…so we sometimes don’t have to:

One Hundred Years of Reagantube: Remembering Reagan In Dumb Videos

Oh can you believe it was only a hundred years ago when Ronald Reagan was born? Which side of the Civil War did he fight on, anyway? (Answer: He didn’t fight at all, but he was an extra at the Ford Theater the night Lincoln was shot, and later claimed to have played the role of Robert E. Lee in James Joyce’s movie Ulysses S. Grant.) Oh, also, back in the 1980s when Ronald Reagan was actually serving as president in some weird state of constant incapacitation? Everybody thought he was a moron. Most Republicans didn’t even support him during the regular lows of his disastrous two terms. He also didn’t defeat the Soviet Union – they ran out of money on their own, just like we’ve done here in America in the past 10 years, in the exact same Central Asian country. But Ronald Reagan did delight America with his constant, idiotic appearances on film and television. Let’s remember the empty suit who led us to a Promised Land of Fox News, Tax Cuts for Multi-Billionaires and the deliberate dismantling of what had been the world’s smartest, most prosperous society in the History of the World….

The Rude Pundit:

2/04/2011

Nine (or So) Ways to Celebrate the Centennial of Ronald Reagan:

….1. Go to Best Buy and max out your credit cards on the most extravagant, useless shit you can find, like 3-D TVs and smart phones that you can implant in your brain so you can only think in Google searches and text messages. Make sure it’s expensive. Then, when you’re tens of thousands of dollars in debt, make sure you die so that your kids have to pay for all of it.

2. If you’re pissed off at your neighbor, but he’s an ex-boxer, go to the local day care center and kick the asses of the children there. Declare that you win, even if no one knows what you were fighting for.

3. Do the following to the local homeless people: Take their coats and shoes. Punch them repeatedly in the stomach. Give crack to their kids. Pawn their shopping cart of possessions. Give the money to the richest family in town. When a homeless woman asks for a coat because it’s cold, accuse her of being both lazy and a thief. And set her war-vet husband on fire….

And, the republican dominated Missouri General Assembly:

FIRST REGULAR SESSION

House Concurrent Resolution No. 14

96TH GENERAL ASSEMBLY

INTRODUCED BY REPRESENTATIVES JONES (89) (Sponsor), NANCE, BAHR, POLLOCK, FRANZ, ASBURY, FRANKLIN, WYATT, STREAM, THOMSON, ALLEN, JONES (117), CURTMAN, CRAWFORD, WHITE, DUGGER, SHUMAKE, DAVIS, HIGDON, BURLISON, DIECKHAUS, LEARA, SCHAD, DAY, BROWN (85), HAEFNER, KELLEY (126), HOUGHTON AND MOLENDORP (Co-sponsors).

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           WHEREAS, President Ronald Wilson Reagan, a man of humble background, worked throughout his life serving freedom and advancing the public good, having been employed as an entertainer, Union leader, corporate spokesman, Governor of California, and President of the United States; and

           WHEREAS, Ronald Reagan served with honor and distinction for two terms as the 40th President of the United States of America, the second of which he earned the confidence of 60% of the electorate and was victorious in 49 of the 50 states in the general election – a record unsurpassed in the history of American presidential elections; and

           WHEREAS, in 1981, when Ronald Reagan was inaugurated President, he inherited a disillusioned nation shackled by rampant inflation and high unemployment; and

           WHEREAS, during Mr. Reagan’s presidency, he worked in a bipartisan manner to enact his bold agenda of restoring accountability and common sense to government which led to an unprecedented economic expansion and opportunity for millions of Americans; and

           WHEREAS, Mr. Reagan’s commitment to an active social policy agenda for the nation’s children helped lower crime and drug use in our neighborhoods; and

           WHEREAS, President Reagan’s commitment to our armed forces contributed to the restoration of pride in America, her values and those cherished by the free world, and prepared America’s Armed Forces to meet 21st Century challenges; and

           WHEREAS, President Reagan’s vision of “peace through strength” led to the end of the Cold War and the ultimate demise of the Soviet Union, guaranteeing basic human rights for millions of people; and

           WHEREAS, February 6, 2011, will be the 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s birth, and the seventh since his passing:

           NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that the members of the House of Representatives of the Ninety-sixth General Assembly, First Regular Session, the Senate concurring therein, hereby designate February 6, 2011, to be “Ronald Reagan Day” in Missouri and urge all citizens of Missouri to recognize this event and participate fittingly in its observance.

