These are excerpt's from this week's Frank Rich's NYT column and it reminds me of many of the myths and forgotten facts of the Reagan presidency:

As the do-something lame-duck Congress’s triumphs were toted up, the White House pointedly floated the news that the president was meeting with Reagan administration veterans (David Gergen, Ken Duberstein) and taking Lou Cannon’s authoritative biography “President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime” on vacation. Reagan, of course, was also pummeled (though a bit less so) in his maiden midterms of 1982, then carried 49 states in his 1984 re-election landslide. In January 1983, Reagan’s approval rating was much worse than Obama’s — 35 percent. So was the unemployment rate (10.4 percent vs. our current 9.4 percent) as Americans struggled to recover from what was then the deepest economic downturn since the Great Depression.
The present-day radicals donning Reagan drag, led by Sarah Palin, seem not to know, as Cannon writes, that their hero lurched “from excessive tax cuts to corrective tax increases disguised as tax reform” and “submitted eight unbalanced budgets to Congress in succession.” Reagan made no promise whatsoever of a balanced budget in the document that codified Reaganomics, his White House’s 281-page message to Congress in February 1981. The historian Gil Troy has calculated that spending on entitlement programs more than doubled on Reagan’s watch. America slid into debtor-nation status, and Americans “went from owing 16 cents for every dollar in national income in 1981” to owing 44 cents per dollar in 1988.
In a particularly instructive passage, Cannon tells of Reagan’s habit of endlessly recycling an inspirational World War II anecdote that, as the press discovered, was a movie-spawned fiction. His White House spokesman, Larry Speakes, was only half-joking when he deflected critics with the old saw “if you tell the same story five times, it’s true.”

Reagan never backed off bashing the Democrats and the 30-year Great Society “binge” for the fiscal woes of his America. Reagan got away with it because he never sounded like a whiner, and because he paired his invective with an optimism that bleached out any pettiness. A former Democrat, after all, he wisely chose F.D.R. as his political model.

Among many of these memories and reminders, Rich makes the point that "Obama is less adept at keeping his messages simple, consistent and crystal-clear".

It has surprised me how Obama's gift for communication and speechifying that drew so many of us to him in 2008 are now turned off by how unable he is to be entrance us with clarity and forthrightness on the issues of his current Presidency, such as health care, fighting against tax cuts for millionnaires, creating a bill in support of 9/11 first-responders and on and on. It is possible to be supportive and a leader on issues without demonizing the opposition, which sometimes seems to be his larger goal - to avoid upsetting anyone.

But the rest of their budget was apparently directed to improving the quality of their Vodka, so they did have that going for them

Change the word Pentagon to Kremlin and Chinese to American below, and go back 20 years to what bcame of the USSR with all their emphasis on a military buildup, and you'll understand why this story concerns me:

BEIJING — The Pentagon is stepping up investments in a range of weapons, jet fighters and technology in response to the Chinese military buildup in the Pacific, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Saturday on the eve of his visit to Beijing.



Despite billions of dollars in proposed Pentagon budget cuts that Mr. Gates announced this past week, he said that the Chinese development of its first radar-evading fighter jet, as well as an antiship ballistic missile that could hit American aircraft carriers, had persuaded him to make improvements in American weaponry a priority.

Kind of interesting, but who is this dude named Jaime?

The comments at the end never fail to disappoint, but I'm surprised by how few there are this time.

http://www.dailylocal.com/articles/2011/01/10/opinion/srv0000010545425.txt

Can't wait to see how Fox spins this one

From Forbes...yes, THAT Forbes magazine:

More Small Businesses Offering Health Care To Employees Thanks To Obamacare



Jan. 6 2011
By RICK UNGAR


The first statistics are coming in and, to the surprise of a great many, Obamacare might just be working to bring health care to working Americans precisely as promised.


The major health insurance companies around the country are reporting a significant increase in small businesses offering health care benefits to their employees.


Why?


Because the tax cut created in the new health care reform law providing small businesses with an incentive to give health benefits to employees is working.


We certainly did not expect to see this in this economy,” said Gary Claxton, who oversees an annual survey of employer health plans for the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation. “It’s surprising.”


How significant is the impact? While we won’t have full national numbers until small businesses file their 2010 tax returns this April, the anecdotal evidence is as meaningful as it is unexpected.


United Health Group, Inc., the nation’s largest health insurer, added 75,000 new customers working in businesses with fewer than 50 employees.


Coventry Health Care, Inc., a large provider of health insurance to small businesses, added 115,000 new workers in 2010 representing an 8% jump.


Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas City, the largest health insurer in the Kansas City, Mo. area, reports an astounding 58% increase in the number of small businesses purchasing coverage in their area since April, 2010-one month after the health care reform legislation became law.


“One of the biggest problems in the small-group market is affordability,” said Ron Rowe, who oversees small-group sales for the Kansas City operation for Blue Cross Blue Shied. “We looked at the tax credit and said, ‘this is perfect.”


Rowe went on to say that 38% of the businesses it is signing up had not offered health benefits before.


Whatever your particular ideology, there is simply no denying that these statistics are incredibly heartening. However, for those of you who cannot get past your opposition, even for a moment of universal good news, let’s break it down.


The primary, most enduring complaint of the opponents of the ACA has been that the law is deathly bad for small business.
Apparently, small businesses, and their employees, do not agree.


The next argument has been that the PPACA is a job killer.


If these small businesses found the new law to be so onerous, why have so many of them voluntarily taken advantage of the benefits provided in the law to give their employees these benefits? They were not mandated to do so. And to the extent that the coming mandate obligations might figure into their thinking, would you not imagine they would wait until 2014 to make a move as the rules do not go into effect until that time?


Of course, there is the nagging banter as to how Obamacare is leading us down the road to socialism.


Let it go, folks.


Private market insurance companies are experiencing significant growth because of a tax break provided by the PPACA. I may have missed the day this was discussed in economics class, but I’m pretty sure this is not a socialistic result of federal legislation.


When data like this appears, we have the opportunity to really find out who is talking smack for political benefit and who actually cares about getting affordable and available health care to America’s workers. Certainly, there will be elements of the new law that will not work out exactly as planned. That’s simply reality when it comes to any new piece of landmark legislation. But if you cannot celebrate what appears to be an important early success, you really should give some thought as to where your true interests and intents lie.


If you’re all about beating up on President Obama, you can conveniently forget this bit of data as if it never really happened. However, if your interest is to make health care available to more Americans, this should be a happy day for you – no matter what your ideological beliefs.

Change, I can believe in. This pick, I can't.

I try to look at things the Dems do and say, Well, if the R's had done that, we on the left would be really upset. And so we have this announcement today:

"January 6, 2011



Business Background Defines Chief of StaffBy ERIC LIPTON


WASHINGTON — He is a top executive at JPMorgan Chase, where he is paid as much as $5 million a year and supervises the Washington lobbying efforts of the nation’s second-largest bank. He also serves on the board of directors at Boeing, the giant military contractor, and Abbott Laboratories, the global drug company, which has billions of dollars at stake in the overhaul of the health care system.

He has been a lawyer in private practice, a bank president, a telecommunications company executive, a political strategist, a fund-raiser and campaign chief, a lobbyist for foreign corporations (he advocated on tax matters for Nestlé and a Canadian petroleum company) and now William M. Daley, the son and brother of Chicago mayors and a behind-the-scenes political player himself, will hold one of the most powerful jobs in Washington: chief of staff in the White House, where he will help decide who gets into the Oval Office and what President Obama’s Capitol Hill agenda should be."

So he is connected to the Military Industrial complex, Big Pharma, lobbyists and opposed the creation of the Consumer Protection Bureau. But here's the sentence in the NYT story that I found most upsetting: "Mr. Daley started as chairman of Chase’s Midwest operations, but by 2007 he had expanded his portfolio, joining the bank’s senior leadership team as chief of its new Office of Corporate Social Responsibility, whose most important function was to oversee the company’s global lobbying efforts."


Chase Bank's Office of Corporate Social Responsibity's "most important function" is overseeing their lobbying efforts?! I can't think of any sentence that better describes how far off track corporate america has gone.

Anyway, back to my original point, which is that if GW Bush had appointed someone with his background we on the left would be stomping mad about it. Let it be known that since President Obama appointed him...I'm still pretty damn perturbed by it.

Next we'll discuss 4:3 vs 16:9

If you were explaining Television to someone for the first time and told them to watch channel 17 or 29, how would you feel explaining that they can't actually watch either of those channels on those channels?

And after spending an hour or so last nght trying to figure out how to optimize the performance on my new set (does anyone call it a TV "set" anymore?), I find myself longing for the days when the biggest adjustment was to the Horizontal Hold.

ESP'n

New York Times:


January 5, 2011


Journal’s Paper on ESP Expected to Prompt Outrage
By BENEDICT CAREY



One of psychology’s most respected journals has agreed to publish a paper presenting what its author describes as strong evidence for extrasensory perception, the ability to sense future events.


The decision may delight believers in so-called paranormal events, but it is already mortifying scientists. Advance copies of the paper, to be published this year in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, have circulated widely among psychological researchers in recent weeks and have generated a mixture of amusement and scorn.

When asked for their comments on how badly some of their peers had reacted, the researchers replied, "We knew they'd say that."