Those who cause chaos use it for their own gain

 

We can point to Ronald Reagan's terms as the start of a lot of our problems.

Writers, Trolls, Bedbugs and Reagan.

In response to the utterly awful obituary of Colleen McCullough, Alexandra Petri of the Washington Post tries her hand at some historical male figures.

Confronting an internet troll.

Dealing with bedbugs.

Is there Atrazine in your drinking water?  Is there

The Supreme Court at stake.

Solar power our national roads!!

An adventure with Google's self-driving car.

Colorado: doing it right.

Reminding us what Reagan did.

Christmas contraceptives

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas...

Excellent overview of 2014.  Best science photos for 2014.

Weird methane readings on Mars... ALIENS!!!1

Bernie Sanders takes on the Koch brothers.

Saint Ronnie couldn't get elected dog catcher in these interesting teabaggery times...

Tampons may save your life...

If you can erase the word, the action never happened.  Right?

Institutionalized racism is hard to root out.

Chipping away at contraceptives.  And women aren't choosing to have more babies, they're just wiser with their birth control methods.  Cutting through the deliberately confusing terminology used when discussing abortion.

Flotsam and jetsam

Dumb Alabama Immigration Law Working So Well Its Crops Are Rotting And this link explains why...

11 Facts You Need To Know About The Nation’s Biggest Banks

Facebook shows the student who will fail chemistry....

No loopholes for millionaires. Ronald Reagan wouldn't even get nominated let alone elected in this day and age....

The breathtaking quotes from Ron Paul.

Krugman about Occupy Wall Street protesters:

What can we say about the protests? First things first: The protesters’ indictment of Wall Street as a destructive force, economically and politically, is completely right.

Reagan actually “raised taxes in seven of his eight years in office,” including four times in just two years

(Post title comes from this article.)

One lap around the net

“Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.” Mark Twain

Rick Perry is a thug. Digby discusses.

The Great Prosperity vs the Great Regression and Why Inequality is the Real Cause of Our Ongoing Terrible Economy by Robert Reich.

10 Things Conservatives Don’t Want You To Know About Ronald Reagan

By Alex Seitz-Wald

Apocalyptic GOP Is Dragging Us Into a Civil War

by Matt Taibbi

The All-Time 10 Worst Military Contracting Boondoggles
By Adam Weinstein

In St. Ronnie's very words:

"Where free unions and collective bargaining are forbidden, freedom is lost." Ronald Reagan,1980

Exactly.

Rush tries to defend St. Ronnie

And mangles it badly...

STARK: Why is Reagan a hero to conservatives?

RUSH: “Why is Reagan a hero to conservatives?” I don’t think you… Given what you’ve said, and I’m not trying to avoid the question, I don’t think you’d ever understand it.

STARK: Well, he’s a tax raiser, an amnesty giver, a cut-and-runner, and he negotiated with terrorists. Why is he a hero to conservatives? I don’t think you understand it.

RUSH: No, I do. Most assuredly I do. I just don’t think that you would understand it. Where did you get this silly notion that Reagan raised taxes on Social Security? What websites do you read? Where did you pick that up?

STARK: Look up the Greenspan Commission. It’s not too hard to find. I mean, it’s a matter of history.

Maybe conservatives love Reagan because he was the very best they could ever deliver, an Alzheimer's patient in the White House who allowed the inmates to party in the trough of taxpayers money....

and why they longingly search for another in Hollywood. They just need a handsome kindly face and avuncular voice, they'll supply the brains.

Edit* ... they'll supply the [LACK OF] brains...

Remembering St. Ronnie...

In all his glory.

Here.

And here.

I wonder if history books will list these 'accomplishments'....

Reagan raised taxes, too!

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Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly:

Jon Stewart referred to the network's "willful misunderstanding of the policy," and characterized a back-and-forth between Newt Gingrich and Sean Hannity as "purposeful idiocy."

Stewart added, "We're at the point now that the by far number one ranked news network in this country, no longer feels the need to report what a policy document says in black and white."

Grover Norquist's work on Ronald Reagan's legacy

From Crooks and Liars:

One of the more down-to-earth tributes was written by Norquist, who said: “Every conservative knows that we will win radical tax reform and reduction as soon as we elect a president who will sign the bill. The flow of history is with us. Our victories can be delayed, but not denied. This is the change wrought by Ronald Reagan.” Norquist all but revealed one of his missions in the coming two years — finding a presidential candidate who would assume the Reagan mantle in a way that neither Bush 41 nor Dole ever could — but not the other. His second big push was practically a guerrilla marketing campaign to make sure that the less-engaged Middle America would get the message that Reagan belonged in the pantheon of all-time greats right next to Lincoln, Washington and FDR. Norquist had learned the lessons of Normandy and of the Brandenburg Gate, which was that powerful symbols can mean a lot more than words (especially in a little-read policy journal), that a motorist under the big Sunbelt sky of Ronald Reagan Boulevard will absorb the message of the Gipper’s greatness without ever pondering if ketchup should be a vegetable in federally funded school lunches or if “the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers” in Central America were drug-dealing thugs, the kind of stubborn things that popped up in those newspaper articles ranking the presidents.

I've never understood the 'worship' of Saint Ronnie, but now I can see who was force feeding the public the load of tripe about him.