In October of 1964, Ronald Reagan presented himself to the country as a politician, giving the speech he’d been giving essentially for a decade without mention of Barry Goldwater. It’s easy for many of us to recall so many lines from The Speech. But we often forget the introduction: “I am going,” Reagan said, “to talk of controversial things. I make no apology for this.”
The Reagan Revolution began at that moment. It took twenty years, until the reelection of 1984, for his approach to governance and the world to be proven right by history. It took twenty-five for it to be memorialized by a wall that isn’t there.
We couldn’t be prouder of our own Bruno Behrend, who recently drove up to a Tea Party Rally in Sheboygan, WI (otherwise known as “real America”) to talk about school reform — getting the crowd excited about breaking up the government education complex.
Some of us here at The Heartland Institute have been corresponding about the riots in London and what it might mean for the U.S. Sam Karnick, Heartland’s research director, has written a very thoughtful piece with Mike D’Virgilio on this subject at The American Culture.
Sam, who lives and works in Indiana, will be in Chicago on Sunday to be a guest on the legendary Milt Rosenberg’s “Extension 720” program, on WGN radio, from 10:00 to midnight. Go here to listen live. We’ll also have an MP3 of Sam’s appearance up on this blog later next week.
Meantime, here’s an excerpt of Sam and Mike’s excellent essay. You might want to head over to the comments and join the conversation.
If doing the same thing and expecting different results really does indicate insanity, then President Obama must be insane.
I listened to his talk earlier today and heard a lot of what we’ve heard from him many times before: more government spending on “infrastructure” (has he already forgotten that even he could find almost no “shovel-ready” projects?), more unemployment benefits, more class warfare, etc.
While he talked, the stock market dropped. The more he talked, the more it dropped and kept dropping after he finished. Final damage tally: Dow average down more than 630 points today. He’ll probably blame the Tea Party and corporate jets.
The talking point of the weekend from the Obama administration and Congressional Democrats was that Standard & Poor’s reduction of the U.S. government’s credit rating from sterling AAA to less-shiny AA-plus was the fault of the Tea Party movement and the freshmen they put into the House and Senate last year. As of Sunday night, if you googled (in quotes) “Tea Party Downgrade,” you got 11,000 hits. That number is sure to skyrocket in the coming weeks , but the argument (if you want to call it one) is absurd.
Congressional leaders and the White House on Sunday appeared to come to an agreement to raise the federal debt ceiling. The deal comes with some $2 trillion in promised budget cuts and no tax hikes — but has come under criticism from conservatives in Congress, the Tea Party caucus and liberals. The deal could come up for a vote Monday.
The following statements from fellows of The Heartland Institute may be used for attribution. For further comments, or to book any of these people on your program, contact Director of Communications Jim Lakely at jlakely@heartland.org or 312/377-4000 or 312/731-9364.
“The Boehner-Reid plan, at best, will result in a further increase in the national debt of $7 trillion. It cuts only $6 billion for next year out of a budget that will spend literally over 600 times that, so it’s no wonder it has been widely criticized by fiscal conservatives.
“These budget debates make no sense because of ‘baseline budgeting,’ which builds in trillions in automatic increases in the budget, and then calls any reduction in that runaway increase a draconian cut in spending. The first step on the road to fiscal sanity would involve repealing baseline budgeting so discussions about the federal budget would sound more like discussions about the family budget.”
Peter Ferrara
Senior Fellow for Entitlement and Budget Policy
The Heartland Institute pferrara@heartland.org
(Ferrara is the author of America’s Ticking Bankruptcy Bomb, released by HarperCollins in June.) [click to continue…]
If Republicans believe they can count on support from the Tea Party, they’ll be in for a surprise on Monday.
National leaders of the Tea Party plan to hold a rally and press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, DC on Monday to challenge House Speaker John Boehner and other Republican Party leaders to block an increase in the national debt ceiling. The Tea Party leaders fear many Republicans will vote with Democrats to raise the debt ceiling to allow more borrowing and spending.
They’re dubbing it a RINO hunt — Republicans In Name Only.
“This is a throwdown issue; this is the Alamo for us,” said William Temple of the Tea Party’s stand against raising the debt ceiling. Temple is chairman of Tea Party Founding Fathers, Freedom Jamboree, and Tea Party National Straw Poll Convention.
That headline is probably as deceiving to you as it was to me. I figured it would be yet another screed by the MSM against the “ignorant” Tea Party folks — who, in truth, are the most-informed voters in this country.
But the author of this post at CNN.com, a fella named LZ Granderson, does not — as one would expect from the MSM — decry the “ignorant” Tea Party electorate that in 2010 kicked many members of Congress to the curb in 2010. Instead, Granderson suggests that ordinary American voters of all stripes be able to pass the citizenship test this country makes legal immigrants to America pass before their triumphant ceremony.
Full disclosure: I’m a snob. Increasingly, I shun popular culture for the esoteric film, theater, literature and music given far wider exposure on National Public Radio than on commercial stations. While I’m in confessional mode, I should add that I’m rooting for the future of the network, as I’ve been a daily listener of NPR for more than 30 years.
I do this despite what I perceive as an obvious left-leaning news bias, a perception that has increased since the release of James O’Keefe’s recent guerrilla video wherein NPR suit Ron Schiller has harsh words for Tea Partyers and Republicans and a negative assessment of conservatives in general. The more NPR staff protests, the more evidence surfaces displaying its decidedly liberal bent.
For several glorious years more than a decade ago, I worked as an editorial writer and columnist at one of Virginia’s great newspapers, The Free Lance-Star in Fredericksburg, Va. It’s a pretty reliable conservative editorial page, run by a mentor of mine. It also features a wild card editorial cartoonist — my friend, Clay Jones. Clay is a talented editorial cartoonist, who has syndicated his work to many great newspapers and magazines across the country.
Clay’s unreliability (from the mainstream right’s perspective) is one of his strengths. He challenges the reader, no matter one’s political perspective. Plus, Clay has an artistic aesthetic that is truly unique. But his cartoon in the wake of the shooting in Tucson was more that just challenging. It facilitated the blood libel against Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, and all of us on “the right.” And it warrants a rebuttal, which I take the opportunity to deposit at Somewhat Reasonable.
Here’s what I put in the comments beneath Clay’s cartoon. Please leave your own comments below.
Heartland’s Benjamin Domenech has an excellent post over at Ricochet titled “Did the Reagan Revolution Fail?” Ben takes issue with the brilliant Steven Heyward’s piece at AEI last week about “Modernizing Conservatism.” Here’s an excerpt from Ben’s Ricochet essay:
