Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and CNN’s Jake Tapper get into a contentious exchange after the lawmaker makes accusations about Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
Why societies collapse | Jared Diamond
Tune Into The Real Ronald Reagan
There is nothing clandestine about Dugger’s quarry of new material, though Reagan’s staff has done its best to play it down. The material consists of transcripts of several hundred five-minute radio spots that Reagan broadcast after he left Sacramento in 1975; a series that ended the day he announced for president in 1979.
There can be no doubt whatever that these broadcasts express Reagan’s own personal, instinctive attitudes to the important foreign and domestic issues of the day, as opposed to cooler or more cautious or veiled attitudes he may have been advised to express then or later.
Reagan himself, in the last of the broadcasts, states that he wrote them all with his own hand. “I’ve scratched them out on a yellow tablet in airplanes, riding in cars, and at the ranch when the sun went down.”
They reveal him as perhaps a cleverer man than most reporters think he is. You may accept neither his premises nor his conclusions, but you will conclude, I submit, on reading these scripts, that Reagan writes better than you would expect. He has a sure sense of how an issue can be turned, sometimes twisted, to his advantage. And he has a real flair for one-liners.
The transcripts also reveal–and this is the heart of Dugger’s contention–a harder, nastier political style than that of the relaxed, tolerant personality Reagan has so carefully cultivated in the White House.
.. “He was presenting himself to the country as a moderate,” this is Dugger’s key charge, “but these transcripts show that deep down he was a hardline right-wing ideologue with fully formed and recently expressed prejudices on all of the outstanding issues of the day.”
.. The transcripts contain too much that supports this harsh judgment. All the clich,es of the Californian radical right are trotted out without inhibition.
“Eighty per cent of air pollution,” the president believes, “comes not from chimneys and auto exhaust pipes but from plants and trees.” Banning pesticides like DDT leads to “political pollution.” Smoking pot leads to sterility.
.. The social attitudes revealed are uniformly indifferent to the old, the poor, the weak, and always coincide with the interests of the rich, corporations, and the financial Haves. The president is more moved by “the injustice done to Allan Bakke” than by the plight of those on welfare, and it is “demagoguery” to believe that income taxes should be progressive, that is, should increase with the size of incomes.
.. More surprising, and more unpleasant, is the president’s habit of using the sly, indirect way of the propagandist, using code language to suggest more than he quite says right out.
.. He does not explicitly advocate the death penalty, for example. That would sound too bloodthirsty. Instead he quotes with approval the father of a murdered man who says, “after two years the murderer of my son goes free, but my son is dead.” Because the late senator Joe McCarthy did not start to make his unsupported allegations about communists in government until after Alger Hiss had been charged with perjury, it does not follow, as Reagan implies, that those who oppose McCarthyism believe that the Cold War existed only in the minds of reactionaries.
.. There is a good deal of old-fashioned chauvinism to be found in the broadcasts. The Caribbean, Reagan concluded because Michael Manley was prime minister of Jamaica, “is rapidly becoming a communist lake in what should be an American pond.” What should be? The Caribbean basin? The Atlantic? The whole great gulf of ocean itself?
..”Maybe there is an answer–we simply do what’s morally right. Stop doing business with them. Let their system collapse.”
What if it doesn’t collapse?
.. Ronald Reagan is the leader of elements in the government who want the United States to obtain a first- strike capability
.. not all Reagan’s ideas are mistaken. His reaction against the New Deal, as Dugger says, would not have taken him to the White House unless it expressed authentic grievances, genuine second-thoughts about what had been accepted wisdom, real pain experienced by those who had not been preferred targets for the benevolence of the liberal system.
It is true. but that does not make the real Ronald Reagan, revealed behind the mask of amiability in his radio scripts, any less profoundly disturbing.
Canada Backtracks on a Carbon Tax
Justin Trudeau’s Liberals try to stop a stampede of capital out of the country.
The new carbon tax is only one of the green policies hurting Canada’s competitiveness. Ontario has long been the nation’s manufacturing hub. But in 2005 the province began phasing out the use of coal for electricity generation, and in 2009 it passed the Green Energy Act, designed to force industry and consumers into renewable energy. The net effect has been skyrocketing electricity prices in the province and declining manufacturing output.
.. Ontario, under new political management since June, and Saskatchewan have gone to court to challenge the federal government’s authority to impose the tax. Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick and Manitoba have their own proposals to price carbon and are all on record against a federal take.
In Alberta, where the economy depends heavily on pumping oil, the United Conservative Party’s Jason Kenney is the favorite to win next year’s election for provincial premier. He has promised to oppose the Trudeau tax. He says he will keep a provincial carbon tax but limit it to “major emitters.”
Canadian Environment Minister Catherine McKenna said last week that the Trudeau government wants “to have the most energy efficient, smart industries here that create good jobs, at the same time do what we need to do to tackle emissions.” But Liberals may soon find out that as one of the world’s foremost energy producers, Canada can’t have it both ways.