bush free to roam about presenting sunny memories  unsullied by actual facts.

The Washington Post turns for missing papers perspective to “Scott Stanzel, a former Bush White House spokesman”

Scotty is just so weary of the whole thing, and blames litigators the Committee for Responsibility & Ethics in Washington:

“CREW ‘has consistently tried to create a spooky conspiracy out of standard [information technology] issues. Their misleading statements about our work demonstrates their continued anti-Bush agenda, nearly a year after a new president was sworn in.“

Bias perhaps demonstrated by being not impressed with Scotty’s own role in the saga, offering vague assurances and misdirection until it became someone else’s problem.

A monument to Confederate denial is rising again in Biloxi Mississippi, with 90% of the cost paid by federal and state taxpayers.

Cracker bitter-enders have rebuilt Beauvoir, Confederate President Jefferson Davis’s home destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, and are now working on the accompanying “presidential library,” completely destroyed by the storm.

Things To Come: Enough Pillars? 

The complex is run by the Mississippi branch of the Sons of Confederate War Veterans.  The Sons are a coven of cranks determined to put across their claim that the Civil War wasn’t about slavery, which has taken them into the nether worlds of  Lost Cause-ist racists, Black Confederate fetishists, and “heritage” activists who enjoy presenting creepy readings of history with much winking and nudging

“We note with interest the revelation that Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama has slave owners in his ancestry. This news demonstrates an interesting irony with respect to contemporary multi-cultural American politics...For candidate Obama, the news is perhaps more complex since his African roots may link him to African tribes that traded their brothers and sisters into slavery.“

  Obtuse Apologists

Quote Me From Your Leader      

Google’s scrappy Android phone system doesn’t pull the babes like Apple’s IPhone, although some claim it will win in the end.

Until then, Android users pining for that Reagan touch must make do with less than glamorous apps.

  While IPhone users revel in the splendor of an official Reagan Library endorsed IReagan app, droid-ists must make do with the new Ronald Reagan random quote function.

The swank factor is not increased just because the app “Comes with several backgrounds.”

And if your fount of wisdom is to be thirty years old wouldn’t you at least like a search function?

Additional  delight may be found with the Ronald Reagan CallClip, which pops up random photographs of our leader.

IReagan has been embraced by clowns of all ages, such as FoxNews goofball Adam Housley.      In his hard-hitting report, Adam spouts “facts” of no known origin. Tie urgently eskew,  he claims that the just introduced IReagan is “the first politician to have an app,” news certain to be of interest to Barack Obama.

If you embrace Reagan and IPhone, but reject Big Library’s IReagan, the for-profit sector has stepped into the breach.

Shake it ’till you make it happen with this        

…or enjoy more random Reagan with this app

Or full-throttle full length Reagan speeches from yesteryear can be had here, divided into three separate eras in chewable $.99 portions.

         

rt of the cost of doing business. You and I pay the taxes imposed on business every time we go to the store. Only people pay taxes and it is political demagoguery or economic illiteracy to try and tell us otherwise.

Two Hearts That Beat As One

Charles Krauthammer knows that the scruffies want our money, and this global warming hokum is but the latest chapter in the ceaseless struggle to make the white man pay.

But once heroes walked the Earth.

“The idea of essentially taxing hardworking citizens of the democracies to fill the treasuries of Third World kleptocracies went nowhere, thanks mainly to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher (and the debt crisis of the early ’80s). They put a stake through the enterprise. “

And how does Chuck know what drove these stakeholders?  Making it up with Magic Realism!

Reagan launched his presidential run with bold talk:

“The only way to free ourselves from the monopoly pricing power of OPEC is to be less dependent on outside sources of fuel.“

But by the time of he debated President Carter, OPEC was just a weakling’s excuse for inflation.

In office Reagan could look bravely into the future:

“Whatever happens in the short-term on oil, we must also continue the transition to an era of fission, fusion, coal, and renewable resources. “

The end result?

“Net imports have generally increased since 1985 while U.S. production fell and consumption grew.”

And when OPEC finally did begin to crumble…

“In April 1986, Vice President George H.W. Bush traveled to Saudi Arabia with a stern warning. Record low oil prices of $10 a barrel threatened the U.S. oil industry and U.S. national security. If prices don’t rise, he warned, perhaps a U.S. tariff on imported oil would do the job.“

If Krauthammer is too enthused on Reagan, he’s too modest in his Thatcher claim.  He  ignores her role in the Saudi arms scandal said to have netted her son twelve million Pounds, apparently undermining that particular kleptocracy by taking their cash.