Oh, wait, that last one wasn’t intentional snark.

Just a few facts:

Five myths about Ronald Reagan’s legacy

By Will Bunch

Friday, February 4, 2011

….In 1982, as the national unemployment rate spiked above 10 percent, Reagan’s approval rating fell to 35 percent. At the height of the Iran-Contra scandal, nearly one-third of Americans wanted him to resign.

In the early 1990s, shortly after Reagan left office, several polls found even the much-maligned Jimmy Carter to be more popular….

….Ultimately, Reagan signed measures that increased federal taxes every year of his two-term presidency except the first and the last. These included a higher gasoline levy, a 1986 tax reform deal that included the largest corporate tax increase in American history, and a substantial raise in payroll taxes in 1983 as part of a deal to keep Social Security solvent. While wealthy Americans benefitted from Reagan’s tax policies, blue-collar Americans paid a higher percentage of their income in taxes when Reagan left office than when he came in….

….Federal spending grew by an average of 2.5 percent a year, adjusted for inflation, while Reagan was president. The national debt exploded, increasing from about $700 billion to nearly $3 trillion….

And Rush Limbaugh gets flustered:

I chatted with Rush Limbaugh about Ronald Reagan today (you can listen)

by Mike Stark

Fri Feb 04, 2011 at 06:33:22 PM PST

….STARK:  They’re a fantastic website.  But why are you dodging the question?  I want to know why a tax-raising, amnesty-giving, cut-and-running, negotiating-with-terrorists guy is a hero to the conservative movement.

RUSH:  Well, because you understand Reagan in a way that is flawed. You — ….

And this “active social policy agenda” is worth praising?:

Reagan’s Legacy: Homelessness in America

By Peter Dreier

…Another of Reagan’s enduring legacies is the steep increase in the number of homeless people, which by the late 1980s had swollen to 600,000 on any given night – and 1.2 million over the course of a year. Many were Vietnam veterans, children and laid-off workers.

In early 1
984 on Good Morning America, Reagan defended himself against charges of callousness toward the poor in a classic blaming-the-victim statement saying that “people who are sleeping on the grates…the homeless…are homeless, you might say, by choice….”

Yeah, that’s some legacy. I’ll be busy doing something else on February 6th.

Wanna hear the Pledge of Allegiance the way the GOP says it?  Check it out on Think Progress.* While we’re on the topic of the Corporatocracy behind this version of the Pledge, what Missourian’s gonna owe bigtime? (Here’s a hint; his initials are R. B.) Kind of makes you think of Ronald Reagan’s description of the political life:

It has been said that politics is the second oldest profession. I have learned that it bears a striking resemblance to the first.

* I am not putting the ad here because there seems to be some kind of controversy about posting it – Think Progress had to take it down for a while earlier.

Uh, no. This has been another edition of simple answers to simple questions. From the Congressional Budget Office:

Data on the Distribution of Federal Taxes and Household Income April 2009

It’s good to be the king. A barely rising tide rockets yachts into the stratosphere. That dark blue bottom line? That’s most of us – if you’re that light blue top line you don’t read our stuff here.

Financial Innovation

– By Kevin Drum | Tue May 19, 2009 9:26 AM PST

…This is a kissing cousin to the question everyone is raising these days about financial innovation.  It goes like this: the basic benefit of all the financial innovation we’ve seen over the past few decades has been to make credit more easily available, and that clearly had something to do with the credit boom and subsequent bust.  This in turn begs the obvious question: was it really a good idea to make credit so easily available?  If the answer is no – if the only result was to mask stagnant wages and produce a fake consumption boom – then maybe all that innovation wasn’t such a hot idea in the first place.

This is rapidly becoming conventional wisdom, and Matt’s point deserves more attention as part of it.  For good or ill, the modern economy is driven by middle-class consumption.  If middle class wages are rising, everything is fine.  They’ll consume more, debt will stay tolerable, and rich people will benefit from the growing economy.  But if middle class wages are stagnant, then vast pools of money are increasingly directed toward the rich, who have a limited ability to spend it.  So they end up loaning it back to the middle class, collecting economic rents along the way, and the middle class laps it up, figuring that their wage stagnation is just temporary and they’ll eventually pay all the money back…

Too bad that years of underfunding and budget cuts have devastated public education and the peasants can’t read graphs…